South Korea Is a Tower Backwater
“What the hell is this…?”
Is this for real?
Am I seriously reading a news story about myself?
There isn’t someone else who went into the basement, right?
“Cheonwoo, what’s wrong?”
“Huh? Nothing. Mom, I’m gonna pack some things.”
“Oh—okay.”
I hurried into my room.
Had I really become a person of interest that the entire world was watching?
Not some overblown nationalist Korean news fluff—the real thing?
News… I can’t trust the news!
Korean media? As if I’d believe that crap!
True truth lives only in the Gallery!
I opened the Gallery—the place where actual hunters gathered, accessible only to Tower climbers.
Come to think of it, I should have Gallery access by now, right?
Enter the Tower, earn climber status, and you unlock a community called Babel Tower. No device, no medium required—it works like a status window any climber can open. Languages translate themselves. Climbers can talk freely about anything.
I went to check the hunters’ raw, unfiltered reactions at once.
Then something floated up in front of my eyes.
Would you like to peep on the Hunter Gallery?
Peep…?
Not “access.” Peep?
What was that supposed to mean?
From what hunters posted about the Babel Tower Gallery, a normal connection just issued you a personal ID and let you use the place right away. So why was I getting this prompt?
Because I was basement staff, maybe?
Thinking back, when I received Manager Authority, there had definitely been a line…
Gallery Peeping is available!
So my connection method was different from the ordinary, universal, garden-variety climber’s.
Maybe being basement personnel had shunted me off the official route onto some shady backdoor path.
“Peep!”
I activated Gallery Peeping.
More unfamiliar lines appeared before my eyes.
Activating Secret Mode.
Guest account issued.
Rank set to Observer.
“Ooooh?!”
Secret Mode. Even Gallery admins couldn’t look up my info.
Guest account. Get banned, spawn another account, click back in.
Observer rank. I could browse other people’s information however I liked.
“This is completely…”
Optimized for trolling, wasn’t it?
Nobody knew who I was. I could mass-produce throwaway accounts and flood the board without limit… and I could dig through anyone else’s profile at will?
Even if I posted anonymously, I’d still know who the other person was.
Permanent peeping status…!
Is this NOT the basement entry condition? (51)
Checked the pinned post (86)
Cleared Floor 32, proof! (17)
Hole-diving was wrong from the start (45)
Some freak showed up from a trash-tier country (139)
Gallery connection successful…
How to put it—it felt like I’d snuck in the back way.
Everyone really is talking about nothing but the basement.
Almost no normal Tower-clear posts. Everyone was arguing over how basement entry was even supposed to work…!
And more than that—the way Koreans were treated on the Babel Tower Gallery was… not great.
Of course. We’re slow at clearing the Tower.
Hunters were national assets, and the higher you climbed, the richer the resources. More skilled hunters meant more resource intake, which meant national power rose with them.
By that metric, Korea was a Tower backwater.
We made decent products from Tower byproducts, sure. But when it came to actually clearing the Tower, we were an underdeveloped nation. In the Tower industry, we barely scraped by on byproducts imported from Japan or China.
Among the three East Asian nations, the furthest behind was the Republic of Korea…
A country short on resources from the start that had poured everything into manufacturing—this was exactly the situation you’d expect.
So this was why we were getting openly mocked in the Gallery…
A basement opener from a Tower-clearing backwater like Korea?
Hilarious www
Basement-kun, if you’re reading this, ditch that underdeveloped dump immediately and come to Great Japan, a proper Tower-clearing advanced nation
I couldn’t read another word.
I was furious! And I couldn’t even argue back!
Korean hunters… had they really been getting treated like this?
Miserable! It was too miserable!
The bullying from Chinese and Japanese hunters especially was next-level. Like they’d finally found the perfect punching bag. They were roasting Tower-backwater Korea with pure abandon…
No wonder the Korean government clamped down so hard on Babel Tower community info!
I never imagined we’d be getting raked over the coals as a “tiny country” like this…
The moment I saw the overseas reactions laid bare, something like rage welled up from deep in my chest.
But. Our country really is a Tower backwater…
Nothing I could do about it!
If you wanted to move forward, you had to be honest with yourself. Stuck floundering at Floor 27? Objectively, we had no choice but to accept “tiny country.”
We were a Tower backwater.
Japan was already clearing Floor 49. China had just entered Floor 52. And Korea alone was still at 27.
Did this country really have so few talented people?
No. There was one.
This country had talent… me!
“I’m pissed. You. I am going to destroy you.”
JapanStrongestYoichi, the first one to post a Korea-mocking thread, needed punishment.
“…One hundred eight throwaway accounts. Report and delete.”
Indiscriminate report-bombing. With guest-account generation and reckless throwaway labor, I stacked reports like a maniac until…
“My victory.”
JapanStrongestYoichi’s post was deleted.
And if I stacked reports on his account, too…
Click-click-click-click—!!!
Just keep clicking until the ban lands!
“Hehehe. Bye-bye, Yoichi. You scrub from the age before me.”
Fixed nickname — JapanStrongestYoichi.
Thirty-one-day ban via report accumulation.
Before any admin could even show up, I’d used the Babel Tower Gallery’s own system to slam him with a ban.
That felt better.
What? The Gallery admin would just unban him when they showed up?
Then I’ll ban him again.
JapanStrongestYoichi, gallery-surfing is about to get a lot harder for you.
I’ll be watching.
“Fufufu.”
With that little revenge out of the way, the information I’d actually come for finally started catching my eye.
No way—the Republic of Korea’s Tower Management Bureau was really hunting for me, and rankers from around the world had even formed teams to figure out who I was!?
The news hadn’t been lying. This country’s press was actually alive…!
There really were this many people trying to find me. Kind of scary?
No—what even was the basement, that people were this desperate about it?
Was it that amazing? That incredible?
It wasn’t, though.
The basement I’d seen was a place where a stalker horse-head monster and a salaryman monster worked while complaining nonstop. What was there even to see in a place like that…
Lost Items?
Clink!
There were Lost Items in the basement!
Why is everyone losing their minds over the basement?
Because the rumor that Lost Items are down there has been floating around for ages.
You all know the Floor Guardians, right?
Spend enough time with the Floor Guardians and they slip a few valuable bits of intel in between the useless chatter.
One of those valuable bits is Lost Items.
Lost Items. A kind of pan-national rumor bait!
The Tower had Floor Managers, ultra-high-tier NPCs who were 'un-killable,' 'un-opposable,' and 'un-dine-with-able?' and every so often those things casually tossed out Tower info, micro-tips, and plot hooks.
Among the hooks they threw was this:
There is a hidden place in the Tower.
We call that place the basement.
In the basement lie things the Tower discarded, things that vanished, things that were forgotten.
Those things, we call Lost Items.
— so said a Floor Guardian. Yep.
And each of those Lost Items held such enormous value and power that the Tower had sealed them in the basement as a balance patch.
In other words: the Tower had taken every power-inflation-breaking, cheat-tier item, stuffed them into the basement where it had already dumped all its errors and bugs, and locked the door!
“Wait, is this actually real?”
The basement was an absolute monster of a place!
And Lost Items… now I finally understood why every hunter on Earth was hunting for the basement entrance with fire in their eyes!
Before I had the Lost Item intel, I hadn’t gotten it. Why would anyone want into that gross basement?
But now I knew.
I knew exactly what situation I was in.
At this very moment, I’m the only person who can monopolize the Tower’s Lost Items?!
I had become someone way more important than I’d thought!
This wasn’t just superstar—this was cosmic-tier star status!?
Insane…!
The scale of it was so big my brain couldn’t keep up…!
W-wait. This is not the time to be happy.
It was certain that I had become the beautiful girl the whole world wanted. In short, everyone wanted me. Everyone was looking for me…
They might kidnap me, lock me up, and use me.
You know those rumors. Outstanding hunters vanishing overnight.
“Mom!”
“H-huh? What is it, son… daughter?”
“How many people know I got dragged into the Tower?”
“Well, everyone around here knows by now, right?”
I’d been pulled in off a street full of people in broad daylight. Anyone who could see had seen. The hunter management bureau had already been by. Living in this neighborhood, there was probably no one who didn’t know.
Had I already become the ultra-famous local celebrity?
I’d heard that once you enter the Tower, you can’t come out until you’ve at least cleared Floor 10.
Even on the easiest difficulty, that took a week.
And I’d come back in a single day? With my gender flipped?
That was weird enough to investigate. And if anyone connected the dots between the day I was taken and the fact that a Korean climber had opened the basement that same day…
I had no idea how ugly it could get!
I had no idea what kind of stunts the Tower-clearing advanced nations would pull!
They absolutely could not find out I was the basement opener!
“Mom. Keep it a secret that I came out of the Tower.”
“Huh? Why?”
“Just. It’s a secret. Don’t tell anyone! Got it? Absolutely no one!”
“O-okay. I understand. But are you really my Cheonwoo? No matter how I look at you… my Cheonwoo was a burly boy… Mom’s having a little trouble adjusting.”
“Aargh! Mom, your son—wait, daughter now. Anyway, I am Cheonwoo!”
Mom was still confused, but after I kept insisting, she forced herself to accept it.
If they find out I’m the basement opener… Mom will be in danger too.
I could not trust this country’s Tower Management Bureau. Too many incidents, too many disasters—nothing but screw-ups. It made me anxious. There had even been a personal-info leak of Korean rankers earlier this year. Missing hunters never got properly investigated; they just stamped them all dead inside the Tower.
For all I knew, they’d sold them to other countries—or covered up kidnappings as deaths because they didn’t want an international incident!
I had no faith this country could protect me.
I had to protect myself.
First, pack a bag.
Time left: twenty-two hours and eleven minutes!
Clothes to change into. Food to eat. Pillow and blanket, too. Everything I could haul into the Breakroom—I was taking all of it.
I would survive to the end and monopolize every last Lost Item!