Chapter 394: Eighty-Eighth Floor, Waiting Room (4)
[30 hours 41 minutes until the rest period ends. Please take a rest.]
Although I hadn’t kept a precise track of how long I had been in the waiting room, it had taken somewhere around thirty-three hours for the countdown to the eighty-fifth floor to appear.
That had been about five hours ago, yet out of the thirty or so climbers we had been waiting on, only one had made it back.
It was a sorrowful and disheartening outcome, though not entirely unexpected.
Even so, many genuinely celebrated his return.
With the all-climber floor just ahead and so few climbers remaining, everyone knew each other’s faces, and most by name as well.
Only one survivor.
To everyone’s surprise, he left a deeper impression than expected—all because of what he had posted on the Community.
Christoph Murray, ranked 6,210.
His post was so memorable that I was still thinking about it hours later. Even someone like me, who rarely paid attention to the Community, had read it.
According to his account, his party had gradually fallen apart while enduring the trial on the eighty-seventh floor. Six members—everyone except him—died, and the enemies kept closing in. Eventually, he gave up on clearing the floor altogether.
Instead of surrendering to death, however, he gritted his teeth and chose to survive.