Free Web NovelChapter 156: « Prove Your Kingship [1] »
[Floor 29 – Entry Confirmed]
[Main Scenario: Prove Your Kingship]
[Only the worthy may draw the blade. Pull the sword to clear the floor.]
[Threat Level: —]
The floor loaded green.
Grass, sunlight, a light breeze moving through a meadow that stretched maybe two hundred meters in every direction before meeting the edge of a forest that looked like someone had drawn a forest from memory on a pleasant afternoon. Birds. There were birds. Something was moving in the trees at the far edge that looked, after a moment, like a rabbit.
I stood in the middle of it and waited for the catch.
Nothing came.
Eighty-eight other climbers spread out around me in the same held posture — weapons half-drawn, eyes scanning, every person running the same threat assessment and arriving at the same result. Peaceful meadow. Blue sky. Warm temperature. HP drain: zero. Monster count: zero. Ambient threat: the birds.
"Is the floor bugged?" someone said.
At the center of the meadow, approximately fifty meters from the entry point, sat a stone anvil. Grey granite, roughly cut, unremarkable except for the sword embedded vertically in its face. The sword was beautiful in the specific way that things designed to communicate authority were beautiful — clean lines, pale metal that caught the sunlight at every angle, a crossguard that had clearly been made by someone who understood proportion. The hilt was wrapped in something dark red and looked like it had been waiting to be held.
Above it, the System UI had a single floating instruction.
[Draw the blade.]
That was all. Draw the blade. One task. No timer. No monster waves. No environmental hazard. No penalty warnings. The exit gate was already visible at the far side of the meadow — a gold arch standing open in the afternoon light like it had been there the whole time.
I looked at the gate.
I looked at the sword.
I looked at the gate again.
The chat had already arrived at full speed.
[LiveStream Viewers: 3,441,882]
💬 KangMinFanatic77: ...is this it
💬 SeoulTowerFan: the floor is a meadow?????
💬 GhostClimber_: this is floor 29. FLOOR 29.
💬 Watchdog_KR: I looked it up. American tower climbers cleared this in under a minute
💬 TowerWatchKR: you walk up. you pull the sword. floor cleared. literally that’s it
💬 user_48821: after floor 26 27 and 28 THIS is floor 29
💬 KangMinFanatic77: I don’t trust it
💬 SeoulTowerFan: same
💬 GhostClimber_: same actually
💬 RealMvpStream: Kang Min hasn’t moved yet
💬 Watchdog_KR: he’s just standing there
💬 user_29441: he’s going to find a problem in a flower meadow
💬 KangMinFanatic77: if anyone can find a problem in a flower meadow it’s him
Junho appeared at my shoulder. "The American records say pull the sword and it’s done."
"I know."
"The exit gate is already open."
"I can see that."
"So." He gestured at the sword.
I walked toward the anvil. Not fast. The grass was real grass — the kind that had some give under the boot, with the specific sound of vegetation bending and springing back. The meadow smelled like something between rain and warmth, the smell a field has on the best day of the year.
I stopped two meters from the anvil.
The sword sat in the stone. The stone sat in the earth. The System instruction floated above it patient and simple. I put my hand on the hilt.
It fit perfectly. Of course it did.
I held it there and thought.
Floor 29 in my previous life was a gap in my memory. I had records of floors through the upper twenties and then again from the mid-thirties onward, but the floor-by-floor recall between them was patchy in ways that had never fully explained themselves. Floor 29 specifically was almost blank. Whatever had happened here — and the blank space meant something had happened, because total absence of memory was different from partial absence — I hadn’t retained it.
Did they really just walk up and pull it? Everyone who had made it to floor 29 before, in the old world, in every country’s tower — did they just take the sword and move on?
Maybe that was the condition. Maybe the Tower occasionally ran floors where the answer was actually the obvious answer. Maybe the lesson was that not every floor had a trap.
I almost believed that.
The problem was that I had cleared twenty-eight floors above this one and every single one of them had layers. The Tower didn’t run floor 26 — a ten-hour coordination nightmare — and then run floor 29 as a walk-up-and-grab. The difficulty curve wasn’t smooth but it wasn’t that jagged either. Something about a sword in a stone with an already-open exit gate and a System prompt that consisted of four words was a particular shape of suspicious that I couldn’t put down.
I let go of the hilt.
Stepped back.
The chat responded immediately. freewebnσvel.cøm
💬 KangMinFanatic77: HE LET GO
💬 SeoulTowerFan: he touched it and let go???
💬 GhostClimber_: why
💬 Watchdog_KR: the exit is RIGHT THERE
💬 TowerWatchKR: walk ten steps through the gate Kang Min
💬 user_83421: HE WILL NOT
💬 RealMvpStream: called it
💬 user_48821: called what
💬 RealMvpStream: that he wouldn’t take the obvious clear
I turned around and addressed the stream directly, which I did maybe twice per floor.
"Every floor has a hidden condition," I said. "Every one. The Tower doesn’t give you a sword and an open door and call it a floor. Something is wrong with this picture and I want to know what before I touch the hilt again."
💬 GhostClimber_: but the Americans just—
💬 Watchdog_KR: maybe the Americans were wrong
💬 TowerWatchKR: OR maybe floor 29 is just an easy floor
💬 SeoulTowerFan: or MAYBE it’s a trap
💬 KangMinFanatic77: it’s definitely a trap
💬 user_29441: how do you know
💬 KangMinFanatic77: vibes. strong vibes.
💬 RealMvpStream: not vibes. pattern recognition across 28 floors
Junho was watching me from three meters away. He had the look of someone who trusted my judgment and was currently exercising that trust against his own instinct to just pull the sword and go home.
"So what do we do?" he said.
"We wait," I said. "And while we wait, I want to see what happens when we don’t do the thing."
Junho looked at the open exit gate. Then at the meadow. Then at the sword. Then at me.
"We’re going to be here for a while, aren’t we," he said.
"Probably."
He sat down on the grass. After a moment, two of Commander’s team sat down near him. Commander remained standing because Commander always remained standing, but they found a tree at the meadow’s edge and leaned against it with the composed patience of someone who had made peace with Kang Min’s process.
I looked up at the sky.
Two points of light sat in the blue, visible even in daylight, which meant they weren’t ambient. Constellations. Two of them, present in my stream viewer list with the specific interface signature that distinguished them from standard viewers. I had seen those signatures before — early floors, when they had issued mission rewards for streaming my climbs and sent brief, pointed messages through the chat.
They hadn’t said a word since then. I had been so deep in consecutive floor clearing that I had almost stopped noticing them.
I looked at the two points of light.
Then at my stream.
"I notice I have two constellations in the chat," I said. "They’ve been quiet for a while. If you happen to have anything useful to say about a sword in a stone, now would be a good time."
The chat erupted.
💬 KangMinFanatic77: THE STARS ARE HERE???
💬 SeoulTowerFan: CONSTELLATIONS IN THE CHAT
💬 GhostClimber_: which ones
💬 Watchdog_KR: they haven’t said anything this whole stream
💬 TowerWatchKR: they’ve been watching silently for how long
💬 user_48821: that’s kind of creepy actually
💬 user_83421: are they allowed to give hints
💬 RealMvpStream: they’re not going to give hints. they never do
💬 KangMinFanatic77: then why are they here
The two constellation markers in the viewer list pulsed faintly. No messages appeared in chat.
💬 [★ Watcher of Ten Thousand Blades] has entered the chat.
💬 [★ The Boundless Archivist] has entered the chat.
Both markers appeared. Both sat there. Neither sent a message.
I stared at them for a moment.
"You’ve been watching since the early floors," I said to the stream. "After the mission rewards you went quiet. I was too busy sprinting through floors to notice when that happened." I paused. "Honestly I’m not sure if that says more about you or about me."
💬 [★ Watcher of Ten Thousand Blades]: ...
💬 [★ The Boundless Archivist]: ...
Three dots each. Then nothing.
💬 GhostClimber_: THEY SENT ELLIPSES
💬 SeoulTowerFan: ELLIPSES FROM A CONSTELLATION
💬 KangMinFanatic77: that means they know something
💬 Watchdog_KR: or they’re trolling
💬 TowerWatchKR: can constellations troll
💬 user_29441: apparently yes
💬 RealMvpStream: the ellipsis from The Boundless Archivist is interesting. an archivist who won’t share their archive
💬 user_48821: rude honestly
💬 KangMinFanatic77: VERY rude
"Gods like you would know the answer to this floor," I said to the two markers. "I’m going to assume you’re not saying anything either because you’re prohibited from it, or because watching me figure it out is worth more to you than telling me. Either way." I turned back to the meadow. "I’ll figure it out."
💬 [★ Watcher of Ten Thousand Blades]: :D
💬 [★ The Boundless Archivist]: :D
💬 SeoulTowerFan: THEY SENT THE LAUGHING EMOJI
💬 KangMinFanatic77: CONSTELLATION EMOJI USE
💬 GhostClimber_: I cannot believe this is happening
💬 Watchdog_KR: they find him funny
💬 TowerWatchKR: constellations find Kang Min funny
💬 user_83421: this is the most surreal stream I’ve ever watched
💬 RealMvpStream: it really is
I stopped addressing them and walked the perimeter of the meadow instead.
The anvil was the only structure. The sword was the only object of significance. The exit gate sat open and waiting. The forest at the edges was quiet in the way forests were quiet on floors that had decided to be peaceful. I walked the full perimeter — about six hundred meters — and found nothing. No hidden alcoves, no secondary puzzle markers, no concealed enemies, no System triggers that fired from proximity.
The floor was exactly what it looked like.
Which was, in my experience, the most suspicious thing it could be.
I came back to the anvil and looked at it properly for the first time. Not at the sword — at the stone itself. Grey granite, four-sided, sunk about thirty centimeters into the earth. The surface was smooth on top where the sword sat and rough on the sides. The joins between the stone and the soil were tight, compressed, the kind of settlement that happened over long periods. Whatever was in this anvil had been here for a very long time.
I put my palm flat against the stone.
The stone was warm.
Not sun-warmed — it was warmer than the ambient temperature of the meadow, generating its own heat from somewhere internal. The kind of warmth that came from something active. Something running.
I pressed harder.
Under the granite surface, very faint, a vibration. Rhythmic. Slow.
Like a heartbeat.
I took my hand off the stone and stood very still.
The gate was open. The sword was waiting. The System said pull the blade and go.
And something underneath the anvil had a pulse.
[LiveStream Viewers: 3,891,004]
💬 RealMvpStream: he found it
💬 KangMinFanatic77: found what
💬 RealMvpStream: whatever is wrong with this floor. look at his face
💬 SeoulTowerFan: he put his hand on the stone
💬 GhostClimber_: and now he’s very still
💬 Watchdog_KR: uh oh
💬 TowerWatchKR: I thought this was the easy floor
💬 user_48821: same
💬 KangMinFanatic77: it was never the easy floor
💬 [★ Watcher of Ten Thousand Blades]: ...
💬 [★ The Boundless Archivist]: ...
