The fluorescent lights were wrong.
That was Jaehyuk's first thought. Not "I'm alive" or "how is this possible" or any of the reasonable things a man should think after dying in a corridor on Floor 147 with three knife wounds and nobody coming to help.
No. His first thought was about the lights.
Floor 1's staging area used a cold white. 6500 kelvin. He remembered because he'd spent nine days here during his first climb, staring at the ceiling, trying to work up the nerve to enter the first trial. The lights had burned themselves into his memory like a brand.
He was lying on the floor. Cold tile. The kind that smelled like a hospital and felt like a morgue.
He sat up.
Around him, two hundred people milled through the staging area. Fresh climbers. You could tell by the way they looked at the Tower walls with wonder instead of dread. Some of them were laughing. A group of college-aged kids were taking photos.
Jaehyuk's hands were shaking.
Not from fear. He'd burned through fear somewhere around Floor 90. This was something else. He turned his hands over. Smooth. No calluses. No scar across his left palm from the Floor 67 trap. No burn marks on his fingers from catching a skill orb wrong on Floor 101.
These were the hands of someone who'd never climbed.
"Hey, are you okay?"
He looked up. A girl crouched next to him, head tilted, eyes full of the kind of concern that gets you killed past Floor 20. She wore a white jacket with a red cross stitched on the sleeve. Healer's mark.
Lee Somin.
She was supposed to die on Floor 23.
"You look really pale," she said. "Like, corpse pale. No offense. I have water if you... sorry, I talk a lot when I'm nervous. Are you nervous? Everyone here is nervous. I've been nervous since Tuesday."
Jaehyuk stared at her.
In his first life, he hadn't met her until Floor 12. By then, she'd already joined a party. A bad one. The kind that used their healer as a shield and called it teamwork. He'd watched her name disappear from the Floor 23 clear list and felt nothing because he didn't know her well enough to feel anything.
That was seven years ago. Or thirty seconds ago. Time was doing something strange in his chest.
"I'm fine," he said.
"You're sitting on the floor in a staging area staring at your hands."
"I do that."
She laughed. Nervous, quick, real. "Okay. Fair enough. I'm Somin. Lee Somin. Are you here to climb? Stupid question, everyone's here to climb. Unless you're lost. Are you lost?"
"No."
He stood. His body felt light. Too light. He'd spent years carrying the weight of stats, the density that came with Strength above 200 and Endurance above 150. Now he was... nothing. Baseline human. He could feel it in his joints, his lungs, the way his legs wobbled slightly.
Starting from zero.
He pulled up his status window out of habit. The familiar blue interface flickered to life.
[ YUN JAEHYUK ]
Rank: Unranked
Floor: 1
STR: 10 | AGI: 11 | END: 9 | PER: 13 | WIL: 15
Skills: None
Titles: None
Tower Recognition: 0.00%
His Willpower was 15. That was... high for baseline. It should've been 10 like everything else. He filed it away. Something to think about when he wasn't trying not to throw up from temporal whiplash.
"So," Somin said, still there, still talking. "I'm looking for a party. For Floor 1. I know it sounds lame, partying up for the first floor, but I'm a healer and healers solo-climbing is just... it's bad. It's really bad. I tried the practice sim and I died in four seconds. Four. I counted."
She was rambling at him like he was safe.
He wasn't safe. He was the furthest thing from safe. He was a man with seven years of blood behind his eyes and a list of names he planned to settle accounts with.
But she didn't know that.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay what?"
"I'll party with you."
Her face lit up so fast it almost hurt to watch. "Really? Just like that? You don't even know my stats. I should tell you my stats. My Strength is literally 7. Seven. That's below average. My healing skill is E-rank, which sounds bad, but E-rank healing is actually really solid for Floor 1 because..."
"It's fine."
"You're very calm for someone who was just lying on the floor."
He almost smiled. Almost.
The staging area's main screen flickered. A countdown appeared. FLOOR 1 TRIAL BEGINS IN: 00:14:32. Around them, people started moving. Forming groups. Arguing about strategy for a floor they'd never seen.
Jaehyuk had seen it. He'd seen all of them up to 147.
Floor 1 was simple. A forest. Kill the alpha wolf. Don't die. Most climbers cleared it in an hour. The smart ones cleared it in twenty minutes. Jaehyuk could clear it in six.
But that wasn't the plan.
He scanned the staging area. Two hundred climbers, give or take. Most would clear Floor 1. About 60% would quit before Floor 5. By Floor 10, only the stubborn or the talented remained. By Floor 20...
His eyes stopped on a figure near the east wall. A woman. Young, maybe his age. Black hair pulled back. She stood perfectly still while everyone around her moved, and her eyes were tracking the room with a precision that didn't belong on Floor 1.
She held a sword. Not a Tower-issued beginner weapon. A real one. The kind that had already tasted blood.
Shin Mira.
Future member of the Seven Kings. The woman who would one day reach Floor 187 and come back refusing to speak about what she'd seen. Right now she was just a girl with a sword and something cold in her eyes.
She didn't know him. Wouldn't know him for fifty floors, if the first timeline held.
Jaehyuk looked away before she noticed him watching.
"Hey," Somin said, tugging his sleeve. "You spaced out. The countdown is at twelve minutes. Should we, like, strategize? I've been watching YouTube guides..."
"Stay behind me," he said. "Heal when I say heal. Don't heal anyone else."
"That's... blunt."
"Floor 1's wolf has a pattern. It circles left, feints right, then lunges. When it lunges, there's a half-second window where its throat is exposed. I'll handle it."
She stared at him.
"How do you know the wolf's pattern?"
Good question.
"I watched a YouTube guide too," he said.
She didn't look convinced. But the countdown was at ten minutes now, and conviction was a luxury Floor 1 didn't require.
What it required was speed. And Jaehyuk needed something very specific from this floor. Something that every guide, every veteran, every so-called expert had called trash. A skill that dropped from the alpha wolf at a 3% rate, that nobody wanted, that people literally discarded on the ground.
[Shadow Step (F-Rank)]
In six months, the top guilds would discover that Shadow Step's evolution tree connected to one of the most broken movement skills in the Tower. By then, the supply would be gone. Every F-rank Shadow Step orb would be worth more than most climbers made in a year.
Jaehyuk knew because he'd watched someone buy one for the price of a life.
The countdown hit five minutes.
Somin was saying something about formation positioning. Jaehyuk wasn't listening. He was looking at the gate to Floor 1, the massive stone archway that hummed with a frequency you could feel in your teeth.
He'd walked through that gate seven years ago as a nobody.
He was about to walk through it again. Same gate. Same Floor 1. Same wolf.
Different man.
The countdown hit sixty seconds. The gate began to glow.
Somin grabbed his arm. "Hey. I just realized I don't know your name."
"Yun Jaehyuk."
"Cool. Cool cool cool. Please don't let me die."
The gate opened.
And somewhere behind them, in the back of the staging area where nobody was looking, a figure in a grey coat watched Jaehyuk walk through with an expression that didn't belong on a stranger's face.
Like they'd been waiting for him.