Elian walked down the maintenance stairs until the sounds of the cheering crowd above faded into nothingness.
He reached the bottom of the stadium's foundation. A dead end of concrete and rusted pipes.
"Floor 0," Elian whispered.
He pulled the Black Cube from his inventory. It was vibrating so violently it blurred in his hand. He held it up to the blank concrete wall.
CLICK.
The sound didn't come from the wall. It came from inside his own skull.
The concrete didn't slide open; it rotted. In seconds, the grey stone turned to dust, crumbling away to reveal a passage that shouldn't have been there.
A blast of air hit him. It didn't smell like a dungeon. It smelled of stale spices, dried blood, and time.
[System Warning: You are leaving the Safe Zone.]
[System Warning: You are leaving the Map.]
[System Warning: Connection to Server... Unstable.]
The blue system boxes flickered and died.
Elian stepped through.
The Descent
There were no torches. No glowing moss. Just absolute, suffocating darkness.
Elian activated a Light Crystal. The beam cut through the dark, revealing the path.
He wasn't in a hallway. He was on a narrow bridge made of black stone, suspended over an infinite void. The architecture was wrong. It was Cyclopean—massive blocks of stone fit together with mathematical precision, but the angles were nauseating. They seemed to twist the longer he looked at them.
"This isn't a floor," Elian realized, his voice trembling slightly. "It's a tomb."
He walked for what felt like hours. The silence was absolute. No dripping water. No monster growls. Just the sound of his boots on the stone, and the beating of his own heart.
Finally, the bridge ended at a massive gate. It stood fifty feet tall, carved from a single piece of bone.
The Black Cube in his hand flew out of his grip. It slotted perfectly into a square hole in the center of the bone gate.
GROAAAN.
The gate opened inward.
Elian stepped into Floor 0.
The Archive of Failures
The room was vast. The ceiling was lost in shadows.
The floor was covered in rows of what looked like glass coffins. Thousands of them. They stretched on as far as the light could see.
Elian walked to the nearest one. He wiped the layer of grey dust from the glass.
He froze.
Inside was a creature. It was tall, with four arms and skin like polished obsidian. It wore armor that looked like a mix of medieval plate and futuristic circuitry.
It was dead. A hole had been punched through its chest.
Elian moved to the next coffin. A woman with wings, her face frozen in a scream.
The next. A being made of crystal.
[System Error: Entity Cannot Be Identified.]
[System Error: Era Unknown.]
"They aren't monsters," Elian whispered, the horror setting in. "They're Players."
He realized then what he was looking at. This wasn't a dungeon. It was a graveyard.
These were the climbers from before. Before humans. Before the "Tower of Aetheria" was a game.
He walked deeper into the room. In the center stood a massive obsidian monolith. It was covered in writing. The System tried to translate it, the blue boxes flickering frantically.
[Translating... 10%... 40%... Failed.]
[Translating... Ancient Tongue Detected.]
Elian touched the monolith.
The Mask of the Stoic on his face flared cold, suppressing the sheer terror that tried to rise in his throat. Without the mask, he might have screamed.
The text wasn't a warning. It was a log.
"Cycle 114 failed. The Corruption reached Floor 50."
"Cycle 203 failed. The Champion fell to madness."
"Cycle 890 failed. Humanity selected as the new host."
Elian stepped back.
"Host?"
Suddenly, the Black Cube—now embedded in the gate behind him—projected a hologram into the center of the room. It wasn't a pristine blue image like the System. It was red, grainy, and distorted.
A figure appeared. It looked human, but its eyes were completely black. It wore a lab coat stained with blood.
"If you are seeing this," the recording spoke, the voice echoing in Elian's mind, "then the System is still running. Good."
The figure coughed, wiping blood from its mouth.
"We failed. The Architects, the High Elves, the Starmen... we all failed to reach the Apex. The thing at the top... it doesn't want to be disturbed."
Elian watched, paralyzed.
"We built the System to gamify the ascent," the recording continued. "To train a species slowly, generation by generation, so they might survive the horror on Floor 100. We turned the war into a game to keep you sane."
The figure leaned into the camera.
"But the Tower isn't a building, Climber. You aren't climbing a tower."
The hologram shifted. It showed a diagram of the world.
The "Tower" wasn't going up into the sky.
It was a Spear. A massive, metaphysical spike driven deep down into the planet.
"The Tower is a seal," the figure whispered. "The floors aren't levels. They are layers of a cage. And you aren't climbing up to godhood. You are digging down."
Elian felt the world spin.
Up was Down.
The "Top" of the tower was the Core of the world.
And the monsters on the floors? They weren't spawned by the system. They were the things leaking from the cage.
"We ran out of power," the recording rasped. "So we made a trade. The System harvests the mana of the dead to keep the seal intact. That's why the Tower opened to Earth. We need your dead."
The figure in the hologram looked directly at Elian.
"But you... you feel different. The System can't read you. You've been here before, haven't you?"
The recording glitched. The figure's face distorted into a scream.
"Don't trust the Administrator. Don't trust the Guide. They are programmed to keep the seal closed at all costs. Even if it means resetting the timeline."
ZRRRT.
The hologram vanished.
The room plunged back into darkness.
Elian stood alone in the dark, surrounded by the corpses of a thousand failed civilizations.
The Tower wasn't a test. It was a meat grinder designed to fuel a dying battery. And he—the Regressor—was just a recycled battery that refused to die.
Suddenly, a sound broke the silence.
SCRAPE.
It came from the monolith.
A panel opened. Inside wasn't a weapon or a skill book.
It was a Key. An old, rusted iron key.
[Item: The Key of Truth]
[Rank: Mythic]
[Use: Unlocks the "Backdoor" of the System.]
Elian picked it up. His hands were shaking, even with the Stoic Mask.
"They aren't climbing to the sky," Elian whispered, realizing the cruel joke of his past life. "We were digging our own graves."
He turned to leave. He had to get out. He had to breathe.
But as he reached the bone gate, a message appeared. Not in blue. But in Red.
[System Alert: Unauthorized Access Detected.]
[Administrator Attention Drawn.]
[Entity 'Elian' marked for... Correction.]
The ground shook. The dust fell from the ceiling.
Something woke up in the darkness of Floor 0.