Han Seol, Dead.
“……!!”
My eyes flew open.
The moment I realized that, an unbearable pain flooded through my body.
“Hh—huhh…! Hh—huhh…!”
I felt like I was about to throw up. My head throbbed. My eyes burned.
Outside, my ears rang; inside, my heartbeat pounded so violently it felt unreal.
“Kgh…! Kuuhk…!!”
The breath I’d been sucking in all at once choked in my throat.
I grabbed at my neck with trembling hands, but I couldn’t breathe properly.
Wide-eyed, I forced strength into the tips of my fingers and toes and swallowed down each ragged gasp.
I’d been through hyperventilating more times than I could count. Calm down. Breathe out slowly, deeply.
With that thought, I beat my own body down long enough to steady my breathing.
“Hideout…?”
Only then did I realize I was lying on the bed in my Hideout.
“……”
I was sure I’d been caught by Behemoth and killed.
At the end, I’d definitely been crushed in the monster’s massive jaws.
“I’m alive…?”
I blinked blankly at the absurdly normal comments from the Jutak.
Just ordinary comments on the verification post for Wind Tower Floor 50.
They were the same ordinary gallery posts I always saw.
Does that mean dying isn’t really dying…?
At the incomprehensible situation, I blinked stupidly.
I was dead. I’d definitely been swallowed by that stinking maw.
And yet, somehow, I was breathing just fine.
Could be a dream… but no, that doesn’t fit.
If this was a dream, it was exactly like always. The gallery’s atmosphere, their manner of speaking, the content—everything.
If this was the afterlife, then I’d been trapped in the tower again, and that made no sense either.
Clunk—
Still dazed, I got out of bed and stepped onto the floor.
The sensation of touching the ground felt wrong, and it hurt so badly it felt like I might topple over at any second.
What the hell is this? What the hell is this, seriously?
The need to make sense of the situation forced my body into motion.
Bang!
“……”
I opened the Hideout door and stared at the timer floating in the Lobby.
-1-
[Doom 302:18:07:18]
[Section 0:18:07:18]
[198 / 63]
Ten hours… had passed?
Ten hours had gone by since I entered Wind Tower Floor 50.
Exactly as much time as I’d spent struggling in the tower.
That proved what I’d experienced, what I’d seen, hadn’t been a dream.
Swish.
“I don’t have any mana stones either.”
I groped through my pockets, but there was nothing there.
Of course not. I’d thrown everything at Behemoth.
I had no idea whether it had been some kind of magic resistance or what, but the bastard had ignored it all anyway. Still, I’d used everything I had.
Which meant what I’d gone through hadn’t been a dream or an illusion.
“……Then I really did revive.”
Some Irregular ability? Some power of the tower?
I still didn’t really understand what was what.
Like the first time I’d seen Irregular, I couldn’t make sense of what was happening to me.
That is, I couldn’t understand it on my own.
But this was different from when I’d first entered the tower.
Swish.
My throat felt bone-dry as I wrote the post.
Ring-ring-ring-ring-
As if greeting the protagonist who had emerged after ten hours of silence, every sort of gallery user was piling into the comments.
Honestly, I could only stare.
I’d died, but I’d come back to life.
I frowned at the comment box overflowing with question marks.
Was this some abnormality happening to me? Or some side effect of Irregular… of the wiki?
Ring! Ring!
I stared at the phone that wouldn’t stop buzzing and squeezed my eyes shut.
It was a relief that I was alive. It really was a relief that I was alive, but…
……Maybe because I just died and came back, but this feeling is fucking awful.
It made all the desperate struggling I’d done to survive feel a little hollow.
“Hoo.”
Exhaling like that, I checked the comments again—and then saw this:
“……?”
The reactions were somehow a little strange, and I blinked at them blankly.
Hadn’t I died yet?
Was this my first death?
Who the hell dies multiple times?
When you die, that’s the end of it.
……Wait. Don’t tell me dying wasn’t the end?
Tap.
The wording was fucking violent, seriously;
Someone explain what the hell is going on, please;;
No, seriously. For real?
Not a dream, not a scam.
Not some special ability from Irregular, not a butterfly effect caused by an abnormality.
Just… this tower had always been that kind of place?
Seriously, why didn’t anyone tell me? Fuck, what is this?
Why didn’t anyone say you could die and come back to life?
“No, no, no…!!”
It felt like betrayal.
I’d thought they were all monsters.
I hadn’t exactly thought it was normal, but I also hadn’t given it much serious consideration. I just assumed the ones who could climb this thing were mostly that kind of people anyway.
Honestly, they were fantasy beings throwing around magic and sword aura, so I’d shrugged it off.
What mattered was that I climbed.
In the end, only a tiny fraction survived anyway.
“The notice I looked at first…?”
I hurried back into the notice and read through it.
The notice I’d read because the Jutak had told everyone to read it carefully after the Irregular incident.
Poorly formatted to the point of being a disaster, with random self-introductions and rambling content.
It was definitely that notice I’d skimmed once before and then replaced with the summary post.
The notice I replaced with the summary…
When I checked the comments, the summary link I’d seen back then was still there.
It had the tower explanation and warnings, just as I remembered.
“No, there isn’t…”
But nowhere in there did it say you’d revive if you died.
“……”
No, it really was written there.
Why the hell was it really written there?
Why was it in that notice?
If it had been in another notice, I would’ve found it.
You damn anonymous bastard.
Then what was the summary post for?
It wasn’t in the summary, so of course I missed it.
You could’ve just added one more line.
[The rest of the info, figure it out through adventure. Lul]
Instead of pulling that shit, he could’ve just written one more line.
He could’ve been kind enough to do that, like the Jutak—
“No… if I think about it, it does make sense that way… sigh….”
Wind Tower, Earth Tower, Soul Tower, Fortune Tower.
They were all absurdly difficult by nature.
If I thought about it coldly, there was no way anyone could clear these things by dying and regressing hundreds or thousands of times without end.
If you thought that would work, you were just a dumbass moron.
This dumbass moron.
And if I looked at the summary post again, the things written there were all the more important stuff anyway.
There was no need to explicitly say you revived after dying.
It was designed from the beginning so that you couldn’t climb unless you failed.
Every single person in this gallery must have experienced death at least once.
“……”
Because the only true death was reaching “Doom Timer 0.”
Once I realized that, I understood why Wind Tower made you grind for so long.
Why Earth Tower made you wander a maze until you escaped, why Soul Tower forced you through endless terror.
Why Fortune Tower proposed absurdly impossible luck-based games.
If it was all just meant to buy time.
If dying and waking up meant you could challenge it again the same way.
“Haha….”
It explained everything.
Every last bit of it.
I had no idea;
I’ve got nothing to say.
Why hadn’t anyone posted that you revive after death?
Because it was obvious. Because it happened to everyone.
[Doom 302:18:07:18]
Because the real “doom” was plainly visible to everyone’s eyes.
Of course I still felt wronged, but I was the one who had only read the anonymous user’s summary and moved on.
It was weird for me to get angry at the one who’d even taken the trouble to summarize it and ask, “Why didn’t you write this part too?”
...So that’s why it’s called the Infinite Regression Gallery.
I’d thought infinite regression simply meant repeating the tower.
But if you died and revived and returned to your Hideout, then that must be included too, which was probably why they gave it that name.
“Feels pretty good, actually….”
My feelings were strange. The sensation felt strange.
Being alive after experiencing death was an odd thing to wrap my head around.
Ring! Ring! Ring!
Regardless of my mood, my phone was ringing like crazy.
Yeah, I can’t even either.
Just because I’d known didn’t mean I would’ve worked any less hard.
I would’ve still struggled like hell, done everything I could not to die and climb higher.
Even so, I couldn’t shake this bizarre feeling.
I suddenly wanted a concept post.
Recommended 123, downvoted 4
It had only been ten seconds since I posted.
120 recommendations already.
Watching the endless flood of posts, comments, and recommendations, I closed my eyes.
Whew. Thank god.
Good was good, I supposed.
Hitting the concept board made me feel a little safer. Yeah, concept posts really were a cure-all.
“A bunch of lunatics.”
Still, it didn’t feel all that bad.
From my point of view, I might look a little stupid for not knowing, but from their point of view, it was fucking awesome, wasn’t it?
While you were dying and reviving and climbing the tower, I climbed it without dying.
The gallery was full of incomprehensible reverence for me, no matter what the Jutak said, and I smiled a little at it.
So, it’s all in the concept board again.
Every post I’d written over the last few minutes had ended up on the concept board.
It was honestly ridiculous, but all I could do was laugh weakly at the fact that I’d only just learned something this important.
“Hoo.”
Still, I was grateful there was a chance to get revenge on that enormous beast bastard.
It basically meant I could go wild in a place where my life wasn’t limited.
I could throw out choices I never could have made before, reckless gambles that had almost no chance of working.
Grip…!
No matter what happens, I’m going to land a big one on you.
You chew up my body with that filthy mouth?
Absolutely not. I’m not letting that slide.
Roughly 300 days remained until doom.
I had more time than I knew what to do with, so I’d thrash around however I had to and make sure I hit back once, hard.
If I don’t come back, don’t worry.
I’ll bring back something amazing the day I do.
Clunk.
“The Avatar of the Earth or whatever…”
First, I was going to smash that huge head to pieces somehow, with my unlimited-life cheat.
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