WeTried Translations

Translator: ZEROSUGAR

Editor: Abstract

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◈ Regression is Too Much

Chapter 197

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The regressor coasts (5)

As the Floor 17 case showed, the Tower operated like some kind of machine. Machines have glitches, and I want to exploit that.

"I don't know if it was just Floor 17 or if every floor is this way... but I think it's got a real shot at working."

The Tower has criteria for determining when someone has entered a floor. Fool those criteria, and I could explore a floor while still being registered as never having set foot in it.

What's the benefit, you ask? Preparation.

The Tower is designed to make preparation impossible through information control. Through the Association, you can draw indirect inferences from things like what injuries climbers came away with, how long they spent inside, that sort of thing. But the exact trial waiting on the next floor? A complete unknown.

What if you could go backward through a floor, though? More precisely, what if you could experience it in advance?

I'd essentially have a cheat code in my hands for preparing perfectly for every floor. It wasn't just about reaching further into the past. The point was the information.

Of course, the odds weren't great. I had no way to know whether Regression's detection criteria and the Tower's even matched, and I still wasn't fully confident I understood how Regression worked. But the potential payoff was massive. It was worth trying.

"So the moment I step in, I sweep through my soul immediately. Feel whether there's some kind of connection or not."

"Hmm... I still don't quite follow this 'soul' of yours..."

Choi Ji-won shook her head. She'd never quite warmed up to my soul theory.

"Jun-ho, couldn't you be sensing something other than a soul?"

"No, that's not it..."

She'd put quite a bit of time into it, and still couldn't feel her own soul. Two souls in that body of hers, and she couldn't feel either one. Was it because there were two? Or was I just some unusual case?

Then again, I hadn't done any better proving the theory myself. I couldn't feel Ji-won's soul at all. I'd tried focusing beside her, holding her hand, hugging her, everything I could think of, and still nothing. On the off chance it made a difference, I'd called over firefighter Park Cheol-jin for a similar experiment. Still nothing.

So either I was experiencing some kind of hallucination, or I was in a state where I could only sense my own soul. Personally, I believed the latter. There was the Floor 17 case, after all.

"Well, maybe this is just one of the perks of being a regressor?"

So I settled on believing that I could do it because I was a regressor, because I had lived long enough. Or maybe my skill level just wasn't there yet. That, I trusted, time would sort out.

With my thoughts roughly in order, I spent two weeks grinding one thing—sensing my soul the instant consciousness returned. Then, I finished my preparations and regressed.

Clearing Floor 17 again was no trouble at all. Done in thirty minutes, then back to the present.

Once I confirmed Ji-won was safe.

"Ready?"

"Let's go."

We headed for Floor 18.

-Entering Floor 18.

Every time you enter a new floor, or go through a regression, there is a moment where consciousness cuts out. It wasn’t something that applied only to me, obviously. Everyone who entered the Tower went through it.

People stepping in would always hesitate for just a beat, about one or two seconds. I had watched it happen more times than I could count during my long stretch on Floor 2. Someone would walk in, stand there blankly for a moment, then start moving as though a switch had been flipped. No amount of conditioning could get you used to it. No amount of strength would let you bypass it. Just one of those things that came with the Tower.

The phenomenon was constant, but how you handled it, and how familiar you were with it, varied. And if I do say so myself, no one has experienced this going-blank more often than me.

"Hup."

So the instant I came back to myself, without a single hundredth of a second's delay, I drew up my Mana and awakened my soul. Several rounds of practice had made the whole sequence smooth and fast.

"...?"

The sense of resistance, though. Nowhere.

On Floor 17, I had felt one faint, paper-thin Mana thread, and all I'd needed to do was sever it. Now there was nothing. Just my own soul, solitary and whole.

"Mm..."

Maybe it had just been a Floor 17 quirk. That seemed likely. It was the Mana-awakening floor, after all, so maybe someone had tucked this in as a kind of Easter egg. Could be that some archangel had prepared a little gift to hand over later, something along the lines of "you have talent!"

Was the Tower's connection established during that one second of lost consciousness? Had Floor 17 been a case where I could sense that moment? Possible.

Or maybe my skill level wasn't up to it. Maybe the Mana thread that judged the entry was so subtle, so careful, that I simply couldn't detect it in my current state. Or maybe it wasn't Mana at all, but something else that determined the entry.

A few more pieces of information and doubt might harden into certainty, but there was nowhere to get those pieces right now. I couldn't try again. It had only ever been the one chance.

The "excess regression" plan was, for the moment, a failure.

"Jun-ho. You're here."

"...It didn't work."

I rejoined Ji-won, who had been waiting nearby. The floor had dropped us onto a sheer rocky mountain. Not the kind thick with trees and lush green. More white than anything else, that pale, bare-rock white, wrapped in heavy mist, the kind of place where you half-expected Sun Wukong to be sealed away somewhere in the cliffs.

"Is that the way up?"

"Looks like it."

We'd come down somewhere on the mountainside but hadn't gotten lost. A path wound up the peak in a slow spiral, like a tourist trail, laid out so you couldn't miss it. With nowhere else to go, we started climbing.

"...Is this safe?"

Crude iron pegs driven into the rock with platforms bolted on, not exactly confidence-inspiring. Fortunately, nothing crumbled or snapped. We made our way up the spiraling path to the summit, where an angel was waiting.

"Good to meet you."

The angel spoke in a composed, measured voice, bowing slightly. He had a needle in hand, skillfully mending a torn rag puppet.

A puppet, though. Made me think of the elder from Floor 15.

"Where are the other players? We saw signs of them on the way up."

While I was off somewhere in thoughts of the old man, Ji-won had already asked the sharp question. The path up had shown clear signs of use. And since we'd entered together, this wasn't a solo floor.

And yet up here on this tall peak, not a single other soul was visible. Just me, Ji-won, and this angel. Unless the floor had a two-person cap, something was off.

"Please don't worry too much. I'll walk you through it step by step."

Unhurried despite Ji-won's question, the angel finished mending the puppet, then reached into his robe and produced two new puppets, holding one out to each of us.

"Here. Please take these."

"...What are these?"

"The heart of Floor 18."

He folded his hands in front of him and began.

"As you have already experienced on Floors 16 and 17, the Archangel holds the path of practice in high regard. That is, the discipline of refining and polishing oneself."

"Yes. We know."

"But do you know what the real problem with practice is?"

"...?"

"It is that humans advance until they grow accustomed to the practice itself."

In modern terms, exercise. Weightlifting.

Consistent anaerobic training builds muscle—that's obvious. The body evolves through the cycle of tearing and recovery.

But what if the goal was the practice itself? If the point was to enjoy the process, enduring, pushing through, suffering while feeling some strange ecstasy in it, then getting stronger becomes an obstacle. The same weight gives less and less.

"Of course, growing stronger matters. People need goals to move forward. But practice must never be reduced to a means to an end. It is both means and goal, a lantern that lights the path ahead. The Archangel always grieved seeing martial artists who had grown so strong they had lost any goal to practice toward, or any way to practice at all."

"Ah..."

"But the Archangel devised a solution. Simply put, reset a body that has grown too powerful."

"...What?"

The words had barely landed when a message window floated into view.

-On Floor 18, all climbers' physical abilities are equalized and fixed.

-Submit a reward that exceeds the Overseer's standard.

All physical abilities equalized? An Overseer? And who was the Overseer, exactly?

Still reeling, I was about to throw another question at the angel when:

"Well then. Good luck."

He pressed a talisman onto the head of each puppet, one after the other. Snap.

"Wait, hold on—"

Consciousness. Gone.

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