The utter stillness was maddening. My senses, deprived of external stimuli, began to turn inward, focusing on the hum of my own internal energies, the faint resonance of the Tongues within me. The -80% mark pulsed again, a silent reminder of the journey yet to be completed, of the limitations I still possessed. Whatever awaited me in Babel, it was beyond conventional combat. This was a test of a different kind. And I was completely unprepared.
Suddenly, without warning, the obsidian-like surfaces of the spherical chamber began to glow. A soft, ethereal light pulsed from every direction, growing steadily brighter, enveloping me. My body felt weightless, and I began to float, slowly lifting from the perfectly smooth floor. It wasn't the violent teleportation I'd experienced at the tower's base; this was a gentle, almost reverent ascent.
As I drifted upward, torrents of information, raw and unbidden, flooded my mind. It was not mere knowledge, but understanding, compressed and uploaded directly into my consciousness. A history, ancient beyond imagining, unfolded within me.
Once, humanity stood as an unfathomable power within the multiverse, wielding the Original Tongue—a unique ability capable of twisting the very fabric of reality itself. Feared by all, humanity embarked on building the Great Tower of Babel, an audacious project meant to connect them to the entire multiverse during an era when the multiverse was actively discovering new territories and monopolizing their resources. But as humanity's might grew, the sovereigns of the multiverse, consumed by an envious fear and jealousy, conspired against them. During the tower's construction, while humanity was at its most vulnerable, allied forces betrayed them. Unable to strip away the Original Tongue entirely, the conspirators shattered it, causing its immense power to fragment. The once unified human language fractured into countless diverse tongues, and the Creator Sovereign, leader of humanity, used the near-complete tower to isolate them from the multiverse. Humanity entered an era of science and technology, their former glory a distant memory, a mere whisper in the annals of time.
The sheer scale of this ancient betrayal, the fall of humanity from a position of cosmic power, resonated deep within me. It explained so much – the fractured languages, the sense of something lost. I, Andrey Netufos, a 'Shoelace' from the outskirts, was inheriting the echoes of a war that spanned galaxies and millennia. The magnitude of it settled, a cold, vast weight in my soul. This wasn't just about my suffering anymore; it was about the suffering of an entire species.