The message didn't disappear. Instead, the voice repeated in my mind, monotone, calm, robotic, like those videos of AI voices, that sounded strangely wrong.
[You have been chosen. Climb the Tower of Stories.]
The words echoed in my skull, over and over as if trying to ingrain that message into every single one of my neurons.
That's when it hit me all at once.
I knew why everything felt so familiar. Tower of Stories had been a novel, an unfinished one that I'd binged during one of my many procrastination sessions instead of studying for midterms.
It was exactly what the name suggested, your typical underdog protagonist who gets treated like garbage for no discernible reason, an opportunity arises to change his fate, he grows stupidly overpowered, collects a harem of love interests along the way like some catch em all series.
The usual power fantasy bullshit that millions of readers ate up with a spoon, and I'd been one of them. I'd stayed up until three in the morning reading chapter after chapter.
But this wasn't some late-night reading session fueled by energy drinks and poor impulse control. This was real. The tower outside my window was real. The falling sky was real.
The fact that my father had called me by the wrong name was terrifyingly, impossibly real.
Which meant I was inside the story.
Somehow, someway, I had been yanked out of my mundane existence as a sleep-deprived college student and dropped into a fantasy novel. But that realization only opened the floodgates to a thousand more questions.
What had pulled me into this place? Who had done it? Why was I here of all people? Who the hell was Ben, the guy who I had taken over? What happened to my old world, my real world? Would I be able to go back?
What about my parents, my actual parents who knew my real name and didn't sound like strangers when they spoke to me? What about my friends, my life, everything I'd built over the past twenty years? I wasn't some loser, I enjoyed my life and I wanted to go back to it.
Would time keep moving while I was trapped in this fictional hellscape? Would it stop completely, freezing my world in place like some cosmic pause button? Or would I be placed back at the exact moment I left, as if nothing had happened? Would my parents wonder where I'd gone? Would anyone even notice I was missing?
More and more doubts boomed in my head.
I felt a tightening in my chest. My legs felt wobbly, my knees buckling under my weight. The room spun around me. I fell to the floor, my knees hitting the linoleum with a sharp crack that I barely registered through the fog of panic that was consuming my consciousness.
But I didn't think about the pain shooting up my legs, didn't consider the bruises that would undoubtedly form on my kneecaps. No, all I could think about were those same damn questions. Each question felt like a weight added to my chest, making it harder and harder to breathe, harder to think, harder to do anything.
I realized it then, with the clarity that sometimes comes in moments of absolute chaos.
I was having a panic attack.
I knew I was having one, I'd had them before during particularly stressful periods of school, when the pressure of grades and deadlines and the constant fear of failure became too much to bear. I recognized the symptoms, the racing heart, the shortness of breath, the feeling that the world was collapsing inward on itself while simultaneously spinning out of control.
But knowing what was happening didn't help. If anything, it made things worse. My anxiety rose exponentially when I realized what was happening to me, a feedback loop of panic about panicking that threatened to send me spiraling into complete mental breakdown.
My vision started to tunnel, the edges of my sight growing dark and fuzzy. My hands were shaking so violently that I could hear my fingers rattling against the floor like castanets.
Sweat poured down my face despite the air conditioning, and I could taste copper in my mouth where I'd bitten my tongue without realizing it.
This was it. This was how I was going to die, not from whatever cosmic catastrophe was happening outside, but from my own brain's inability to cope with the impossible situation I'd found myself in. I was going to panic myself to death in a fictional world, which had to be some kind of record for pathetic endings.
That was until the robotic voice spoke in my mind once more, I was expecting the same message to boom in my mind. But it wasn't.
[You will find what you seek if you climb the Tower of Stories]
When the Tower spoke, I felt myself calming unnaturally so, like something was consciously calming me.
In that moment of relative calm, my brain finally started working again instead of just screaming into the void. I remembered something from the story, from the novel, or whatever the hell the correct terminology was for this situation.
The Tower of Stories wasn't just some random deathtrap. It had a purpose, a goal, a simple one, a goal like many other fast food novels. According to the story, if you reached the 100th floor, your greatest wish would be granted to you.
Of course, it wasn't like I had any confirmation of this supposed reward. The novel had only been written up to floor 69. For all I knew, the author had been making it up as he went along, with no clear idea of what would actually happen at the top.
And yet, somehow, I knew it was true. I felt it in my bones. The Tower's promise wasn't just a plot device it was real. It had to be, because I don't know what I would do if it wasn't.
If I wanted to have any chance of getting back to my family, to my friends, to my actual life with my actual name and my actual identity, I would have to climb the tower. All one hundred floors of it.
Although it wasn't like I had a choice, the decision had already been made for me, a decision that had been made for millions of other people in this world. I looked at the new message in my vision. The robotic voice ringing in my mind.
[You will be sent into the Tower in 3... 2... 1...]
I remembered what had happened to the protagonist at this part of the novel.
I raised my hand to my eyes, and even though I was expecting it my eyes still widened in shock as I saw what was happening. My fingers were slowly disintegrating into motes of black light, dissolving from the tips inward like black sand being blown in the wind.
I was expecting to feel something, anything at all, after all while I didn't remember the whole story word for word I knew the protagonist had had some reaction to it.
Anxiety, fear, pain, regret, desperation, expectation, fascination, dread.
But instead, I felt weirdly... hollow.
The disintegration continued across my entire body quickly it didn't even last ten seconds.
Fingers first, then hands a second later, the black motes spreading up my arms like some kind of beautiful, terrible disease. My feet and legs followed the same pattern, dissolving from the extremities inward.
I looked down at myself, or what was left of myself, and watched as my torso began to fade, my chest and stomach breaking apart into countless tiny lights that drifted away like glowing dust. My arms were completely gone now, leaving me as nothing more than a floating head attached to a rapidly diminishing neck.
Finally, inevitably, my head began to dissolve as well. I felt my hair disappear first, then my scalp, then my forehead. My vision started to fragment as my eyes dissolved, the world breaking apart into disconnected flashes of color and light.
Then everything went black.
Complete, absolute darkness. Not the darkness of closing your eyes or being in a room without light, but the fundamental absence of light itself. I couldn't see, couldn't hear, couldn't feel, couldn't even be sure I still existed in any meaningful sense.
But in that non-existent vision, in that space between being and nothingness, text appeared in front of me, the kind of texts I would be getting used to if I survived whatever this place was going to throw at me.
[Welcome to the Tower of Stories, Khan Reynolds]