When the light finally thins, I am standing on polished stone.
The air tastes sharp, almost like snow before a storm.
High above, a ceiling of pale crystal bends the light into slow-moving rainbows.
For a heartbeat I can only stare, chest rising and falling too fast.
Then the shock breaks into a sudden, bubbling laugh.
"Hah… hahahaha!"
My own voice echoes across the endless hall, wild and cracked.
I lift my arms and turn my hands palm up, palm down.
Fingers, nails, scars—everything is whole again.
The memory of blood and torn flesh feels like a distant dream.
Before I can breathe, the cold chime of the system cuts through the air.
Announcement: All players who have cleared the First Floor will remain in the Tower Lobby for one week. Rest, recover, prepare. New trials begin after the allotted time.
A sigh of relief spreads across the vast chamber as other survivors appear in flickers of light.
Some cry, some sink to their knees, others stare blankly as if still trapped in nightmares.
I should feel comfort in the crowd.
Instead a sudden heat pulses at the center of my forehead.
Something burns.
I stagger, clutching at my brow.
The laughter dies in my throat.
A cold mark etches itself against my skin—a circle, a perfect skull, bright red and pulsing like a heartbeat.
Before I can speak, a harsher light floods the room.
Warning: Irregularity detected.
The words blaze across every wall, huge and blood-colored.
Gasps ripple through the lobby.
A new surge of light whirls around me—no, not only me.
I catch three more figures in the same crimson glow, each with the same skull blazing on their brows.
One girl screams.
Another clenches his fists and lowers his head, silent as stone.
The floor tilts.
The lobby vanishes.
I am pulled—no, ripped—sideways through a dark corridor that smells of iron and cold rain.
When the world steadies we stand inside a smaller chamber lined with black glass.
The air hums with power, like a storm about to break.
System Directive: Irregular units identified. Your entry violates the standard weave. Your systems are incomplete. Full player support revoked. From this moment you will climb the Tower without a system. Your soul and body are not one.
The words hit like hammers.
No system?
No interface, no status window, no instant recovery, no cold blue letters to steady my mind.
The thing I relied on, even cursed, will be gone.
A bitter laugh echoes from my left.
I turn.
A boy stands there, maybe sixteen at most, with hair the color of ripe wheat and eyes as green as mountain jade.
Even dressed in torn travel clothes he carries himself like a young king—chin high, shoulders square, gaze calm and sharp.
Royalty lives in the way he breathes.
Panels of light unfold in the air before us, glowing like open books.
Names and histories scroll across them faster than I can follow.
Then the light twists.
For me it is not a simple panel.
A scroll unfurls in midair, ancient parchment edged in silver, characters bleeding with soft gold.
Every detail of my stolen existence writes itself there—Fan Ling, Age: 32, Title: Reincarnator from a Higher Realm.
Behind the letters, faint illustrations bloom: a shadowed Earth fading into a new sunlit continent, the moment of my death sketched in strokes of ink and ash.
My stomach knots.
The secret I guarded through blood and silence lies bare in the air.
The blonde boy's green eyes flick toward me—assessing, measuring.
I take a half step back.
Beside him, another vision rises.
Instead of a scroll, a great sakura tree shimmers into being, its petals glowing like dawn.
The blossoms whisper as if in a wind only they can feel.
From their drifting light, words form:
Name: Sakura
Age: 53
Title: Regressor from the Lower Realm.
Petals fall, each carrying fragments of her past—echoes of a battlefield, a clock turning backward, a child's cry swallowed by time.
The beauty of it steals my breath even as fear crawls through my spine.
More names follow, ten in all.
Each one tagged with something impossible—Returner, Time-Stolen, Dream-Born.
The system lists them like trophies, each stranger than the last.
Some appear as carved stone tablets, others as floating rivers of ink, each display as unique as the life it reveals.
I cannot move.
Shock pins me harder than any spell.
My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth.
I want to shout, to deny it all, but the words will not come.
The boy with green eyes tilts his head, a faint smile ghosting across his lips.
"So," he says, voice soft but carrying in the heavy air, "we are not alone."
His words fall into the silence like stones into deep water.
I stand frozen, heart hammering, the mark on my brow still burning, the whisper I thought I'd left in the forest beginning to stir again at the edge of thought.
Slaughter, it sighs.
Slaughter.
I swallow hard, but the taste of iron will not leave my mouth.