The Sweeper of Floor Zero

The Maw is a hundred floors of tower sunk into the earth, and every licensed adventurer in the kingdom pays the Delvers' Guild for the right to climb down it and kill what lives there. Nobody pays for what happens after. The carcasses have to be weighed, hauled, rendered, and swept, and that work belongs to men like Kol Harn: constitution-tested, bottom-scored, unlicensed for life, and bound by contract to Floor Zero, the yard at the rim where the tower brings up its dead.

Kol has a knack the Guild does not know he has. When he puts his hands on the remains of anything the Maw made, the Echo wakes: he reads the death the dead thing remembers, and keeps a tenth of what it was. A hound's second heart, beating ten extra heartbeats when a fight should end him. A rat's nose for hollow metal behind three feet of stone. A swordsman's form, taken from a corpse the manuals say is off limits. Every knack is real, bounded, and priced, and the price is the hook in the book: each read costs him one memory of equal weight, permanent, and the payment bleeds at the edges for years. He bought his first fire with his sister's name. He has been climbing out of that debt ever since, one notch on a tin tag at a time.

Then a routine haul puts a two-headed hound's skull in his hands, and the death-memory shows him something impossible: a man with Kol's own face, standing on a floor no sweeper is ever carried to, hushing the corpse like a secret. By the time the vision ends, the chalk sketch of his sister on the back of his work tag has gone black, and he can no longer picture her face at all.

So Kol does what a sweeper does with a mess too big for the pan: he starts counting. Notches on a tag lead to a dead delver's hidden cache. A cache leads to a porter's job under a dead man's license, signed beside an absorption clause that reads like freight law. Freight law leads below the Tenth gate, into a company worth following, a census officer who reads hands, and a yard economy with a second ledger under it: gray candles that burn brighter than beast-fat, a night cart that collects readers, and a mortality roll the Guild files as equipment losses.

Every floor down, the trade gets stranger and the stakes get closer to the skin. A rope-people called the kept who never pay for anything and remember everything. A hidden stair the maps deny. A sister who went down three years ago and left only a ribbon. And a quiet man standing hip-deep in a river of everyone's paid memories, holding the whole current back with one raised hand, waiting for the sweeper who is coming down to him early.

The Sweeper of Floor Zero is a dungeon-crawl about the man with the wheelbarrow: a LitRPG of small numbers and large debts, where every skill is somebody's tenth, every shortcut is somebody's memory, and the bottom of the world keeps the kind of books that can only be closed by the honest. Sweep first. Ask never. Count everything twice.