In the vast desolate world, there was once a nomadic madwoman famous for her strength.
She used to call the Sword of Damocles something else.
The Tower of Babel.
As a child, the young woman back then did not think too much about it, because the asteroid was called many names by different groups.
Whenever the madwoman descended in a fit of madness, she would claim to be a player who once roamed inside the asteroid.
She said it was both a beautiful and tragic place.
Her stories were extremely unrealistic and constantly changing.
She said there was a lake inside the asteroid.
Then she would say it was a mountain inside, then it would become a polar region, then a city… and so on.
Clearly all made up.
The madwoman’s occasional bouts of insanity was one of the reasons why others stayed away from her.
As for the other reason…
Women, regardless of appearance or temperament, were considered rare commodities in the desolate era and were often targeted by others.
In a world of survival of the fittest, the weak were the first to fall prey to the strong, and women in general who possessed lesser strength and many inconveniences than men were unfortunately considered prey.
Most women were now either protected by large organizations for the so-called continuation of mankind, and the rest were held captives as sex slaves by abusive rogues.
Yet the madwoman was truly strong, no one could defeat her.
She once slaughtered a small rogue base who targeted her, killing all adult men and freeing the captive women.
Although the freed women soon lost their freedom and eventually landed on the nearby bases’ hands, no one dared to offend the madwoman anymore.
Then, one day, the madwoman picked a baby from somewhere, raised the baby with one hand while fighting monsters with the other, and taught everything she knew to the child.
That child was the young woman.
As someone raised by the madwoman from infancy to adulthood, the young woman knew very well that the madwoman was indeed, as everyone thought, truly suffering from insanity.
Often, the madwoman would suddenly laugh and cry, raising her hands and gesticulating in the air.
Back then, the young woman often saw her mentor talk animatedly to nothing but air.
But the madwoman was also mostly lucid and wise.
She seemed to know many things and could easily find food and water.
She could easily identify whether a plant was edible or poisonous, and never got lost in her way despite the lack of clear roads outside the bases.
She knew a lot of recipes and could easily craft various ointments, balms, and potions from the available wild plants.
To the young woman, the madwoman was a wise sage, her mentor.
One of the frequent stories during her mentor’s moments of insanity was about playing a huge survival game.
The madwoman was a player, one of the few chosen ones to enter the Sword of Damocles—or rather, the Tower of Babel as she called it during her bouts of insanity.
The madwoman claimed that she had fought against giants and aliens, and traveled many worlds within the tower.
She said she had reached the maximum level and was blessed with many skills.
Finally, she would always say that she was betrayed, and then she would close off on her own, either curling up in one corner incoherently whispering, or rampaging in the middle of enemies, not stopping until she was covered with her enemies’ blood.
It happened so many times that the young woman had grown numb to it, dismissing it as a madwoman’s delusion.
But now…
Was her mentor telling the truth all along?
[Congratulations to Player… for clearing the Tower of Babel for the first time.
First clear rewards…]
The same words sounded again in her ears, reverberating in the surroundings.
But none of it registered in the young woman’s head anymore.
All she could think of were the stories that the madwoman had once told her.
It was impossible to be just a mere coincidence.
Alone, they could still pass off as coincidence, but together…
A ‘Player’ inside the ‘Tower of Babel’…
Remembering something, the young woman’s eyes suddenly sharpened.
Almost instantly, she reached inside her collar and pulled out the blue pendant that hung around her neck.
The moment the light from the distant asteroid reflected off the surface of the blue pendant, as if in resonance, the pendant began to glow as well.
The young woman’s fingers tightened.
Alarmed, she immediately ripped away the necklace.
She had once asked her mentor about this pendant.
Back then, the madwoman had been unwilling to talk about it and simply told her that this pendant was a token given to her by a friend when they were still alive.
The pendant was her most important thing, she could lose anything except this.
But later, when the madwoman was in her bouts of madness, she said one thing which the young woman had also dismissed as nonsense back then.
She said that this stone was from that tower, taken from a floating fragmented orb at the top of the tower, which the madwoman grabbed the moment the tower threw her out…
Such insane nonsense–
Yet her mentor must have been telling the truth all this time!
Despite all differences, every human on earth agreed to one thing–
The asteroid was dangerous, the harbinger of destruction.
With alarm bells ringing in her mind, the young woman was about to throw the pendant far away from her—
It all happened too fast.
The young woman saw the blue pendant suddenly emit a blinding stream of light that rushed towards the distant beacon of light.
For a brief moment, she suddenly saw another scene in an entirely different place.
A vast space filled with shards of translucent crystals, with an open night sky above.
Countless spatial cracks resembling gigantic eyes gazed downwards.
A rotating mass of blue stone fragments like a planet suspended in the air.
Below it all, a tall silhouette of a sturdy man in black, metallic armor stood while holding a great sword, saying something to the air above him.
Then the white light flickered out and the scene disappeared.
Back in the city ruins, the young woman lost all strength in her body and fell to the ground.
She could feel coldness seeping to the tips of her fingers holding the pendant, slowly spreading throughout her body.
The young woman tried gasping for air, but she seemed to no longer be able to move or breathe.
She laid on the ground helplessly, only her gaze was fixed up at the sky.
Then she saw another impossible scene.
The night sky filled with bright stars… began to move.
Backwards.
Slowly at first, then suddenly, through her dimming vision, she saw the stars turn into streaks of light running from one end of the horizon to the other end as the whole sky seemed to be moving backwards at the speed of light.
Then her vision darkened completely.
****
[What a pity…]
[You could have become one of us, but you chose to remain a feeble human instead…]
Atop the Tower of Babel, the Player who cleared the Tower of Babel, the deathly game of survival that had lasted for more than a century, raised his head to gaze up at the sky beyond the spatial cracks.
The man ignored the voices and stared unblinkingly as the stars all turned into streaks of light while the entire world spun backwards on its orbit.
He did not understand how the entire planet was able to revert its rotation, nor could he make sense of how, instead of catastrophes, it would instead result in the so-called ‘restart’.
None of what had happened in the past hundred years made sense anyway.
To him, what mattered was that he had finally achieved his goal.
The moment each player was welcomed into the tower, they were always greeted by one promise: if they cleared the tower, they had two choices.
One, become a god so powerful no humans or monster could ever match, with the power to create worlds on his fingertips.
Or they could choose to make one wish which the tower would grant at all cost, except for one–if they wished to harm the gods, the wish would be voided, and it would be considered a failure, not a clearance.
Failure meant either death in the hands of the enemies or, if they managed to hang on to dear life but still failed, they would be stripped of all the abilities they gained and expelled from the tower.
They would fall to the bottom and roam aimlessly in the sea of monsters, a fate worse than death.
Fortunately, after countless hardships, the tall man in armor finally succeeded in clearing the tower.
He was the only one left of his team.
But he intended to fulfill everyone’s wish.
To expel the aliens from this world and return the state of the world and its inhabitants to how it once was.
Fortunately, the Gods, despite their unwillingness, honored their promise.
[We shall return to you your world as you wish it to be, filled with corruption, pollution, inequality, and war…]
[Such a world, why bother…]
[What a pity, you yourself will never see it, so why bother…]
But that was his world.
Let the fate of humanity lie in the hands of humanity.
No gods or aliens should decide the fate of humanity.
Finally, as every corner of the world was filled with white light, the man closed his eyes and allowed his body to disappear into the light, like grains of sand scattering in the wind.
The world was still.
***
When the light receded, the world became bustling.
People who had long since become ashes walked on the busy streets.
Buildings that were ruined stood tall and proud under the sunshine.
Birds flew among the branches of trees.
After watching them for a while, a terminally-ill patient peacefully closed their eyes in the hospital for the last time.
A grenade exploded in the air, shattering the already ruined building of a war-torn country into debris.
Cries of women and children echoed within the building.
In an industrial park of a certain country, smog filled the air as factories thrived.
A government official shook hands with a company executive, casually accepting a gifted car.
Unknown to everyone, the world had indeed turned back in time.