Chapter 219 - 219: « Woonhee 591»
Min-ju had developed opinions about fish.
This became apparent within approximately ninety seconds of his arrival at Woonhee's apartment, which was where Min-ju now spent her weekday afternoons while Woonhee worked from home. Min-ju produced a worn picture book from somewhere near the couch and brought it directly to him and opened it to a page depicting a deep-sea anglerfish with an expression that made clear she had thought extensively about the anglerfish and had conclusions to share.
The conclusions were delivered in the combination of recognizable words and confident vocalization that constituted her current communication style. He gathered that the anglerfish was interesting, that its light was relevant, and that the regular fish on the adjacent page were less interesting than the anglerfish by a margin she felt strongly about.
"She's been on the deep-sea section for two weeks," Woonhee said from the kitchen, where she was making tea without asking whether he wanted any because she had been making him tea since floor twenty-three without asking. "I think it's the bioluminescence. She keeps trying to figure out where the light comes from."
Min-ju looked at him expectantly over the top of the anglerfish page.
He sat down on the floor next to her and looked at the anglerfish. "The light is made inside the fish," he said. "It generates it from itself."
Min-ju considered this with the focused attention she brought to information she was evaluating for accuracy. Then she turned to the anglerfish picture and pointed at the luminescent lure.
"Inside," she said.
"Inside," he confirmed.
She turned the page to the next deep-sea creature and the presentation continued.
He sat on Woonhee's living room floor for forty minutes while Min-ju worked through the deep-sea section of the picture book and delivered her assessments of each creature with the systematic thoroughness of someone who had been thinking about this independently for two weeks and now had an audience. He listened to all of it.
Woonhee brought tea and sat on the couch behind them and watched the presentation without interrupting.
When the deep-sea section was complete and Min-ju had moved on to reorganizing the block collection in the corner with the decisive energy of someone who had finished one project and was beginning the next, Woonhee said, "The governance submission went public three days ago."
"I know," he said.
"I've fielded forty-seven contact requests. International guild representatives, government Tower affairs bodies, independent climbing organizations, three academic research groups that study Tower architecture." She set her tea down. "Also two constellation-aligned entities who declined to identify their patron and one entity that identified itself as representing a group called the Founding Records Committee, which I have not been able to find in any Tower public registry."
"Don't respond to the two aligned entities," he said. "The Founding Records Committee is legitimate — they're an oversight body that doesn't appear in the standard public registry because their mandate predates the Tower's current governance structure. You can respond to them."
Woonhee wrote it down. "The marketplace has had a thirty percent international traffic increase in the last seventy-two hours. Apparently when a regression-class convergent being's operational infrastructure becomes public knowledge, everyone wants to know if they can access any part of it."
"They can access what's listed," he said. "The safe relics, the standard items. Nothing changes about what's listed."
"I know. I wanted you to know the traffic exists." She looked at him. "What about the guilds. The three major Korean guilds have all sent formal inquiry packages about what the documentation means for the Tower's political structure and what your intentions are going forward."
"My intentions are to climb," he said.
"That's not going to satisfy them."
"I know. Tell them the documentation is in the formal governance record and the oversight process will run its course. What I'm doing is climbing." He looked at Min-ju, who had organized the blocks into a structure that was significantly more architecturally sound than anything he had seen her build before, the base wider, the height proportional. She was studying it with the assessing attention of someone deciding whether it met her current standards. "There are five hundred and ninety-one more floors."
Woonhee was quiet for a moment.
"After those five hundred and ninety-one floors," she said. "What's at the end."
He thought about the Tower's administrative intelligence. The cultivation system designed to produce convergent beings. The pre-Tower presence following him through floors above eighty. The native-level architecture stretching above floor seventy-five all the way to floor six-sixty-six.
"I don't know yet," he said. "I know what the Tower is designed to produce. I know what the convergence is. I don't know what floor six-sixty-six is or what reaching it means or what's on the other side of it if there is another side."
"And you're going anyway."
"Yes."
Woonhee held that with the specific acceptance she brought to information that was complete as far as it went and insufficient as far as planning went and necessary to work with regardless.
Min-ju had decided the block structure met her standards and had moved on to adding a second level. The architectural principle carried upward — she was applying the wider-base logic she had learned from the first collapsed tower to the second level's construction, the blocks placed with deliberate offset.
He watched her work.
"The streaming numbers," Woonhee said. "Since the convergence floor. The concurrent viewership during the governance submission was eleven million."
He hadn't checked the viewer count since floor seventy-five. He had been in the native-level space and the floors above it and Jiseok's workshop and he had not looked at the chat or the viewer count or the stream overlay with any attention.
"Eleven million," he said.
"Eleven million and three hundred thousand at the peak," Woonhee said. "It held above nine million for six hours after the submission was confirmed. The VOD for floor seventy-five has four hundred thousand concurrent viewers right now and it's three days old." She paused. "You've changed what Tower streaming is. Most streams are watch-me-fight content. What you've been doing since floor one is something else."
"I told you," he said. "The stream is a tool."
"For witnesses," she said. "Yes. RealMvpStream said it in the chat during the governance submission and it was picked up by every Tower media outlet in six countries by the next morning." She looked at him. "You made witnesses, Kang Min. Four million people became eleven million people became an international record because you made the whole thing visible while it was happening."
Min-ju placed the last block on the second level and sat back on her heels and looked at the structure. It stood. She looked at Kang Min over her shoulder with the expression of someone who had successfully completed something and was noting the completion.
"Good," he said.
She nodded, confirming his assessment was accurate, and went back to studying the structure for potential third-level architecture.
He drank his tea and thought about five hundred and ninety-one floors and what it meant to have witnesses for all of them.
"The contact requests," he said. "Keep logging them. When the oversight bodies begin their formal processes the documentation of who contacted us and when and what they asked will be relevant."
"Already doing it," Woonhee said. "Since the first request arrived."
Of course she was. He had picked the right person to run the external architecture of what he was doing. He had known that since the first meeting, had known it more specifically with each floor cleared, had trusted it completely by floor thirty.
"Thank you," he said. "For all of it."
Woonhee looked at him with the expression she used when something had been said that was accurate and that she intended to acknowledge once and not make into a moment.
"Don't thank me," she said. "Clear the floors."
He stayed another hour. Min-ju's third level was attempted, partially successful, one section of it requiring reconstruction after a miscalculation in the load distribution. She applied the reconstruction with the systematic patience of someone who understood that the reconstruction was part of the building process rather than a failure of it.
He left when she had the third level standing.
Outside, the city was doing what it did on Wednesday afternoons in the current world — the gates visible at the district boundary, the Tower's presence in the urban landscape having become background in the way that permanent features became background, the thing that was always there eventually getting absorbed into the definition of normal.
He had five hundred and ninety-one floors and the native-level architecture and the star alongside him and the documentation in the permanent record and Jiseok building something new on a working surface that had been cleared for the first time in forty years.
He went back in.