Chapter 12
This person is not from Earth.
I could tell the moment I saw him.
Earth's eyes don't look like that.
There was no distinction between the whites and blacks in the old man's eyes.
Only a cosmic blackness, impossible to tell where it was looking or what it was thinking.
Those eyes turned toward me.
“Hmm? And who might you be?”
A deep, heavy voice that seemed to reverberate through the entire cave.
There was no emotion in it at all, which only made it more chilling.
I couldn't say a word.
No, I couldn't.
Paralyzed by fear, I rolled my eyes around to inspect my surroundings.
The walls were covered with anatomical charts of human muscles and bones.
On the shelves, glass jars held twisted organs and fetuses that seemed somehow too incomplete to be called human.
The stinging smell of chemicals, along with the foul reek of rotting organic matter.
My head swam for a moment.
[Would you like to leave the Tower? Y/N]
I decided to make an emergency escape at once.
It was obvious I was about to be royally fucked.
I pressed Y without hesitation.
[Unable to exit the Tower!]
[Restricted area!]
[An unknown error has occurred!]
[Sending diagnostic and usage information will help improve your experience in the Tower]
[Close / Send Info]
[Time remaining: 13 minutes 42 seconds]
‘Damn it….’
This was absurd.
When I froze without answering, the old man's brow furrowed slightly.
“Why are you silent? Strange. Are you a mindless creation? Should I dispose of you?
Hmm. I'm not sure. You don't seem to be human. Who made you?
Why won't you speak? Just who are you? Why won't you speak? Why? Why? Why?”
Cold sweat trickled down my spine at his low muttering.
The old man was clearly half-mad.
“Why are you silent? Aren't you an intelligent being? Then should I dispose of you? Who are you? Why did you come here?”
Talking about disposing of someone when there's a person right here?
No, this old man didn't see me as a person.
He looked like he was examining an interesting animal or an insect specimen.
I hurriedly opened my mouth.
“Ah, n-no. I'm a person. Just someone who happened to be passing by nearby.”
My frightened, flustered answer was a complete mess.
What kind of person would just be passing by a place like this?
But the old man didn't seem to care about my clumsy excuse.
He seemed satisfied simply by the fact that I had spoken.
“Oh? You can speak human language. Fascinating. Very fascinating. Where did you learn it? Who made you?”
The old man scanned me up and down with interest.
Once again, I was left speechless.
Who made me?
Should I give him my parents' names or something?
“Why are you silent? Why are you silent? Why are you silent? Why are you silent? Why are you silent?”
‘What the fuck….’
It looked like I'd really gotten myself caught.
Calmly, I forced my paralyzed lips apart.
Right. Just stall for time.
Fortunately, the timer was still running normally.
That was the only thing I could trust right now.
“…I'm just a person. Nobody made me.”
“Hmm? Hm…. Fascinating. Truly fascinating….”
The old man rose from his seat and took a step toward me.
‘I need to run. Back up and sprint. Right now….’
Alarm bells were ringing in my head.
But my body wouldn't listen.
They say your body freezes when you meet a beast. Was this what that meant?
The old man reached out toward my frozen body and touched my shoulder.
At the same time, my shoulder tore clean off my torso.
My arm didn't turn into sand or anything like that.
Blood gushed from the severed stump.
“Aaaargh!”
“It's true. You're human.”
“Ghk, ngh….”
“So there were still humans left… I'm moved.”
Pain beyond imagination.
The agony was something I'd never experienced before, and I couldn't even scream properly.
But whether I rolled my eyes back in pain or not, the mad old man just kept talking.
“Perfect. This skin, this skeleton… it's exactly the form I failed to achieve hundreds of times.”
He came right up to my face and started scrutinizing me from head to toe.
His finger touched my cheek.
A chill ran through me from his excessively cold hand.
“Where did you come from?”
“Hah… ngh….”
“Aha! You couldn't speak because of the pain? My apologies. It has been quite a while since I last met a human….”
When the old man brought my arm back to the stump, it reattached itself.
But the pain I'd felt earlier was still there, and my mind was still in no state to speak.
“You can answer now, yes? Where did you come from?”
“Ci….”
“Ci? Did you come from a city? How odd… There shouldn't be any human cities left.”
“You crazy bastard!”
I was completely panicking.
I couldn't even remember my plan to stall with conversation.
This was the first time I'd ever truly felt my life in danger.
I had to struggle somehow.
And my struggle was this:
Blowing the old man's head off with a sand bullet.
“Hm, your pain should have stabilized. Is your mind still unstable?”
But there was no way that would work. The sand bullet lost its shape and crumbled away the moment it touched the old man's skin.
“Die, you bastard!”
Even so, I didn't stop and fired bullets with all ten of my fingers.
But not a single shot so much as scratched him.
The old man didn't even seem to think of this as an attack in the first place.
He calmly sipped his tea and said,
“Have you calmed down? May I ask my questions now? I can, can't I?”
“Hah… haah… what the hell….”
“Where in the world did you come from?”
I didn't even know how many times I'd heard the same question.
By then, I gave up on everything.
I decided to leave everything to the old man and just go along obediently.
Yes, I was definitely out of my mind right now.
Pain and fear. Helplessness. All of it had pushed my mental limits to the edge. I was dizzy and out of it.
I barely managed to answer the old man.
“…I came from outside, from beyond the Tower.”
“The Tower? What is the Tower? How are you alive? Humanity outside should all be dead.”
“I don't know what the Tower is either. People are alive and well out there… Is that enough now?”
“Hmm… you're not lying. Strange. Truly strange. The Tower, you say? Doesn't that remind one of it…? Hm? Hmm?”
[Warning: A severe error has been detected.]
[Forbidden access.]
[Correcting error immediately.]
Suddenly, the old man's eyes spun around once.
His black eyes turned completely white, then returned to black again.
The old man gave his head a violent shake.
And then he asked me again in a voice full of madness.
As if he'd forgotten all the questions from just moments ago.
“Did you clear out all the test subjects out there?”
Though terrified by his state, I kept answering.
“Do you mean the goblins?”
“Yes. My little test subjects. The shaman at the end was one I'd put quite a lot of effort into, only to have it ruined like this.
I had just started observing it, so what a shame.”
The old man clicked his tongue as if he were truly disappointed.
With his words, all the pieces of the puzzle clicked into place.
Why the goblins on the fifth floor were set up exactly like Hard difficulty.
Why there were so few of them, unlike what you'd expect from Extreme difficulty.
‘It was because this old man was the real boss….’
The goblin horde wasn't a monster created by the Tower.
They were soldiers the mad old man in front of me had released for his experiments.
The old man's gaze swept over my body again.
“But what does that matter? You've appeared right in front of me!”
“….”
“Of course, one can't judge by appearance alone… I need certainty. Certainty.
I must confirm whether the spark of intelligence burns within you….”
‘What the hell is he talking about….’
“There is one way to check. You'll cooperate, of course?”
“Yes, of course.”
You'd kill me if I didn't. I swallowed the words that almost came out.
At my answer, the old man grinned so wide it looked like his mouth might split open.
Soon, he pulled something from within his robe.
A palm-sized black cube.
A strange object, as if a piece of space itself had been cut out.
“It's a box only a wise beast can open. If you can open it, that will prove you're qualified.”
“What's inside?”
“The essence of knowledge. But in any case, what's inside isn't important. Isn't that right?”
The old man chuckled and handed me the box.
“I made it so the box recognizes my voice and opens when I say a specific keyword.”
“What keyword did you set?”
“Nothingness. Blank.”
“…Huh?”
I doubted my ears.
The old man continued his explanation.
“It opens only when spoken, but the moment you speak, it is no longer ‘nothingness.’ Because sound exists.
This is the perfect contradiction I created.
Thanks to that, I can never take what's inside out either. How about it? Isn't it amusing? Isn't it? Isn't it?”
“Yes… very amusing.”
Rage surged up inside me.
What the hell did this crazy old bastard want me to do?
Once again, I felt a powerful urge to blast his head off with another sand bullet.
But I had to endure it.
I'd already seen that it was useless.
It would be better to drag things out and wait to be automatically ejected from the Tower.
“Well? Can you solve it?”
The old man pressed me.
His gaze held pure intellectual curiosity, along with a cold severity that seemed to test my worth.
I swallowed hard, tense.
I wracked my brain.
But there was no way my idiot brain, which had spent its whole life rotting away on forums, would suddenly produce a brilliant idea now.
‘Think… think. Some pun puzzle like this. I'm sure I've seen one while lurking on forums….’
In the dead of night, the forums were always full of all sorts of bait threads.
Sometimes, quizzes and deduction puzzles like this would pop up.
Everyone would clutch their heads and try to find the answer.
“Still nothing? Hm, how boring. Tedious… Perhaps you're not qualified after all? What do you think?”
‘Shut up… I wish you'd just shut up….’
Now every breath the old man took felt like a noise gnawing at my nerves.
I wanted to cover my ears. The madman's muttering. His rough breathing. My own heartbeat. I wanted to block out everything.
A desperate desire to erase all sound.
That was the exact moment.
‘Erase sound?’
A single word flashed through my mind like a spark.
The thoughts chained together, leading me to the answer.
A concept that didn't exist in this madman's world. An answer from my world.
“Hey, old man.”
Having found the answer, I was no longer afraid of the old man in front of me.
An inexplicable calm washed over my whole body.
I lifted my head and looked at him.
The old man's black eyes gleamed.
‘That's terrifying.’
I forced myself back into polite speech and answered.
“Have you ever heard of noise canceling?”