On a lonely savannah stretching endlessly under a dark sky, the wind whispered its cool breath across the land.
A Tree with gnarled limbs swayed to its rhythm, its branches dancing like silent sentinels.
Water trickled gently onto cracked soil from an unseen source, its sound barely audible beneath the sweeping hush of the breeze.
The thickets rustled, but the boulder in their midst remained unmoved just like the lifeless monster sprawled away from it.
Its bloated corpse stained the earth with dark blood, soaking the grass and leaving behind a foul stench.
Suddenly, the body shifted.
It jerked slightly, then rolled with a dull thud, exposing its torn, everted innards to the sky.
From beneath the monster, a battered figure stirred, Sibir.
His breath came in shallow rasps as he blinked, slowly orienting himself to the oppressive dark.
There was no moon.
No stars.
No light to speak of.
He had pushed the creature off him, but it had taken all the strength he could muster.
Now he just lay there, staring up into the void.
His muscles screamed in protest, but strangely, he wasn't afraid.
He was alive.
Somehow, against all odds, he had survived.
And even stranger, he was no longer on Earth.
That realization hadn't struck him during the fight, but now that his mind had space to think, the signs were unmistakable.
The sky above him was pitch black, no stars, no moon.
Just endless dark.
And no sound.
No chirps, no howls, no predators coming to scavenge the remains.
The silence was unnatural.
He considered the implications.
As a scholar, he knew full well the catastrophic consequences of a missing moon, the destruction of tides, instability in planetary rotation, and total ecological collapse.
Yet, here the land stood still, untouched.
It made no sense.
So either this wasn't Earth… or he was caught in a simulation. A cruel joke, maybe.
A virtual trap.
He scoffed at the thought.
Fantasy.
He dismissed it.
'Either way, I'll find out.' he thought
With effort, Sibir sat up, then pushed himself onto shaky legs.
The pain in his ankle was gone completely.
Curious, he flexed his foot.
It moved without resistance.
"I can walk now?" he muttered.
His voice startled him.
"Hello!!" he called out experimentally.
Hearing himself echo into the void made his chest swell with a flicker of joy.
He wasn't mute.
He was real.
'Am I dreaming?' he asked the night in thought, but his body answered instead, a deep, hollow rumble in his stomach.
There was nothing left to do in the dark.
He walked forward a little, leaned against the end of the terrain wall, and slowly let his body slip into rest, whispering to the void in his head.
He slept.
And awoke.
Three times, the night stirred him, but each time, he fell back into unconsciousness until finally, the light broke.
---
Sibir opened his eyes again, and he could see the world properly for the first time.
The lone tree.
The spring or maybe a small lake nearby.
The unmoving boulder.
And the grotesque corpse of the monster still staining the field.
But there was something else.
Just a few meters from the corpse, half-buried in the dirt, stood a stone tablet, tall, rectangular, and weathered by time. His eyes widened.
He remembered the voice just before he lost consciousness. That strange, disembodied greeting.
"Someone left this," he muttered, rising with ease.
His strength had returned.
His body felt restored.
All that remained now… was food.
He approached the stone tablet.
It stood up to his waist and had a rough texture except for a smooth surface with markings.
At first, the inscriptions looked foreign, like a dead language, but as his eyes adjusted, the characters shifted into meaning.
They made sense.
---
[FLOOR 1]
Welcome to the Tower of Conquest, Challenger!
You have been summoned from your world to have a chance at greatness.
[RULES]
> Clear each floor, which contains a set number of lifeforms.
Each floor's challenge will have a minimum strength threshold of 1.5x your base strength.
Defeat the bearer to obtain your reward.
>Beware of the Abyss.
To ascend to the next floor, place your hand marked with your name on the tablet.
---
Sibir read the inscription twice, then a third time.
His thoughts raced.
So he had been summoned.
This wasn't some accident.
There was a purpose to this nightmare.
'Then… did everyone who fell in like me also get summoned?' he thought
'If so, where are they?'
He stared again at the tablet.
The rules were clear, the first one, at least.
Fight, Win, Ascend.
The second… was a warning.
"Beware of the Abyss," he repeated under his breath.
His eyes lingered on his own healed limbs, the surge of strength, the ease in which he stood.
It made sense now, A different world.
'A fixed number of lifeforms… and the tablet only appeared after I killed it.' Sibir narrowed his eyes, thoughts racing. 'Bearer… reward. So my reward was being brought back to life? Just to suffer again?'
He sighed.
'Then that means I've already cleared this floor... and the next one's waiting.' Sibir thought
But he wasn't ready to rush.
Not yet.
Turning from the stone tablet, Sibir made his way to the spring, a small body of water at the edge of the terrain.
His eyes scanned the still surface as he reassured himself.
'There's nothing in there. No monsters...' He paused, adding with a hint of dry humor,
'...And I'm a decent swimmer.'
He stepped in.
The cool water lapped at his ankles, then rose gradually to his waist as he waded forward.
He tested the density of the buoyancy, which felt the same as Earth's water.
He could float, at least.
He continued until his chest was submerged and felt a resistance, an invisible wall.
The same kind that seemed to encircle the entire terrain.
'Maybe the other humans... they're beyond the wall,' he thought.
But for now, this was enough.
There was no danger in the water.
It was murky, yes, but it flowed gently, disappearing past the barrier in a curved route like a U-turn.
That was all the assurance he needed.
Sibir stripped off his blood-soaked pants, thin, clearly made for lounging, not a battle, and began scrubbing them clean.
Then he bathed, washing away the dried blood and grime from his skin.
He stepped out of the water naked, refreshed, and alert and hung his damp clothes on a low branch.
The occasional breeze gave him hope that, at least, natural elements could seep through the invisible wall.
The sky, however, remained mysteriously blocked or shielded.
With nothing else to do, he wandered the terrain nude, collecting the monster's pikes, eighteen still intact, and one broken in two.
The shattered one, he remembered, was the final blow that killed it.
Even though the tablet didn't insist he move on immediately, he had no intention of walking into the unknown unprepared.
He glanced at the tree with no fruit.
Perhaps the season hadn't come, or perhaps the monster devoured everything.
Either way, it wasn't worth waiting for.
He was beginning to accept it now.
Whatever reality he once knew was gone.
This was something else entirely, a world straight out of fantasy.
Time passed slowly.
With each breath, Sibir drifted between contemplation and weariness, sighing frequently as he perched naked on a low branch of the tree, sunbathing while his pants dried.
His stomach groaned again.
He cast a glance at the monster's corpse, still untouched by decay, even after more than twelve hours.
He'd inspected it earlier, noting its condition.
Maybe decomposition worked differently here.
Or maybe time itself did.
He considered his options.
Hunger clawed at him, but he hesitated.
The thought of feasting on a beast like that on day one of this new reality, this tower was… unsettling.
Animalistic.
But how long could he go without food?
Eventually, night fell again.
The sky darkened just as thoroughly as before, the world swallowed in unnatural silence.
Sibir lay beneath the stars that didn't exist, staring upward.
Then it struck him.
"I was lucky," he whispered to himself.
If the monster had attacked him at night when visibility was zero, when his instincts dulled, he wouldn't have survived.
Not even close.
This darkness was its domain, considering it had no eyes and was stealth-based with sensitivity to sound, and he had faced it in daylight.
That was the only reason he was alive now.
He turned those thoughts over and over in his head until the wind lulled him to sleep once more.
---
By dawn, Sibir awoke with a clear mind.
He had spent two days thinking.
Two days fasting.
And finally, he had a plan.
He approached the large boulder, running his hand over its weathered surface.
His eyes caught faint cracks along one side, perhaps remnants from the earlier clash.
'There's always a reason,' he thought.
He grabbed one of the monster's blunt pikes and began hammering into the cracks, prying at the stone with force.
Eventually, chunks of rock splintered off, some small, others thick and sturdy.
That was what he needed.
Taking two dense, jagged stones and the shortened, dulled pike, he made his way back to the tree.
Still nude, he knelt and began his next project: fire.
He struck the stones against each other.
Sparks flew.
Not every rock could do this, but these had a glossy, hardcore, perfect for friction.
With dry twigs and fallen leaves, he built a small fire pit near the tree's base.
He lacked rope or a proper blade, but the pike served well enough with a stab-and-tear technique to shred what he needed.
In time, the flames caught.
A real fire.
Bright, warm, and comforting in this strange world.
He smiled, just slightly.
Part two?
He turned to the corpse again, this time with grim resolve.
He had already carved out a chunk of flesh using the pikes.
Now it was time to roast it.
It had been two days since Sibir entered this place.
Two days without food until now.
He crouched beside the fire, watching the meat sizzle over the flames.
The monster's flesh was unlike anything he'd ever seen, fibrous and pale, with a strange, almost crystalline texture.
He was used to red meat, the kind you'd see behind a butcher's counter or on a campfire spit.
But this… this was alien.
Still, he didn't care.
Survival didn't wait for preferences.
He lost two pikes in the process, which snapped, and warped by the heat.
Poor conductors.
But by then, the meat was cooked, or at least, as cooked as it was going to get.
Sibir sat cross-legged beside the fire and tore into the roasted flesh with a straight face.
It wasn't exactly appetizing, but there was a juicy, fatty flavor to it, strange, but better than nothing.
The goal was simple: fill his stomach.
He did.
Within twenty minutes, he had eaten his fill.
Once done, he washed his hands and face in the spring and slipped back into his dried pants, now a bit rough from the sun but still wearable.
Then came the clean-up.
He gathered the remaining sixteen intact pikes, along with the two broken ones.
Using stringy innards stripped from the monster's body, he lashed them together like a bundle of firewood and hoisted the crude weapon stack onto his back.
"It's a good thing that thing was huge," he muttered.
The meat.
The materials.
Everything about the monster had served a purpose.
He made his way back to the tablet, the same stone slab that had marked the end of the first battle.
His eyes studied its surface.
"I just need to touch it, right?" he asked aloud, shifting the bundle to one arm.
He reached out with his right hand and pressed it against the tablet's surface.
Nothing.
Sibir blinked and frowned.
Daylight was still on his side, and that was why he had decided to move now.
If the next floor had a monster anything like the last, then fighting during the day might give him another edge.
He crouched quickly and re-read the inscription at the base of the tablet:
"Hand on which your name is written."
His brow furrowed.