The collapse came first as silence.
No alarms. No shriek of metal. Just the weight of every floor breaking its contract with gravity. Seoul cracked open like a burnt page, air rushing inward from the void the Tower had left behind.
Hae-won hung there in the middle of the descent—neither alive nor dead—suspended in the collapsing geometry. His body flickered, part shadow, part memory, his veins glowing faintly with the afterimage of rewrite. The command had done its job: it had forced the Tower to fold in on itself, to erase its fragments, to give Seoul back the illusion of peace.
But the cost—
Regression #390.
That was the price the Ledger had whispered before the end.
The System reappeared, flickering between color and static.
Not in the cold white text Hae-won was used to, but in something quivering, almost uncertain.
[ System: Ledger Review Initiated. ]
[ Exchange Proposal: Regression #390 → Full Restoration. ]
[ Value Calculation: 100% Return of Soul, Memory, Emotion. ]
[ Condition: Permanent psychological integration. Refusal impossible. ]
[ Commencing in 00:00:10. ]
Hae-won tried to laugh. It came out a dry rasp.
"Now you feel bad? After three hundred and eighty-nine restarts?"
His voice cracked around the number. The air was molten around him, thick with evaporating time. The chains at his wrists twitched—half-subsonic serpents desperate to move, but bound by some invisible rule.
[ 00:00:03… ]
Then the flood came.
It wasn't fire, or light, or even pain. It was everything.
Every scream, every hesitation, every moment he'd ever wanted to die.
Memories hit him in shards—broken bottles of a life he had outlived too many times. The orphanage. The academy. The stairwell pendulum. The laughter that turned into blood. Yun Arin's hand in the dark before she was pulled away. The countless faces of those he had saved and slaughtered.
He saw them all. Not in sequence—at once.
[ Restoration Complete: Emotional Sync 100%. ]
[ Regression Locked: Further loops prohibited. ]
[ Permanent State: Harvester of Death (Evolved). ]
[ Passive Effect: Soul Reclamation – Absorbs trauma from others, amplifies personal agony. ]
[ System Note: We are… sorry. ]
The last line didn't look real. It pulsed once, weakly, and vanished.
Hae-won fell to his knees. Not from pain, but from weight. His heartbeat was a drumline of lives. His breath drew ghosts into existence. The ground beneath him—what remained of Seoul—trembled as he exhaled, and faint outlines of people flickered into being, the ones who had died under his hands, staring not in anger, but in recognition.
He looked around, hollow-eyed.
"This is what guilt feels like with a body," he muttered.
His voice was low, humorless. "Congratulations, Ledger. You finally made me human again."
Arin's voice broke through the ash storm, ragged but real.
"Hae-won!"
She was running toward him, the fragments of heaven still glowing faintly at her feet, her wings burned down to light scars. Behind her, Ji-an and Do-hyun were barely keeping balance as Seoul's physics tried to remember itself.
When she reached him, Hae-won was half-smiling, half-bleeding. His pupils were silver, reflecting too many worlds. The chains around his arms were coiling upward like living things—no longer weapons, but arteries of guilt.
Arin knelt and grabbed his face. "What did you do—?"
"Bought us a world," he said quietly. "Traded the last one for it."
She wanted to scream, but then the sky tore.
Above them, the Ledger—the true, unseen authority—appeared for the first time as a black sun lined with scripture. Every word on it was a name, and all of them were names Hae-won had once killed, saved, or rewritten. The black sun pulsed, and in that pulse came a truth:
[ Soul Count: 390 regressions archived. ]
[ Rebirths denied. Burden transferred to singular entity: Cha Hae-won. ]
[ Emotional Overload Threshold: Imminent. ]
Hae-won smirked bitterly. "Guess I'm the ledger now."
He stood, every motion cracked with the sound of dragging iron. Arin tried to hold him, but the pressure rolling off his skin was unbearable—his aura wasn't rage, but grief turned kinetic. Even the chains hummed, low and mournful.
When he looked up, he didn't look angry. Just tired.
"I remember everything now," he said, eyes fixed on the black sun.
"All of them. Every scream. Every second. Every goddamn death. You think you're sorry? You don't feel. But I do."
And the sky trembled.
Then he whispered the name of his new skill—so soft it was almost kind.
"Transmission."
The ghosts around him flickered, their pain easing as threads of silver light stretched from their bodies into his. Their agony became his, their screams fell silent. Arin's breath hitched.
"Hae-won, stop—"
He smiled faintly. "No. This time I'll carry it right."
And then the world went still.
Seoul began to breathe again.
But the man at its center was no longer just human.
He was the Harvester of Death—
the one who remembered too much to die.
The rain didn't fall. It hung—thin strings of water frozen mid-air above the ruined square where Seoul once breathed.
The Tower had vanished, its frame dissolved into static light, yet the sky still trembled as if the system couldn't decide what to replace it with.
Cha Hae-won stood in the middle of it, staring at his reflection in a puddle that refused to ripple.
The reflection stared back in a dozen layers: silver-haired, black-eyed, bloodied, laughing, dying—each one from a different lifetime.
[ REGRESSION COUNT : 504 ]
[ Ledger Exchange Complete — Vitality Restored 100% ]
[ Warning : Temporal corrosion detected in host mind … ]
[ Leak probability : 83% ]
A voice—his own, maybe from the 200th cycle—whispered in his ear:
"Five hundred and four times, and you still think this is new?"
He clenched his fists. The chains coiled lazily at his wrists, their color shifting between red and white like breathing embers. They remembered even when he didn't.
Arin touched his shoulder.
"Hae-won…? You're shaking."
He almost laughed. "I'm remembering."
And the world obliged.
⸻
It began like a slideshow smashed against his skull.
The school rooftop.
The empty dormitory hallway.
The first Tower, the second, the thousand faces he'd tried to save.
Every suicide, every restart, every reason he thought he had.
Each image stabbed through his nerves and bled into the next until he could no longer tell which was now.
His chains screamed, whipping outward at near-sonic speed, carving spirals through the air. Buildings around them buckled under the pressure.
[ Regression Leak Initiated ]
[ Anchor 504 — Active ]
[ Memory Stability -27% ]
Do-hyun shouted from a distance, "Hae-won! Pull it back! You'll drag the rest of us—"
"—into me?"
Hae-won's voice split, echoing twice, one in the present and one in some older tongue of pain.
He stared at the ground, and his shadow stared back—filled with people.
All the versions of him that had died before.
They began to move, mimicking his breath, whispering his regrets.
Arin stepped closer despite the pressure. "Look at me! Not them!"
But he couldn't.
Because they were looking at her too—every dead Hae-won, every loop that had ended with her gone.
One of the echoes spoke, hollow and kind:
"She dies in 505."
He froze.
The words weren't prophecy.
They were memory.
⸻
The sky cracked. System text bled across the clouds like neon veins:
[ Partial Regression Unlocked ]
[ Access Point : Cycle 505 pending activation ]
[ Condition : Subject death required ]
Hae-won's laughter came low and wrong. "Of course. They always make me earn the reset."
He drew in a breath that rattled like metal. The chains lifted, coiling around him in slow orbit—Mach-one speed restrained by will alone.
Arin gripped his arm. "Then don't die. Please."
He met her eyes, exhaustion burning behind the silver. "You think I haven't tried living? Five hundred and four times, Arin… I've died every way imaginable. Maybe this one I just—forget."
Then the leak reached critical mass.
Light exploded from his spine, fracturing the air into shards of time.
For a moment, all of Seoul saw every version of him—five hundred four ghosts overlapping, fighting, falling, smiling, breaking.
And then—everything snapped back.
The puddle rippled. The rain finally fell.
[ Regression Leak stabilized ]
[ Host state : Unaligned ]
Hae-won collapsed to his knees, steam rising from his skin.
He looked up at Arin with a tired grin that barely held.
"Guess I'm still here. Must be the reward for not learning my lesson."
She caught him before he hit the ground.
Above them, in letters of light, one final message flickered—half-erased, as if the Tower itself was afraid to say it aloud:
[ Cycle 505 … Approaching ]
The rain had finally started to fall for real.
Seoul, or what was left of it, was quiet again—too quiet for a city that had been half-swallowed by a god's experiment. The neon lights flickered without power, the air humming with the aftertaste of divine code.
Hae-won sat on the remains of a bus stop sign, one arm bandaged in silence, his silver hair plastered to his face. Steam curled off his skin where the chains had burned themselves trying to stabilize his regression.
Around him, the survivors—Do-hyun, Ji-won, Arin, and the others—stood at varying distances.
Nobody spoke first. They didn't need to. The world itself was holding its breath.
Finally, Ji-won—newly resurrected for what felt like the hundredth time—broke the silence.
"So… five hundred and four?"
His voice tried for humor and missed.
"That's… uh. That's a lot of retries, man."
Hae-won gave a small, humorless laugh. "Yeah. Collect ten more and I get a free coffee."
Do-hyun exhaled sharply through his nose. "You shouldn't joke about it. You died, Hae-won. You always die."
"Yeah," Hae-won said, looking down at his hands. "That's kind of my thing."
Arin stood behind him, hands clenched. She had been silent since the collapse, watching the scars on his back shimmer like constellations under the skin. When she finally spoke, her voice trembled.
"What do you remember now?"
He hesitated—then, with the tone of a man confessing to himself more than anyone else:
"Everything I wanted to forget. The academy, the roof, the tower's stairs, all of it. Five hundred and four lives stacked on top of each other, and not one of them ever learned how to stop climbing."
"Then why keep going?" Ji-won asked softly. "Why not let it end?"
Hae-won looked up, eyes pale as mist. "Because ending it would mean admitting the tower was right about me."
He smiled faintly. "And I'm still petty enough to prove that bastard wrong."
There was something terrifying about the way he said it—too calm, too steady.
It was the voice of a man who had accepted his madness as muscle memory.
⸻
The rain thickened, pelting against the asphalt.
And then, as always, the System returned.
[ WARNING: Scenario Synchronization in Progress ]
[ Cycle 505 - Prelude: "THE QUIET BETWEEN HEARTBEATS" ]
[ Primary Target: Cha Hae-won ]
[ Global Status: Partial Merge with Remaining Towers ]
Every survivor turned their gaze to the text burning across the sky.
"'Primary Target'?" Ji-won muttered. "That's… new."
Arin stepped forward instinctively, as if to block him from the declaration itself. "It's singling him out again."
Do-hyun swore under his breath. "They never give him a break."
Hae-won stood slowly, his shadow lengthening under the pale light.
The air around him began to hum—the chains reacting to the System's words like living things ready to strike.
"I told them," he muttered, "I'm not their protagonist anymore."
The System answered anyway, its voice calm, dispassionate:
[ Correction: Classification Override Initiated. ]
[ Designation: Harvester of Death — Active. ]
[ Function: Balance between life and return. ]
[ Secondary Directive: Record cycle termination conditions. ]
Arin's breath caught. "Hae-won—what does that mean?"
"It means," he said quietly, "that I'm the insurance policy."
He turned to them, eyes reflecting the electric light from the sky.
"Cycle 505 isn't about winning. It's about watching which of us breaks first."
⸻
For a few seconds, nobody moved. The rain fell harder, drowning the quiet into something heavier.
Then Ji-won—bravest or stupidest among them—slapped Hae-won on the shoulder.
"Then we make sure it's not you," he said.
Hae-won blinked, startled. "That easy, huh?"
"Yeah." Ji-won grinned. "We'll just keep you too pissed off to die."
Do-hyun groaned. "That's actually a pretty solid plan."
A small, fractured smile tugged at Hae-won's lips.
The first real one in what felt like centuries.
[ Scenario Countdown: 00:23:59 until Activation ]
[ Location: Reconstructed Seoul Core ]
[ Objective (Unknown). ]
The System text faded, leaving only the rain and the sound of their breathing.
Arin looked up at the blackened skyline, whispering,
"Whatever's coming next, it's not just the tower anymore…"
And behind her, Hae-won whispered something only the rain heard—
a promise, or maybe a threat.
"Then let the world try again. I'm not the same mistake twice."
The collapse came first as silence.
No alarms. No shriek of metal. Just the weight of every floor breaking its contract with gravity. Seoul cracked open like a burnt page, air rushing inward from the void the Tower had left behind.
Hae-won hung there in the middle of the descent—neither alive nor dead—suspended in the collapsing geometry. His body flickered, part shadow, part memory, his veins glowing faintly with the afterimage of rewrite. The command had done its job: it had forced the Tower to fold in on itself, to erase its fragments, to give Seoul back the illusion of peace.
But the cost—
Regression #390.
That was the price the Ledger had whispered before the end.
The System reappeared, flickering between color and static.
Not in the cold white text Hae-won was used to, but in something quivering, almost uncertain.
[ System: Ledger Review Initiated. ]
[ Exchange Proposal: Regression #390 → Full Restoration. ]
[ Value Calculation: 100% Return of Soul, Memory, Emotion. ]
[ Condition: Permanent psychological integration. Refusal impossible. ]
[ Commencing in 00:00:10. ]
Hae-won tried to laugh. It came out a dry rasp.
"Now you feel bad? After three hundred and eighty-nine restarts?"
His voice cracked around the number. The air was molten around him, thick with evaporating time. The chains at his wrists twitched—half-subsonic serpents desperate to move, but bound by some invisible rule.
[ 00:00:03… ]
Then the flood came.
It wasn't fire, or light, or even pain. It was everything.
Every scream, every hesitation, every moment he'd ever wanted to die.
Memories hit him in shards—broken bottles of a life he had outlived too many times. The orphanage. The academy. The stairwell pendulum. The laughter that turned into blood. Yun Arin's hand in the dark before she was pulled away. The countless faces of those he had saved and slaughtered.
He saw them all. Not in sequence—at once.
[ Restoration Complete: Emotional Sync 100%. ]
[ Regression Locked: Further loops prohibited. ]
[ Permanent State: Harvester of Death (Evolved). ]
[ Passive Effect: Soul Reclamation – Absorbs trauma from others, amplifies personal agony. ]
[ System Note: We are… sorry. ]
The last line didn't look real. It pulsed once, weakly, and vanished.
Hae-won fell to his knees. Not from pain, but from weight. His heartbeat was a drumline of lives. His breath drew ghosts into existence. The ground beneath him—what remained of Seoul—trembled as he exhaled, and faint outlines of people flickered into being, the ones who had died under his hands, staring not in anger, but in recognition.
He looked around, hollow-eyed.
"This is what guilt feels like with a body," he muttered.
His voice was low, humorless. "Congratulations, Ledger. You finally made me human again."
Arin's voice broke through the ash storm, ragged but real.
"Hae-won!"
She was running toward him, the fragments of heaven still glowing faintly at her feet, her wings burned down to light scars. Behind her, Ji-an and Do-hyun were barely keeping balance as Seoul's physics tried to remember itself.
When she reached him, Hae-won was half-smiling, half-bleeding. His pupils were silver, reflecting too many worlds. The chains around his arms were coiling upward like living things—no longer weapons, but arteries of guilt.
Arin knelt and grabbed his face. "What did you do—?"
"Bought us a world," he said quietly. "Traded the last one for it."
She wanted to scream, but then the sky tore.
Above them, the Ledger—the true, unseen authority—appeared for the first time as a black sun lined with scripture. Every word on it was a name, and all of them were names Hae-won had once killed, saved, or rewritten. The black sun pulsed, and in that pulse came a truth:
[ Soul Count: 390 regressions archived. ]
[ Rebirths denied. Burden transferred to singular entity: Cha Hae-won. ]
[ Emotional Overload Threshold: Imminent. ]
Hae-won smirked bitterly. "Guess I'm the ledger now."
He stood, every motion cracked with the sound of dragging iron. Arin tried to hold him, but the pressure rolling off his skin was unbearable—his aura wasn't rage, but grief turned kinetic. Even the chains hummed, low and mournful.
When he looked up, he didn't look angry. Just tired.
"I remember everything now," he said, eyes fixed on the black sun.
"All of them. Every scream. Every second. Every goddamn death. You think you're sorry? You don't feel. But I do."
And the sky trembled.
Then he whispered the name of his new skill—so soft it was almost kind.
"Transmission."
The ghosts around him flickered, their pain easing as threads of silver light stretched from their bodies into his. Their agony became his, their screams fell silent. Arin's breath hitched.
"Hae-won, stop—"
He smiled faintly. "No. This time I'll carry it right."
And then the world went still.
Seoul began to breathe again.
But the man at its center was no longer just human.
He was the Harvester of Death—
the one who remembered too much to die.
The rain didn't fall. It hung—thin strings of water frozen mid-air above the ruined square where Seoul once breathed.
The Tower had vanished, its frame dissolved into static light, yet the sky still trembled as if the system couldn't decide what to replace it with.
Cha Hae-won stood in the middle of it, staring at his reflection in a puddle that refused to ripple.
The reflection stared back in a dozen layers: silver-haired, black-eyed, bloodied, laughing, dying—each one from a different lifetime.
[ REGRESSION COUNT : 504 ]
[ Ledger Exchange Complete — Vitality Restored 100% ]
[ Warning : Temporal corrosion detected in host mind … ]
[ Leak probability : 83% ]
A voice—his own, maybe from the 200th cycle—whispered in his ear:
"Five hundred and four times, and you still think this is new?"
He clenched his fists. The chains coiled lazily at his wrists, their color shifting between red and white like breathing embers. They remembered even when he didn't.
Arin touched his shoulder.
"Hae-won…? You're shaking."
He almost laughed. "I'm remembering."
And the world obliged.
⸻
It began like a slideshow smashed against his skull.
The school rooftop.
The empty dormitory hallway.
The first Tower, the second, the thousand faces he'd tried to save.
Every suicide, every restart, every reason he thought he had.
Each image stabbed through his nerves and bled into the next until he could no longer tell which was now.
His chains screamed, whipping outward at near-sonic speed, carving spirals through the air. Buildings around them buckled under the pressure.
[ Regression Leak Initiated ]
[ Anchor 504 — Active ]
[ Memory Stability -27% ]
Do-hyun shouted from a distance, "Hae-won! Pull it back! You'll drag the rest of us—"
"—into me?"
Hae-won's voice split, echoing twice, one in the present and one in some older tongue of pain.
He stared at the ground, and his shadow stared back—filled with people.
All the versions of him that had died before.
They began to move, mimicking his breath, whispering his regrets.
Arin stepped closer despite the pressure. "Look at me! Not them!"
But he couldn't.
Because they were looking at her too—every dead Hae-won, every loop that had ended with her gone.
One of the echoes spoke, hollow and kind:
"She dies in 505."
He froze.
The words weren't prophecy.
They were memory.
⸻
The sky cracked. System text bled across the clouds like neon veins:
[ Partial Regression Unlocked ]
[ Access Point : Cycle 505 pending activation ]
[ Condition : Subject death required ]
Hae-won's laughter came low and wrong. "Of course. They always make me earn the reset."
He drew in a breath that rattled like metal. The chains lifted, coiling around him in slow orbit—Mach-one speed restrained by will alone.
Arin gripped his arm. "Then don't die. Please."
He met her eyes, exhaustion burning behind the silver. "You think I haven't tried living? Five hundred and four times, Arin… I've died every way imaginable. Maybe this one I just—forget."
Then the leak reached critical mass.
Light exploded from his spine, fracturing the air into shards of time.
For a moment, all of Seoul saw every version of him—five hundred four ghosts overlapping, fighting, falling, smiling, breaking.
And then—everything snapped back.
The puddle rippled. The rain finally fell.
[ Regression Leak stabilized ]
[ Host state : Unaligned ]
Hae-won collapsed to his knees, steam rising from his skin.
He looked up at Arin with a tired grin that barely held.
"Guess I'm still here. Must be the reward for not learning my lesson."
She caught him before he hit the ground.
Above them, in letters of light, one final message flickered—half-erased, as if the Tower itself was afraid to say it aloud:
[ Cycle 505 … Approaching ]
The rain had finally started to fall for real.
Seoul, or what was left of it, was quiet again—too quiet for a city that had been half-swallowed by a god's experiment. The neon lights flickered without power, the air humming with the aftertaste of divine code.
Hae-won sat on the remains of a bus stop sign, one arm bandaged in silence, his silver hair plastered to his face. Steam curled off his skin where the chains had burned themselves trying to stabilize his regression.
Around him, the survivors—Do-hyun, Ji-won, Arin, and the others—stood at varying distances.
Nobody spoke first. They didn't need to. The world itself was holding its breath.
Finally, Ji-won—newly resurrected for what felt like the hundredth time—broke the silence.
"So… five hundred and four?"
His voice tried for humor and missed.
"That's… uh. That's a lot of retries, man."
Hae-won gave a small, humorless laugh. "Yeah. Collect ten more and I get a free coffee."
Do-hyun exhaled sharply through his nose. "You shouldn't joke about it. You died, Hae-won. You always die."
"Yeah," Hae-won said, looking down at his hands. "That's kind of my thing."
Arin stood behind him, hands clenched. She had been silent since the collapse, watching the scars on his back shimmer like constellations under the skin. When she finally spoke, her voice trembled.
"What do you remember now?"
He hesitated—then, with the tone of a man confessing to himself more than anyone else:
"Everything I wanted to forget. The academy, the roof, the tower's stairs, all of it. Five hundred and four lives stacked on top of each other, and not one of them ever learned how to stop climbing."
"Then why keep going?" Ji-won asked softly. "Why not let it end?"
Hae-won looked up, eyes pale as mist. "Because ending it would mean admitting the tower was right about me."
He smiled faintly. "And I'm still petty enough to prove that bastard wrong."
There was something terrifying about the way he said it—too calm, too steady.
It was the voice of a man who had accepted his madness as muscle memory.
⸻
The rain thickened, pelting against the asphalt.
And then, as always, the System returned.
[ WARNING: Scenario Synchronization in Progress ]
[ Cycle 505 - Prelude: "THE QUIET BETWEEN HEARTBEATS" ]
[ Primary Target: Cha Hae-won ]
[ Global Status: Partial Merge with Remaining Towers ]
Every survivor turned their gaze to the text burning across the sky.
"'Primary Target'?" Ji-won muttered. "That's… new."
Arin stepped forward instinctively, as if to block him from the declaration itself. "It's singling him out again."
Do-hyun swore under his breath. "They never give him a break."
Hae-won stood slowly, his shadow lengthening under the pale light.
The air around him began to hum—the chains reacting to the System's words like living things ready to strike.
"I told them," he muttered, "I'm not their protagonist anymore."
The System answered anyway, its voice calm, dispassionate:
[ Correction: Classification Override Initiated. ]
[ Designation: Harvester of Death — Active. ]
[ Function: Balance between life and return. ]
[ Secondary Directive: Record cycle termination conditions. ]
Arin's breath caught. "Hae-won—what does that mean?"
"It means," he said quietly, "that I'm the insurance policy."
He turned to them, eyes reflecting the electric light from the sky.
"Cycle 505 isn't about winning. It's about watching which of us breaks first."
⸻
For a few seconds, nobody moved. The rain fell harder, drowning the quiet into something heavier.
Then Ji-won—bravest or stupidest among them—slapped Hae-won on the shoulder.
"Then we make sure it's not you," he said.
Hae-won blinked, startled. "That easy, huh?"
"Yeah." Ji-won grinned. "We'll just keep you too pissed off to die."
Do-hyun groaned. "That's actually a pretty solid plan."
A small, fractured smile tugged at Hae-won's lips.
The first real one in what felt like centuries.
[ Scenario Countdown: 00:23:59 until Activation ]
[ Location: Reconstructed Seoul Core ]
[ Objective (Unknown). ]
The System text faded, leaving only the rain and the sound of their breathing.
Arin looked up at the blackened skyline, whispering,
"Whatever's coming next, it's not just the tower anymore…"
And behind her, Hae-won whispered something only the rain heard—
a promise, or maybe a threat.
"Then let the world try again. I'm not the same mistake twice."