The first thought that came to mind when I woke up was simple.
“…An unfamiliar ceiling.”
It really was an unfamiliar ceiling.
After all, today was the first time I’d ever woken up staring at the bathroom ceiling.
“Ugh… Why am I sleeping here…?”
Yesterday, I was sure I’d posted some shitpost on the gallery.
Then gone to sleep early, dreaming of a hopeful tomorrow….
So why was I using the bathroom floor as a bed?
Hmm… I don’t know. I can’t remember at all.
I’m pretty sure I had some strange… and incredibly horrible dream….
But since I can’t remember the contents of the dream, I guess it wasn’t that important.
They say dreams are highly volatile and don’t remain in your memory very well in the first place.
“Sigh. For now, I should wash up.”
Judging by the sunlight coming in through the window, the sun was already high in the sky.
If I wanted to find a decent part-time job, I had to start looking diligently from now on.
“Ow… Sleeping on the bathroom floor made my whole body ache….”
So I moved my creaking body to wash up.
And the moment I reached the sink and looked into the mirror.
“……? What the hell, who are you?”
A strange man in the mirror was staring back at me with a startled expression.
He was even copying my every movement.
“What… the…?”
And then it happened.
“Urgh…! My head…!!!”
Along with a pain that felt like my head was splitting open, the memories from earlier—
The moments I had mistaken for a dream began to surface.
“That… was all real…?”
The memories of me awakening as a Climber.
Of having an EX-rank skill.
Of fainting after drinking the handsome-making medicine I’d made myself.
“…Status window.”
Ding!
[Name]: [Iroun]
[Level]: [1]
[Class]: [Alchemist]
[Skills]: [Transmutation(EX)] [Emerald Cauldron(SS+)] [Pure Flame(S+)]
[Trait]: [Handsome Man(B+)]
“Huuup…!!!”
I-It’s real! This was real!
A real status window appeared just because I muttered those words!
“T-Then….”
That reflection in the mirror… is really me…?
I took a closer look at the man reflected in the mirror.
He was a man with a strong jawline and sharp eyes, giving off a somewhat cold impression.
Depending on the person, it might be a face they’d find more scary than handsome.
But to someone else, it looked like the kind of face that would be popular for perfectly embodying the classic bad boy.
So. How should I put this?
What I’m trying to say is…
“This is… me…?”
I had become so handsome that I unintentionally uttered a line straight out of a romance manga heroine’s mouth.
#####
After realizing that I had awakened as an EX-rank super-handsome Climber,
I scribbled a post on the gallery to get this uncontrollable joy under control.
───
[Title: This Tower-bro finally awakened as a Climber!!!!]
[Job-Hunt Villain]
(a smug frog pic)
Yeah, yeah, amazingly enough, it’s true.
Your big bro awakened as an alchemist.
I made and drank a handsome-making medicine and became a total stud.
So, my gallery friends!
Tell this Climber newbie what he should do first!
───
[Comments]
[DrTowerKnows☑: Hm…? Ah, damn, what is this? A new move just dropped…?]
ㄴ[(newbie swordsman flustered by a new pattern sticker)]
ㄴ[Wasn’t this game dead? Why is there an update?]
[SoftBeanRiceCake☑: Oh no… I think he broke…]
ㄴ[Job-hunting stress really is scary if it can give you this kind of mental illness…]
ㄴ[Well then, this match… is my victory for not getting a job and becoming unemployed♣]
ㄴ[You’re kind of… ha… never mind.]
ㄴ[(frog staring like it’s looking at a bug sticker)]
[Hey I get that you’re crazy but why the hell are we your friends, you bastard]
ㄴ[(dumbfounded sticker 1)]
ㄴ[(dumbfounded sticker 2)]
ㄴ[(He… called us friends… sticker)]
“Ahh, so no one believes me.”
I told them the truth of what I’d experienced, without changing a single syllable.
Yet not a single person accepted it as fact.
Well, of course they wouldn’t.
Even I would dismiss it as bullshit if the guy living next door said, “I’m actually the CEO of a major corporation.”
Even if it later turned out to be true, until then I’d have denied it, saying there was no way.
Humans are creatures who first deny truths too difficult to handle, after all.
Well, I also mistook my awakening as a Climber for a dream, so maybe I’m not in a position to talk.
“But there isn’t a single comment about what I should do first.”
I hadn’t expected much in the first place, but I guess this was how it went.
Apparently, there were no kind gallery users willing to tell me.
“Can’t be helped. I should stop acting like a spoon-fed noob and look it up myself….”
[DrTowerKnows☑: Just looking at what you wrote, I don’t believe at all that you awakened, okay?]
ㄴ [DrTowerKnows☑: But just in case, I’ll leave a link to a simple summary I wrote.]
ㄴ [DrTowerKnows☑:]
ㄴ[Wow, he’s actually telling him?]
ㄴ[This person really is way too nosy.]
ㄴ[That’s the good part… ehehe…]
ㄴ[? Are you gay?]
“Oh…?”
What, there was actually a gallery user kind enough to tell me this?
I’d only ever used this place like a trash can to dump my emotions into every day, and I never even checked the comments, so I had no idea someone like this existed.
“First, let’s check.”
Of course, I wasn’t so naïve that I’d click a link like that right away.
I looked through the regular posts of the fixed-nick user who’d posted the link,
checking whether he was really trying to help me.
And as a result.
“Why is such an esteemed person in a shabby gallery like this…?”
I learned that DrTowerKnows, who had given me the link, was a well-liked fixed-nick user who specialized in organizing and uploading information related to the Tower.
Seeing how every single one of his posts was organized to the level of an academic paper,
I even had a reasonable suspicion that he might really be a doctor, just like his nickname suggested.
“So the saying that if five pieces of trash gather, there’s one normal person among them is true?”
…Huh? Was it the other way around?
Anyway.
After checking one more time to make sure it wasn’t a link to a dangerous site,
and confirming there were no issues, I finally clicked the link.
───
[Title: 10 things a practical, compressed Climber newbie should know.]
[DrTowerKnows☑]
(Nice to meet you. sticker)
As you all know, I’m a Climber whose hobby is collecting and analyzing information about the Tower and posting it on the gallery.
So if you want to learn about the Tower in a somewhat deep way, thoroughly reading the posts I’ve written will be pretty helpful.
But if there’s one thing I overlooked, it’s that you bastards would never read my posts.
Even now, whenever something comes up, you go, “It’s boring and pedantic” ← and pull this shit, don’t you?
At first, I let it slide, but thinking about it again pissed me off.
So I’ll post the ultra-simple summary you people wanted, one that’s “not boring and not pedantic.”
For the record, if you disagree, I’m right anyway. Yeah.
Then let’s begin.
1. The Tower you climb is assigned based on the country where you were born.
If that country has multiple Towers, you’re randomly assigned to one of them.
2. When you awaken as a Climber, you receive a random class.
At that time, you also receive skills related to your class, and those are random too.
3. You can challenge the Tower once per day. (Resets at 00:00)
To challenge it, say [Enter Tower] or think it strongly.
The method for using skills works on the same mechanism.
4. You can get a rough idea of the monsters that appear while climbing a Tower by looking at the Tower’s name.
Examples from Korea’s Four Great Towers: [Tower of the Conqueror (land-grab)] [Tower of Struggle (boss raid)] [Tower of Insects (bugs come out;;)] [Tower of the Dead (corpses come out;;)]
Climbers call this the Tower’s “theme.”
5. Grades attached to things related to the Tower range from F to S.
They say there are grades above S, but that’s only hearsay, with no verified cases.
6. Use the gallery’s marketplace function to dispose of currency or monster materials obtained from the Tower.
You all know this gallery appeared together with the Tower, right?
Maybe because of that, unlike ordinary galleries, it has various functions, and if you verify yourself as a Climber, those functions unlock, so make good use of them.
7. The section where the most Climbers have died is Floors 1 to 5 of the Tower.
Don’t die from naive thoughts like “It’s a low floor, so it’ll be fine.” Prepare thoroughly.
I’m being genuinely serious, so do every bit of preparation you possibly can before entering.
8. Then how should you prepare?
That differs depending on your class and Tower, so search your class and Tower on the gallery and look for information posts.
9. Aren’t these all way too obvious?
As you can tell from the title, I only wrote things that are good for newbies to know. Yeah.
10. You don’t like this post, it doesn’t help, and it’s boring and pedantic.
Then die.
※Edit
There are too many troll comments, so I’ve set it so gallery users without verification marks can’t comment. Yeah.
If you’re mad, awaken as a Climber, get verified, and then comment.
───
[Comments]
[HikingKing☑: Information posts always deserve recommendations.]
[ZlzonMage☑: Teacher… I… always… read… your posts… well… Thank… you… always…!]
[SoftBeanRiceCake☑: Takes me back… Those stupid guys and girls who came in knowing nothing and whined that they couldn’t catch a goblin… Ah, of course, they’re probably not in this world anymore, haha.]
[LadyLance☑: If you use a lance, climbing the Tower is not all that difficult, you see! Everyone, please use lances!]
[TouchMeAndIBlow☑: Boring. I’ll die.]
ㄴ[DrTowerKnows☑: You fucking bitch.]
ㄴ[TouchMeAndIBlow☑: (Art is an explosion! sticker)]
.
.
.
“Hmm, I see.”
I got the gist of it.
What the Tower was.
And I realized something.
The knowledge I’d had before—mostly from short-form videos—was full of extremely absurd claims.
“I had no idea the mortality rate on the lower floors was this high….”
As someone who had somewhat admired Goblin Slayer (5 million won a month), this was pretty shocking.
In the videos, they explained goblins as the weakest monsters in the Tower and made it sound like there was nothing difficult about them, so I’d really thought they were total pushovers.
But after browsing the gallery a bit, it turned out the reality was that they were bastards who had slaughtered the most newbie Climbers.
If I hadn’t read this post, I might have entered the Tower like I was going for a walk and died.
“I can’t trust NewTube videos too blindly.”
Rather than bait videos made by people crazed for views, posts by verified current Climbers on the gallery were much better, even if the place was overflowing with shitposts.
In that sense, the information posts by the well-liked fixed-nick DrTowerKnows would be a big help to me.
“I should remember DrTowerKnows.”
From the looks of it, he seemed like a decent person.
If I asked him something I was curious about, he seemed like he’d grumble and still tell me everything.
Of course, if I asked him everything like a spoon-fed noob, I might get blocked.
So I planned to spend about a day thoroughly browsing the gallery.
Now that I’d awakened as a Climber, I didn’t need to cling to getting a job, so I had plenty of time.
Entering the Tower after making every possible preparation, just like DrTowerKnows’s post said, was probably the right call.
“It’s not like someone’s holding a knife to me and threatening me to go into the Tower.”
And also……
“…This should come first after all, right?”
Rather than entering the Tower right now,
there was something I personally wanted to prioritize.
“[Transmutation]”
Ding!
[Please input what you wish to transmute.]
〖 -- 〗
When I looked in the mirror earlier, a thought had occurred to me without thinking.
The face in the mirror was definitely so handsome that just looking at it made a “Hah—!” sound come out of me on its own.
But wasn’t the body attached to that face far too scrawny…?
That was the kind of wicked thought I had.
“…It feels kind of off.”
How should I put it? It was like someone had cut only the face out of a celebrity photo and pasted it on.
It felt like I was looking at something clumsily made, which made me feel strangely nauseous.
So I made a vow in my heart.
Even if I had to go through that horrible pain from before again,
I would change this scrawny body into something worthy of that face.
“It’s not like I’m some egg ghost with only a head floating around.”
So while I had time to spare like this,
I intended to deal with this uncanny valley first.
[Please input what you wish to transmute.]
〖Medicine That Gives Me the Perfect Body〗
“Let’s go!!!”
A medicine that gives me the perfect body.
I don’t know if I’ll actually be able to make it.
But I should at least try.