Floor 4 smelled like rust and wrong decisions.
The gate spat them into a cavern so wide the walls disappeared into haze. Not dark like Floor 2. Worse. Lit just enough to see shapes but not edges. The kind of visibility that made you walk into things you'd been staring at for thirty seconds.
Red light. No source. The stone itself glowed, faintly, like something beneath it was running a fever.
Somin's staff pulsed white against the red. It looked like a candle fighting a furnace.
"I don't like this," she said.
"You said that about Floor 2."
"Floor 2 earned it. This is earning it faster."
Fair.
Jaehyuk pulled up the Broker's notes in his head. Floor 4. Resource race. Multiple teams dropped into the same cavern, competing for supply caches hidden in side chambers. The floor didn't have a traditional boss. It had a timer. Sixty minutes. Grab what you can. The teams with the most resources at the end get bonus stats. The teams with the least get nothing.
Simple. Except the Tower had changed it.
The Broker's warning sat in his chest like a stone. Forced separation event. Don't fight alone.
In his first life, Floor 4 had been a solo sprint. He'd memorized every cache location, every shortcut, every dead end. He could have drawn the map from memory.
But that map was for a floor that didn't exist anymore.
"Stay close," he said.
"I was planning to be surgically attached to your shoulder, so yeah."
Three other teams materialized around them. Flashes of white light. Twelve people total, including Jaehyuk and Somin. Standard instance size for Floor 4.
Two of the teams looked fresh. Floor 3 survivors running on adrenaline and incomplete gear. The third team was different. Four climbers. Coordinated formation. Matching boots.
Not Vanguard. But trained like them.
Their leader, a woman with cropped hair and a spear, locked eyes with Jaehyuk for half a second. Assessment. Dismissal. She turned and led her team northwest at a jog.
They knew where they were going.
"Northwest caches are decoys," Jaehyuk said. Quiet. Just to Somin.
"How do you..."
She stopped herself. Took a breath. "Right. Seven years."
He almost smiled. She was getting faster at skipping the question.
The real caches were south. Three chambers connected by a tunnel that flooded at the forty-minute mark. If you weren't out by then, you swam. If you couldn't swim in armor, you drowned.
That was the Floor 4 he remembered.
The Broker's note said the flood timer had moved. Thirty minutes instead of forty. Ten minutes shaved off his margin.
Ten minutes was a lifetime down here.
"South," he said. "Fast."
They ran.
The cavern floor was uneven. Ridges of stone jutted up like broken teeth. Jaehyuk's body screamed at him. Stats of 16 to 19 weren't built for sprinting across terrain like this. His ankles rolled. His lungs burned. Every step was a negotiation between what his mind wanted and what his body could deliver.
Somin kept up. Barely. Her staff bounced light off the walls as she ran, throwing shadows that moved wrong. Some of the shadows had too many limbs.
"Jaehyuk."
"I see them."
The walls weren't empty.
Creatures clung to the stone above them. Flat. Translucent. Like jellyfish pressed against rock. They didn't move. Not yet. In his first life, they'd been harmless. Scenery. The kind of thing you ignored because the real threats were elsewhere.
The Broker hadn't mentioned them.
Which meant either they were still harmless, or the Broker didn't know they'd changed.
Neither option was comforting.
They reached the southern tunnel at the eight-minute mark. Good time. The tunnel mouth gaped wide, the stone around it slick with moisture that hadn't been there seconds ago. The flood was already priming.
Inside, the red light shifted to blue. Bioluminescent moss on the ceiling. Beautiful. Deadly, if you touched it. The spores caused paralysis in about six seconds. Jaehyuk had watched a climber learn that the hard way in his first life. The man had reached up to touch the pretty lights and was frozen solid before his hand came back down.
"Don't touch the ceiling," he said.
"Wasn't planning on it."
"Or the walls."
"Less thrilled now."
"Or anything that glows."
"So... nothing. Touch nothing. Got it. Living my best life."
The first cache chamber was twenty meters in. A circular room with a stone pedestal in the center. On the pedestal, three supply boxes. Standard Tower design. Brass clasps, no locks. The contents were randomized but weighted toward the team's needs.
Jaehyuk opened the first box. Healing salve. Mid-grade. Worth about fifty shards on the Lobby market. Somin's eyes lit up.
Second box. Shard pouch. Two hundred. Decent.
Third box. Empty.
No. Not empty.
There was something in the bottom. Small. Dark. A token the size of a coin, made of a material Jaehyuk had never seen before. Black, but not matte. It absorbed light the way water absorbed sound.
He picked it up.
Nothing happened.
His status window didn't react. No notification. No skill prompt. No title update.
Just a coin-shaped object that felt heavier than it should.
"What is that?" Somin asked.
"I don't know."
She looked at him. The look that meant: you always know.
"I don't know," he repeated. Slower. "This wasn't here before."
Before. His first life. Seven years of climbing and he'd opened this exact cache in this exact room and there had been no black token. No mystery coin. No object the Tower hadn't bothered to label.
The Broker's warning echoed. The Tower noticed you on Floor 2. It's adjusting.
Was this an adjustment? A test? A trap wearing a reward's clothing?
He pocketed the token. Deal with it later. The timer was still running.
"Second chamber," he said. "Three minutes."
They moved deeper. The tunnel narrowed. The blue moss thickened overhead, close enough that Jaehyuk had to duck. The moisture on the walls was rising. Not a trickle anymore. A film. The flood was coming earlier than even the Broker's corrected timeline suggested.
Twenty-two minutes left. Maybe.
The second chamber was larger. Two pedestals. Six boxes. And a problem.
Someone was already there.
Not the spear team. A solo climber. Male. Young. He was crouched over the second pedestal with a box in his hands and a wild look in his eyes that Jaehyuk recognized instantly.
Panic.
The solo climber saw them and flinched. His hand went to a knife on his belt.
"Easy," Jaehyuk said. "We're not here for your boxes."
"Stay back."
"We're staying back."
"I said stay BACK."
The man's voice cracked on the last word. He'd been alone down here. In the dark. With the blue moss and the moisture and the shadows that had too many limbs.
Somin stepped forward. Hands up. Staff glowing white.
"Hey," she said. Soft. The voice she used on bleeding people. "You're okay. We're not going to take anything. What's your name?"
The man blinked. His grip on the knife loosened a fraction.
"Hwang," he said. "Hwang Jisoo."
"Jisoo. I'm Somin. That's Jaehyuk. He looks scary but he's mostly just rude."
"Thanks," Jaehyuk said.
"Welcome." She didn't look back. "Jisoo, are you hurt?"
He shook his head. Then stopped. Then nodded. His left arm hung wrong. Not broken. Dislocated, maybe. He'd been favoring it since they walked in.
"Let me see," Somin said.
"I don't..."
"I'm a healer. It's literally the one thing I'm good at. Well, that and talking too much. Let me see your arm."
Jisoo looked at Jaehyuk. Whatever he saw there, it wasn't threat enough to override the pain. He sat down and extended his arm.
While Somin worked, Jaehyuk opened the remaining boxes. More salve. More shards. A skill fragment, E-rank, useless. And in the last box on the second pedestal...
Another black token.
Identical to the first. Same weight. Same light-swallowing surface.
Two tokens. Two chambers. Not random. Placed.
The Tower was leaving breadcrumbs.
For him? For anyone? He didn't know and the not-knowing was starting to taste like Floor 147. Like the corridor where certainty went to die.
"His shoulder was dislocated," Somin said behind him. "Fixed now. He'll be sore for a day."
Jisoo flexed his arm. Winced. But the joint was back in place.
"Thank you," he said. Quiet. Like the words cost him something.
"Come with us," Somin said.
Jaehyuk looked at her.
"He's alone," she said. "The floor punishes solo climbers. You said that."
He had said that. The Broker had said that.
"Fine," Jaehyuk said. "Stay behind Somin. Don't touch anything that glows."
"What glows?"
"Everything."
They moved to the third chamber. Fifteen minutes on the timer. The water on the walls was ankle-deep now. Not rising fast. Rising steady. The kind of steady that became fast without warning.
The third chamber's door was closed.
That was wrong.
In his first life, all three chambers were open. No doors. No barriers. You walked in, grabbed supplies, walked out. The timer was the only obstacle.
This door was stone. Heavy. No handle. A slot in the center, coin-sized, with the same light-absorbing darkness as the tokens.
Jaehyuk stared at it.
"That's new," Somin said.
"Yeah."
"New bad or new interesting?"
"I'll let you know."
He pulled the first token from his pocket. Held it over the slot. The surface hummed. Not a sound. A vibration. Like the stone was breathing.
He placed the token in the slot.
The door didn't open.
A second slot appeared beside the first.
He placed the second token.
The door ground open. Stone on stone. The sound was old. Older than the Tower had any right to be.
Behind it, the third chamber was different from the others. No pedestals. No supply boxes. Just a room, circular, with a single object in the center.
A mirror.
Full-length. Standing upright. The frame was black metal, the same material as the tokens. The glass was dark. Not reflective. Not transparent. Just... present.
Jaehyuk stepped forward.
The mirror showed nothing.
Then it showed everything.
His reflection appeared, but wrong. Older. The face of a man who'd climbed to Floor 147 and watched everyone he trusted sell each other for survival. Scars he no longer carried. Calluses on hands that were now smooth. Eyes that had seen seven years of the Tower's worst kindness.
His first life. Staring back at him.
The reflection moved. Not with him. Independent. It raised a hand and pressed it against the glass from the other side.
Somin grabbed his arm. "Jaehyuk, don't."
The water was rising. Ankle to shin. The timer was running. And the mirror was showing him something the Tower had never shown anyone on Floor 4.
Because Floor 4 didn't have mirrors. It didn't have tokens. It didn't have locked doors.
None of this was supposed to exist.
The reflection's mouth moved. No sound came through the glass.
But Jaehyuk could read lips. He'd learned on Floor 89, from a deaf climber who'd taught him in exchange for safe passage.
Two words.
Don't trust.
The mirror went dark.