Chapter 470: Ninety-Seventh Floor, The Wraiths (2)
[Release the wraiths. Time remaining: 17 hours 32 minutes.]
A considerable amount of time passed. Fighting the horde hadn’t been particularly taxing, so this floor felt less like a trial and more like live combat practice.
Well, that isn’t entirely accurate, either.
The strongest enemies I had encountered only matched the strength I had possessed on the eightieth floor, allowing me to completely overpower them. Any wraith struck by my lightning collapsed and dissolved into wisps of black smoke that drifted into the air. I continued carving through the battlefield, remaining ahead of the steadily expanding firestorm behind me.
As I cut down one wraith after another, a lingering question surfaced, the same one that had been on my mind since the beginning. Why did their strengths vary so much?
From ordinary humans to a challenger on the eightieth floor.
At some point, it occurred to me that these wraiths could be climbers who had perished while ascending the tower. If someone had fallen on the first floor, their wraith would understandably possess the strength of an average human.
Adding to my theory, since I had killed a fifth-class god not long after the eightieth floor, climbers who had died closer to the hundredth would roughly match that level of strength.
If I were right, the massive number of wraiths would also make sense.
After all, Kalain is the only other challenger to make it this far in the tower.
A span of four thousand years lay between Kalain and me. Based on my experiences, the Tower of Ordeal had taken a million climbers from each of the four worlds containing sentient species for a single climb of the tower.
Who knew how many worlds had undergone the Tower of Ordeal’s trials throughout those four millennia? Even an underestimation meant such an astronomical number of dead was plausible.