The red digits of the digital clock trembled in the dark room like a heartbeat: 23:58.
Only two minutes. I had just one hundred and twenty seconds left to enter that Tower that had hung in the sky like a graveyard for ten years. Most people, knowing how lethal the first floor was, chose to stay home and live like ants in this dull world. But for me, this place was the real prison.
23:59:59.
Time stopped. My heartbeat thundered in my ears.
00:00:00.
The world was yanked out from under me. The sensation of falling forced bile up my throat, and my consciousness sank into darkness.
When I opened my eyes, the world was buried under a violet fog. In the center of my mind, a screen glowed in golden letters:
[Solo Quest: First Blood]Objective: Kill the Tower Wolf.Skill: Absolute Adaptation.Description: The higher your physical capacity, the faster you adapt to environmental threats.
"Absolute Adaptation…" My lips trembled with excitement. This wasn't just power this was the key to becoming a god.
That joy was cut off like a knife by a deep growl. Twenty meters away, a massive black wolf was raking the ground with its claws. Then it launched itself at me with terrifying speed.
I swung a hard kick with my right leg, but my foot struck nothing but air. The wolf twisted in midair and crashed down onto me. The moment its sharp fangs sank into my left arm, I heard my bones crack. Pain blotted out the world but something inside me snapped. I left my left arm in its jaws like bait and started driving my right fist into its glowing yellow eyes with everything I had.
The wolf recoiled with a howl, and my arm was no longer an arm just shredded flesh. I grabbed a sharp stone from the ground. The wolf lunged again, and this time it clamped its teeth into my torso, between my ribs. I felt my organs being crushed.
A normal person should have died there but Absolute Adaptation had seeped into my cells. I felt my blood clotting, an unnatural heat rising around my wounds. I plunged the stone into the wolf's already-blinded eye again and again until its skull cracked. I didn't stop until its snarls died out and its body went completely still beneath me.
The Price of Survival
At last, the stone slipped from my hand. As the adrenaline drained away, an unbearable pain surged through my body.
I fought to stay conscious. If my eyes closed in that moment, I knew they would never open again I could feel death waiting to claim me the instant I blacked out. And I knew this too: if I pressed the "Exit" button and returned to the real world right then, I wouldn't survive the shock of the transition with these wounds. I would bleed out on my bedroom floor.
My odds of clearing the first floor were low but if I wanted to be among that rare few, I couldn't leave this graveyard as a corpse. There was only one way to survive.
Then a hunger rose in me wilder than anything I'd ever felt. My body needed an immense amount of energy to repair itself. I forced myself upright. With my one good hand, I tore out the wolf's organs and began to eat them raw.
My throat clenched on the first bite. The heavy stench of blood nearly made me vomit. But hunger was stronger than disgust. I kept biting. And after a while, something strange happened the taste of raw meat stopped feeling so unbearable. Even my palate was adapting to this brutality.
I'd been beside the carcass for hours. I ate the wolf completely. I wasn't fully healed, but I was out of immediate danger. I could see it feel it the warm wave inside me pulling torn tissue together, my flesh slowly sealing shut. I was no longer an ant.
The final option appeared in my mind:
[Quest Complete. Would you like to exit?] [YES / NO]
By the time only white bones remained of the wolf, I didn't know how many hours had passed beneath the Tower's violet sky. My bleeding was finally under control; Absolute Adaptation had patched the most critical holes. The moment I was sure the transition shock wouldn't kill me, I touched that invisible "Exit" button in my mind.
My sense of space shattered.
00:20 Slamming Back Into Reality
When I slammed onto the hard wooden floor of my room, I forced the last air from my lungs in a ragged cry. The hours I'd spent in the Tower had amounted to only twenty minutes in the real world. The clock's red glow shone in the silence like an executioner.
I tried to get up, but the world spun violently around me. My left arm hung at my side no longer even close to whole, just a bruised weight with deadened nerves. I staggered toward the bathroom, clinging to the walls, forcing myself to resist blacking out with every step. With each movement, the sharp pain between my ribs screamed the truth:
I'm not dying… but I'm nowhere near okay.
A Stranger in the Mirror
I flicked on the bathroom's cold light. The reflection staring back at me looked less like a human and more like a scavenger. My clothes were smeared with dried wolf blood; my face had caved in from exhaustion. But the marks of Absolute Adaptation were there: the edges of my wounds were tightening as if pulled by invisible stitches, and a rhythmic tingling under my skin made my bones ache.
The old, bored kid in my eyes was dead. In his place was the savage, exhilarated glint of a hunter who had survived the one-in-a-thousand.
That gaze no longer belonged to this world.
Unquenchable Hunger
The kitchen was as silent as ever, but the hunger inside me wasn't silent it was a scream. My stomach had burned through the wolf's energy and was now starting to consume my own tissue. With trembling hands, I opened the cabinet: eggs, stale bread, canned food…
I tore everything open with my one good hand. I didn't have time to cook. I swallowed it all raw fast, animalistic, desperate. In minutes, every scrap of food in the house was gone, yet my cells still roared:
More.
I stared at the empty wrappers. I didn't have a single coin left for tomorrow's meal.
Tomorrow: The First Ration
The same notice that had run for ten years on TV crawled beneath the screen now blinking on my phone as well:
"Registration Centers Open 24 Hours. New Climbers Receive a First-Day Ration and Emergency Support."
The state didn't just pay climbers. It gave them everything they needed to survive.
The registration center was within walking distance.
Tomorrow, I had to go.