The Skill Window appeared even though I had not cleared Stage 1.
Something had clearly gone wrong this time.
If this were a computer, I would have called it a bug. But how could a bug occur in a supernatural phenomenon like the System Window?
Far too many unbelievable things had happened for this place to be dismissed as augmented reality.
For example, increasing a stat strengthened the body in real time, while skills resembling supernatural powers could be used immediately after they were learned.
That was why everyone believed this place had been created through the intervention of a divine being.
Of course, there were many other possibilities besides a god.
And the next most plausible candidate was aliens.
“Perhaps they really are aliens.”
A god who made mistakes?
It was easier to believe that a higher intelligence had created this place using technology from an ultra-advanced civilization.
Perhaps they were aliens. If they were creatures similar to humans, then they would be capable of making mistakes as well.
The theory that aliens, rather than a god, had imprisoned humanity began gaining credibility in my mind.
I had always wondered.
What was this place, and why did it continually force us to climb towers?
What was this System Window, and what were the futuristic technologies and environments that occasionally appeared?
I had imagined countless possibilities.
Using what had happened today, I organized my thoughts into several hypotheses.
1. The System had error and reboot functions. They were safeguards against mistakes.
2. In other words, this was an artificial world, and it was not perfect.
3. Someone was watching the humans trapped here.
4. They were testing humanity because they wanted something from us.
5. To them, I was an Irregular.
They had clearly failed to identify my true nature.
Otherwise, I should have been eliminated during the reboot as well.
Perhaps aliens truly had abducted Earthlings indiscriminately and were subjecting them to some horrific experiment.
I did not know the exact purpose of that experiment, but what they wanted was obvious.
They wanted one of the humans to reach the summit of the Tower of Infinity.
Otherwise, they would not have installed a separate assistant program called the System to help us adapt.
If their only goal had been to enjoy watching us kill one another, there would have been no need for a System.
They could have simply locked us in a room and watched.
Instead, they used all manner of mechanisms to kill humans.
They forced us into conflict with one another and drove us to commit sins.
“Fuck. I feel like a guinea pig.”
Clutching my throbbing head, I forced myself to stand.
Regardless of the truth, I had to survive until the end if I wanted to climb the towers.
And to survive, I had to keep moving forward.
My only hope of ending these infinite regressions would be waiting at the summit.
MURMUR- MURMUR-
I looked around at the noise and saw several people gathering into groups and talking among themselves.
Some watched me warily.
“A multi-person room this time.”
What a nuisance.
Sometimes I awakened alone in the starting room, but at other times, dozens of people opened their eyes in the same room, as they had now.
Moreover, this was one of the most crowded multi-person rooms I had ever encountered.
Trouble always erupted quickly in rooms like this.
Everyone in the pure-white room wore nothing but identical prison-style jumpsuits.
“Have you awakened? You were the last one to wake up. Are you feeling all right?”
A kindly looking old man approached and asked about my condition.
‘Tsk.’
People this kind never survived long in this place.
“······.”
Clicking my tongue inwardly, I ignored him and looked around.
“Do you happen to know where we are? Half a day has already passed, yet no one knows anything. You were the last one to awaken.”
The old man questioned me with a faint glimmer of hope.
He seemed to find my cold and composed demeanor strange.
An ordinary person would have panicked and demanded to know what he was talking about.
I did not.
“What a fucking crowd.”
A rough count revealed fifty-three people.
Having more people was not an advantage in the Tower of Beginnings.
Gathering together caused harm far more often than it helped.
“Do you remember anything? We simply cannot··· Everyone remembers their name, age, and common knowledge, but none of us have any specific memories. We do not remember how we lived or how we came here.”
The same was true for me.
Not once throughout my infinite regressions had I remembered my past.
I knew that my name was Lee Hojun.
I knew that I was a twenty-two-year-old citizen of South Korea.
But I could not remember who my parents were or how I had lived.
Even the most basic and natural memories were gone.
The same had been true for everyone I had ever met throughout my infinite regressions.
“Someone must have erased our memories.”
“Erased··· our memories?”
I ignored the old man as he stared at me in shock and looked toward the center of the room.
As always, a fight had already broken out.
“No, you fucking tiny-dicked runt!!”
“Go on, hit me! Hit me, you fat bastard!!”
A slender woman with a short bob was exchanging insults with a tattooed, musclebound thug.
“They certainly have plenty of energy.”
A scrawny man lay bleeding on the floor.
The short-haired woman stood in front of him.
From the look of things, the musclebound thug had thrown his weight around and created a threatening atmosphere, and the woman had opposed him.
“You fucking bitch!!”
SLAP!!
The woman’s head snapped violently to the side from a single slap.
Everyone gasped in horror. Following the social norms they had learned outside, several people stepped forward to help the woman and condemn the thug.
However···
“Shut your fucking mouths!! Anyone else who wants to get beaten to death can step forward!!”
The room instantly fell silent.
Everyone began glancing nervously at the people around them.
It was the same everywhere.
Those with power invariably sought to rule over others.
That was nature stripped bare.
“What a pathetic spectacle.”
I ignored their nonsense and began searching for the way out.
Most of them would die soon anyway.
More than eighty percent of the people who entered the Tower of Beginnings died, and more than half of those deaths occurred during Stage 1.
The exact numbers changed slightly with each regression, but there was never a significant difference.
I had experienced it personally, but I had also confirmed the statistics through an information-reading skill I obtained later.
I dismissed them as people who would soon be dead regardless.
Then···
“GRRK!”
I heard the musclebound thug make a strangled noise.
“You went down from one kick to the balls! You dared to slap me? Go on, hit me again, you tiny-dicked fucker!!”
The thug was crawling across the floor while clutching his groin.
Beside him, the short-haired woman dusted off her hands.
One of her cheeks was swollen and red, but her eyes still burned with defiance.
“Tsk, tsk. She should have stayed down.”
Whether she had struck a vulnerable point or not, the fact that she had retaliated against someone stronger than herself deserved some credit.
However···
“Y-you fucking bitch···!”
“What? A fucking bitch? Do you need another beating before you come to your senses?”
There was no protection of the law here.
This was a world without the police or the military.
It was the wilderness, where strength was everything.
The short-haired woman tried to kick the man in the groin again.
However, the man had recovered enough to react.
With a vicious expression, he abruptly caught her foot.
“L-let go of me. I mean it—you’ll die!”
The man slowly and awkwardly rose while holding her leg, then twisted it violently.
“AAAAH!”
The moment she fell, he threw himself on top of her and seized a fistful of her hair.
“Ha. You fucking bitch. I am going to kill you today.”
THUD!
THUD! THUD!!
The people around them tried to intervene, but it was useless.
Even while being beaten, the short-haired woman fought back by biting, scratching, punching, and kicking.
“DIE!!”
The man held her head firmly in place and rained down punches with all his strength.
The musclebound thug was so powerful that clumps of her hair tore free.
Even the people trying to restrain him were struck several times and driven away.
Amazingly, not one person among this enormous crowd was larger than the thug.
Everyone else was emaciated, as though they had spent every waking hour playing games in a PC café.
In the end···
THUD! THUDTHUDTHUD!! THUDTHUDTHUD!!
“······.”
The short-haired woman lay on the floor and continued to be beaten.
It was impossible for a woman who barely weighed forty or fifty kilograms to fight a healthy adult man head-on.
Especially without so much as a blade.
It was no different from a child fighting an adult.
No matter how fiercely she retaliated, her attacks were insignificant to an adult man flooded with adrenaline.
They only awakened his capacity for even more merciless violence.
Once the people attempting to separate them suffered bloody noses and broken bones, they grew frightened and began standing by.
“Go on. Fight back again like you did before, you fucking bitch. I do not go easy on women.”
Red scratches covered the thug’s face, hands, and feet, but he did not seem to care.
He stomped on the short-haired woman’s face and spat on her.
No one could stop his merciless assault.
The short-haired woman seemed to have exhausted all her strength. All she could do was curl into herself and endure his fists and feet.
Her face was already a ruin, and several of her ribs appeared to be broken.
An ordinary person might have found it tragic.
To me, it was an unremarkable scene that inspired no emotion whatsoever.
“The weak submit, and the strong rule.”
Perhaps the short-haired woman was fortunate to have learned the rules of this place now.
From this point forward, she would know better than to hold her head high before someone stronger than herself.
I shook my head and looked away from them.
Then I returned to what I needed to do.
SWISH- SWISH-
CLICK.
“Found it.”
GRRRR-
I found a single tile that sat at a different height from the others.
Unlike before, it was not in the center of the floor. It was embedded in the wall at the corner of the room.
I was almost pleased that I had found it so quickly.
By coincidence, the door opened directly beside me.
As it opened with a loud noise, everyone’s attention naturally turned toward me.
“What is that? What did you do?”
The musclebound thug’s gaze locked onto me.
Looking triumphant, he turned away from the short-haired woman and slowly approached me.
I considered whether I should kill him before he could become a nuisance or simply ignore him and enter the corridor.
According to my principles, I should ignore him.
However, I had a feeling that he would do far more than merely annoy me.
THUMP!
CHOMP!!
Fortunately, someone resolved my dilemma for me.
It was the short-haired woman, who had been lying motionless as she endured the beating.
The instant the thug turned his attention toward me, she slowly rose, climbed onto his back, and sank her teeth into his neck.
“···So she really was a crazy bitch?”
“AAAAARGH-!!”
She tore out the carotid artery beneath his ear with perfect accuracy.
GUSH.
“Y-you insane bitch!!”
The thug quickly seized the short-haired woman and tore her away, but blood was already pouring from his neck like water from a punctured plastic bottle.
He collapsed to the floor in panic.
Flailing helplessly, he tried to cover the wound with both hands.
However, the artery had already been properly torn open, and his hands could not contain the bleeding.
He needed a bandage or some kind of fabric to stop the blood immediately, but there was nothing in the pure-white room except the clothes they wore.
The man tried to tear off the upper portion of his clothing, but even that was difficult because of the jumpsuit’s design.
“S-someone, help me.”
The others were shocked by the sudden murder.
Moreover, they knew exactly what the thug had done before becoming the victim, so none of them readily stepped forward.
The sight of enough blood to form a pool gushing from his neck would have made anyone hesitate.
“GRRK. KHK.”
He was going into shock.
When the carotid artery was torn open, blood could no longer reach the brain properly.
Within minutes, blood loss caused the body to enter shock.
The people around him stared helplessly at the dying thug.
They all wore the expressions of people watching someone die for the first time.
As everyone stood frozen by the surreal sight, the battered short-haired woman walked steadily toward me.
“What are you? Are you one of the organizers? How did you open this door?”
Her entire face was bruised and swollen, and one arm hung limply at her side as though it were broken.
Despite that, she remained confident.
She did not look like someone who had just killed another person for the first time.
“Then again, an organizer would not stand by while someone died. So have we really been abducted into some damned show straight out of a movie?”
Could she have bitten through the thug’s carotid artery in the hope that the organizers watching from somewhere would stop the show?
The fact that she had managed to consider such a possibility while being beaten meant there was far more to her than what she had shown.
She was viewing reality with an extraordinarily cold and calculating mind.
I needed to revise my assessment of her.
“Then again, it is difficult to survive here without going insane.”
I ignored her question and voiced my own thoughts as I entered the corridor.
The fight had been brief, but it reminded me of my own weak past.
The days when I could not resist and could only endure whatever others did to me.
And the first time someone like me had killed another human being.
In this place—in the towers—only those willing to go mad could survive.
The others followed me into the corridor.
Strangely, they appeared more frightened of the corpse than of the short-haired woman who had killed him.
Or perhaps they simply hated remaining in the same room as a dead body.
“What is this place···? Listen, you clearly know something. Why do you not share it with the rest of us?”
When the corridor opened into a spacious, modern area, the woman and several others finally brightened.
They all stared at me, waiting for an answer.
“There is a chatterbox in the center. Go ask it. Stop bothering me.”
For a moment, I considered simply killing them.
The more I ignored them, the more certain it was that they would continue clinging to me.
However, that would violate my principles.
‘I have to follow my principles if I do not want to lose myself.’
When someone repeated a deranged world like this endlessly, it was easy to lose their sanity.
The more deranged I became, the harder it was to climb the towers.
I had to preserve my sanity, and that was why I had established principles.
‘Do not commit unnecessary murder.’
Because everyone I killed would return to life after the next regression, I felt no guilt over murder.
Killing someone had become far too easy a solution.
That was precisely why unnecessary murder was the thing I had to guard against most.
It was the only way to keep myself from becoming a madman who reveled in slaughter once again.