The eleventh floor abyss remained under heavy guard. Kangpany security details occupied the perimeter, their armored suits reflecting the dim light of the overhead mana lanterns. These players stood in rigid formations near the primary excavation sites. They carried high-grade weaponry and monitored the area for unauthorized entry. G-dragonfly crouched behind a jagged rock formation several hundred meters from the main camp. He adjusted the settings on his recording equipment, ensuring the transmission remained encrypted and hidden from the standard Tower frequencies.

Beside him stood the old man. Only G-dragonfly could see him. The spirit wore the remnants of heavy plate armor from a different era. He stood with his hands folded behind his back, his translucent eyes fixed on the security patrols. This man had been a ranker in the Old World Tower. He had climbed the floors in a time when the mechanics were different and the stakes were permanent. He acted as a guide, providing information that had been lost to the current generation of players.

G-dragonfly whispered to himself while checking his HUD. "Found you through pure accident, old man. A ranker from before the reset, someone who actually touched the upper floors." The spirit pointed toward a gap in the patrol rotation. G-dragonfly moved. He stayed low to the ground, utilizing the shadows cast by the massive sinkholes beginning to form in the crust of the floor. These sinkholes were the entry points to the deeper abyss.

They bypassed the first line of guards by timing the sensor sweeps. G-dragonfly reached the restricted zone where the recent expedition had concluded. The air grew cold. Frost covered the cavern walls. He moved toward the center of the battlefield where the Demon King had been defeated. He searched for the sinkholes that the spirit had predicted would appear. His goal was the rebirth stone, a demonic gemstone of high density. The spirit had explained that this stone allowed a player to become a demon candidate. Such a status provided a path to becoming a Demon King, granting power that made a player independent of the influence of the constellations and other Tower entities.

They reached the heart of the crater. The ground was solid ice. The temperature had dropped significantly since the death of the boss. G-dragonfly searched the crevices and the frozen remains of the demon’s lair. He found nothing. There was no gemstone. The area had been stripped of its primary essence.

The spirit walked across the frozen floor. He examined the marks on the ice. He looked at the spot where the Demon King’s body had collapsed. He turned to G-dragonfly.

"Kang Min," the spirit said quietly, his voice like wind through old stone. "After the kill, he came out of the body directly. Not beside it. Not standing over it. Out of it."

"You’re saying he took the candidacy right there."

"In the Old World, that was the method. You crawl out of the defeated king’s corpse, you inherit what it carried. It was not symbolic. It was the transfer." The spirit looked at the hollow center of the crater. "He did not discover this accidentally."

G-dragonfly stood in the center of the icy wasteland. "Then he’s from before. A returnee. Someone who already climbed." He turned it over in his mind, stacking the evidence. The efficiency. The knowledge that shouldn’t exist at this stage of the Tower’s public history. "Everything about Kangpany points to a man who already knows the answers."

"That is my ruling, yes."

G-dragonfly exhaled slowly, watching the vapor of his breath disappear into the cold air. "And nobody asked. News is barely spreading about what happened here, and nobody is asking how he walked out of that thing alive. How he knew to go in at all." He shook his head. "The Tower appeared a long time ago. Early days, people went in and never came back. If even one of them had returned with real information, the world would be in a completely different position right now."

He paced on the ice. "He came back with everything. Every shortcut, every mechanic, every secret that costs other people their lives to discover. And he’s keeping it. Hoarding it. Letting people die on the lower floors while he sits on a monopoly of knowledge he didn’t earn a second time."

"Calm yourself."

G-dragonfly stopped pacing.

The spirit folded his hands behind his back again. "I was a climber. Before that, a knight. I have watched men make the same calculation you are judging Kang Min for, and I have made it myself." He moved to the far edge of the frozen crater and looked toward the ceiling of the cavern. "You do not know what he saw before he returned. There are things in the upper floors that do not survive being spoken aloud. Information that, if it reached the public, would not inspire hope. It would end things."

"You think he’s protecting people."

"I think it is possible. I also think he may simply be carrying the weight of it alone because he was given a second chance and does not know what else to do with it." The spirit paused. "I would have done the same. If I had been returned to my world before it fell, I would have taken every advantage I could and told no one why." His translucent eyes grew distant. "Instead I abandoned it. I left to climb and I never came back. That is my failure, not his."

G-dragonfly listened. "Even after hearing it as many times as you’ve told me, I can’t fully hold the scale of it in my head. The Tower reaching across different realities. Different spans of time. Entire worlds feeding into it and disappearing."

"You will never fully hold it," the spirit said. "That is not a weakness. It is simply the honest limit of a mind that has only known one world."

He began to move again, walking slow circuits across the frozen ground. "The ice in this crater is not natural. When a soul of the Demon King’s density is removed abruptly, the surrounding thermal energy is consumed to fill the vacuum left behind. What you are standing on is the environmental consequence of that extraction. The floor is cold because something enormous was pulled out of it."

G-dragonfly crouched and pressed his palm to the ice. He could feel nothing through his glove but the silence of it.

"The sinkholes are not structural failures," the spirit continued. "They are vents. The Tower has lower ecosystems beneath every floor. The holes are where pressure equalizes between those layers and this one. If you learn to read the patterns in how they open and where, you can track movement. Anticipate what rises." He gestured toward the nearest sinkhole at the edge of the crater. "Fable fragments drift upward through those vents. Pieces of history the Tower has absorbed from other worlds. Collecting them is a long process, but the constellations recognize the story you build from them. Enough of them and you are no longer a player to be observed. That is a different category of existence in the Tower entirely."

G-dragonfly rose to his feet. He catalogued the information quietly, cross-referencing it against everything he had already recorded.

Then the spirit stopped walking. He stood tall in his translucent armor, his posture shifting into something more deliberate.

"There is another path," he said. "One worth more than the stone you came here looking for."

"The rebirth stone is already gone."

"I am not speaking about a replacement for it. I am speaking about something the stone could not match." He looked upward, toward the ceiling of the cavern and the higher floors beyond it. "Demons are powerful. Demon candidacy is a real advantage. But demons exist within the Tower’s hierarchy. They are strong, but they are still accounted for. Still beneath something."

"The angels," G-dragonfly said.

"The overseers. They manage the floors. They enforce the system’s rules. They are the Tower’s authority made flesh." The spirit turned to face him fully. "Their blood is golden. Literal gold, not metaphor. And if you kill one and take it, what you receive is not a path to power within the Tower’s existing structure. You step outside the structure entirely. No constellation holds that over you. No system rule applies to it in the way they apply to everything else."

G-dragonfly stood very still. "You’re telling me to kill an angel."

"I am telling you that the ceiling on demon candidacy is visible from where we are standing. The ceiling on what angel blood provides is not." The spirit looked back toward the patrols moving in the distance. "You came here for an item that was already taken. I am giving you the objective that was not."

The ice remained thick beneath his boots. The patrols continued their rounds in the distance, unaware of the conversation occurring in the center of the restricted zone. The abyss was empty of the stone, but the guide had provided a new objective.