No one remembers when NULL appeared.
There were no warnings, no omens carved into the sky. One day, a structure stood where nothing had existed before—a tower of dark stone, rising straight upward, its peak lost beyond clouds and instrumentation alike. It did not emit mana storms. It did not roar. It simply existed, indifferent to observation.
Hunters named it NULL after their instruments failed to read it.
No rank. No difficulty. No limit.
The first raid entered three days later.
They were confident—veterans from a top-tier guild, equipped with relic-grade weapons and a healer whose name alone could stabilize markets. The broadcast showed them crossing the threshold, joking, arguing about floor distribution, already planning how the discovery would reshape the balance of power.
The feed cut out after fourteen minutes.
Recovery teams found nothing. No corpses. No remains. Not even blood.
NULL remained silent.
Over the following years, the world learned patterns the hard way. NULL did not behave like other towers. Floors did not reset. Enemies did not follow known classifications. Retreat was permitted—but only sometimes. Those who returned spoke in fragments, their memories unreliable, their sleep filled with repeated deaths that had not happened to them.
Every raid failed.
The stronger the team, the faster they collapsed.
Guilds bled prestige and manpower. Nations quietly blacklisted the structure, then quietly violated their own bans. Analysts produced theories that contradicted one another. Religious groups called it judgment. Scholars called it a system error in reality itself.
NULL did not respond.
At some point, a detail emerged—small at first, almost dismissed.
Among the survivors, one name appeared more often than statistics allowed.
Not a carry. Not a prodigy. Not a ranked hunter.
A support-type leader who never dealt the final blow.
Eiran Holt.
Every team he led was wiped out.
Every time, he returned.
No one called him unlucky.
They called him cursed.
And still, against reason and reputation, Eiran Holt kept signing raid contracts for NULL—placing his name at the top of forms that listed expected casualties, knowing exactly how many lines would be filled before the end.
The tower did not kill him.
It let him watch.