[Reason: No chatting on the Report Board!]
Snort.
‘That mod’s got some nerve.’
Smiling at the way they had imitated my manner of speaking, I slipped my phone into my pocket.
Next time, I ought to send soy sauce instead of cola.
‘Wait... Now that I think about it...’
I did not necessarily have to use Starpang’s gift function exclusively for gifts.
If Starpang truly had products from every conceivable world, wouldn’t it also have items horrifying enough to make someone recoil just from looking at them?
Edible insects, gay photo books, stinky tofu, and so on....
‘Not that I’d send them while paying ten times the customs fee....’
The realization that I could abuse the gift function made the corners of my mouth rise on their own.
There were still plenty of bastards whose memos remained. I had only erased half of them that time.
‘Look forward to it.’
My grudges last a lifetime.
*
Thud!
"Urgh...."
I opened the tower’s door, stepped inside, and stretched my stiff body.
Before coming in, I had taken painkillers and muscle relaxants, and even sprayed on a pain-relief patch.
It was a place where I only had to use my head, so it should not put much strain on my back.
Step.
‘Would the Tower of Wisdom have been the hardest one without the wiki?’
I pondered as I headed toward the door visible in the distance.
The Tower of Fate was excluded from the start, since it was a game of luck, while the Tower of Mindscape ultimately relied on mental fortitude, just as the wiki had said.
Honestly, I thought the Tower of Trials did not differ much whether you had the wiki or not.
Even with a walkthrough, you died if your body was defective. And even without one, you survived if you were strong enough to smash through everything.
‘They called it the most straightforward tower.’
And this Tower of Wisdom was said to demand everything from simple reasoning to sophisticated judgment.
Recalling the explanation written in the wiki, I arrived before the door.
"Hmm."
Nothing was written on it. Everywhere but the area in front of the door was steeped in darkness.
Glance.
‘...No, right?’
Like someone with PTSD, I cautiously glanced up at the ceiling.
I had experienced the exact same thing on the eleventh floor just last week. I doubted they would do the same unfunny trick twice, but I still licked my dry lips.
‘The wiki isn’t reacting either.’
Without letting down my guard, I cautiously pulled the door handle, but it remained firmly shut without budging.
I looked around, wondering what the hell it could be, when—
[Identify the differences between the two doors.]
‘...What the hell does that mean?’
I blankly blinked at the message that appeared before my eyes a moment later.
If it meant doors, there was only the exit before me and the entrance I had come through.
I frowned, thinking they looked exactly the same no matter how closely I examined them, and a timer appeared in front of me: [10:00].
‘It takes about a minute to make a round trip to the other door.’
How was I supposed to identify the differences between the two doors?
They could at least explain it properly. Making me use my wisdom even for this was absurdly unkind.
[9:59]
‘Should I go back first...?’
As I blankly turned around at the ticking timer—
Ding!
[Tower of Wisdom]
- First Run, Floor 11 Walkthrough: Find the five differences among the patterns drawn above the two doors. Temporary [Entrance Door] activated.
The wiki sent me a supplementary explanation along with a strategy for clearing it.
‘Five differences... So it’s a spot-the-difference puzzle?’
The doors were larger than I had expected, and the distance between them was not exactly short either.
The pattern on the exit looked far more intricate and ornate than I had expected, so it seemed like it would be difficult to find them, but....
Tap.
Just as I had activated a temporary map on the tenth floor, tapping [Entrance Door] brought up an image of the pattern-covered door that filled my screen.
It meant I did not have to go all the way back or memorize every detail one by one.
"Nice."
I zoomed in on the perfectly straight [Entrance Door], as if it had been photographed head-on, and began searching for patterns that differed from the exit in front of me.
‘The ten-minute limit is really the kicker.’
Without the wiki, how many times would I have had to run back and forth and retry this with my body in this condition?
Come to think of it, the tenth floor of the Tower of Wisdom had been a maze too.
I could not assume that, just because it was the Tower of Wisdom, I would only be standing still and thinking.
‘Found one.’
Not even a minute later, I found the first difference.
A pattern depicting some unidentifiable creature...? Its appearance was slightly different.
Tap.
[9:12]
[1/5]
‘Okay.’
When I approached the exit door and lightly tapped it, a message indicating a correct answer appeared beneath the timer.
As expected, nothing was difficult as long as I had the wiki.
[2/5]
.
.
[3/5]
And so I found the second difference, then the third.
[4/5]
‘Can’t I just tap randomly?’
Just as I found the fourth difference, a question occurred to me.
If I had not had the wiki, would I truly have needed to go back and forth? And what happened if I picked a wrong one?
[4/5]
[4:23]
‘...I can’t resist.’
Even I wondered why I was doing this when I had deliberately left just one answer remaining. Seriously, there was no bigger idiot than me.
‘Yoshi, Curiosity Heaven, let’s go.’
Still, I could not suppress my curiosity.
Smack!
Thinking, It can’t kill me, can it? I slapped the spot next to the answer I had found earlier.
[10:00]
"Ah."
At some point, my body had returned to the entrance.
I let out a small groan at the timer, which seemed to tell me not to mess around and to start over from the beginning.
‘So if I failed, this would have been an endless loop too?’
And I would have had to memorize the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of patterns carved into two doors a minute’s round trip apart.
...Without the wiki, I really would have been screwed.
*
Ding!
"Oh, my wiki...!!"
At the supernatural phenomenon before me, I dropped to my knees and bowed deeply toward the wiki.
Floor 15 of the Tower of Wisdom.
After rapidly climbing from the eleventh through the fourteenth floors without failing once, I headed straight for the tower without resting.
The fifteenth floor was exceedingly simple.
It was an incredibly easy and simple floor that I could clear in under thirty seconds if I put my mind to it.
Conversely, its structure also meant I could be done for in ten seconds.
‘I do not even want to imagine what this would have been like without the wiki.’
Unlike the other floors, the fifteenth floor was divided into sections.
A path from the entrance to the center, a rest area in the center, and a path from the rest area to the exit.
On the path connected to the entrance were square stepping stones in four different colors.
They looked suspicious as hell, so I counted them. There were fifteen in each direction, for a total of 225 stepping stones.
There were different numbers of each color in particular, so I crossed the path while carefully memorizing exactly how many there were of each, certain that it had to mean something.
[Cross by stepping only on the least numerous color of stepping stone.]
The instant I reached the rest area, the stepping stones behind me vanished without a trace.
I remembered that there had been the fewest red stepping stones, and I roughly remembered where the starting point was, but I was not confident I could make it all the way across.
I was trembling, thinking I would obviously fall if I stepped on the wrong stone, when—
[Tower of Wisdom]
- First Run, Floor 15 Walkthrough: Color markers active.
The wiki showed me a cheat code that went beyond even being a walkthrough.
Looking at the bright red stepping stones—red like my feelings for the wiki—as if all I needed to do was follow them, I pressed my hands together and prayed.
‘Seriously, seriously, Wiki, you’re the best....’
When I got back, I really needed to kiss it every day.
*
Rumbleee...!!
『Tower of Wisdom』
-19-
‘It’s so ridiculously easy, it’s almost laughable.’
Without a single point of difficulty, I easily cleared up to the nineteenth floor at a level practically fit for children.
Honestly, it felt wrong to even say that I had cleared them. The wiki had essentially done everything.
Step.
I could not be completely certain yet, but by now I roughly understood this tower’s structure... No, the wiki’s efficiency.
On floors that were not multiples of ten, the wiki was almost omnipotent.
It provided walkthroughs so perfect that I could climb while closing my eyes and picking my nose.
‘As long as I don’t pull stupid stunts like I did on the fifteenth floor of the Tower of Trials.’
That did not mean the walkthroughs for floors that were multiples of ten were bad, either.
Though the basic difficulty went up, they still told me the core strategy.
My basic abilities were just pathetically lacking, but it was definitely helping.
To the point that I could not help feeling respect for the people who kept climbing the towers without the wiki.
‘How do they even do it?’
How the hell did they survive here for hundreds or thousands of years?
And they did not even have the wiki.
Glance.
‘About forty minutes have passed.’
I checked the timer as I passed through the dark corridor.
Even the ban the mod had handed down to me had not been lifted yet.
Rather than feeling like I had climbed a tower, it felt like I had taken a walk in the park near my house.
‘No reason to rest, and I can’t browse the gallery anyway.’
Since my original goal had been the twentieth floor, I headed straight for the Tower of Wisdom without resting.
Thud!
And so, I entered the twentieth floor of the Tower of Wisdom once again.
Fwoooosh!
The moment the door closed, everything around me turned pure white.
"Urgh...!"
Even when I closed my eyes, light seeped through my eyelids.
Even when I covered my face with my arms, the light invaded from every direction.
‘What is this...?’
A few seconds later, I finally opened my eyes, but I could see nothing.
The entire tower had literally been dyed pure white.
Where were the walls? Where was the ceiling?
The white was so intense that I could not distinguish anything at all.
‘Is this what an isolation room in a psychiatric hospital feels like?’
Like the image that came to mind when I thought of psychiatric hospitals as a child.
The entrance I had entered through, and even the exit I needed to reach, had vanished completely.
The place seemed to be about the size of a somewhat large room.
But because everything was pure white, I could not judge distances. The boundary between where the wall began and where the ceiling began was vague.
‘...I understand why locking someone in a completely white room drives them insane.’
Glance.
I could not even see my own shadow, despite how bright the light was.
Whether I raised my hand or jumped in place a little.
Nothing changed. All I could see was the white space.
"Aaaah!!"
Even when I screamed with all my strength, the sound was swallowed up.
It was muffled, as though I were underwater or in a vacuum.
"Hoo...."
My stomach churned because both my vision and hearing were so utterly different from moments ago.
I scrunched up my face and waited a moment for the tower’s command.
Scrape... Scrrrape....
"..."
An unpleasant sound came from directly above my head.
I swallowed hard and looked up, but naturally all I could see was the blinding ceiling. Just as I grimaced—
"?"
An X-shaped black space appeared in the glaring ceiling overhead.
More precisely, the spaces between the arms of the X were somehow grotesquely warped.
Rumbleee...!!
Then, from beyond it, an ominous sound I seemed to have heard sometime before rang out again—
"This is insane...!!"
Something pure white began pouring wildly through the gaps of that X.
Crash!
I immediately turned and tried to take a step, but I fell.
I fell because I could not tell where the floor ended and the wall began.
Whoosh!
I hurriedly planted a hand on the ground to stand, but something dropped from overhead faster than I could move.
On the ceiling, which I turned to glance at, a huge object roughly the size of my body was pouring down like a waterfall.
‘Ah....’
Squeeze.
*
"...I’m okay."
I was so completely fine that it made me suspicious.
‘Is this a dream? Did I die?’
No. If that were the case, I would not faintly feel the sensation of something pressing down on my body.
The once pure-white space was now blocking my vision with these things, making it dark.
Ding!
‘I definitely didn’t die.’
I gave a hollow laugh at the wiki notification, as if it were telling me to get a grip.
Frowning, I swam through the things weighing me down, pushing them far away.
Each one was as large as a human body, yet they unexpectedly moved aside with a light shove.
The darkness quickly cleared, and the dazzling white room once again filled my vision.
‘A puzzle...?’
I emerged from the pile and checked what they were.
They looked like pure-white jigsaw puzzle pieces.
They were the size of an upper body and about a palm thick.
Every piece had protruding tabs and indented slots.
Glance.
When I picked one up, it was surprisingly light.
Styrofoam? No, the surface was harder than that. Yet it was as light as a feather.
I blinked for a moment, wondering what the hell this situation was.
Rumbleee...!!
"Don’t tell me, again?"
I raised my head at the sound that rang out once more, and a message appeared before my eyes.
[Fill the space perfectly within the time limit.]
‘Fill the space...?’
The strange instruction felt as if it was about to make something click, yet did not. I blankly looked around.
"..."
A white space covered entirely in pure white—the walls, the ceiling, even the floor.
White puzzles piled up like mad, without any patterns, colors, or pictures.
And then—
Rumbleee...!!
"This thing really is insane, huh?"
I let out a hollow laugh as I watched the ceiling faintly descend toward me.
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