Two years.
For two goddamn years,Raven Ashford had been breathing the sulfur-choked air of Floor 15.
His lungs felt like they were full of burning tar.His left leg was a mess of torn muscle, courtesy of a Hellhound's claws. Behind him, the rest of the pack was still howling, a sound he now associated more with "home" than silence.
He slammed his shoulder into a pillar of red, cracked rock, gagging. The Crimson Wasteland. A pathetically literal name.
A thin, holographic window blinked in the corner of his vision.
[WARNING: HP CRITICAL: 18/240]
[STATUS: Bleeding (Severe)]
"Shut up," Raven spat, swiping the notification away. He didn't need the System to tell him he was dying.
He'd been a Climber for two years and was still stuck on the"beginner" floors, a permanent E-Ranker. A joke. But quitting wasn't an option.
Quitting meant Aria died.
That thought was sharper than any Hellhound's tooth. His sister, Aria, 12 years old, wasting away from a disease that sounded like a fantasy curse: Mana Corruption Syndrome. The cure? An elixir that cost 500 million won. His current savings, after two years of this hell? 35 million.
He was a failure. A desperate, failing brother who had run out of time.
The howling stopped.
Raven froze, his breath catching. Silence was always, always, worse. He peeked from behind the pillar. The Hellhounds had stopped at the edge of a ravine, fifty meters back. They weren't coming closer. They were just… watching.
Why?
He looked forward. Oh.
Ten feet in front of him, half-hidden by shadow, was an obsidian archway. A rusted Guild plaque was bolted to it: FORBIDDEN ZONE. VIOLATORS WILL BE ELIMINATED. INSTANT-DEATH TRAPS BEYOND THIS POINT.
The Hellhounds were smart. They knew their prey was already dead.
A dry, hacking laugh escaped Raven's throat, turning into a bloody cough. "Better to die trying than return empty-handed," he whispered, reciting the mantra that had gotten him this far.
He pushed himself off the pillar and staggered, one limping step at a time, into the absolute, oppressive darkness of the Forbidden Zone.
The air inside was stale, cold, and dead. There were no traps. No monsters. Just silence and the suffocating feeling of a place the Tower itself had forgotten. He walked for what felt like an hour, fueled by nothing but spite, until he found it.
It wasn't a treasure chest. It wasn't a boss.
It was a hole.
A perfectly carved spiral staircase, made of a stone blacker than the shadows, leading down.
Raven's exhausted brain glitched. Down? The Tower only went up. You climbed from 15 to 16, not... down. At the lip of the first step, a single, grime-covered numeral was carved into the stone: 0.
"Floor Zero," he breathed. "Shouldn't exist."
He was already dead anyway. He took the first step down.
He descended into a massive, cathedral-like space that shouldn't exist beneath a wasteland. It was frozen in time. Dust motes hung suspended in the air.
And on a single obsidian altar, under a beam of light from an unknown source, sat a book.
It was a massive grimoire, bound in something that looked like shadow and leather. It was open. Raven limped closer, drawn by an unseen force. He could see the text on the pages glowing. The left page shone with a warm, steady golden ink. The right page pulsed with a dark, sinister purple-black ink.
The Codex of Duality.
His hand, slick with his own blood, reached out. The moment his fingertip grazed the cover, it happened.
[SYSTEM ALERT]
[WARNING: FORBIDDEN ARTIFACT DETECTED]
[INITIATING EMERGENCY PROTOCOL...]
[CANDIDATE ANALYSIS... COMPLETE]
[COMPATIBILITY: 99.8%]
[BEGIN INTEGRATION]
Pain, pure and white-hot, exploded behind his eyes. It wasn't pain; it was erasure. His body was being torn apart and rewritten, atom by atom.
Visions flooded his mind—a war between cosmic beings, six angels screaming as they fell from a golden sky, seven others weeping as they forged chains. A final, booming pact: "Balance must be maintained or reality collapses."
Then, silence.
Raven woke up gasping, his back on the cold floor. He felt… whole. He looked at his hands. The bleeding had stopped. His HP was full.
He scrambled to a nearby pool of still water—a makeshift mirror.
The man looking back wasn't him.
His hair was still black, but a stark white streak now ran through the right side. His eyes... gods, his eyes...
His left eye was a deep, bloody crimson.
His right eye was a piercing,electric blue.
Then he felt it. An agonizing stretching from his back. He screamed as two things burst from his shoulder blades, tearing through his cheap leather armor.
In the reflection, he saw them. A single, massive black wing, dark as a void, unfurled from his left side. And from his right, a luminous, brilliant white wing that glowed with a faint, holy light.
He was a monster. An angel. An abomination.
A new System window popped up, this one a calm, steady blue.
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION]
[CLASS CHANGE: VESSEL OF DUALITY]
[YOU HAVE INHERITED: THE CODEX OF DUALITY]
[6 FALLEN ANGEL AUTHORITIES]
[7 HEAVENLY VIRTUE AUTHORITIES]
[WARNING: BALANCE MUST BE MAINTAINED]
[CORRUPTION LEVEL: 0%]
[GRACE LEVEL: 0%]
Before he could even process the words "Fallen Angel," he heard a familiar sound. The scratching of claws.
The Hellhound pack, brave now that he was "gone," had crept down the stairs. They saw him. They smelled him.
They pounced.
Raven didn't think. He didn't strategize. He reacted.
A new instinct—cold, arrogant, and powerful—surged through him. He looked at the lead Hellhound and felt only... disdain.
[PASSIVE SKILL ACTIVATED: PRIDE'S THRONE]
[STATS BOOST 50% VS. WEAKER FOE]
He moved. He was faster than he'd ever been. He leaped, the black and white wings flaring—not for flight, but for balance—and activated a skill he didn't even know he had.
[ACTIVE SKILL ACTIVATED: MORNING STAR'S DESCENT]
He didn't just hit the beast. He obliterated it, crashing down like a meteor of dark light, leaving a 20-meter crater. The other Hellhounds vaporized in the shockwave.
Silence.
Raven stood in the crater, breathing hard. He felt incredible.
Then, a new notification.
[CORRUPTION LEVEL: 15%]
He looked at his reflection again. The black wing looked... slightly larger. More solid.
A cold dread settled in his stomach, more terrifying than any Hellhound.
He had the power to save Aria.
But what would he have to become to use it?