Tower of Endless: Death Granted Entry

Moon, still surrounded by the ink like Echo, a halo over his body that was engulfed by blackness...

He couldn’t react or set his thoughts straight... It was not something he chose, nor did he know how to retract it.

He extended his hand forward, and the echo extended with it, like another part of his body that wasn’t entirely his, nor was it not his own.

It was how Uon and Samuel described it exactly, but it was too foreign to him as someone who came from the first floor.

It covered his body, should be transparent normally, but his was overtaken by the the blackness.

He tried to separate them, tried to retract the black back into his body, but... he failed.

Every time he tried, it ended in failure.

He tried to retract everything entirely but even that failed.

He thought he would be happy once his Echo was finally released, but now he questioned everything.

He was now facing a weird feeling he wasn’t familiar with.

No, maybe he had faced it before.

And calling it a feeling... was not right either.

Emptiness.

Like everything was for nothing, to achieve nothing, to make things worse.

He couldn’t tell the source, nor could he understand why it had come to this...

He looked at Samuel, who was studying the black radiance with a more stoic face than usual.

”What should I do about this?” Moon asked, seeking guidance.

”Even your clothes can’t hide it once released,” Samuel guessed, and his guess was reasonably accurate.

Moon didn’t answer. Only trying would give an answer.

He lifted his body off the platform and started putting on his clothes.

Once he was done, ”Indeed, it hides the scent of death passively released off your body, but it doesn’t filter your Echo,” Samuel confirmed, to Moon’s disappointment.

Moon, for some reason, couldn’t hold it... he found himself in a fit of laughter.

His mind was trying to cope with this defeat he was being faced with.

Shaking his head, he thought of the events that has happened and led him to this. He believed there was an answer, there must be an answer.

The mountain, the emblem, the people, the warrior...

There must have been a way. They could not have let him end up in such a situation.

Or...

His mind went blank for a moment.

’Right...’

’It was my choice.’ He thought deprecatingly.

It was wrong from the beginning.

His Echo wouldn’t have been shown, wouldn’t have been in this situation.

If only he gave it up.

His laughter resumed, louder than before.

Samuel stood there. The room didn’t have dedicated source of light but with the arcane circles everywhere, giving a faint radiance.

A faint radiance that hid both their expressions, leaving behind one figure silent in place and another holding his stomach, laughing too hard.

Samuel stood there, watching, letting him cool off on his own without interrupting.

It was a consequence of Moon’s choice, but Samuel also was there, helping him willingly.

Once he had calmed down a little, he sat down again leaning on the wall.

Samuel asked, ”When did this happen?” In an attempt to fix this, he had to go back to the roots.

But these very roots... maybe they didn’t make any sense.

Moon thought about everything in his head, from the beginning to the end. The battlefield, his death...

What should he say, what should he keep to himself... would anyone believe this absurd story?

Would anyone believe him?

The answer was obvious. No one would believe him.

He wasn’t naïve. Even though he was but a slave for a long time, kept away from the world’s common sense. He was not an idiot.

”I think before I entered the trail, I was either dying or already dead,” Moon explained, before adding, ”That bastard eyeball said I reek of death the moment it looked at me.” His tone was laced with both hatred and bitterness.

He couldn’t explain or elaborate further... That moment was what changed everything, rejected his death, sentenced him to loneliness, and gave his sanity away to an unending trial.

Samuel didn’t ask further. He had never seen anything like this.

This was not how people entered the trail zone. They either get invited or find the entrance on their own.

The very existence of the entrance was close to a myth, and no two people managed to find the gate in the same place or at the same time.

It was a rather complicated thing, becoming an ascender was a multilayered aspect with countless theories and beliefs people held about the concept of ascension.

It was one of the mysteries of the Tower... finding the gate.

Moon’s story, on the other hand, didn’t follow what he knew about the Tower, and it confirmed what he had concluded previously.

Moon wasn’t an Undead in disguise.

But also, he couldn’t understand how he managed to enter the trail zone.

There were instances where warriors on battlefields would get invited to the trails, but it was rare for that to happen after a large scale battel was over.

A theory exists that the Tower would select those who perform exceptionally, or fighting against something beyond their own strength.

Yet, someone who was fatally wounded entered, or was even dead at the time.

This had never happened before...

Unless he was invited by the administrator...

But looking at everything that has happened and was told, it was unlikely.

”Death Echo, unlike Personal Echo, Ambient Echo, or Tower Echo... could only exist once someone dies,” Samuel spoke slowly with calmness unbefitting the situation. ”Tower Echo is what the Tower shares with ascenders who succeed in their trials. Personal Echo is your very own, the echo that you release, use, and later recover as it returns. As for Ambient Echo, it exists in the air, unaffiliated free echo of everything that has existed at any moment in time.”

Samuel paused before adding,

”Death Echo is an abnormal state. It shouldn’t exist in the living, and under some circumstances it produces Undead.

”It doesn’t exist in without death. Someone must get killed for his personal Echo to start converging into Death Echo...

”A common warrior on the first floor, one who has never ascended the Tower, cannot have much Echo, and accordingly, your amount of Death Echo is beyond what should exist from someone dying on the first floor.

”Even...” before finishing what he was going to say, he decided not to voice it for now.

Moon, who listened attentively, was far less confused than Samuel.

He made the wrong choice, the greater evil.

He couldn’t digest the outcome, as it wasn’t something he could face nor challenge.

Everything about his current state didn’t make any sense, but one question was eating at his mind.

”How am I fine?” Moon was more puzzled than concerned.

Samuel said this could not exist in the living, and he was only sure of the pulsing heart in his chest and the flowing blood of his own.

”It’s either something about you we are yet to know, or the circumstances where Death Echo came to be...” Samuel added.

”Are you affiliated with an Outer?”