The penalty incurred by failing to obey one’s [Unique Trait] differed from person to person, and from trait to trait.
No one knew what type their penalty would be until they experienced it firsthand.
In the end, it was all guesswork.
Well, even so, guessing wasn’t entirely meaningless.
No matter how completely random a penalty was, it tended to be at least somewhat related to the [Unique Trait].
For example.
In the case of someone whose Unique Trait was, [You must interlace your fingers when washing your hands], they would receive a penalty if they didn’t interlace their fingers.
Maybe the soap wouldn’t lather properly.
Or no matter how much they washed their hands, a certain amount of bacteria would remain.
In that way, even if you couldn’t know exactly what the penalty would be, you could make a guess by connecting it to the [Unique Trait].
Just because that person washed their hands without interlacing their fingers,
it didn’t mean they’d receive some absurd type of penalty, like suddenly turning into a woman overnight.
“…”
Should I give myself a round of applause?
I had accomplished that impossible feat.
My Unique Trait was [You can only taste things inside the Tower], so no matter how hard I thought about it, I couldn’t understand why the penalty had turned me into a woman.
I can understand losing my sense of taste.
I can even understand my sense of taste becoming distorted.
But turning into a woman was something I couldn’t understand at all, no matter how much I racked my brain.
I stared blankly for a moment at my reflection in the bathroom mirror.
A woman.
No matter who looked at me, I was a woman.
The girl reflected in the mirror looked less beautiful at first glance and more somehow gloomy.
Of course, if you looked closely at each individual feature, the girl was extremely beautiful.
Bright, clear eyes, a sharp nose, a slender jawline.
Hair that flowed down glossy to her chest.
Even an incredibly voluptuous figure, with curves in all the right places.
The girl was so beautiful that I couldn’t believe this was my appearance, but…
There was one thing.
Those cheeks.
Her sunken cheeks, as if she had been starving for days, made the girl’s overall atmosphere incredibly gloomy.
…Well, considering all I’d eaten over the past three days was a few pieces of king jokbal and one bite of ramen, of course I looked haggard.
The rotten expression caused by extreme mental stress was a bonus.
Even though I had turned into a woman overnight, I was surprisingly calm.
To be honest,
the shock of my sense of taste being twisted overnight was far greater than the shock of turning into a woman overnight.
The caterpillar ramen I ate three days ago and the hell-flavored king jokbal I ate last night were truly…
“Uweeeeegh.”
See? Just imagining that taste was enough to make me want to puke.
A strange feeling came over me when the retching that came out of my mouth was not a man’s voice, but a woman’s.
Whatever the case, becoming a woman wasn’t that important.
Regaining my sense of taste was far more important to me.
…That was how shocking the taste had been.
Grooooowl.
My stomach sent a signal.
Because of the extreme hunger, my stomach was starting to hurt now.
I absolutely have to enter the Tower today.
Whether it turns into porridge or rice, I need to eat something inside the Tower.
First, I entered the [Tower Gallery] and gathered every bit of information I could.
I also read through the notices I had neglected all this time from start to finish.
And while I was at it, I searched for information about penalties too.
After climbing to the 5th floor of the Tower, if you create a fixed nickname on the [Tower Gallery], your penalty is alleviated.
I needed certainty on whether it would give me my sense of taste back.
Fortunately, it seemed like there was no need to worry.
Title: Life got so much better fr after I got a fixed nick and my left hand stopped going numb
Title: I was basically blind but after getting a fixed nick my vision became 2.0 lololol
Title: I was an id1ot for gritting my teeth and taking the penalty because I didn’t want to go to the Tower fr
It seemed the penalty was definitely alleviated once you got a fixed nickname.
If there was one thing that worried me…
It was the time those posts had been written.
1 year and 7 months ago.
1 year and 8 months ago.
Even the most recent one was from 1 year and 6 months ago.
There was only one person who had foolishly received their penalty for a very long time like me.
And even that person’s penalty was nothing from my perspective.
[Title: Telling the story of how I got a fixed nick after taking the penalty for 1 year and 9 months]
[Nickname: PenaltyReliefBeam]
My Unique Trait is [When drinking water, you must only drink one mouthful].
If I leave about a 30-minute interval, I don’t get the penalty, but for 1 year and 9 months, I completely ignored the penalty and drank as much as I wanted.
I think I got my first penalty around the 3-month mark, and the water started tasting a little sour?
I just thought of it as weak lemon water and drank it.
It was bearable until 1 year and 6 months, but as the penalty kept stacking up and I hit 1 year and 9 months, fuuuck lololololol
Every time I drank water, it got so sour my tongue stung.
I felt like I couldn’t live like this, so I started climbing the Tower 3 months ago, and today I finally got a fixed nick…
The penalty got alleviated, so now it feels like tasty lemon water.
Honestly, even better.
- What the hell is this id1ot
- Why didn’t you climb the Tower earlier lololololol
- Gets featured as the archetypal fool;;;
…
…
…
I started properly losing my sense of taste from the 6-month mark, so wasn’t changing it to mere lemon water way too lenient as a penalty?
It seemed that the more deeply a [Unique Trait] was connected to the Tower, the greater the penalty became.
Since I was already at it, I searched for cases where someone had undergone a sex change due to a penalty, but naturally, no results came up.
If I get a fixed nick, will I be able to turn back into a man?
I’ll find out once I climb the Tower myself, I guess.
Soon after, I searched up and read every Tower newbie guide I could find.
If I had to summarize the information in one line,
it would be something like, [If the wording of your Unique Trait is strong, you can easily cheese your way up to the 5th floor; if the wording is weak, don’t go above the 2nd floor.]
The stronger the wording of the Unique Trait, and the more related the Unique Trait was to the Tower, the stronger the power one could display inside the Tower.
Even the Unique Trait of the publicly acknowledged strongest Hunter in Korea had been revealed to the public, and that Hunter’s Unique Trait was…
[You can only breathe inside the Tower.]
There was no need to waste my breath explaining how powerful that person was.
Of course, effort never betrayed anyone.
Even if someone had a Unique Trait like [You must only smoke cigarettes with your right hand], one with wording that wasn’t particularly strong and had no relation to the Tower,
they could become strong through effort.
That Hunter gritted his teeth and smoked ten packs a day, pushing the return value of his Unique Trait to the extreme.
If you properly followed your Unique Trait, your stats increased.
In exchange for giving up his lungs, that Hunter had currently become a renowned Hunter worthy of using the title of “Ranker.”
Since he was a guy occasionally mentioned in featured posts under the title “The Hope of Free-to-Play,” even I, who had no interest in the Tower, knew the stories about him.
Though I didn’t know his name.
In any case, if you looked purely at the wording, my Unique Trait was strong to a somewhat serious degree.
And on top of that, its connection to the Tower wasn’t just sufficient—it was overflowing.
With this much, wouldn’t I be able to climb to the 5th floor pretty much for free?
…Though I didn’t know if a coward like me could kill monsters.
You could enter the Tower by pressing the “Enter” button at the top left of the gallery, or by personally visiting the Tower in central Seoul.
From the moment you got a fixed nickname, you were obligated to register as a “Hunter,” but below the 5th floor, there was no need to register as a Hunter.
If I visited the Tower, I could probably receive a newbie support set from the government.
But the important thing was that my ID had become useless.
If I wanted to explain that “I became a woman due to a penalty,” it would probably take days, or even weeks.
I don’t have time.
I’m starving to the point I’m going insane.
There was no need, nor any room, to hesitate any longer.
I pressed the “Enter” button at the top left of the gallery
and moved to the 1st floor, Area 1 of the Tower.
…
…
…
Unique Trait, [You can only taste things inside the Tower].
Looking at the wording alone, one might ask if I could just pack a whole bunch of food and have a meal in the very safe 1st floor, Area 1 of the Tower, or on the 0th floor of the Tower…
If that were possible, I would’ve eaten in the Tower long ago.
I visited the Tower about a year ago.
Even though penalties are supposedly ignored inside the Tower, for some reason,
in my case, even if I ate food inside the Tower, I received the penalty all the same.
I don’t know why either. It’s frustrating because I can’t find a single case similar to mine even if I try.
Well, “the penalty of a Unique Trait is ignored when you enter the Tower” is information people discovered through experience, not information the Tower Lord left in a notice.
It wouldn’t be strange if the information was wrong.
To begin with, if penalties really were ignored, I should have turned back into a man the moment I entered the Tower.
But I was still a woman.
The inconvenient lumps of fat were still there too.
Perhaps because it was a beginner area, the 1st floor, Area 1 of the Tower was a completely open space where there was no need to even worry about a monster ambush.
It was a place only newbies who had just entered the Tower would come to, so of course there wasn’t even a trace of another person.
Now that two years had passed since the Tower appeared, would there even be any newbies like me?
“Uuuuu…”
That fact made me tremble in fear even more.
I’ve said this several times already, but I’m the coward among cowards.
It wasn’t for no reason that I gritted my teeth and endured the penalty for an extremely long time of two years.
The monster in the 1st floor, Area 1 was the “Vampire Bat.”
As the name implied, it was a bat that sucked human blood.
According to the information posts on the gallery, befitting the 1st floor, Area 1, Vampire Bats flew so pathetically slowly, and the amount of blood they sucked was small, so there was no need to be afraid of them, but…
Flap.
Flap.
Flap.
“Hiiiiiik!”
For someone like me, who was already cowardly and hated bats, even that insignificant monster was threatening enough.
A total of three Vampire Bats began chasing me.
“Kyaaaaaaaak!”
Terrified, I forgot my original objective and ran away with all my might.
But the stamina of my changed body was extremely frail.
“Hah, huff, huuh…”
Had I run for about thirty seconds?
My stamina was almost gone.
Thanks to that, the Vampire Bats had nearly caught up to me.
A Vampire Bat aimed for my neck and opened its jaws wide.
“Hiiiik!”
I couldn’t just let myself get bitten and have my blood sucked, so I unconsciously spread both hands and caught the Vampire Bat with a smack!
The Vampire Bat’s body burst apart and it died.
When their companion was killed by my attack, the remaining two Vampire Bats fled.
“Uwek…”
I wiped away the lumps of Vampire Bat innards remaining on my palms, my face twisting in disgust.
This was why I didn’t want to come to the Tower.
I didn’t want to kill monsters, and I didn’t want to be attacked by monsters either.
“…Huh.”
But why was it?
From my palm, which was covered in Vampire Bat innards,
I felt like I could smell something delicious.