Climbing the Tower with Multidimensional Avatars - Chapter 180

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Episode 180. The Tower – Night Walker (1)

I switched off the flashlight for a moment.
If there were any monsters lurking beyond my detection range, the beam might reveal our location, so I needed to move with caution.
Instead, I used Night Vision magic that allowed me to see even in darkness and scanned the surroundings.
Beyond the elevator lay a sealed, ordinary room.
Being underground, the air was thick with a stale, musty odor, though it didn’t seem as though toxic substances hung in the atmosphere.
Once I confirmed it was safe, I released the magic and switched the flashlight back on.
Lee Su-young swept the flashlight across the space and spoke.
“The layout matches the room we saw upstairs.”
“But unlike up there, this one’s been torn apart.”
Like the upper chamber, this room contained numerous aged, crumbling documents, but they were all scattered across the floor with chaotic footprints trampled over them.
Diana picked up some papers and read through them, frowning.
“Just like upstairs, everything seems terribly old, yet the paper has somehow survived intact.”
“Well, depending on the material and how paper is made, it can last thousands of years without much trouble.”
Korean hanji can last eight thousand years, and Japanese washi around seventeen hundred years.
Since this world had magic, preservation enchantments likely existed here too, and given that the ruins had been untouched for ages in a dry environment, it wasn’t strange at all for the papers to have survived relatively intact.
Though I couldn’t say exactly how ancient these ruins were.
Mano studied the faint footprints with interest and spoke.
“Looking at the prints, it’s as if someone were fleeing from something.”
At Mano’s remark, Lee Su-young asked.
“But there’s no dirt on them—so what did they step in to leave marks like this?”
Mano paused briefly, then gestured into empty air.
A white plastic bottle tumbled out, suggesting he’d purchased something from the shop.
It wasn’t a potion—it looked exactly like the disinfectant bottles you’d find at a pharmacy. I couldn’t tell if the label was in Arabic or Egyptian, but using the translation function, it read “Hydrogen Peroxide Disinfectant.”
The Tower Shop really did sell everything under the sun.
“Are you checking for a Luminol Reaction?”
Mano nodded at my question.
“More precisely, I’m observing the decomposition process of hydrogen peroxide, but given how those footprints look like they’re fleeing something, I thought it worth checking.”
At Mano’s answer, Lee Su-young asked.
“What’s a Luminol Reaction?”
“You know those forensic shows—CSI or crime investigation movies—where they use that chemical that glows bright blue when it touches blood? You mix distilled water and Luminol Solution with hydrogen peroxide to make it. If there’s blood, just the hydrogen peroxide alone will bubble.”
Diana added to my explanation.
“The catalase enzyme in blood breaks down hydrogen peroxide into oxygen and water, creating the reaction. But if the blood is too old—dried and degraded by microbes—the hydrogen peroxide alone might not produce a reaction. I’m not sure how well this will work.”
“Oh, I just searched the Tower Shop and they stock Luminol Solution too. This place really does sell absolutely everything.”
True to a shop that sold silver and arrows but not silver arrows, the Tower Shop stocked Luminol Solution, hydrogen peroxide, and distilled water, but not the Luminol reagent itself.
I purchased the distilled water and Luminol Solution and handed them to Mano.
Mano mixed the solutions roughly and poured them over the footprints.
It took a moment for the reaction to show given the age of the blood, but the footprints glowed in bright blue fluorescence.
“These footprints are definitely blood.”
My expression, Diana’s, and Rachel’s all grew serious at the sight of the glowing blue prints.
Seeing our faces, Lee Su-young asked.
“But why is it important that this is blood?”
Rachel answered her question.
“It’s important because it validates the documents we read upstairs.”
“Validates them?”
“According to the documents we read, this world was at war with monsters that were like vampires but weren’t actually vampires.”
Yet their characteristics matched those of vampires.
Since vampires are sensitive to blood, if someone had tracked blood to this place, they would’ve been hunted down immediately, meaning there should have been signs of resistance or pursuit here—but there were none.
In other words, the bio-weapon based on these monsters that was researched here was proof that the creature described in the documents wasn’t a vampire at all.
“So if the documents we saw upstairs are credible, then the information we have is correct, which is good, right?”
I shook my head at Lee Su-young’s words.
“Not necessarily.”
“Huh? Why not? The weaknesses were listed too.”
“That’s the good part. But if this monster exists, it only resembles a vampire—it isn’t one—so we can’t predict how it’ll attack. According to the documents, it devours souls, but how does it do that? Like a vampire biting? Or could it just drain them from proximity? A single touch might be all it takes.”
In truth, vampires weren’t easy enemies to face either.
The one we’d fought on Floor 16 had just woken from slumber and couldn’t use many grappling techniques, but vampires in general transform into mist to negate physical damage, cast various enchantments and illusions—they’re formidable creatures.
Seeing Lee Su-young’s expression grow grave at my words, I let out a quiet laugh.
“Still, there’s no need to worry too much. We have two people who can use Holy Power.”
Their Holy Power flowed in opposite directions, but both should prove antithetical to whatever creature might lurk in this place.
“Ah, that’s true.”
Lee Su-young relaxed slightly, yet her expression grew serious as she grasped that the creature would be formidable.
“For safety’s sake, it would be best to spread sunlight in all directions first, then move beneath it.”
I looked toward Rachel.
Rachel paused to consider, then drew out cards that resembled a Memorize Card from a pouch hanging at her waist—or rather, from something shaped like a Card Deck Case.
Curiosity prompted me to glance over and ask.
“What is that?”
The cards were precisely the size of playing cards and looked similar to TCG game cards.
“Memorize Cards. You store magic in them beforehand and carry them around.”
In essence, they were magical scrolls. I couldn’t help but be amazed by Rachel’s explanation.
“Magic can be stored in something that small? How?”
Scrolls were never smaller than A4 paper, and typically took a rolled form, as the word “scroll” itself suggested.
Creating scrolls that seal magic semi-permanently is already quite difficult work, but reducing them to this size would multiply the difficulty several times over.
To my question, Rachel spoke as if discouraging further inquiry.
“It’s related to my ability.”
“Ah, I understand. My apologies.”
In the Tower, prying into others’ abilities was considered bad form.
Knowing the details of an ability could expose its weaknesses.
No perfect ability existed in this world.
Even the Multidimensional Avatar, which seemed to have no weaknesses despite having its drawbacks, possessed one.
There was no way to strike my true body on Tower Floor 1, but there were plenty of methods to destroy my avatars, which I could continuously regenerate.
I could be forced to abandon avatar creation if enemies continuously killed each new one I summoned, or if they threw me into an environment where death was inevitable.
So unless they were party members I’d spend considerable time with—and even if they were—it was wise to conceal one’s abilities.
Any secret known to someone else ceased to be a secret.
Rachel seemed pleased by my apology and accepted it with a smile.
“No, it was an honest question, and if you have aptitude for magic, it’s natural to be curious about such things.”
Just as I was observing Rachel and Mano, whom I’d met for the first time today, she too seemed to be studying us carefully.
It was probably paranoia, but she might have sensed that I actually could use magic.
My thirty-meter leap in a single bound and my detection of the trap would certainly look like magic in action.
Sometimes, even mistaken hunches can lead to truth, like catching a mouse while backing up behind an ox.
I activated my mini-map and confirmed the location of the Stone Statue I needed to destroy.
“Then let’s go.”
I spread my senses outward and left the secret chamber containing the lift.

* * *

In a coffin placed in a corner of the Central Research Laboratory, a man stirred to consciousness.
“How long was I asleep this time?”
The man’s eyes gleamed brightly even in darkness, and he surveyed his surroundings as clearly as in daylight. He checked a simple clock made from interlocking gears.
The first gear took roughly ten seconds to complete a rotation; the second gear, meshed with it, took a hundred seconds; the third took a thousand seconds; the fourth took ten thousand seconds. A primitive timepiece, but functional.
The man confirmed the time by the position of the whitewashed gears.
“About twelve years of sleep, it seems. The cycle shortened by three years this time.”
The man had once been a court mage of a kingdom that waged war against the Night Walker—a creature that devoured souls and walked the night, having invaded this world long ago.
The war was named the Sunrise War because it made use of the sun.
The Sunrise War ultimately succeeded in eradicating the Night Walker through the sacrifice of countless soldiers, knights, and mages.
This research facility, where the man now lay, was built in the final stages of the Sunrise War on the king’s orders as both a military installation and a site for classified research. The man had been appointed its director.
The facility’s purpose was the creation and application of bio-weapons using Night Walkers.
Having fought Night Walkers for so long, these men understood their terror better than anyone. Human greed pondered whether such formidable creatures could be harnessed and utilized.
The facility’s existence was of course classified at the highest level, and even those few high-ranking officials who knew of it mostly believed it to be a military installation and storage facility in preparation for a potential resurgence of Night Walkers.
The valuable silver and mithril stored on Floor 1 served merely as a smokescreen to obscure research that was unethical and would be deemed a crime against civilization.
Only the king who issued the orders and the core mages working at the facility knew its true purpose.
The lesser mages performing simple experiments below understood little of the research’s significance.
As time passed, the facility director aged, and one day the king passed away.
When the king who had ordered the research died, while the facility’s core personnel worried about the continuation of their work, the man worried only about his own mortality.
The director grew fearful as death approached moment by moment, and bio-weapons no longer mattered to him.
Ultimately, the director deliberately infected himself by devouring a Night Walker of noble descent—an experimental subject—becoming a Night Walker himself and obtaining youth and endless life.
Perhaps because he had forcibly extracted the bloodline from the source of infection, the director fell into a rampage, slaughtering the facility’s researchers while consuming their souls.
Had he retained consciousness, he would have silenced the high-ranking officials who knew the facility’s secrets by killing them first, but despite missing them in his unintended rampage, the director felt no regret.
A seal had been placed upon them all—one that forbade them from speaking of anything related to the Research Facility. And even had the seal not existed, they would never have dared to speak of those years, for fear of facing capital punishment.
The Research Director’s prediction proved correct. Centuries passed without a single subjugation force arriving to end him.
Yet there was one thing the Research Director had not foreseen: upon becoming a Night Walker, his existence became bound to the Research Facility itself.
When the Night Walkers—the research specimens—had been sent to the Facility, they arrived bearing multiple Binding Seals imposed by the king, who had been a Grand Mage of incomparable power.
The king was a Grand Mage so formidable that the Research Director could not hope to understand his work, and so this binding had come about without his knowledge.
When the Research Director discovered this truth far too late, he began to research desperately for any means to escape the Facility.
But having slain all the other mages within the Research Facility, he could no longer properly consume the souls of the living, and so he was forced to enter periodic hibernation.
On this awakening—he could not remember which number it was—the Research Director frowned.
“When the soul reserves are depleted, sleeping longer only means sleeping longer. One cannot wake early. …Ah yes, there’s an intruder in the Facility. That’s why I’ve awakened. Tsk! Just when the research was nearing completion.”
Over the centuries, the Research Director had searched for a way to escape the Facility, and through the Stone Statue—a Cursed Object of the Facility—he had finally found it.
Now nothing remained but to escape, so when the unwelcome visitor arrived, frustration mingled with anticipation within him.
He was like a starving, savage beast driven to the edge of famine.

(To be continued)

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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