Looking around, what I saw were three translucent difficulty selection windows.
“Phew… I wrote one stupid post and got dragged into a tower, just like the typical cliché of a tower-climbing story.”
I let out a small sigh and regretted it for a moment,
then, gripped by a dreadful suspicion, I hurriedly checked the difficulties again.
[Easy] [Normal] [Hard]
Easy Mode and Normal Mode had padlocks on them, as if to say they couldn’t be selected, and only Hard Mode’s intense glow entered my eyes.
It was a situation where curses couldn’t help but come out.
Right before entering the tower, I’d belittled Easy Mode by saying it was for elementary schoolers, but who actually locks everything because of that?
When I tried selecting Easy Mode as a test, I was bounced back with a stinging electric shock.
“Heavens!!!!!”
Even when I looked up at the sky and screamed, there was no change in the padlock.
“I wanted to live a peaceful life in Easy Mode, marry a gentle and virtuous priestess who only had eyes for me, take in as a concubine a female mage who’s a little prickly but likes me more than anyone, and have a peerlessly beautiful elf girl I happened to meet become obsessed with me—a healing-life kind of story—but God, lamenting that my, Jeong Seha’s, talent would go to waste, has sent me to Hard Mode.”
Even after I spat out a rapid-fire rap of lamentation, there was still no change in the padlock.
Some people might have this question.
Didn’t the post I wrote on the gallery clearly say I wanted to go to Hard Mode?
Of course, that isn’t wrong.
If I could have chosen any difficulty, I would naturally have entered Hard Mode, thinking it was a chance to turn my life around.
However, isn’t there a saying: “You poke at the persimmon you can’t eat”?
It was just that, because options I couldn’t even choose had been presented to me, I wanted to choose them even more.
And so, after sobbing in front of the Easy Mode selection window for an hour.
Clank.
“Oh! The padlock’s opening!”
Without a moment’s hesitation, I spammed the Easy Mode entry button.
[Upon entering the above difficulty, reality may be altered to readjust plausibil…]
[Yes] [No]
“Altered? Well, whatever happens, happens.”
Together with the sensation of my body floating gently upward, my eyes slowly closed.
***
[You have entered the 1st floor.]
Clear Condition: ⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛.
When I opened my eyes, what I saw was the system message saying I had entered the 1st floor,
and it seemed the clear condition was undisclosed.
“Phew.”
Until just now, all I could see was the difficulty selection window, so it hadn’t sunk in, but now that I’d entered the 1st floor, I could really feel that I had entered the tower.
Thinking that I had escaped my life on Earth, where I spent every day without any meaning, and had gained an opportunity like an anime protagonist, I was intoxicated more by excitement than anxiety toward this unfamiliar place.
When I looked around, there were green plains and a vast sky, and on the ground lay various pieces of equipment such as greatswords, daggers, axes, staves, and bows.
Apparently, the weapon you picked up first determined your class.
“If you’re a real man, then the class is obviously this!”
The weapon I reached out for while shouting confidently was.
A staff.
After being discharged from the military, the only exercise I’d done was moving my fingers while playing games. A class that used the body was impossible for me.
Since I hadn’t lived as a hikikomori for just a day or two, I was confident in evaluating myself cynically.
Look at this. I was struggling to hold up just one wooden staff with both hands.
“……”
‘Wait, wait, wait.’
No matter how much of a hikikomori, loner, and beta male I was, there was no way I couldn’t lift a wooden staff that wasn’t even one meter long.
Come to think of it, didn’t my field of vision feel much lower than usual?
Even the words I shouted when I picked up the staff sounded strangely higher-pitched than usual.
With a sense of dread, I checked my hand, and a small, fair hand that couldn’t possibly belong to the average Korean man entered my view.
“No, this can’t be. This can’t be happening!”
Ignoring the high-pitched voice unique to a young elementary schooler echoing in my ears, I checked the symbolic part of a man’s body as if clutching at straws.
Naturally, the important area was empty.
Only then did I decide to accept reality.
“I became a girl.”
As if dragging me into the tower wasn’t enough, they turned a perfectly fine adult man into a little girl.
Whoever made this tower must have an absolutely atrocious taste.
The posts I had written, like “If you don’t pick Hard Mode, cut your dick off” and “Only elementary schoolers pick Easy Mode,” briefly flashed through my mind.
“Hmm…”
Since it’s originally difficult to reflect on yourself and easy to blame others, I decided to completely forget any memories unfavorable to me.
Even when playing games, I was the kind of person who got solo-killed three times and then asked after my teammates’ parents in chat, so of course I felt no guilt.
“Oops.”
I’d been blanking out for a moment from the shock of becoming a little girl, and before I knew it, I sensed a presence nearby.
Excited at the thought that I might see someone else besides myself, I hurriedly looked around,
but what entered my eyes was a small, cute green slime.
“Waaah! So cute!”
Had my heart become female because my body had become female?
A feminine exclamation popped out of my mouth without me realizing it.
Forcing down my embarrassment and forcibly reviving my reason, I figured out what role the slime had.
This harmless slime was a tutorial made so that those who had just entered the tower could get used to using weapons.
There would be a lot of people using a bow or the staff I chose for the first time, so it probably meant to practice on the slime.
“Slime, I’m sorry about this.”
No matter how cute the slime was, I had to do what needed to be done.
It was a pathetic slime that could be killed just by stepping on it, but since I’d become a mage anyway, I might as well kill it with magic.
I struggled to lift the staff I’d left on the ground because it was too heavy, holding it up with both hands, and prepared to use magic.
“…”
“I don’t know how to use magic?”
“…”
“Ex… Explosion?”
I chanted a spell like a character I’d seen in some anime, but naturally, nothing changed.
This wasn’t the kind of mage I’d been expecting.
Subculture works trending recently only featured talented protagonists who gained fortuitous encounters and grew rapidly, so I’d forgotten, but older works took ages for even a single stage of growth.
Most of them were works where the protagonist learned magic steadily from childhood without a cheat key like a status window, or grew while fighting truly desperate battles.
Come to think of it, I’d forgotten the status window.
“Status window!!”
[Status Window]
Name: Jeong Seha
Gender: Female
Age: 10
Health: 10 Durability: 2 Strength: 3 Agility: 4 Magic Power: 0 (+1)
Skills: -
Achievements: -
“What a truly pathetic status window.”
Even my last hope, the status window, didn’t seem to have anything special in it.
The Magic Power stat was only barely 1 when I was holding the staff, too.
“It hurts my heart a little to directly confirm through the status window that I’ve turned into a woman.”
I felt like confirming my changed age would deal a tremendous blow to my mental health, so I deliberately averted my eyes.
After many twists and turns, even checking the status window, a thought suddenly occurred to me.
‘But what do I do now?’
First, let’s organize my thoughts. My goal is to escape the 1st floor.
What is the method to escape the 1st floor?
Would it be solved if I simply survived for a few days?
Assuming I handled my water supply at the lake far off in the distance, would I have to catch slimes or something for food?
If I used the staff (physical), I could probably turn a pathetic slime into slime jerky in one blow.
But I was worried that eating slime jerky would make me lose my dignity as a human being.
To begin with, that tiny slime wouldn’t even put a dent in my hunger.
What about the hypothesis that I had to complete the task corresponding to each floor to move on to the next?
If I killed the tutorial slime, the next monster would appear, and if I fought and defeated all the monsters, I’d enter the 2nd floor.
Or since it was Easy Mode, there was also the possibility that it would end just by killing the slime.
I looked at the slime standing blankly in front of me.
“Is it really right for me to kill such a small, cute, harmless creature?”
If I carelessly killed the slime now and a wild beast came out as the next monster, I’d be in trouble.
To prepare for the next monster, I should learn magic first and then kill the slime.
It was absolutely not because I felt bad about killing the cute slime and was putting it off.
Stroking the slime that had somehow climbed onto my hand and was rubbing its cheek against me, I opened my mouth.
“Let’s start studying magic.”
***
A month passed.
There had been no change at all in my life for the past month, the life where I’d thought a happy otherworldly life would begin.
I was merely living a leisurely life with the green slime I’d named Dingdong.
The reason I gave it the name Dingdong was this.
“Dingdong~”
Boing.
Dingdong bounced upward.
Since it was cute how it hopped up every time I called it Dingdong, I named it Dingdong.
What happened to studying magic?
I held the staff for a month, tried chanting spells, and tried feeling the flow of mana, but there wasn’t a single result.
I even considered throwing away the staff now and switching to being a swordsman, but with my trash stamina, being a swordsman had its limits too.
“Do I have to eat dirt for thirty days to use magic or something?”
Spending my time leisurely while spouting pointless nonsense like this was my only hobby.
The food problem was also solved thanks to Dingdong.
When I followed Dingdong, there was a tree full of fruits that looked like coconuts, and the fruits seemed to be a complete food with a perfect distribution of nutrients.
I was sick of eating only this every day, but what could I do? I had to eat this, at least.
If there was one fortunate thing, it was that this life wasn’t bad.
There weren’t any beautiful girls in the happy anime-like otherworldly life I had dreamed of, but there was a beautiful slime, so it was bearable.
“At this rate, I wouldn’t mind living with a slime for the rest of my life.”
“Dingdong~”
Boing.
Boing.
Didn’t I just hear Dingdong bounce twice?
When I turned around, to my surprise, Dingdong had multiplied into two.
No, to be exact, it seemed another slime had come to play.
If the slimes doubled, then my happiness doubled too.
With a Dingdong on each of my left and right hands, there was no greater joy.
“Ahh, so this is having a flower in each hand.”
What was even more surprising was that when I put the two slimes together, they fused with each other.
The fused Dingdong seemed to be in a good mood, hopping here and there as it enjoyed itself.
I was watching it with a pleased expression as well, right at that moment.
[1st Floor Cleared!]
Moving to the waiting room in 10 seconds.
“Wait, why is this suddenly happening now?!”
Because of the completely unexpected clear, my thoughts weren’t even working properly.
At the very least, I had to say goodbye to Dingdong.
“Dingdong…”
Before I could even finish speaking, my vision slowly blurred.
[Settlement]
Time Taken: 30 days 9 hours 29 minutes
Skills Acquired: -
Achievements Acquired: No-Kill
.
.
.
[Settlement]
Time Taken: 30 days 9 hours 29 minutes
Skills Acquired: -
Achievements Acquired: ⬛⬛
Error: Achievement impossible to acquire in the scenario of the corresponding floor achieved
Measure: Temporarily deactivated