Chapter 57
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Translator: MadScientist
Chapter: 57
Chapter Title: The Truth
-----------------------------------------------------------------
What is the Tower?
Ever since the Tower appeared on Earth, countless researchers had taken an interest in it.
Where did the Tower come from, and why did it rise up?
What material was the Tower made of?
What scientific principles lay hidden within the Tower?
Why a tower, of all things?
Countless questions spawned more questions, and humanity's greatest minds became obsessed with unraveling the Tower's secrets.
A scholar is one who seeks to explore. A sudden, brand-new mystery had appeared.
The Tower was truly a treasure trove for intellectuals.
Yet on a macro level, no one had achieved any meaningful results even now.
Consider how long it took humanity to comprehend nature through scholarship in the first place.
At the outset, humanity couldn't grasp nature and invented the concept of gods.
In ancient times, they advanced from gods to attempts at philosophical understanding.
In the Middle Ages, they interpreted nature through mathematics, and only by the mid-19th century did the concept of physics emerge.
Over the next 100 to 200 years, geniuses reformulated those fields and produced more advanced theories.
This was all to say that even physics alone required thousands of years of accumulated knowledge and innovation.
So could humanity truly understand even a speck of magic, the Tower, or the System—phenomena that had appeared less than a decade ago?
Of course, there were plenty of hypotheses, but none had been deeply explored by humanity.
The closest anyone had come was geniuses like Seo In Ah delving deep into mana, allowing everyone to grasp the basic concepts—but the Tower itself remained shrouded in mystery for most.
They simply shared information gained through trial-and-error clears.
They understood through using items and harnessing mana crystals.
That's why it took me a little time, even after hearing the administrator's words, to fully comprehend it.
To put it simply, the Tower was a component inside a kind of perpetual motion machine.
To humans, the birth of the universe began with the Big Bang.
But that was just a hypothesis from when humanity was ignorant of mana's existence. Once we realized mana was real, new hypotheses began to emerge.
Of course, none of them held the truth.
Mana didn't come into being alongside the Tower. Unlike the System granted to humanity upon the Tower's arrival, mana was a force that had existed across the entire universe from the start.
Mana nurtures life and energy, creating ecosystems. Over time, when enough mana gathers on a planet, it disperses again to forge new worlds.
But what happens to the ecosystem left behind when mana scatters?
It withers away and vanishes.
The architect of this universe didn't want that. Or more precisely, they wanted traces to remain.
So the architect, unwilling to allow perfect decay, created the Tower system.
As a part within the perpetual motion machine called the universe.
It transfers a select few survivors from doomed worlds into the Tower. Like humans carving names into stones, the architect preserves remnants of fallen worlds within the Tower.
The Tower becomes the eternal trace of this endlessly cycling universe.
At the same time, it rapidly generates and circulates mana, accelerating destruction.
Worlds nearing their end always greet the Tower. A few traces can then reside on the 90th floor.
And the Tower, laden with the mana it produced, erupts into other worlds, scattering mana anew.
The vanished Tower reappears when the next doom arrives.
An infinite loop.
In other words, the universe is a perpetual motion machine that endlessly cycles through the power of mana.
The Tower was nothing more than an air purifier in that machine, ceaselessly circulating mana.
And humanity? We were just the dust trapped by its filter...
This was the truth of the universe.
"So there's no need to feel aggrieved. You're living in a world born from swallowing the previous one, after all."
"......"
The administrator boldly laid bare the universe's secrets to me. It seemed this truth held no great significance to her anymore.
Unlike me, plunged into shock, it was just an obvious fact to her. In a way, it was a natural reaction.
"Then who is the architect of that universe?"
The question lingering in my mind was: What kind of being designed this universe?
Her pupils dilated slightly at my question.
"Kyahahaha."
She laughed so hard she clutched her stomach, clearly amused.
"Why are you laughing?"
"Come on, doesn't it strike you as funny too?"
She continued as if it was absurd.
"You're asking me about the god who created this universe? What, did you think I knew?"
"......"
"Or after hearing the truth, does humanity's struggling feel pointless, like less than dust? For the record, that's not sarcasm. That's just how it felt to me."
What if you learned that humanity's progress—no, history itself, the entire universe—was just a precisely crafted machine made by someone?
Realizing humans are no different from ants crawling on the ground could fill you with an indescribable sense of futility and exhaustion.
Moon Byul felt that exhaustion too.
All of this was a predetermined catastrophe. It was a truth every world had to accept—it was simply Earth's turn now.
No matter how infinitely Alex regressed, nothing would change. It was all predetermined.
Once my thoughts reached that point, the existence of the regression candy felt utterly malicious.
Regression, akin to a divine power, only mass-produced meaningless suffering. The conversation I had with Alex at the cafe was pointless, as were the government's plans, the guilds' efforts—everything was futile.
All of humanity's endeavors lost meaning before the truth of the world.
Earth's tragedy was a farmstock bred for the next world, and even survival held no greater significance than etching a name on a wall.
"Then... what are you? If the world cycles infinitely like that, who decides who becomes the administrator?"
"Hm... You're still doubting me?"
I believed her, but I didn't want to. My values were crumbling. What had I endured in the Grimoire for?
The administrator who once feared me was gone. At some point, she'd become like a doctor delicately delivering a death sentence to an ignorant child.
Careful not to shock the child.
As if no amount of flailing could evade death, since I couldn't reshape the universe anyway.
"You probably guessed already, but I'm one of the survivors from a previous world."
As she'd said, I'd suspected as much. But who had granted her this authority?
"Those who conquer the Tower from a fallen world become Conquerors."
She casually manipulated the hologram to show me.
It was a list of Conquerors.
Summaries of who had conquered from which world, with names and world details.
There were races resembling humanity, beastfolk straight out of fantasy, bizarre monsters I'd never seen, and even aliens that looked like they belonged in media. Worlds of all kinds.
Some entries had black-and-white photos with an X mark over them.
"Conquerors are granted residence in the Tower and immortality, in exchange for aiding the next world's downfall. So, what's the greatest perk of being a Conqueror?"
"Escaping doom for eternal survival?"
"Wrong!"
The administrator crossed her arms in an X shape again.
"You can die whenever you want."
"......"
Eternal life as the prize, and death as its benefit?
"You wouldn't get it yet, but immortality is hell. Could you really live happily after your original world falls?"
...Probably not.
I could understand it, actually. By human standards, I'd spent time in the Grimoire in something like pseudo-immortality, and if I had to stay there forever, I'd kill myself on the spot.
"Beyond that, the other survivors who make it to the 90th floor from a fallen world don't live comfortably either. They can't even die."
"Why not?"
"Haven't you ever read fairy tales? The superhumans on the 90th floor aren't going to be kind to them. 'What were you doing while we held off the end? Now you crawl in?' That's the standard reaction. On the 90th floor, the strong make the law."
Hearing her words, I could guess where she came from.
A survivor from a fallen world, but not a Conqueror.
Someone who luckily survived until reaching the 90th floor.
She had originally been a resident of the 90th floor.
"You couldn't endure that hellish life and sought another way."
"...Yeah."
The girl I'd suspected might be the villain, the one I'd thought was the perpetrator of destruction, was just another victim in the endless cycle of the universe.
"So... when Earth faces its end this time, you'll finally be able to die?"
She'd called death the greatest blessing for a Conqueror—not power. It must have been because she yearned for it.
"If I'd known in advance... I never would have joined the 90th floor. You can't imagine what a blessing it is to just get swept up in the end and die."
The truth of the world was far crueler than I'd imagined.
What meaning was there in a world like this?
"What's with that look? Do you know how many people want to be an administrator? I'm a total lucky one!"
"What about the NPCs... Are they the same?"
She nodded.
"Not all of them, but NPCs assigned roles are residents too. You can tell at a glance—the rest are just simulation holograms."
The NPCs in the village on the 40th floor hadn't felt alive. They were probably the holograms she mentioned; the philosopher had been a survivor from a fallen world.
In contrast, most of the NPCs I'd met on the 20th floor had felt far more vibrant.
In this horrific truth, I realized there was no such thing as a happy ending, no matter how things played out.
Even if Alex regressed endlessly to save everyone and reached the 90th floor, what awaited at the end was hell under another name.
'What about me...?'
What choices could I even make?
Here, my free will had been stripped away.