Have you ever felt like you wanted to die?
Not in the way people say it when they're tired or frustrated. I mean really wanted to die. To just stop existing. To have the world go quiet.
I have.
It started with the accident. My parents, my younger sister, my grandmother. All four of them in the same car on a Tuesday evening. A truck driver fell asleep at the wheel.
That was it.
That was all it took.
Four people I loved more than anything, gone because a man didn't get enough sleep.
The police officer who told me had kind eyes. I don't remember a single word he said.
Then came Soo-Yeon.
We had been together for three years. I thought she was the reason I was still standing after the crash. Turns out she was standing closer to someone else the whole time.
She told me on a Wednesday. Exactly one week after the funeral.
She said she had been unhappy for a long time. She said she was sorry and left my apartment wearing the perfume I had bought her for her birthday.
I sat on the floor for hours after she walked out.
Then my job went too.
Budget cuts, my manager said. He couldn't look me in the eye when he said it.
Three months. That was how long it took for everything to fall apart.
I stopped eating properly. I stopped answering calls. I would sit in my apartment in Seoul with the curtains closed and stare at the ceiling and wonder what the point of any of it was.
Then one night, around two in the morning, I found it.
Towers Ascendance.
It was on Webnovel. I had downloaded the app out of boredom, looking for anything to keep my mind from eating itself alive. The cover caught my eye first. Then the title. Then the first line pulled me in and didn't let go.
The story was about the end of the world. Not in the slow, political way people usually imagine it.
Mysterious towers appeared. Massive, ancient looking structures that erupted from the ground all across the earth without warning.
From these towers came monsters that pushed humanity to a desperate point.
Many people died.
But not everyone.
Before the towers appeared, a small number of people had been quietly chosen. Nobody knew why. Nobody knew how. They were just ordinary people living ordinary lives.
And when the dust settled and the world was broken and desperate, they were the ones who came back. Rebuilding what was left of humanity from the inside out.
I read forty chapters that first night.
For the first time in months, I forgot to be sad.
-
"Huh."
I stared at the update notice on my screen.
The author was going on a break.
I sighed and leaned back. Then I accepted it. What else could I do.
Park Jiho, the author behind Towers Ascendance, was one of the hardest working writers I had ever seen on Webnovel. Three chapters a day. Every single day. Each one sitting comfortably at three thousand words.
We were at chapter 890 now.
I had caught up in three weeks. Three weeks of barely sleeping, barely eating, just reading. Other authors worked hard too, I wasn't dismissing that. But there was something different about Jiho. Something almost inhuman about the consistency.
So yes. A break was earned.
I closed the app and set my phone face down on the table.
The apartment was quiet. It was always quiet now.
I no longer cried in the mornings. That was something. I no longer stared at my phone waiting for my ex to call. That was also something.
But I still felt it. That quiet, formless wish sitting at the back of my mind like a tenant who refused to leave. It wasn't that I wanted to hurt myself.
It was just that sometimes, late at night when the silence felt too loud, I thought it would be almost peaceful if my life simply ended.
Like a reset.
I understood the appeal better than I ever thought I would.
I turned off the lamp and lay down on top of my blanket without getting under it. The ceiling was dark. I watched it for a while.
Then my eyes got heavy.
I slept.
-
Something woke me up.
Voices.
Agitated, overlapping, climbing over each other in pitch and panic. I opened my eyes and the first thing I noticed was that the ceiling was gone.
Above me was rock. Rough, grey, ancient looking rock lit by a pale light that had no clear source.
I sat up slowly.
I was in a cave.
A large one. And I was not alone.
There were maybe fifty, sixty people around me. Some standing, some still on the ground. All of them loud. A woman in a business suit was screaming. Two men were arguing in what sounded like Portuguese. A teenager in a school uniform kept repeating something in Japanese, his voice cracking each time.
"Where are we?"
"Is this a kidnapping?"
"My father will have every person responsible for this arrested, do you understand me?"
"Someone call the police."
"There is no signal."
I looked down at my hands. Still fine. Same clothes I had fallen asleep in. My phone was in my pocket with no signal, just like the man said.
I stood up and looked around properly.
That was when I saw him.
He stepped out from the shadow at the far end of the cave and the noise dropped immediately. Not because anyone chose to stop. It just happened, like the sound had been pulled from the room.
He looked almost human.
Tall. Lean. Dressed in dark robes. The face was calm and sharp and arranged in a way that was almost pleasant.
But the horns were hard to ignore.
Two of them. Curving back from the temples. Black and smooth and very real.
For a long moment nobody said anything.
"Hello everyone," the figure said with a smile. "Welcome to the tutorial floor of the tower. My name is Kaelen and I am the floor master of the tutorial grounds."
Then someone laughed.
A man near the front. Young, built, wearing an expensive watch. Was that a Rolex?
He bent down and picked up a loose rock from the cave floor.
"Great costume," he said, still half laughing. "Very impressive. Now someone tell me where the cameras are and take me back home."
He threw the rock.
It hit Kaelen square in the chest.
The man burst apart.
One moment he was standing there with a smirk and the next he was simply gone, replaced by a warm red mist and a sound I will never be able to unhear. The screaming that followed was immediate and total.
Something wet touched my cheek.
I reached up slowly and wiped it away. I looked at my fingers.
I didn't react. I don't know why.
The cave was chaos. People pressed backward, tripping over each other, crying, praying. Kaelen stood exactly where he had been standing. Expression unchanged.
I should have been terrified.
Instead my mind was doing something quiet and methodical underneath all the noise.
Because I had seen this before.
In a book.
Maybe it was because I had been thinking about it right before I slept. But I caught on immediately. Chapter one of Towers Ascendance. The tutorial floor. The floor master with horns. The man who threw the rock. The blood.
I had read this exact scene.
I had read it on my apartment floor at two in the morning, phone screen too bright in the dark, turning pages so fast my eyes burned.
Kaelen opened his mouth.
And before a single word came out, I already knew what he was going to say.
My lips moved with it. Silently. Word for word.
"Welcome, chosen ones."