WeTried Translations

Translator: ZEROSUGAR

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ Regression is Too Much

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Chapter 224

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The regressor is mentally weak (3)

-You have entered Floor 23.

The sky was dark.

Not the glittering darkness you see when you stagger home drunk and sit on a bench to look up. Not the dim light before dawn either, the kind you see on those rare mornings when you wake up early and step outside just to breathe in the cold air.

It was the color of dirty mop water, dull and nasty, the unpleasant kind of dark. Just looking at it put you in a bad mood and made you want to spit on the ground for no reason.

"Ji-won..."

I could not sense Choi Ji-won's mana. Because she used Heart of Lightning Flash so often, that crackling aura was easy to detect even from far away. Unless she deliberately hid her mana, we usually let it flow freely as soon as we entered the Tower, so we could find each other quickly. Which meant she was either not here, or very, very far away.

"Hmm."

Well, nothing I could do about that. Instead of looking for Choi Ji-won, who was nowhere to be found, I started walking toward a mana presence I could feel relatively nearby. About five to ten people. I would need to see them to know for sure.

Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.

After stepping over crumbling dirt and pushing through dried-up grass, what I found was a huge village. It was far bigger than Floor 22, not even comparable. Too big to call a village, not quite enough to call a city, large enough to hold several thousand people. The name was awkward, so I would just call it a village.

"Creepy."

Every building in the village was well maintained. The wood had a sheen, and the roofs were spotless without a speck of moss. No cobwebs under the eaves either.

The stone blocks laid out in clean rows were pristine with no marks, and when I glanced inside a mailbox, it gleamed like it had just been cleaned.

Everything looked almost brand new, but one thing bothered me.

There was not a single person.

A place this large, with new-looking buildings, yet no sign of use at all. Is this what they call a liminal space? That dizzying feeling of being trapped in an empty world.

No, there were people. Smoke was rising over there. I pulled myself together and quickened my pace again.

Come to think of it, the direction of the mana I sensed matched the direction of that smoke. Someone had lit a fire. One of the few residents, or a player? The answer was obvious.

"You came."

"You're here."

The source of the smoke was a small campfire. A group of men and women sat around the weak flames and looked at me. Their appearance was neat overall, but their armor held a thin layer of dirt. They had clearly been waiting here for more than a day or two. Since I said "armor," you probably guessed already, they were all players.

More importantly, how long had they been waiting? At this level, it looked like we were short on people.

"Was I the last one?"

"Yeah. We were missing exactly one."

A rough-looking woman stood up while cracking her neck side to side. There had been seven people by the fire. Including me, that made eight in total.

"I was so restless I thought I'd die."

"Exactly. We're finally starting."

The other players loosened up too. They were all skilled. Anywhere they went, people would recognize them as masters. If the quality of players was this high, we could probably clear Floor 23 without much trouble.

My chest swelled. The fact that people this remarkable were joining forces to overcome the Tower, the fact that they were all striving to grow stronger, stirred the romantic in me.

"Everyone. Sorry to say this the moment I got here, but..."

"...?"

"Let's really do this. Let's clear it, no matter what."

"You're stating the obvious."

"Hah. We're not kids. Let's clear it fast and head back."

The others shook their heads at me. My words made them cringe a little, but they also pulled up one corner of their mouths and chuckled. We were not enemies. We were companions climbing the Tower together.

[8/8]

"Starting."

"Let's go."

As soon as that number appeared before my eyes, as if my arrival had fulfilled the condition.

"Smoke?"

"Looks like some kind of gimmick."

From between the buildings, faint smoke began closing in from all sides.

It did not look natural at all, very clearly artificial.

"Uh, uh..."

The circular wall of smoke filled the entire area in an instant. By the time the haze got so thick I could not see an inch ahead, I could not hear anything anymore either. Even my mana, which I used in place of sight, would not extend outside my body. It felt like an invisible hand had wrapped around my entire body.

"..."

"..."

Ten seconds. Twenty. Thirty.

Exactly one minute later, the smoke scattered all at once and my blocked vision cleared. The scene looked the same. A small campfire. A strangely spotless village. Even that unsettling sky.

"Is everyone okay?"

"Yeah. I'm fine. Nothing wrong with my body..."

Same for me. Everyone checked their condition, but nothing seemed off. Mana circulated normally, all items were still there, all limbs attached.

Right when that round of checks ended, a message window rose before us.

<Floor 23>
-Find and kill two False Entities. They will target the climbers' lives.
-One Penalty will be given to climbers each day.
-Every day before sunset, you must carry out assigned Daily Missions. If any Daily Mission remains incomplete, a major Penalty will be applied.

"Find two False Entities..."

"Are monsters hiding somewhere in this village? And what do they mean by mission?"

"I still don't get it... nobody here with a working brain?"

Me included, none of us seemed to understand Floor 23's task clearly. Missions, False Entities, what the hell were they talking about? A creepy task fit for a creepy village...

"Wait."

No, something felt off. Something was very, very wrong. Same village. Same sky. And same people...?

"How many of us are there right now?"

"What are you talking about?"

A man frowned at me like I had just said something idiotic.

"No, can you not even count? Look. One. Two. Three. Four. Five, six."

His voice was loud at first as he counted heads.

"Seven. Eight... nine..."

"..."

"..."

"...ten."

By the time he counted the tenth person, his voice had dropped so low I could barely hear it.

"Weren't there eight of us?"

"There were definitely eight. I saw [8/8] too."

Eight went in, ten came out. There were two extra.

"So this is what the status window meant by two False Entities..."

"Then two people here aren't real humans, they're monsters?"

"Probably."

None of the other players muttering with grave faces looked especially odd or suspicious. They were all the same people I saw by the campfire, by the campfire, by the campfire...

"Fuck."

My memory was fuzzy. I could not remember faces clearly. I was not great at remembering faces, sure, but not so bad that I would forget people I met ten minutes ago. This was the Tower's trick.

"Hey, does anyone remember who is who? Some of you were here for a while."

"I remember. There was a guy I talked to about life. So that guy was... fuck."

"Was the person next to me a man? A woman? I can't even remember that."

"What number was I again? Last? First?"

The memory mix-up was the same for the others. Even players who looked like they had stayed here a long time, judging by their armor condition, could not recognize each other's faces.

"You remember me, right? I came last. I filled us up to eight."

"...Did you? But wasn't the last person a woman?"

"No, I think two people came at once at the end."

"No, I definitely came last..."

...Was I really last? Now even my own memory was scrambled. Everything felt vague. Was I really the last one? No, maybe someone came after me.

Confusion swallowed the whole situation. We had clearly resolved to work together, but mistrust slowly mixed into the way we looked at one another.

-This is your Daily Mission.
-Repair the signboard at the west gate [Incomplete]
-Reforge an ingot at the smithy [Incomplete]
-Complete the artist's final painting [Incomplete]

At last, the "mission" mentioned by the status window appeared.

"I think... I need to go east."

"I'm northwest."

"I'm headed to the village center."

Even these missions were all different, and the locations were all over the place.

"...Wait a second."

With two monsters confirmed to be mixed in among us, if our routes got tangled in total chaos, it would take no time for someone to die.

"For now... let's each talk about ourselves."

Right here, right now, we had to find the monsters.

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