‘So that’s why they call it an hideout?’
Past the small passage beneath the timer at twelve o’clock, I found a door.
Beyond it was a tiny one-room space.
A blanket and pillow, a small toilet and shower, and bread and water inside a little cloth-covered basket.
"Three loaves of bread."
There was about a liter of water, stored separately in what looked like a metal container.
Hungry, I picked up a piece of bread.
When I tore off a bite, it was hard and dry.
"Ugh..."
It tasted awful, too. The pound cake from Army rations suddenly seemed gourmet by comparison.
The water was lukewarm, at that unpleasantly warm temperature. I grimaced, swallowed the dry bread, then sighed and looked around.
The whole place seemed to be telling me, Eat and sleep here.
‘Then the other four passages must connect to the towers.’
That was probably how the system worked.
I still didn’t know whether this was Earth, or some game or novel world.
As I looked around with the attitude that I’d find out eventually, I remembered the mod telling me to read the announcement.
Swipe.
[☆ Infinite Regression Gallery Announcement] (999+)
[Author: Not an Eraser🔸]
Hello. I am Not an Eraser, newly appointed as the second administrator.
The previous announcement was rather old, so I am making this post to organize things anew.
For the rules and things you must observe in the Infinite Regression Gallery, please refer not to this post but to the post titled “Infinite Regression Gallery Rules.”
This is not a post about gallery rules. It is a guide for newbies who have just awakened in this place.
If you have any questions, rather than asking in either place, please check “Questions” or “Suggestion Box.”
However, you must only post truly important questions in Questions & Suggestion Box, and if it is discovered that your question was not important───
‘...This guy talks way too damn much.’
I frowned at the post, which was already making my head spin just from the introduction. It had so little readability that it felt like it had been tossed out as dog food.
A quick scroll told me it would take at least an hour to read the whole thing.
Dumbfounded, I scrolled all the way down and found the comments in complete chaos... no, furious, with people who clearly shared my opinion.
‘The mod said I absolutely had to read it, so I should...’
But I didn’t have the confidence to get through it. The comments were full of complaints, with no one having summarized or organized it separately.
As I spent a moment wondering whether I really had to read this—
Anonymous: This is driving me nuts so I summarized the announcement myself, fuck. Come here gall.infinity/view/13412322
‘Now this is a proper gallery.’
Grinning at the summary link I’d finally found at the very end, I tapped the comment.
[☆ Fuck, Mod, Stop Writing Announcements Like That]
[Author: Anonymous]
Hi newbies.
I’m not gonna spew bullshit like the mod. Getting right to the point.
1. We don’t know where this place is either. We woke up and were just here, okay?
2. Of the five passages, the small one is your quarters. The other four are towers.
3. You’ll see something like a timer in the center.
- Apocalypse = You die when it hits 0. Don’t actually know if you die, but people vanish overnight and never come back, yeah.
- Section = You see something like [ 0 / 7 ] right underneath? It means you have to climb to the 7th floor within the time limit.
It’s fine to climb a bunch at once, like [ 100 / 7 ]. When the timer resets, it’ll look like [ 100 / 14 ].
You need to climb one floor a day, but in the final two weeks you suddenly have to climb fifty floors, so don’t cut it close. The higher floors are harder, and you won’t have enough time.
If you fail to meet the section timer, the text and numbers change color. Yellow once, red twice, yeah.
Miss it three times? Congratulations, your life is over.
You have to climb every tower you cleared all over again from the beginning. The important part is that the “Apocalypse timer stays the same.”
4. Say you have incredible luck and skill, and you climb all four towers to the 100th floor within the time limit?
Congrats, you start over from the beginning again. But this time, the Apocalypse timer resets too.
You see -1- at the very top of the timer, right? That’s how many times you’ve looped. I’m on my 340th right now, hi.
5. To escape this place, when you start a tower over, there’s an insanely, insanely, insanely, insanely low chance that something shiny will appear, yeah.
We call it an [Irregular]. If you grab it and ask it to let you out, you can leave (probably).
People who get out can’t come back to the gallery, so we don’t know either. Anyone who saw it firsthand has already disappeared.
6. By the way, the mod is a beautiful girl. Sometimes she posts unbelievably hot selfies.
7. Number 6 is a blank entry. If you can see it, you’re destined to get fucked in the Tower of Mindscape.
8. Actually, there’s nothing more to say.
Three-line summary, yeah.
1. You have to climb the towers.
2. It gets harder every time you regress.
3. You’ll never meet anyone for the rest of your life. Everyone is in a separate space.
4. There are no guides. Any post or comment about strategies gets automatically deleted.
There’s actually more to it than that, but the rest of the information...
Find out through adventure. Later.
Upvotes 7654 Downvotes 258
[Comments]
Not an Eraser🔸: I tried my best in my own way...
┗ Not an Eraser🔸: And...! That isn’t even a three-line summary...!!
┗ Anonymous (Author): Who says a three-line summary has to be three lines?
‘The mod’s announcement had fifteen thousand downvotes, though.’
I couldn’t call it neat, but this one was definitely more condensed.
I roughly understood why the gallery was called the Infinite Regression Gallery, and why its description called it endless hell.
And the most important thing was──
"Fuck! Shit!"
They had squandered that precious [Irregular] on browsing the gallery.
Handles like 6373rd Run or 1344th Run must have referred to the number of times they had regressed.
Which meant they had failed to get an [Irregular] despite repeating this place that many times.
6,373 years. 1,344 years.
I squeezed my eyes shut at the crushing weight of an unimaginably vast amount of time.
"Haa."
I knew there was no taking it back, but I couldn’t help sighing.
‘Let’s go for now...’
There was nothing else to see in the hideout right now. In any case, I had to climb seven floors of a tower within six days and sixteen hours.
*
"Oh..."
When I passed through the dark passage beside the hideout at one o’clock, something like a gigantic tower appeared before me.
It was so immense and tall that I couldn’t see its end even when I craned my neck upward.
I considered which one to enter first, but since I had to climb them all anyway, I chose the closest tower.
『Tower of Trials』
There was no other explanation. Only the tower’s name was written at the entrance.
‘I’m scared to just walk in.’
I searched the gallery with that thought in mind, but there was no useful information.
There were posts about how some tower was fucking awful, or what someone had seen in a tower, but that was it.
People would talk about “what they saw in the towers,” but not “how they cleared it.”
"Haa... Oh, right."
As I stood there doing nothing but sighing, I remembered something I had briefly forgotten.
‘There was one more thing on the internet besides the gallery, right?’
An icon in the internet app called [StarWiki].
Wiki was practically synonymous with an ark of knowledge, so wondering if it might have information about this place, I tapped the app.
[StarWiki]
[___________]🔍
The first thing I saw upon entering was the name and a search bar.
There were no categories to speak of, so it looked like I had to search manually. I moved my finger.
‘What should I search for?’
Not knowing what or how to search, I simply typed “tower.”
[Searching . . .]
[Automatically switching to an answer suited to your current situation.]
(Restricted)
┗ Tower of Trials
┗ Tower of Wisdom
┗ Tower of Mindscape
┗ Tower of Fate
"Oh..."
I let out a small exclamation at the page that appeared along with the notification.
Like how the star candy had changed according to where it was first located, it felt as though it was properly looking after me, considering I had wasted my wish on something useless.
[Tower of Trials]
Test the limits of the body.
┗ Concept: The most straightforward, yet most difficult tower.
┗ Traits: Brutishly simple labor, combat against enemies of unknown origin, survival in harsh natural environments, and more. This tower forces out the body’s limits. A Floor Master appears every ten floors, and Floor Masters are vastly more powerful than enemies on other floors.
‘Hmm, I don’t think this is the one for me.’
No matter how I looked at it, this didn’t seem like a place I could survive.
They said the difficulty increased with every regression, so I didn’t think it would be that hard at the first floor of my first run, but...
Still, the hurdle was far too high for a shut-in rice seller.
‘First, I’ll check the other ones—’
As I turned around with that thought, the passage I had come through had vanished completely.
"...Hello?"
My head spun at the sight of not even a trace of the passage remaining, as if I had no choice but to enter the tower.
‘This is fun!’
What’s the worst that could happen? I’d die. Things would work out somehow.
*
Boom!
The instant I opened the tower door and stepped inside, it slammed shut on its own.
I tried opening it again, but naturally, it wouldn’t budge. I supposed it was either die or clear it.
‘What’s going to come out?’
I clenched both fists. I had never learned to exercise or fight, but I’d imagined it plenty of times.
In my imagination, I single-handedly wiped the floor with thugs and defeated a gang of robbers that came to attack me──
Clank!!
"Eek!"
After staring quietly into the dark interior of the first floor for a moment, lights suddenly turned on in the distance.
I swallowed and stepped toward the lights, as though they were beckoning me over.
‘...There’s nothing but a door?’
Beneath the light, where I eventually arrived, stood only a thick iron door resembling the entrance.
As I blankly looked around, I noticed something written above the door.
[Remaining Hits: 1,000]
"...?"
I blinked at the meaningless message visible beneath the dim light, then cautiously struck the door.
Thud.
[Remaining Hits: 1,000]
A heavy sound echoed out, but for some reason the number didn’t change.
Wondering if I had to hit somewhere else, I looked around, but everything beyond the area in front of the door was steeped in darkness.
‘Harder?’
With that thought, I gritted my teeth and struck the iron door with all my strength.
Boom!!
"Hngh...!"
I clenched my teeth through the insane pain shooting through my hand.
[Remaining Hits: 999]
"You want me to do this 999 more times...?"
The count above decreased by one, as if confirming that this was right.
The vibrations ringing through my bones were enough to numb my hand. A thousand times like this? My hand would break before I even got halfway.
‘Even if one hit takes ten seconds... a thousand hits would take nearly three hours.’
Ding!
Just as I gave a hollow laugh, wondering if this was the brutishly simple labor I had seen on the wiki, my phone notification went off.
[Internet (1)]
A red (1) had appeared above the internet app.
As though possessed, I tapped Internet. The (1) notification was still on the StarWiki icon──
[Tower of Trials]
┗ First Run, First Floor Strategy: Strike the fifth circle from the top on the right-side door three times at a steady pace.
The moment I tapped StarWiki, a strategy for the tower appeared on the page.
"Hmm..."
Looking at the door, I could see there were indeed more than a dozen circles arranged on it that looked like patterns.
Wondering whether this could possibly be real, I raised my fist as though entranced.
Thud! Thud! Thud!
Rumble...
I blinked as the door opened, kicking up dust, the instant I followed the instructions.
『 Tower of Trials 』
-1-
A dark passage appeared once again.
Letters floated in the faint light, as though announcing that this was the first floor.
‘...Do I go in?’
I cautiously stepped through the pitch-black doorway.
Had I taken ten steps... no, perhaps twenty? Once I emerged from the darkness, I was somehow standing before the hideout passage.
As if this was the spawn point, I stood blankly staring at the place where I had first awakened, then slowly raised my head.
-1-
[Apocalypse 364:16:11:12]
[Section 6:16:11:12]
[ 1 / 7 ]
"...It went up."
The bottom number had risen from 0 to 1.
Seeing that unmistakably filled-in number, as if I had cleared the first floor, the corners of my mouth rose without me realizing it.
‘You’re pretty damn good, Wiki...!’
I still didn’t fully understand what was going on, but maybe the wish I had made to the star wasn’t so bad after all.
[Is the first floor normally this easy?;;]
[Author: King God Wiki]
"Okay."
I had cleared one hurdle, so now it was time to hear the cheers and applause directed at me.
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