Act Fast
So if you fight back you just die?
Then shouldn't I be able to do it too?
A thread was currently burning up the gallery in real time.
The Aberration Survival Gallery.
Known simply as SurvGal, this place had one rule that could never be broken:
Never, under any circumstances, oppose an aberration.
For the people here—those who had survived by obeying that rule, and who had watched what happened to those who didn't—a single photograph was nothing short of a seismic shock.
Which meant that a post stepping in to quell the rising speculation was inevitable.
Since the newbie's post was so shocking that all these threads about "is he an aberration spy?" and "is this staged?" started rolling in, I went ahead and did a proper write-up.
First, the spot in the photo the newbie took.
Any SurvGal veteran will recognize it—that's the Sky Tower, the place with a completely absurd difficulty rating.
That's why the veterans didn't even bat an eye when the newbie said he was in the Sky Tower. Nobody's ever seen someone survive more than a day up there.
The rule sheet comes out all torn to shit, and the aberrations there are smart enough that helping is pointless anyway.
I mean, the last person who made it past Floor 100 to the lower floors immediately turned into an aberration spy, and got banned by the Head Mod for it. Those who were around back then will remember.
So I can say this with certainty.
That thing is a Floor 100 aberration. For real.
We'd already guessed it was a mental-corruption type.
It matches the speculative Sky Tower aberration concept art pretty closely too.
So how the hell did he kill it?
Fuck if I know.
And the user at the center of all this buzz...
"I'm hungry."
...was busy looking for food.
Browsing the gallery had taught me a few things.
First, that the world I was in was one overflowing with what people called aberrations—the kind of entities you'd find in everything from classic Napolitan ghost stories to full-blown apocalypse scenarios. Second, that there was a gallery connecting all these worlds to each other. And third, that I myself was trapped in a world of insane difficulty.
Honestly, having that much information dumped on me at once left me dizzy, but I figured I now knew roughly enough about how this world worked.
Which meant that—
"Where. Is. The food..."
—I still couldn't find anything to eat.
By now, roughly four hours had passed since I'd possessed this body. I hadn't been counting precisely, but that was about what it felt like. Having spent nearly three of those hours sitting and reading the gallery, it was about time hunger caught up with me.
"Seriously, luck just hates me."
I opened the pinned post at the top of the gallery.
When you first get dropped into a world, you're going to agonize over where you are and what you should do first.
So I wrote this to explain the general approach.
S Tier: You have food, water, and a safe zone.
You've got nothing to worry about here.
Just focus on finding the rule sheet and figuring out what NOT to do.
A safe zone is an invincible zone if you've got one; if not, you'd better prepare regardless. Either way, having food and water already makes you blessed.
A Tier: Safe zone + food.
Practically identical to S Tier.
Take it easy early on and just focus on finding water.
...
...
...
F Tier: Aberration threats: YES / Food, water, safe zone: NONE
Alright. You're screwed.
Find the rule sheet as fast as humanly possible, and instinctively steer clear of anything that feels dangerous.
Use the community as much as you can, dodge the aberrations, and find a safe zone.
Etch this into your brain: securing a safe zone is the absolute foundation of survival.
No safe zone means you can't even sleep. You can't stockpile supplies. You can't run.
And do NOT—under any circumstances—entertain the idea of facing an aberration.
You run. You survive. That's it.
"Hmm..."
I touched my chin, thinking it over.
Could I actually trust this post?
The guide clearly said to never oppose an aberration under any circumstances. And yet here I was, with the torn-up remains of a former aberration at my feet and a safe zone I'd made with my own two hands.
In other words, I'd turned an F-tier start into a C-tier one.
And sure enough, the messages were floating right in front of my eyes.
Smiling Aberration eliminated.
Sky Tower 100th Floor is now designated a Safe Zone.
Of course, I'd need to verify whether any of that was actually real.
But for now, I had nothing else to believe in.
"Ha..."
So, what came next?
I dug through the gallery for posts on what to do once you'd secured a safe zone.
If you've found a safe zone, congratulations.
You've achieved half of survival.
Next, you find water and food...
I decided I didn't need to read any further and closed it. It was just going to tell me to find water and food anyway.
So the gallery's recommended survival strategy boiled down to this: establish a safe zone as your base, farm it, and stockpile as many supplies as possible.
But a question bubbled up from somewhere in my head.
"And doing that gets me out of here... how, exactly?"
Everything here revolved around survival. As if the mere act of living out the rest of eternity in this godforsaken place was something to be relieved about.
Yeah, no. That wasn't going to be me.
I was going back to my original world—no matter what—where I'd play my favorite games, tear into some fried chicken, and sleep in a nice warm bed.
My gaze drifted to the thing I'd torn apart.
A fresh surge of anger rose, and I brought the mop down on it one more time for good measure.
Looking at it made one thing crystal clear again: there was no way I could rest easy for even a single day in a place where vermin like this crawled around.
Every direction I looked, nothing but stress in physical form.
The unseen threats pressed on me from all sides, and even the system-certified "Safe Zone" label failed to give me any real certainty.
I knew myself well.
I don't have much patience. I knew that if I stayed cooped up in a place like this, one day I'd snap. Sustained stress drives people insane. I had exactly one experience proving I couldn't withstand it for long—and the military alone had been more than enough.
I needed to act before I lost my mind.
That thought gripped my head tight and refused to let go.
I've looked around. No food, no water.
Condition's still decent, so I'm proceeding with exploration.
As expected, everyone reacted negatively.
I didn't think any of them were cowards or despair-addled fatalists, though. To be honest, I still didn't know whether aberrations were really as terrifying as they claimed—and what filled my head instead was the thought that it might actually be worth a try.
I was short on information, sure, but my judgment wasn't purely reckless. I'd scoured the place thoroughly, and all that was here was a parking-lot expanse with a few pillars sticking out of the floor. That was it. Nothing else.
The only things of note were the room that looked like a management office, containing the dead aberration and a handful of mysterious talismans.
The talismans definitely hadn't been there when I first arrived—they seemed to have appeared the moment the aberration died. I had no idea what they were, and no amount of poking or prodding gave me so much as a hint, so I'd pocketed them for now.
And nearby, a single emergency staircase leading down.
Whether I stayed rooted here or went down, I was going to die either way. Stay put and I starve; go down and I die fighting an aberration. Honestly, thinking about it coldly, I fully recognized that my odds of beating an aberration in a fight were low.
Which was exactly why fighting was a last resort.
My plan was to head down and focus on exploration first—and even that, apparently, looked too dangerous to them.
Still, it seemed there was at least one person out there thinking along the same lines as me.
First off, you're right—if there's no food or water, going down is the only real option. You've clearly searched Floor 100 thoroughly, and there's no guarantee of food on the floor below either, so going down while you still have your strength is the correct call.
So I'm not trying to talk you out of it. I just want to give you as much inferred intel as I can.
Like I said before, I once saw someone who made it down to Floor 99, and according to him, he "saw something" down there.
He turned into an aberration spy shortly after.
You've browsed the gallery by now, so you know how it is—the aberrations are complete lunatics, but they're not mindless lunatics, so each one tends to have some kind of counter-strategy.
For the Floor 99 aberration, the trigger is probably sight. Seeing it. My best guess, anyway.
Honestly there's barely any intel so this is all I've got. Good luck down there.
"Ha..."
Letting out a sigh, I picked up the mop.
Everything the posts said came down to the same conclusion I'd already reached.
I'm going down.
Maybe there had never been another option to begin with. The longer I delayed, the lower my odds of survival fell.
Having finished a quick mental outline of what I was going to do, I opened the door to the emergency staircase.
I descended the stairs until a number came into view: 99.
There were no more stairs leading down beyond it.
"So breakthrough is the only way through, huh."
Whoosh.
I drew in a breath.
The moment that door opened, my vision would be cut off. What would remain to me was nothing but my own senses.
Relying on them alone, I closed my eyes.
Darkness closed in around me. Naturally so—I'd shut them myself.
In exchange, my senses sharpened. With nothing to see, even the faintest brush of air made the hairs on my skin stand on end, every nerve straining to cling to whatever stimulus it could find around me.
I had no intention of stalling any longer.
So I opened the door.