Chapter 199. Source of Fear 

With that one word, my consciousness collapsed.

I fell into a gap of vibration that had neither light nor darkness and in the next moment, I was seeing the world through someone else’s eyes.

Breath is drawn in.

A structure floating in the void, a world where light and mathematics intersect.

I am not human.

I am an Architect.

An infinite blueprint spread out before me.

A signal flowing in from beyond the dimension.

It was the Unknown.

They had no words.

Yet their mere existence was a wave of being that changed the world.

And my colleagues and I were building a structure to communicate with that being.

The Tower was not language.

The Tower was structure.

The Tower was refined geometry.

We prayed.

Each floor of the Tower was a signal, and each human was a code.

They died.

Their deaths were signals.

They were called hope and absorbed into the Tower.

At first, I believed that was right.

However.

“Why is there no response?”

Hundreds, thousands of floors were stacked, but they gave nothing.

They merely observed.

There was no interest, no understanding.

Perhaps we were building a meaningless structure.

“We were merely being observed.”

Some of the Architects whispered that.

The Unknown did not interpret us.

They merely measured us.

‘Only to see how far, how high we could reach.’

Our prayers did not reach them.

Our deaths were nothing but units of measurement.

Then I arrived at a thought.

‘This is not worship. This is humiliation.’

I experimented.

One floor, just one floor, I designed not as ‘prayer’ but as ‘invasion.’

And that floor vibrated.

For the first time… the waves of the Unknown trembled.

They reacted.

It was the first time.

When it was not prayer but intrusion.

When it was not reverence but challenge.

They turned their heads.

Then, I realized.

“Communication is impossible. But reaching them is possible.”

I shouted to my colleagues.

“The Tower we have built is futile.”

“We cannot approach God.”

“But there is a way to make even them react.”

“We become God ourselves.”

What followed was a succession of destruction and creation.

The floors I made were not prayers, but equations of attack.

I designed humans as tools, and as weapons.

“They are weak, but they are the most compliant, and they can grow the strongest.”

“Let us design them not as fuel for the Tower, but as the Tower itself.”

“From now on, humans are weapons. Born as weapons, they will become spearheads meant to reach God.”

Thus.

Great, great, great, great.

Time changes.

Space warps.

Rumors of him spread quickly.

It was the collapse of belief.

The consensus of the Architects, who had been one body under the doctrine of ‘worship,’ split for the first time.

And in that gap, rebellion bloomed.

“He defiled the ritual.”

“He created intruders.”

“He polluted the structure.”

Words became actions, and structures became armaments.

Architect.

The ‘first will’ that had designed structures in this dimension before the Tower existed.

They were complete blueprints.

Their existence was not destruction but a halted order, yet when that halt exceeded its limit, they became
weapons themselves.

A single glance from them bent space.

A single gesture from them erased dimensions.

Only then did I realize.

That attacks could be made through ‘structure.’

I fought.

It was the first time.

Responding not with language but with collision, not with blueprints but with destruction.

And I faced another kind of being.

They were human.

But they were different from the humans of now.

They were those called the Taecho humans.

“They have no Traits, and no abilities.”

That is right.

They had no strengthening, no structural modification.

They fought only with themselves.

But one of them destroyed my structure.

“…!”

It was a result I could not understand.

A defense layer calculated according to computation, a structural barrier made by overlapping space upon space.

Yet that human, merely a human, broke it with his hands.

There was nothing in those hands.

No sword, no fire, no structure.

However.

He moved.

Overcoming pain, enduring despair in a way that accepted even death.

And that movement itself was a signal.

A true structure.

A structural will unique to humans, possessing neither machine, Tower, nor Trait.

I was rendered powerless before that simplicity.

Then I knew that simplicity itself was transcendence.

They disappeared.

The Taecho humans were annihilated.

The Taecho Architects fell silent.

The war ended in my victory.

But something within me changed.

‘I did not understand those humans.’

I began to build the Tower.

But it was different from before.

I know now.

The greatness of that simple flesh.

They were weapons.

But they were beings that became weapons by their own will, not designed as weapons.

So I designed them.

Those who resembled them.

Those made able to endure pain.

Humans who awaken through Traits, grow through despair, and can finally aim for God’s neck.

They were the materials of the Tower and the structure of the Tower itself.I raised the Tower.

Not with prayer, but with attack.

Not with knowledge, but with emotion.

Carrying the simple truth I had realized.

‘God is not understood. But God can be made to kneel.’

The name of that Tower is the Tower of Arrogance.

I designed it.

I made them face despair the higher they climbed the Tower, so that only those who could endure that despair could stand before God’s gaze.

And I waited.

For the one person who would climb my Tower.

Not a god but a true human who could face God.

My breath… stopped.

At the end of something that was neither light, sensation, nor time, I awoke.

No, more precisely, I was revived within ‘his traces.’

The Great Architect.

The memories, insight, emotions, and defeat he left behind.

All of it swallowed me.

His rage dug into me, and his despair began to flow through my eyes.

And his ambition, the ember of conquest that had not gone out even at the end of that endless fall, burned my heart.

I saw how beautiful and how persuasive that path was.

“I will not kneel to what I cannot reach.”

He said that and built the Tower.

He collapsed, but that will was still alive.

Deep in my consciousness, his voice lingered in my ears.

“You will become like me. You too will eventually reach this conclusion. Humans are tools. Structures. Materials.”

I closed my eyes.

Through the black gap, between the cracks of space a light that was not light, a form that was not form, whispered to me.

“Now, choose. Will you rebuild the Tower like him. Or….”

After a brief silence.

“Will I be forgotten again?”

In that moment, I felt a pain splitting within me.

It was as if I myself had become two people.

One side shouted for me to follow his memories, and the other… silently kept its silence.

I drew breath between them.

And… I spoke, “I do not walk to climb the Tower. I walk… to ask why this Tower was made. I walk… to prove what a human is.”

The memories ruptured.

In that moment, along with a pain as if my head were being torn apart, a figure appeared between the black gaps.

It was a bust of the Great Architect.

But only its eyes were alive, and that gaze pierced through me.

“If you deny me, then bear those memories as well. My rage, my longing, my failure. And… my end.”

I nodded.

“I… will not turn away from it.”

“But I will not make them like you.”

“I will become not a tool that breaks humans, but one who understands them.”

In that moment, the world trembled.

In the deep Abyss of the Black Tower, the memories embedded in the structure began to scatter, and the fragments of that will
pulsed within me.

I knew.

This was the Trial.

Enduring the memories alone was not enough.

Only those who found a path within them were truly qualified to advance to the next floor of the Tower.

I began to walk.

Now I do not climb to destroy the Tower.

To avoid conquering, to build a Tower different from before, I go to the top of this Tower.

The top.

There was nothing there.

The countless floors and trials that existed throughout my climb, the repetition of rules and non-rules piercing dimensions, all when I reached the climax of every design, at the end there was only a single space.

No, it was not even a space.

That place was inside me.

I see.

Black void.

No, a being beyond the void that claims to be me.

That form was blurry.

It distorted the moment my gaze touched it, and fled the moment I tried to understand it.

But I could know.

It was definitely me.

“You… who are you?”

I ask.

But it soon returns.

Not through my mouth, but through that mouth.

“I am you. And I am the one you turned away from most.”

In that moment, something inside me twists.

Crack!

What breaks is consciousness.

Space rings.

No, my head rang.

It was not a memory but a fragment.

A part of me that had been torn and scattered.

The Source of Fear.

Nepas.

Twisted One.

Seed of pain and despair.

And me.

“You forgot. You were not a simple explorer. You could not recall for even a single moment that this Tower began from you.”

‘…What does that mean?’

“You merely avoided the pain you chose for yourself. The reason the Unknown feared you, the reason Nepas was wary of you.. It was because you were the most unstable possibility, one even they could not imitate.”

“By forgetting yourself, dividing yourself, and sealing yourself. You made the Tower, made it climbable, and made it so you could stand at its peak.”

Only then do I remember.

My emotions, my thoughts, my pain scattered like debris.

They appeared as countless Twisted Ones scattered about; they despaired like me, went mad like me and yet in the end, they were remnants that could not reach my essence.

‘I was their source, and I was their destination.’

“Self-awareness is punishment.”

He, no, I whispered.

“You were the Source of Fear. And now you try to understand that fear. In that moment, you return to me again. So choose.”

“Will you deny yourself, or… Will you accept me?”

Silence.

I could not answer.

No language had power.

There was no right answer here.

Only facing the unfamiliar being that is myself and the countless possibilities of evil born within it was what this Tower demanded as the sole trial. That was all.

“I…”

I steady my breath.

If I cannot avoid it, I must pass through it.

“I do not fear you.”

“I do not deny you.”

“But…”

“I will not complete you.”

“I do not end with you.”

In that moment, space splits.

The Source of Fear buried in the darkness of my form trembles faintly.

And his shout, his rage, can be heard.

“I will erase the parts that do not acknowledge me.”

At last, he, the Source of Fear and the Great Architect, declared his will to erase me.