Chapter 377

Regression (24)

-You have entered Floor 15.

A sky that looked like the universe itself had been transplanted whole. Stars twinkled, the sun blazed, and the moon looked down in silence.

Bubble, bubble.

A black mountain made of half-burned rock, ringed by a sea of magma. I looked around for a moment and took a deep breath. Should I go up?

"..."

Crunch, crunch.

One step, then another. I climbed the mountain carefully. Come to think of it, I always used to hear that clink, clink sound around this point. But right now, for some reason, it was quiet. It seemed the elder had noticed something too.

I was almost at the summit. What now. How should I even bring this up. I was still turning it over in my head when.

"Come."

The elder's voice, calling me. I stopped agonizing over it and stepped onto the summit.

"Hm."

The elder looked me over and let out a low hum. His body was less thin than it was withered, wrinkled all over. But an aura flowed quietly from every inch of him. Even now, strong as I'd become, I couldn't catch even a glimpse of the full shape of that power. Maybe on par with the Heavenly Demon, or beyond.

"It's embarrassing, so stop that."

"Ah, sorry."

"And no matter how hard you look, you won't feel anything. It's built that way."

The elder said that and beckoned me closer with a downward flick of his hand. Coming from an ordinary person, it might have looked a little arrogant, but combined with his wrinkled appearance and that mysterious aura of his, it didn't feel unpleasant at all.

"Hmm."

Once I stood in front of him, he stroked his chin and studied me quietly. It looked like he was examining something, or maybe puzzling something out.

I didn't know for sure, but I felt like I could guess what was on his mind.

"You'd be right."

"...Right about what?"

"You're doubting it, aren't you. Whether I'm the same person from your memory. I am."

"...Heh."

The elder had told me once before that he retained faint memories. And if those memories still carried forward now, then the me he remembered would still be the weak version of me from back then.

Comparing that old me to the current one, we shared a face, sure, but the contents were a completely different person. If the elder was going to sense anything odd, I'd guessed it would be that.

"So it really was true. Really... really."

My guess seemed to land, because the elder smiled and reached out his hand toward me. Palm turned sideways. A handshake.

"Remarkable. Truly."

"In what way?"

"You. You're what's remarkable."

I gripped his wrinkled hand. The elder laughed heartily, as if he genuinely found this incredible, and said.

"You've worked hard. How much effort did it take to get this strong? How much blood did you spill, how much flesh did you carve away? Everyone knows you have to work hard to grow strong, but actually doing it is another matter entirely. Admirable. Truly."

"...Thank you."

"I'm not just saying that. You've worked hard. The you I remember wasn't the type overflowing with talent. I mean it, congratulations."

"No, well..."

I hadn't expected this kind of reaction. I accepted the elder's praise a little awkwardly. Had I worked hard? I had, plenty. But I'd never heard praise, or anything like admiration, for it from anyone besides Ji-won. Mostly because nobody else even knew.

"Yes, the only one you can trust is yourself. Don't trust others. With an ability that remarkable, why would you create variables by trusting other people? You won't betray yourself. A good attitude."

"Uh, um."

The praise had drifted a little off target, but I could still feel that the elder meant his congratulations sincerely, so I just stood there with an awkward smile, listening to him.

"Yes, if you make use of your ability, someday..."

Then, all of a sudden. The elder stopped talking. The wrinkles that had risen cheerfully like a smiling mask slowly sank back into place.

"What's wrong?"

"...Hah."

The elder's expression shifted completely. He looked at me quietly, like he pitied something, like he grieved something, and at the same time, like he was almost looking forward to it.

"Wh, what's wrong?"

"If this Tower has exactly one rule."

The elder said this, looking at me with a bitter light in his eyes.

"It's that there is always a rule."

The Tower was almost like a machine. This wasn't some cliché about cause and effect. A "specific result" comes about because there was a "specific cause."

"Wha... what do you mean."

"I can't explain it to you."

"Not even if I choose that reward, 'The Elder's Wise Counsel'?"

"...What can't be done can't be done. Circumstances have changed. Yours, to be precise."

"..."

In the past, the elder had once told me the Tower's secret. He'd confessed to me that his world had been destroyed, and that as a result, it had been absorbed into the Tower.

He'd been driven to the brink of death for telling me that secret, though it never happened once I regressed. Either way, what mattered was that telling me the secret had been possible back then, at least...

"You're... too strong now. Which means you've become too 'important' a person."

I was different now. Giving information to the nobody I used to be, and giving information to someone as strong as I'd become, those couldn't possibly be the same thing.

"..."

"And besides."

Having said that, the elder.

"You won't need my counsel anyway."

He murmured, stroking at the empty air.

"You'll understand once you see it."

The air trembled. The atmosphere itself shuddered.

"To clear Floor 15, all you need to do is choose one of the rewards floating in front of you right now."

A list of rewards floated up before my eyes. But I couldn't focus on it. No, I didn't even have room to focus on it.

"...!!!"

Shadow swallowed the surroundings. The whole starry expanse embroidered across the black universe vanished from sight.

A boulder. No, something large enough to be called a rock formation. A massive slab of stone shifted, little by little, before settling behind the elder with a thud.

What was this? All of a sudden?

For a moment I mistook it for the elder trying to attack me, that's how out of place the size of that rock was. Why bring out something like that in the first place? What was it even for? I wanted to ask right away, but the elder wasn't even looking at me anymore.

"..."

The elder silently lifted the hammer he'd been holding. He drew it back behind his head.

Clang.

And struck the rock.

Clang. Clang. Clang.

An impact heavy enough to shake the ground slightly. A rhythmic sound. Was he suddenly training or something? No, no. This... this was a sound from my memory. Just the scale of it was different.

"...A stone statue?"

Every time I'd entered Floor 15, the elder had always been tapping away at some small stone. This time, though, he hadn't even been holding a hammer, so I'd simply forgotten for a moment.

And if the hammer sound in my memory had been a light clink, clink against stone, what I was hearing now was closer to a heavy clang! clang! There was a reason I hadn't registered the difference right away.

But why... why was the elder striking a rock that huge? Was that how you normally started a stone statue, from something that massive? Was it not okay to bring a small one to start with?

No, no. That wasn't it. That wasn't it at all. The elder had said there was no need to explain. There had to be a reason. There was clearly some reason a boulder that size was necessary.

I looked around desperately. What I saw were countless stone statues. But every single one was small enough to fit in the palm of a hand. Some varied a little in size, but they all shared one thing in common: they were small.

"...A difference in size?"

I spread my mana out, searching for the biggest one. I picked up the largest statue I could find and checked its shape.

"..."

It was shaped like a dragon. I couldn't make it out completely, but it definitely looked like a winged dragon.

Naturally, a memory surfaced. The massive dragon that had appeared in America. The monster Michael Zetter had barely managed to hold off, pouring in everything he had.

The future.

The monsters that had appeared in reality varied wildly in strength. Some, like the dragon in America, had become nationwide crises. Others were creatures a small African country could handle entirely on its own. Their size, their shape, their strength, all of it had varied.

'If this Tower has exactly one rule. It's that there is always a rule.'

What decided how strong a monster turned out to be? Wasn't there some kind of standard behind it?

And if there was a standard. Then maybe.

"..."

What if. What if, really.

What if the strength of the monsters appearing in reality was determined by the strength of the player who'd entered Floor 15?

What if the massive dragon that struck America had been created because of Michael Zetter, or 'the Empress'?

I lowered my gaze and looked down at my own body. I traced back through the staggering amount of mana pulsing inside me, the swordsmanship etched into my fingertips, the knowledge of the future crammed into my head.

If Michael Zetter was the reason that dragon had come into being...

"Then I..."

Because of me...

Just what kind of monster was going to show up on Earth?