Grey Spider

Grey Spider is the thousand-year-old elder who creates the Magic Tower, rules the fiftieth floor, and binds constellations beneath its spires as sources of power. Born among the despised Grey gender of the Niglus-Kukulu witch race, she builds a civilization by refusing to resemble the gods who abandoned her people. That defiance becomes another empire of conquest, and her encounter with Bae Hu-ryeong leaves her waiting for a promise that appears to have died with him.

Biography

A thousand-year web and the Grand Campaign

Grey Spider is born able to remember everything she sees and hears, including her mother’s pity in the womb. She grows up hating the divine order that brands the Grey as cursed, kills the gods who ruled her world, and becomes monarch to the sisters who gather around her. Her refusal to abandon responsibility gives rise to the Magic Tower, but its power expands into conquered worlds, imprisoned constellations, and a monopoly over the fiftieth-floor route. The civilization she protects therefore repeats the domination that first shaped her hatred. (Chapters 296, 302–304, 311)

Bae Hu-ryeong reaches the fiftieth floor and treats her not as a timeless monster but as an adult capable of choosing differently. He invites her to follow his ascent and promises that she can become the second person to conquer the Tower. Grey secretly waits on the ninetieth floor, but after six years concludes that he died. She preserves the ruined sixth spire as a place to display his remains if he returns and turns the disappointment into more than a century of hostility toward the Sword Emperor’s memory. When Gong-ja imitates Bae Hu-ryeong’s private words during the Grand Campaign, that old wound overwhelms her strategic composure and draws her into direct battle. (Chapters 298–300, 302–305)

Kim Gong-ja reveals that Bae Hu-ryeong did reach the ninety-ninth floor and continues as the Sword Constellation skill. Grey cannot see or hear him, but the skill card proves that he did not simply abandon his promise. Her attack falters, allowing Gong-ja to defeat and capture her. Even after her remaining branches begin surrendering, Grey prepares to die with the First Magic Tower rather than watch her oldest sisters be destroyed. Gong-ja and Uburka instead show them a future in which conquered peoples can live without pretending that their past was innocent; Grey responds by kneeling in her sisters’ place and accepting responsibility for the Tower’s crimes. (Chapters 305–312)

Responsibility, challenges, and death

The Magic Tower loses its spires, releases its imprisoned constellations, and gives up its colonies. Many witches migrate to Lion World or join other factions, while Grey refuses an easy affiliation. She establishes herself in an empty wasteland where anyone harmed by the Magic Tower may challenge her. She intends to answer the duel requests personally and, if she survives them, resume climbing rather than continue waiting for Bae Hu-ryeong. This choice neither erases her crimes nor asks victims to forgive her; it makes her body and future answerable to the people whose worlds sustained her civilization. (Chapters 312–313)

Years of challenges eventually bring her down. Grey knows the names and histories of the people gathered around her deathbed, including those whose families or bodies the Magic Tower exploited. They deny her a heroic ending, a grave, and even remembrance. She does not beg, resent Gong-ja, or reconcile with her victims; she reaches toward the sky and dies before completing her final words. Her death clears Gong-ja’s ninety-fourth-floor test because the person whose destiny he changed most profoundly dies without blaming him. (Chapters 387, 391)

Gong-ja later memorializes her with red peonies in the Garden of Withered Flowers. He refuses to revive her despite repeatedly wondering whether resurrection might eventually let her become happy, because he chooses to honor the life and death she accepted. Bae Hu-ryeong likewise acknowledges that Grey walked on her own feet and later plans to visit the garden and pay his respects. Her latest state is therefore death with remembrance—not public absolution, not reconciliation, and not a restored Magic Tower throne. (Chapters 397, 400)

Appearance and personality

Grey Spider is a pale, slender woman with dry fingers, visible green veins, and long limbs compared to winter branches. As the Magic Tower elder she wears a broad-brimmed hat that shadows her expression, carries a staff, and flies on a broom. At death she is frail and nearly blind and deaf from accumulated wounds. “Spider” is both her personal epithet and the language used for the witches and command network of the Magic Tower; the corpus presents her human witch body as the largest “spider” of that order rather than documenting a separate, named combat transformation with independent mechanics. (Chapters 304–305, 309, 311, 391)

She is intelligent, bitter, profane, proud, and relentlessly responsible by her own standards. Grey reads motives and battlefield narratives quickly, maintains command while enraged, and despises both gods and people who evade the consequences of their choices. Her tenderness is expressed as obligation rather than warmth: she calls the oldest witches her sisters, refuses to watch them die alone, and ultimately kneels for them. Bae Hu-ryeong’s promise exposes the loneliness beneath that severity, while Gong-ja’s intervention proves that even a person fixed for a thousand years can change direction. (Chapters 298–300, 302–313, 387, 400)

Abilities and skills

Memory, longevity, and witch existence

Grey is born with perfect retention of what she sees and hears and demonstrates knowledge accumulated across more than a thousand years. Life inside the Tower lets her exceed an ordinary lifespan, and her survival through centuries of conquest gives her the experience to recognize aura, magic, constellation authority, and deception at a glance. This longevity is not absolute immortality: she can be wounded, requires treatment after fighting Gong-ja, risks death by using magic before healing, and ultimately dies from successive lawful challenges. (Chapters 302–305, 308, 313, 391)

Her identity as a Grey witch underlies the spider imagery of her faction. The Magic Tower’s members call themselves spiders, route aura and telepathy through webs, and organize branches as networks under her command. Grey is described as the greatest or largest spider because she is their monarch and central authority. The supplied chapters do not establish a discrete transformation skill, activation condition, or alternate arachnid body for her, so the epithet should not be treated as proof of an unlimited shapeshifting power. (Chapters 302–304, 309–311, 391)

Ancient magic and combat

Grey is a great sorcerer capable of casting dozens of different spells almost simultaneously. In her duel with Gong-ja, every instant brings thirty-six attacks with differing trajectories and speeds; she intercepts hundreds of shadow strikes, uses cutting magical force, summons a distant hunter directly into her grasp, and reshapes the city by reducing intervening buildings to dust. Her broad knowledge of suffering also helps her perceive and counter multiple forms of the Infernal Heavens Demonic Art. (Chapters 304–306)

Her magic is powerful but neither effortless nor unbeatable. Rage strengthens the pressure of her barrage but narrows her attention around Bae Hu-ryeong, and Gong-ja survives long enough to expose the truth behind his “return.” Both combatants suffer broken bones and extensive wounds, while the Alchemist warns Grey that renewed casting during recovery could kill her. Later challengers ultimately overcome her. Her latest combat state is death, not continued regeneration or an unseen reserve of immortal magic. (Chapters 305–308, 313, 391)

Tower command and strategic authority

As elder, Grey commands thousands of witches through a city-wide telepathic Spider Web. The network passes aura and orders across great distances, supports distributed commanders and decoys, summons branch forces as a meteor-like army, and activates the five spires’ escalating alarms. She also directs colonial garrisons, deploys a force against Lion World while her headquarters is besieged, and uses captured constellations as magical infrastructure. These are institutional capabilities built over a millennium, not powers she can exercise unchanged after the Tower surrenders. (Chapters 303–304, 308–311)

Gong-ja defeats the organization by breaking command links, targeting officers, winning over the quests that legitimize resistance, and preventing the remote attack on Lion World. Four branches surrender before the First Magic Tower follows under different terms; the spires fall, the sealed gods are freed, and Grey ceases to rule the fiftieth floor. Her later wasteland is deliberately empty of the armies and infrastructure that once magnified her personal magic. (Chapters 304, 308–313)

Power progression

Relationships

• Bae Hu-ryeong: Grey’s rival, unfulfilled companion, and deepest emotional wound. His invitation gives her a future to wait for; his apparent death hardens her, and the proof of his continued ascent finally makes change possible.
• Kim Gong-ja: The challenger who uses Bae Hu-ryeong’s memory to break the Magic Tower’s narrative, defeats Grey, prevents her sisters’ destruction, and later preserves her as a flower without reviving or absolving her.
• Assistant Writer: A resistance organizer harmed by the Magic Tower who nevertheless stands between the surrendered Grey and a mob, insisting that revenge requires personal responsibility rather than opportunistic humiliation.
• Uburka: Gong-ja’s son, whose intervention stops the Magic Tower’s attack on Lion World and helps the First Magic Tower imagine surrender without surrendering its people’s future.

Items

• Grey Spider uses a staff and a flying broom in battle and command, but the corpus does not give either a stable personal name or an independently catalogued history.
• No notable personal item is established for Grey Spider within the generated item scope.