Entrance Anchors are embedded in the ancient stone of the Tower's rim, set into the circular wall that surrounds the great abyss at Versa's heart. There are hundreds of them, spaced along the rim's inner face, each one a runic arch of the same construction as the Tower itself — old enough that no record exists of who placed them or how.

They are the only way in.

Unlike the Exit Anchors inside the Tower, Entrance Anchors are not active at all times. They sit dormant until someone approaches and places their hand directly on the arch's surface. Contact is the trigger. No mana stones are required to descend — entry into the Tower is free. The cost comes later.

When a hand touches the arch, the Anchor activates and a visual indicator appears: a *blue portal signals the Anchor is open for descent. A red portal* signals that someone is currently coming out of that same Anchor — meaning an active Exit somewhere below has routed a returning party through this specific arch. During a red portal state the Anchor repels anyone attempting to enter, not violently, but with the particular insistence of two magnets of identical polarity being pressed together. A person pushing against an active red portal feels the resistance immediately and clearly. There is no forcing through it. Someone is coming out, and entry is not possible until they have finished.

The five-minute cooldown after an Entrance Anchor closes is noticeably shorter than the fifteen minutes required by Exit Anchors in the Tower's Rest Areas.. Most adventurers assume this reflects the Tower's indifference to who enters versus who leaves — the dungeon is easier to get into than to get out of, by design or by nature. The more practically minded note that the asymmetry discourages parties from descending only as far as the nearest Rest Area and immediately extracting. If entry and exit cost the same wait time, conservative parties could treat the Tower as a short commute. The longer extraction cooldown ensures they cannot.

The actual mechanical reason is unknown to anyone in Versa. An Entrance Anchor only needs to establish a connection to one of the first-floor arrival points within the current Tower instance — a short, local link. An Exit Anchor must reach across the dimensional boundary entirely, trace a path to the surface, and secure one of the Entrance Anchors there that is not already handling another extraction. In periods when multiple Tower instances are running simultaneously, each with their own active Exit Anchors, the surface Entrance Anchors are serving a shared queue. The twenty-five minutes is not a mechanical lock. It is the Anchor waiting for a clear line.

Once a hand activates a blue portal, the same one-minute window that governs Exit Anchors applies here. The first person to step through opens the window. Up to four additional people may follow within that minute. The moment a fifth person passes through, the portal closes regardless of remaining time. If the minute elapses with fewer than five people having entered, the portal closes and enters a fifteen-minute cooldown before it can be activated again.

The Anchor deposits the party at the top of the descent passage connected to that specific arch, from which the stairways lead downward into the upper floors. Which arch a party uses determines which section of Floor 1 they arrive in — a detail that matters more than new adventurers expect, since the route from the arrival point to the nearest staircase downward is itself subject to the instance's layout and must be navigated like everything else.

Entrance Anchors always connect to the current instance — the most recently generated version of the Tower's interior. A party stepping through on the first day of a new instance and a party stepping through three weeks later are entering different dimensions entirely, even if they use the same arch. The arch does not remember previous instances. It does not offer a choice. It opens into whatever the Tower currently is, and the Tower is always current.