Chapter 47
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Translator: penny
Chapter: 47
Chapter Title: Reminiscence
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Sitting in a chair next to the table, I fiddled with the camera.
Ellie watched me and tilted her head.
"Isn't that the director's?"
"It's mine right now. Temporarily, but that was my second request."
"You sound like you made a deal or something."
"Something like that."
The first request would continue indefinitely.
The tower was an endless series of floors, dotted with countless villages in between.
I had captured all the scenery of the tutorial village, but there were still plenty more villages to film.
By gradually filming the lives of the villagers in those places, I held onto the hope that I could eventually change their perceptions.
For now, I had finished filming everything I could on the first floor.
"So you're doing that because there's still stuff left to film?"
"No. I'm not planning to film anything. I just wanted to look back at the videos I've taken so far."
The reason I took her camera as my second request wasn't for recording.
The director wasn't the type to hand over the key tool for utilizing her trait so easily, but she also knew well that there was no logical reason for me to damage the camera.
Our negotiation, which had started with each of us holding the other's ideals on a leash, had now turned into a relationship between a client commissioning videos for information and a director receiving payment.
I needed the camera for my requests too, and destroying the recordings or breaking it would shatter our cooperative relationship—with no benefit, since Seo Ji-woo had ways to respond.
"You want the camera? For the whole day? Just for viewing, of all things... even so..."
She had given me suspicious looks, but she had no choice but to agree to the second request.
If it had been before starting the first request, that suspicion alone might have made her refuse to hand it over entirely.
"Just wanted to look at some old footage."
Climbing the tower repeatedly, enduring countless failures—the main cause was the snowball of deficiencies that had built up from the early stages.
That led to multiple full resets, dropping back to the first floor to overhaul my ascent.
As a result, I remembered the shortest route up to the 700th floor, but my memories from the early days right after entering the tower had grown hazy.
This issue had become blatantly clear during my conversation reminiscing about the first floor with Sua.
The day we first stepped into the tower was a few years ago for her, but thousands of years ago in my timeline, so the gap in our memories was vast.
I barely retained clear memories and could nod along to her recollections, but about seventy percent of the stories she brought up were completely gone from my mind, leaving me to just nod knowingly.
The early parts of my notebook had diary-like entries, but they were just chaotic outpourings of emotions from back then, not enough to vividly recall past scenes.
"Ellie, want to watch together?"
"Sure!"
Ellie pulled her chair over from across the table to sit beside me, ready to view the screen.
Sipping the tea she had prepared, I began the reminiscence.
I first accessed the very first item in the storage space.
As expected, it was set against the backdrop of the first floor.
"Whoa, when was this? You look so young and fresh, Earthbound Spirit!"
"Does my current self show up on the screen?"
"There, in that corner. Top right!"
"It really is. How did you even spot—wait. More importantly, what do you mean by 'fresh'? There's hardly any difference from now."
Maybe I was sensitive about age because my perceived lifespan was so long.
Living in the tower meant no worries about aging, though.
Am I all withered now or something?
"Your eyes are sharp like a wolf's now, but back then they were all ~dopey."
"It's so far away, I can barely make out your face."
"Your expression looks just like the slimes living in the forest."
"Where do you see that?"
To me, it really did look similar. Was it that different from now?
Let's keep watching.
Being early on, we were clearly sticking together in a group.
I had no understanding of my trait yet, and information about the tower was scarce, so I was too busy grasping the situation to do much, just standing around idly in the camera's view.
- "But what if the battery runs out?"
- "Can't we charge it with electricity or something?"
- "Where do we even get electricity?"
- "There are slimes, so maybe with magic somehow?"
- "Just in case, don't waste it too much. We might need it later."
Not being very sociable, I wasn't at the center of the group and didn't feature prominently on screen.
My voice wasn't even recorded, and I didn't say a word about the notebook and pen in the same case as the camera.
By my current standards, hiding information was commendable for an adventurer, but considering the atmosphere back then, it felt a bit cold.
"You and Sua were already close back then, huh? She's always trailing right behind you."
"...Yeah. Come to think of it, I don't think I talked to anyone on the first floor as much as Sua."
As the camera angle shifted, my figure would occasionally appear.
And right beside me was always Sua.
"I can't hear your voice, but... she was probably teasing you about not even being able to catch slimes. How often did that happen for me to remember it so vividly?"
If even those few conversations hadn't happened, I wouldn't have bothered going down to find and bring back the deserters who didn't ascend to the second floor. So it was hard to say we weren't friendly from this point.
Our bond started from the shared sense of weakness as two people who couldn't even properly catch slimes, which was ironic considering one became the guild master with a unique trait and the other had a legendary trait.
Sua got cocky quickly after succeeding in solo-killing a slime and pulling ahead, though.
The thick camaraderie where we dropped formal speech came later.
- "Aren't there any other monsters besides slimes? I'm getting sick of them."
- "Sua, that's rude to the others. You catch them easily, but some people still..."
- "No, that's not what I meant! It was fun when we all teamed up at first, but now most people can handle them alone. That's what I miss."
If my memory of the name was right, Su-hyun was the one who went up to higher floors first following Ryu Jae-hyun and eventually...
"That's everything from the first floor."
"It's super short."
"It wasn't filmed with any purpose like now; it was just casually recorded as a memento. That's why there's not much to gain compared to expectations."
I had hoped to see things like discovering the first quest at Raymond's inn, performing requests as a group, or having dinner together at the restaurant.
Just as I didn't note down everyday life in my notebook because it didn't seem special, Seo Ji-woo hadn't thought to film it with the camera either.
In the end, our first-floor selves in the footage felt even more detached from reality, bringing us one step closer to adventure and camaraderie.
"Next is... not the second floor."
"Huh? How do you know?"
"See that long building in the back? That's the magic tower on the sixth floor. Plus, the second floor was all ruins, so there wouldn't be fancy buildings like that."
There were no saved videos of the scenery from the second to fifth floors.
Unlike the peaceful village-like first and sixth floors, those levels had no distinction between hunting grounds and safe zones.
It was only natural not to bother with the camera amid hordes of monsters swarming chaotically.
The content of the second video wasn't much either.
The gain was being able to clearly distinguish those who stayed with the coalition from those who split off into small groups, compared to the first video.
And one more thing.
- "Whoa, you did this, Sua?"
- "I wanted to be a mage too..."
- "Bro, you're suited for martial arts. You have no talent for magic."
Sua summoning a massive fireball.
It was the sight of an adventurer who had begun to understand her own trait.
"Seeing it with my own eyes makes it feel way more real than hearing about it. Would any monster survive a direct hit from a fireball like that?"
"Right after Sua started properly using her talent, it was smooth sailing. With healers and mages, floors that were just about beating down enemies were cleared in no time."
I played the third video.
Still the sixth floor.
- "Whoa, you did this, Sua?"
It wasn't a continuation from the previous point.
Strictly speaking, it was the sixth floor from a different run.
"It looks similar to before, but there's a subtle sense of unfamiliarity."
"I'm not in it."
"Huh?"
"I don't appear even once in this video."
In the run where I decided to actively use the Sword Saint's power, I didn't move with Seo Ji-woo, so naturally, I didn't show up in the footage.
Yet the camera still recorded their day, and on the whole, there were no major changes.
The fourth and fifth videos were also set on the sixth floor.
As they went on, the flow of the videos changed dramatically.
In some, the group size noticeably shrank; in others, I was overly involved with the coalition.
As Seo Ji-woo had said, after succeeding in conquering the sixth floor, the camera was filled haphazardly with videos she had no memory of filming.
"Is this when she started realizing about the regressions?"
After conquering the seventh floor, more videos from the seventh floor would suddenly appear; the same phenomenon likely occurred on the tenth and eleventh floors.
Since I clearly appeared in the videos but skipped participating from the second floor onward, and my actions varied greatly between videos, it gave Seo Ji-woo ample reason to suspect me.
I continued flipping through the records seen through the camera's lens.
Let's call the first video shot on the seventh floor '7-1' and the second '7-2'.
From my perspective, memories proceeded as 7-1, 8-1, 9-1.
Regressing brought 7-2, 8-2, 9-2.
Of course, this was only when overhauling the entire climb from the start; repeating the same floor multiple times would be 9-3, 9-4, 9-5, etc.
After challenging the twenty-third floor countless times and finally succeeding, only to realize when trying the twenty-fourth that the method for the twenty-third was wrong, the order would get messed up again: 23-4, 23-5, 23-6, 24-1, 24-2, 23-7. Even explaining it was complicated.
And that wasn't even all.
Normally, she wouldn't have filmed the thirtieth floor, but variables during route revisions might have led Seo Ji-woo from another run to record it there.
Instead of 29-1, 30-1, 31-1, it might have flowed as 29-2, 30-1, 31-2.
"I can't figure out the order of these videos. Which run came first or later by my standards."
In the end, I gave up on piecing together the puzzle.
I just distinguished faces full of adventurous spirit from those calculating situations by looking at my expressions in the videos.
Picking out only the faces before exhaustion set in, it felt like glimpsing quite a hopeful story.
"Oh yeah, there was that. I'd completely forgotten about this one."
Unlike now, where I only remembered means for efficient conquests, the camera captured memories without bias.