Chương 3: Total Collapse

The gate rose at the far end of the floor zero expanse, enormous and unmistakable, the same gothic stonework and layered arch I had passed through more times than I could accurately count. The carvings on it had never changed. I had stopped looking at them closely a long time ago. The screen drifted with me, unhurried, as if it had nowhere else to be.

'If I could destroy it I would,' I thought, and that was not frustration talking. It was a genuine assessment. The screen had an almost deliberate quality to the way it appeared and responded, reactive in ways that suggested awareness without ever confirming it. I had no evidence it was sentient. I also had no evidence it was not. Either way it had decided I was its business, and I had learned to work with that rather than against it.

I raised a hand and the screen expanded, shifting from the class selection view into the broader layout I had studied across hundreds of loops. There was a lot to it, more than any one run had given me time to fully absorb. The status information at the top was the straightforward part, the numbers that told me where I was and what the current class gave me to work with.

Attributes below that, the general spread of how strong, how resilient, how mentally capable this build made me at baseline, and how far those numbers could grow. Resources tracked the things that depleted and recovered in real time, health, stamina, the third one that I had spent a long time learning to use properly. Skills were the part I had come to rely on most. They could be earned, not just assigned.

Gained through actions repeated enough times or conditions met in specific ways, and once acquired they could be developed further. I had accumulated a significant number across different class runs and found that certain ones paired with Pathfinder in ways that multiplied what either of them did alone. Skills had saved me on floors where my attributes were plainly insufficient for what I was fighting. They were the part of the system that rewarded attention. However, skills could never be imitated.

No matter how skilled I became as a swordsman, if I performed a move from a previous skill set gained in an earlier regression, that technique would always be ten times inferior, regardless of how perfectly I executed it. Nonetheless, the memories remained intact. I had always switched between sword and spear forms depending on the situation, using whichever weapon became more efficient at the time, with or without their skills. Traits and titles were the part that rewarded nothing.

Three of them, same as always, sitting in their row without any indication they could be changed or improved. The Regressor. Pathfinder. Master of Many Paths. I had made peace with the first two. The third one I still looked at it, aware that something was behind it and equally aware they had no current means of finding out what. I had decided some time ago to stop spending active thought on it... that decision had not fully taken.

At the bottom of the screen sat the class path, which was the part that interested me most right now. It was structured like a branching diagram, showing not just the current state of a class but the directions it could develop over time and the unlocks available at each stage. This was how I had moved between classes across previous runs, finding the branches and following them. The mage was the latest selection, sitting at the start of its own branch with the path ahead of it visible and clear.

And beside it, still obscured, a second portrait covered in fog. I had noticed it the moment I selected the mage class and had not been able to get a clear look at it since. Whatever it was, the system had decided I had not earned the right to see it yet. I closed the screen with a gesture and looked up at the gate.

"Let us see," I said. I had said that before every single run. I was aware of that. It did not stop me from saying it. The screen materialized in front of me one last time before I moved. [STATUS] Name: Koalemos Race: Devas Level: 1 Class: Mage Class Rank: Apprentice Stolen novel; please report. Titles: [The Regressor] [Pathfinder] [Master of Many Paths] [ATTRIBUTES] Strength: 1 Agility: 2 Vitality: 5 Intelligence: 24 Wisdom: 19 Perception: 16 Affinity: 8 The numbers were lower than they had any right to be.

Intelligence and Wisdom sat high, which made sense on paper, but I had never found a real use for either of them across any previous run. Every stat that actually kept a person alive in the early floors, Strength, Agility, Vitality, sat at the bottom end of what the system would even allow. I stared at the screen for a moment longer than I should have.

"Fuck," I muttered. A word I had learned to appreciate thanks to human literature. [RESOURCES] Health: 90 / 90 Mana: 240 / 240 Stamina: 100 / 100 The Mana pool had doubled from what I expected. Base Mage started at one hundred and twenty. Mine read two hundred and forty. I had no explanation for that yet and no time to look for one. My Health, however, sat at ninety, which was low enough to make the next few floors genuinely dangerous. One bad hit and I would be spending the rest of the run limping.

[SKILLS] [Arcane Burst] Lv. 1 [Basic Mana Manipulation] Lv. 1 [Insight] Lv. 1 I looked at them and had nothing useful to say. Skills were skills. At least it was not the Charm Dance I had inherited as a Monk two runs back. That particular skill had done exactly nothing for me in every situation that mattered. [TRAITS] [Regressor] Description: Your memories from previous lives remain intact.

[Pathfinder] Description: You have inherited the folly of Koalemos, the wandering fool who chased roads that even the gods deemed meaningless. Yet through endless wandering, countless mistakes, and paths born from madness, you discovered routes hidden from mortal and divine sight alike. You walk where no map exists, guided by instinct, and ignorance. The roads you find were never meant to be found. I had never seen those descriptions before. Not under this section, not under any section.

I had been through enough runs to know what the system typically handed out at character creation. These were not typical. It also said my name… [Master of Many Paths] [Unknown] The description was blurred past the point of reading. I squinted at it the way a person does when they already know squinting will not help. It did not help. I moved down to the class progression.

[CLASS PATH] Current Path: [Mage] Next Available Evolution: [Grand Magus] Description: A master of countless schools of magic who has surpassed specialization. Fire, ice, death, life, space, and time are no longer separate arts but fragments of a single greater truth. It would seem that my current path Grand Magus, spelt as mage. Interesting… Other Available Evolutions: [Arcanist] Description: A mage who pursues the fundamental principles behind all magic.

Rather than mastering individual elements or schools, they study the hidden structure of the arcane itself. [Foolish Sage] Description: A mage who follows the path of Koalemos, the divine fool. They chase impossible ideas, pursue meaningless questions, and stumble upon truths that wiser minds were too afraid to seek. [Alchemist] Description:??? [???] Description:??? I looked at that one for longer than I meant to.

The Mage class carried multiple paths and roles, each one specialized in something the others were not. That much I already understood. But Foolish Sage was different. It carried his name, or rather, the name I had been given and had not yet decided to accept. Koalemos. The divine fool. The wandering idiot who found roads that were not supposed to exist. And the Alchemist didn't reveal any more information. It seemed that the Insight Skill was limited in that regard. After all, it was only at Level One.

Arcanist was just another mage... it did mention mage after all in the description, so I will think of it as another different class but still one and the same. The system had no hesitation about putting that in front of me. I dismissed the screen and turned my attention to what lay ahead. From floor one to five, it's mostly confrontations — except the first floor, which includes a stealth sub-objective. On floor five, I'll be facing a titan... I didn't let myself dwell on that.

With luck, and a few spells, I could probably target its weak points. From five to fifteen, the pattern holds: meet the trader, fight my way up. Though something fundamental shifts around floors fourteen and fifteen. And fifteen is where I hit my roadblock, the one I've climbed over countless times, yet it still proves dangerously unpredictable. Up until floor twenty, that's where human civilization lies. The first ten floors are going to be brutal.

I'll need to locate the pendant quickly, gather weapons along the way, I can't rely solely on this staff. I also need access to the archives. I have to reach floor twenty in time, or else he'll descend and lose his life... I need to reach human civilization. Fast. And I need to see that trader again. I smile as my thoughts race, and my hand finds the big door handle for the ginormous gate. I could not afford to sit here and think about it. I had done enough of that in other runs.

Thinking, in the early floors, was a good way to die while standing still. I pushed the door open with both hands and the air outside came in immediately. Cold and sharp, carrying the smell of grass, the grey grass outside moved in a wind I could not feel on my skin. I had always found that wrong. The grass moved. I did not feel the wind. I had stopped trying to explain it. Then the ground shook. A rhythmic shifting, like the floor itself was deciding whether or not to hold together.

I saw them before I understood what I was looking at. Black limbs, white eyes, moving through the grey grass from the direction I had woken up in, pulling themselves over each other with a sound that sat somewhere between scraping metal and wet tearing. They moved fast. Faster than I remembered them moving. [Warning: Safe zone has collapsed.]