The dream of Kim Woo-joo, an ordinary guy with nothing but a high school diploma, was to land a job at one of the country’s top auto manufacturers.
Not the brain-busting office track. The production line. All body, no brains.
An ironclad rice bowl, guaranteed by a militant union!
An ironclad rice bowl that pays better than civil service!
Solid benefits!
That’s right — a stable, high-income job!
When you’re born an orphan and spend your whole life scraping by in a group home, you come to understand something.
Just how incredible, how magnificent it is to step out into society with a stable, high-income job.
Sure, the bar was high. It’s not called an iron rice bowl for nothing.
But endure long enough, grind hard enough, and the results come.
“Look at this! All those years of grinding away since the orphanage — it was worth it!”
A phone screen with the word PASS glowing in fat letters.
Woo-joo pressed his lips right against the screen and smiled wider than he ever had in his life.
It felt like winning the lottery.
And so — his first day at his long-awaited new job.
Woo-joo had no parents to stick a candle in a cake and toast his first day.
Maybe the world felt bad about that.
It celebrated his first day by planting a candle of its own — a Tower, right in the center of the whole planet.
Is this actually happening?
With no warning whatsoever, Towers began erupting all over the world.
And along with them, a small but growing number of people emerged who could climb them — what people called Awakened.
The Awakened would enter the Towers, come back out with Tower Crystals, and rake in money by the fistful.
But most people don’t spend long envying lottery winners. Woo-joo was no different.
He was perfectly content just living in the present — happy, ordinary, stable.
And then. Exactly one year later.
A Tower deep in northern Canada suddenly exploded.
Half of Canada — the second-largest landmass on Earth, the one that lived quietly in America’s shadow — was gone in an instant.
And tiny Liechtenstein didn’t even leave a trace. Swallowed whole by the back pages of history.
“What in the world is even——”
World leaders convened in emergency session.
They identified a common thread among every Tower that had detonated.
None of them had been cleared past the 10th floor within a year.
That was when humanity finally understood.
The Towers that had brought such abundance to the world — through Tower Crystals — would turn catastrophic if no one pushed past the 10th floor within a year.
But none of that had anything to do with Woo-joo.
He wasn’t Awakened. And the Towers had Awakened people to climb them.
Woo-joo rested when he rested, worked when he worked, and collected his paycheck every month without fail — living a happy, ordinary life.
But they say ruin approaches slowly.
Two years on, cracks started forming in Woo-joo’s happiness too.
Around the time Canada fell and a handful of African nations began going off one after another —
the situation snowballed, and world markets started freezing solid.
Canada. It might feel like a country that barely registers, living in the shadow of America, the world’s number one. But it’s still the second-largest nation on Earth by landmass.
Fertile, sprawling plains. Natural mineral deposits tucked away in every corner.
Those were what had pushed Canada into the top ten economies in the world.
And then half of that was vaporized in a single moment.
By one Tower explosion.
The ripple effects sent wheat prices, lumber prices, and seafood prices into a frenzy.
All things the world had come to depend on Canada for.
Global inflation exploded.
That alone would have been bad enough.
But America — which had invested heavily in Canada — took massive losses too.
And naturally, every other country with deep ties to America went down with it.
That’s when people started calling it the Canada-Triggered Great Depression.
The first catastrophe no one was prepared for. The Tower explosions.
The second catastrophe no one was prepared for. The economic collapse.
A colossal wave that swept across the entire world.
Woo-joo, just one ordinary person, couldn’t escape it either.
The iron rice bowl he’d clawed his way into — restructured.
He was thrown back out past the threshold he’d barely cleared.
He tried to get back in. The threshold was now far higher than before.
“God. How does a construction gig not even have openings anymore?”
A basement room where light barely trickled through a window the size of a mail slot.
Woo-joo was scrolling through a day-labor job site on his phone and scratching the back of his head in frustration.
“…Is a fried chicken joint really my only option at this point?”
The last resort flashed through his mind.
There’s even a saying that whether you studied liberal arts or STEM, everyone ends up as a fried chicken shop owner after they retire.
Gonna be a shop owner eventually anyway. Why not start now?
But almost immediately, Woo-joo shook his head with a small sigh.
Not that it was totally impossible, realistically speaking.
The money he’d been squirreling away over the years, plus the severance from the layoff — put it all together and he could probably scrape together around five million won in liquid cash.
But starting a business now? Right now?
When everyone’s out of a job and nobody has money?
Prices had exploded from the Canada-Triggered Depression.
Fried chicken had basically become a luxury item for the wealthy.
It had been so long since he’d been able to afford it himself.
So how was he supposed to sell it to anyone else?
“Ugh. What the hell has the Tower done to us all?”
Was there any move left to make?
Woo-joo sat and thought.
Even when the sky falls, they say there’s always a way out. Where’s my way out?
His thoughts drifted, naturally, toward something adjacent to gambling.
Lottery, maybe? Stocks? Crypto?
He was right there on the edge — weighing whether to throw himself in like everyone else, like a moth to a flame chasing one big score — when.
— Ding!
A sound pierced through his ear.
[Kim Woo-joo has Awakened!]
And then yellow holographic text floated up in front of his eyes.
[Name] : Kim Woo-joo
[Level] : 1
Awakened?
Woo-joo flung his phone aside, eyes blown wide.
“Huh……”
A shaky exhale.
“They really do say you never know——!”
A faint smile crept across his gaunt face, edged with something like hope.
Awakening is sometimes called a “lottery with no ceiling.”
As long as you go in and don’t die, the Tower Crystals you can farm will let you stack wealth beyond anything an ordinary person could ever dream of.
“Please let it be A-rank or above——!”
The rank of the ability matters just as much as awakening in the first place.
If awakening is like getting your hands on a winning lottery ticket no one else can easily buy —
then your awakening ability is what tells you which prize tier you won.
A-rank or above is second prize. S-rank or above is first.
In his situation, second prize would be more than enough.
Woo-joo breathed a prayer more desperately sincere than anyone else’s in the world, then scrolled down through the holographic window floating in front of him.
[New Ability Acquired!]
[Trait ‘Intrude’ obtained!]
“Intrude……?”
Awakened traits are usually pretty self-explanatory.
Take Fire for example — whether you’re swinging a sword or shooting arrows, everything catches flame.
Body Enhancement? You don’t even need a weapon. You can bulldoze through a Tower floor bare-handed.
But Intrude?
“What does this even do……?”
Woo-joo’s face twisted into something strange.
The expression of a man who kind of likes something but also feels vaguely put off by it. A deeply weird face.
A trait he’d never heard of in his life: Intrude.
Seeing is believing.
He pressed [Details], and —
[Intrude] — EX Rank
You can intrude upon a Tower currently being run by another person!
You can accumulate contribution alongside them in any form!
What, is this some kind of meetup service? Why would a trait like this even exist?
He puzzled at it and pressed again.
[Towers Currently Available for Intrusion] : Republic of Korea
[Floor 40] Seo I-an
[Floor 22] Yoon Ji-hye
[Floor 12] Yeom Gi-hun
……
— Scroll sideways to browse overseas listings!
Hm. Looked like he could enter overseas Towers too.
“But what do I even do once I’m in there?”
Right. That was the real question.
Say he intrudes on the highest floor available.
Then what?
His trait isn’t a combat trait like Fire or Body Enhancement.
If he so much as grazes a monster, won’t he just die instantly?
“Is this really EX rank?”
The heavy anticipation evaporated in an instant.
And filling the space it left behind — just emptiness and confusion.
“No. Okay. Let me look into this more first. Who knows, right? Maybe it’s actually way better than a combat trait.”
He genuinely hoped so.
It was EX rank, after all. It couldn’t be useless. It couldn’t.
He picked up his phone and logged into the Awakened Community.
You need Awakened verification to post, but anyone can read — a space with information on just about everything since the Towers appeared.
He needed intel. Intel was the priority.
For better or worse, he had Awakened today.
His job was gone. Reemployment looked bleak. He’d literally just talked himself out of the fried chicken shop idea.
So. From here on out, he had to go into Towers and earn money.
Even when the sky falls, there’s always a way out?
He’d just found his.
Pretend he hadn’t noticed?
Not a chance.
At the very top of the Awakened Community’s front page — a pinned post.
A primer for new Awakened. The kind of thing he’d obviously never read before.
And anyway, the media had been blasting Tower stuff nonstop, so even non-Awakened people had a general picture. Things like:
Towers only allow one entry per day.
Clear a floor and the Tower Merchant appears.
That sort of thing.
“Can we skip all that and get some Intrude intel? C’mon, guys.”
He muttered to himself — no one listening — and typed intrude into the search filter.
And then.
“Nothing?”
The Awakened Community. Running since the Towers first appeared, packed with information of every conceivable variety.
And nothing.
Human nature works a certain way, though.
Think something should be there and it’s not? Think something should surface and it won’t?
That competitive instinct kicks in. Not giving up — digging in out of sheer stubbornness.
Two hours of continuous searching followed.
Not just the Awakened Community. Naver, Google, YouTube, AI chatbots — he combed through everything like picking lice off a comb.
Did he find anything?
If he had, would he be sitting here feeling this rattled?
“Something’s wrong. How is there literally nothing? Not a single hit on Intrude?”
Head tilted.
Completely blank.
There were a few things he did manage to find, though.
He’d thought Intrude was a weird enough trait, but apparently other bizarre, one-of-a-kind traits existed — things like Madness and TS.
And not a single EX-rank Awakened had appeared anywhere in the world. Not one documented case.
“Putting it all together — I’m the only EX-rank Awakened. And I’m the only one with the Intrude trait.”
That was the conclusion he reached.
“But that’s not even the point. No matter how I think about it, I have no idea how I’m supposed to actually use this thing……”
Traits broke down broadly into three categories: physical combat, magical combat, and the crafting-focused Enchanters.
Intrude didn’t seem to belong to any of them.
EX rank or not — what even is this?
Was it some kind of freeloader trait? Get into other people’s Towers and socialize?
“Ugh, my eyes.”
He’d been glaring at his phone so long his vision was going blurry.
He set the phone on the floor, leaned his back against the wall for a breather, and pulled up his status screen one more time.
[Intrude] — EX Rank
You can intrude upon a Tower currently being run by another person!
You can accumulate contribution alongside them in any form!
Word for word identical to before.
Right, he knew that — but.
…Pressing it once more activates the Tower Intrude screen, doesn’t it?
Some time had passed.
Maybe the list had changed. He pressed it again.
And then —
[Details]
Intrude has no usage limit.
Entry into and exit from Towers is unrestricted.
However, you cannot enter the same floor on the same day more than once.
The Intruder participates in Tower conquest as a “Hidden Party Member.”
Okay, he needed to correct himself on one thing.
One short press — Tower Intrude screen.
One long press — Trait details.
The unlimited entry, the free exit — that part was reassuring. Safety was guaranteed, at least.
But “Hidden Party Member.”
That was where things got complicated.
Why do Awakened climb Towers?
To stop the collapses and protect world peace?
No.
Everyone’s in it for money.
TC.
Short for Tower Crystal.
With TC, you could buy useful items from the Tower Merchant that appears after clearing a floor.
You could commission an Association-affiliated Enchanter to convert them into whatever supplies you needed — “TC conversion.”
Or you could use them to power yourself up — buying stats, skills, upgrading weapons, that kind of thing.
And the last option: sell them to the Association.
The transaction ratio between Awakened and the Association supposedly varies based on Tower contribution — and apparently you have to sign a contract with confidentiality clauses before any of it happens.
But the open secret, as widely circulated rumors go: low floors net you a few hundred a day. High floors? Thousands, or even in the tens of millions.
And that’s for solo play.
In a party, rewards get split according to contribution.
So naturally, every Awakened just hard-forced solo play like it was the obvious answer.
And yet — “Hidden Party Member?”
Hm…. Doesn’t that make me a position no one’s going to want?
Now that he thought about it — depending on how this went, the Awakened might be scarier than the monsters.
Anyway. One thing was now clear.
The Intrude trait is not, at minimum, for socializing.
Make friends with someone who’s come to steal your share of the contribution?
Not a chance.
Then what the hell was it for? If it’s supposedly EX rank?
He picked up his phone again, desperate for an answer.
And then —
[Title] So we’re supposed to buy from the Tower Merchant? What if you just held a knife to their throat and robbed them? Win-win, right?
[Author] Anonymous5
— right?
One oddly interesting post caught his eye.
Just this one, then I’ll go back to searching.
└ [Anonymous12] Tower Merchants are basically NPCs. Attacks don’t work on them, and the moment you try, you get a one-month entry ban.
└ [Anonymous5] Oh, so that’s what tips them off. Sucks to be the only one who had to find out the hard way.
└ [Anonymous12] You actually tried something you could’ve found in two seconds of searching…… lol
Well. Good to know.
Learning something new was nice, but this wasn’t what he urgently needed right now.
He shook his head to refocus and kept scrolling up and down.
And then a post with unusually high view counts jumped out at him.
[Title] GOD it’s so hot I’m about to explode and this is making it SO MUCH WORSE
[Author] Seo I-an
What was this?
He clicked it lightly. Nothing much inside.
Just someone complaining about running out of low-grade recovery potions and being stuck in a bad spot.
“Seo I-an.”
Come to think of it — Seo I-an had been mid-Tower when he pulled up the Intrude screen earlier.
The name had been at the top of the list. He remembered it. Highest floor count, too.
Current Korean record: Floor 41. And Seo I-an was on Floor 40.
That’s basically a ranker. You’d think they’d go in properly stocked. Sheesh.
Rankers had money to burn. This looked like a self-inflicted problem.
A faint thread of envy stirring in the back of his mind.
They say attachment comes from deprivation.
His thoughts drifted, inevitably, back to money.
And then — out of nowhere —
Must be killing them to leave the Tower.
A pang of sympathy.
Made sense, too. His own trait, Intrude, came with free entry and exit — but for ordinary Awakened, it wasn’t like that at all.
Entry was limited to once per day. And leaving a Tower before clearing the floor meant every bit of contribution you’d earned on that floor — your TC — just vanished.
So ordinary Awakened were careful. Extremely careful when it came to deciding whether to leave.
Which was also why most Awakened played it safe: repeat-farm the floor just below their personal record. Maximum efficiency, maximum contribution.
Anyway. It seemed like Seo I-an had either thought they could clear their highest floor today, or had been slamming their head against it trying to push through to the next one——
“Oof. A high-floor ranker too, so their contribution pool must be huge. Hang in there, I guess.”
Someone else’s problem, but imagining it made his own chest ache.
He offered a small private moment of condolence and was just about to press the back button when —
“Oh, wait.”
A sentence he’d seen earlier while researching Towers flickered through his mind.
[Anonymous12] Tower Merchants are basically NPCs. Attacks don’t work on them, and the moment you try, you get a one-month entry ban.
Just a flash.
Like puzzle pieces snapping into place — the scattered gaps in his head started filling in, assembling into one complete picture.
“Thank you! Anonymous12!”
He said it out loud, to a stranger whose name and face he’d never know.
He thought he’d finally found it.
The method to flip his position in an instant — from “a position no one wants” to “a position someone might actually welcome.”
And with it — the perfect way to use his trait, Intrude.