Jaehwan

Jaehwan is the last Walker to reject regression, an Awakened One whose relentless Stab develops into the world-destroying power of Destruction. His journey tests whether a person can oppose the System without replacing it with another absolute reality.

Biography

The walker who refused to return

Jaehwan enters the Tower of Nightmares with the other people taken from Earth, but his defining choice comes when the survivors discover the Stone of Regression. Nearly everyone uses the stone to return to the past, abandoning the current timeline in the hope of preventing the catastrophe before it begins. Jaehwan refuses. He does not regard an earlier copy of the world as a substitute for the people and history already in front of him, and he forms Carpe Diem with the few Walkers who make the same choice. The group continues climbing even as its members die or eventually regress. (Chapter 1)

By the ninety-eighth floor, only Jaehwan and Kim Yoonhwan remain. Mortally wounded, Yoonhwan pretends that he will regress so Jaehwan will not stop for him. Jaehwan understands what his friend is doing, tells him to go, and continues upward without looking back. He then spends decades alone on the ninety-ninth floor fighting the Ice Dragon Velkisus. The equipment left by his companions—including Yoonhwan's armor, Han Seoyul's bracelet, and the True Dragon Sword—becomes both his means of survival and the material record of everyone who reached that point with him. (Chapters 1–2)

The hundredth floor reveals that the Tower is not a heroic trial but a cultivation facility. Beastrein treats its inhabitants as Products and offers Jaehwan entry into the so-called Main Game. Jaehwan feigns enough interest to obtain information, but rejects the premise that his life can be measured by the System. He repeats the basic Stab billions of times, develops Doubt and Understanding, and finally abandons the numerical data through which the System defines him. After severing Beastrein's controlling Link, he turns his Stab against the Tower itself. (Chapters 4–10)

Graffiti left by an earlier challenger points him toward the Phantasmal Tree and the First Nightmare. Jaehwan does not leave because he expects to recover his original world; he explicitly chooses the present over both regression and nostalgia. By breaking the Tower's ceiling and emerging into Chaos, he begins a wider campaign against every structure that turns lives into cultivation material. (Chapter 10)

A stranger in Chaos and the inheritance of Gorgon

Jaehwan arrives in Chaos naked, wounded, and ignorant of its rules. He learns that Chaos lies along the Trunk of the Phantasmal Tree and that its inhabitants are souls without their former bodies. His first contacts, especially Mino, complicate his instinct to regard everyone around him as already dead. When criminals threaten Mino with hostages, Jaehwan cannot use an indiscriminate Stab without risking the people he means to save. Her refusal to betray him also directly challenges the bleak certainty on which he has relied since leaving the Tower. (Chapters 11–18, 28)

His encounters with Karlton and Chunghuh expose him to a moral order that is imperfect but not empty. Karlton's willingness to submit even his own contaminated soul to Gorgon's law earns Jaehwan's respect, while Chunghuh's Forgotten One Severance gives him a first view of power beyond the System. Jaehwan reproduces its principle through Stab to help save the contaminated men. He remains skeptical of institutions and ceremonial authority, but begins distinguishing between blind obedience and a person's deliberate fidelity to a principle. (Chapters 30–32)

Inside Gorgon, conspirators try to seal the corrupted Citadel Lord, only for Catastrophe to descend through the Lord's body. Jaehwan cannot defeat the Ancient God directly, so he uses Doubt to identify the Link sustaining the incarnation and severs it. The dying Lord transfers Gorgon's crest, memories, and spiritual power to him, asking him not to lose his human heart. Jaehwan inherits the office reluctantly because the citadel cannot survive without a Lord. (Chapters 39–41)

The former Lord's advice is to do as little as possible and preserve Gorgon through stagnation. Jaehwan rejects that answer. Instead of treating the fortress and its perpetual emergency as natural facts, he decides to remove the conditions that make a Citadel Lord necessary at all. His aim expands from protecting one settlement to uniting Chaos and ending its dependence on isolated strongmen. (Chapter 42)

Carpe Diem, the Palace of Rebirth, and the Abyss Expedition

To establish authority quickly, Jaehwan publicly challenges Gorgon's strongest fighters. The spectacle is calculated: his experience leading the original Carpe Diem taught him that a group asked to follow an impossible plan first needs a visible reason to trust its leader. After defeating the Hall Masters and other challengers, he recruits volunteers for an Abyss Expedition and works with Meikal to construct a new one-floor Carpe Diem. The artificial Tower accelerates time and Awakening, but also accelerates soul contamination, so Jaehwan makes the risks explicit and permits volunteers such as Cayman to choose for themselves. (Chapters 53–58)

Training others forces Jaehwan to articulate a path he had discovered alone. Within Alienation he encounters possible versions of himself and confronts the assumption that isolation is the only source of his strength. His followers do not simply imitate his Stab; their choices and trust become part of the world he is trying to create. That change is reflected when he opens his Unique World during the assault on the Palace of Rebirth. (Chapters 59–77)

Against Sa Myeonggaram, Jaehwan reaches Creation by aligning the alternate selves revealed through Alienation around one shared belief. The result is Destruction, a black world capable of attacking the Settings and Links that maintain other worlds. He defeats Sa and, after hesitating, fulfills the Lord's request to sever his Pineal Thread. Destroying the Palace frees Chaos from the immediate machinery of Rebirth, but it also proves that Jaehwan's victories can erase lives and worlds as completely as the System he opposes. (Chapters 77–79)

Jaehwan personally attends the memorial for the thousands killed in the conflict. When the Great Lands retaliate, he uses his contaminated soul as a vessel for Catastrophe and trusts Chunghuh to restore him with Forgotten One Severance afterward. The plan destroys an overwhelming force of Lords, but places Jaehwan at risk of being forgotten and leaves survival dependent on the relationships that keep his existence anchored. (Chapters 81, 94–98)

The Abyss Expedition turns on him after learning that he is alive and that the Fruit connecting the realms has been destroyed. Rather than compel their loyalty, Jaehwan accepts responsibility and cuts his own Pineal Thread, abandoning the remaining bond to a physical body. He enters the Abyss as a soul with Chunghuh, Karlton, and Sirwen following by choice. Chaos remembers him as a king who neither reigned nor sought to rule. (Chapter 98)

The Metaverse and the war against its floors

In the Abyss, Jaehwan travels with Runald and Andersen, and discovers Yoonhwan imprisoned as a potential Doll. His first impulse is to destroy the detention center, but Andersen convinces him that a direct assault may lose the person he came to save. Jaehwan agrees to use the Grand Auction's procedures, demonstrating that his life in Chaos has made him more willing to rely on another person's judgment. When Yoonhwan is transferred into the Metaverse, Jaehwan enters the ten-floor Tower with Runald despite the danger. (Chapters 102–109)

The Metaverse converts gods whose tickets expire into Dolls and turns its floors into contests sustained by belief. Jaehwan manifests a Sanctuary despite being neither a conventional god nor Vicegerent, accepts the Moya Moya Crow so Andersen can communicate with him, and learns that Yoonhwan has not yet been irreversibly transformed. To protect Andersen's abandoned Followers and Dolls, he attacks the Six Gods and destroys the sixth-floor world that confines them. (Chapters 109–135)

The seventh floor offers a more personal trap: Yesterday recreates Carpe Diem and the companions Jaehwan lost. He rejects the comforting past again, tears through the illusion with World Stab, and frees Runald. On the floors of Yesterday and Today, Jaehwan destroys the facilities consuming gods, rescues anonymous captives, and becomes the center of a new coalition. He still refuses to govern it. Instead, he uses broadcasts and the pressure of public witness to isolate the Metaverse's Leader from the Alliance rather than fight every inhabitant at once. (Chapters 137–149)

Long periods of distorted time let Jaehwan teach the gods and refine Way of Wave, a situationally amplified Stab derived from Constellation Rending. He defeats Russell without killing either the god or Vicegerent by using Soul Erasure to separate their Link. He then overcomes the Leader and reaches the ninth floor, whose rule requires each passenger to kill all the others. Jaehwan refuses the rule outright. Supported by the World Power of those who trust him, he breaks the ceiling with Star Stab and brings the surviving passengers upward together. (Chapters 155–169)

At the summit, the Driver offers Jaehwan a route to the end of the world while drawing power from the entire Tower. Jaehwan refuses to accept an ending reached by the Driver's prescribed path, especially when the Metaverse's dead and exploited inhabitants are the fuel. Unable to stop the departing ship directly, he attacks the source: allied World Power and the Leader's help allow him to split the Metaverse and sever its Links. The Tower collapses, many Dolls and fallen inhabitants return, and the Driver escapes with diminished power. Jaehwan leaves carrying the histories of the destroyed floors as part of his responsibility, not as proof that every consequence of his choice was good. (Chapters 170–175)

The Great Forest, Gestalt's Eye, and the Rift war

After the Metaverse falls, Maiad introduces Jaehwan to Ignel and helps him acquire Solitary Existence while Solitary Unbowed is being repaired. Jaehwan later breaks Maiad's memory-erasing Setting and learns that his benefactor is also the Lord of Rift. Their relationship becomes a conflict between two people who both opposed the existing order but reached incompatible conclusions about what hope can justify. (Chapters 176–181)

At the Grand Auction, Maiad uses Jaehwan and the promise of Deus Ex Machina to draw out hidden powers. Their eventual duel exposes the enormous difference in their accumulated World Power. Jaehwan fully manifests his Sanctuary and calls on the Fortress of Regret and the restored Metaverse, yet Maiad's seven Towers overwhelm him and break Solitary Existence. Andersen holds Maiad back with Naked, ordering Jaehwan to reach the Great Forest and find the Mad God. Her disappearance leaves him defeated and consumed by guilt. (Chapters 186–194)

Runald prevents that guilt from becoming a solitary suicide attack. Jaehwan asks whether the boy will continue following even if the journey brings danger or future hatred; when Runald agrees, Jaehwan accepts him as his Follower and commits to being his god. The exchange marks a reversal of Jaehwan's old habit of deciding alone what sacrifices others may make. He still leads Runald toward danger, but now asks for and accepts the boy's choice. (Chapter 196)

In the Great Forest, Jaehwan undergoes Molting in a lethal hot bath, shedding layers of Clothes and increasing his World Power while repeatedly approaching the dissolution of self. He learns that Clothes are System-shaped versions of a being, that the Longevity Clan consists of Clothes shed by Gestalt, and that Ouroboros is both a method and the history of that division. Gestalt's Eye, already present in his left eye, lets him perceive Clothes, draw on their World Power, and use Cognitive Dissonance to repair severed Links. With it, he restores and reads the Record of the Abyss. (Chapters 201–206)

Jaehwan returns to the Destruction and reunites with his companions as Maiad allies Rift with the Great Lords. He rescues Yoonhwan, rallies the Companions of the Metaverse and the Guides of Destruction, and defeats Jerome by bringing the many Jaehwans contained in his Clothes into one overwhelming act of Destruction. Yet Maiad's Plausibility Destruction makes most of the Abyss accept that Big Brother has never existed. Jaehwan alone continues to see the eye in his sky. He understands that the coming war concerns not only military control, but which reality people are willing to recognize. (Chapters 208–225)

Only One World and the road to Big Brother

Maiad uses the conflict to turn Mountain of Corpses, Sea of Blood from a personal Unique World into an agreed reality, Only One World. Jaehwan opposes it because peace obtained by erasing every competing world repeats the logic of cultivation on a larger scale. His companions hold the battlefield while the people of Gorgon and Chaos send him their World Power through Karlton's newly manifested Citadel Gorgon. That trust completes Jaehwan's own movement from an isolated Unique World toward a shared reality. (Chapters 226–235)

Jaehwan's Destruction devours Maiad's world and shatters the divine artifacts powering Deus Ex Machina. He defeats Maiad but recognizes the path his opponent once tried to walk: Maiad challenged the sky repeatedly before despairing that an existence could defeat the System. Before dying, Maiad tells Jaehwan when Big Brother's eye will close and warns that time is existence's greatest enemy. (Chapters 235–237)

Jaehwan spends a year in the reformed Abyss, where the old hierarchy of gods is replaced by measures intended to value their Followers' happiness. He nevertheless refuses to treat local reform as the end. Cultivation still consumes the Borderlands, and any peace inside the Abyss remains dependent on the System that permits that destruction. His companions fear that attacking Big Brother may end their world, but ultimately let him choose. Jaehwan enters the darkness beyond the closing eye alone. (Chapters 236–238)

Time inside the passage stretches from years into millions and then into spans too large for Jaehwan to measure. He practices Stab, argues and eventually forms a strange companionship with the awakened intelligence within Solitary Unbowed, collapses into exhaustion, and questions whether his purpose is only another product of the System. The ordeal reveals the nature of Clothes and tries to dissolve the motives that make him a distinct person. Jaehwan reaches Panopticon without fully surrendering that existence, though countless Clothes have borne the attrition in his place. (Chapters 238–241)

There he meets Mulack Armelt and learns that Big Brother is not one ruler but the state of transcendence reached by those who endure the Time Waterfall and leave ordinary being behind. Adaptation, Awakening, and cultivation are parts of a vast process for producing new Big Brothers. Mulack argues that the System is stable, accepted, and safer than its destruction; Jaehwan answers that transcendence has stripped its rulers of the very reasons that once led them to challenge it. (Chapters 242–248)

Jaehwan cannot overcome Mulack alone, but the discarded Jaehwans—his Clothes and fellow outcomes—help because they remain Jaehwan. Their choice restores the meaning that transcendence denies. Jaehwan rejects the throne of the 1,131st Big Brother and drives his accumulated Stab through Panopticon and the System. The Phantasmal Tree collapses, Fruit rains into Chaos, and Jaehwan experiences himself as a ten-year-old watching the destruction of the lonely tree. The victory does not feel like a final ending. (Chapters 245–250)

The First Nightmare and Revision

Jaehwan awakens as a ten-year-old boy in an ordinary modern world. The Tower, Chaos, and Abyss are treated as an elaborate delusion caused by trauma, and a therapist known to him as Teacher asks him to prove his memories. Jaehwan refuses to prove his existence in the same terms demanded by this reality. Over ten years of treatment, however, he grows less certain. When the expected Tower of Nightmares fails to appear, twenty-one-year-old Jaehwan is left alone beneath a peaceful sky. (Chapters 251–255)

The new life has no Skills, Settings, Unique Worlds, or immortality. Jaehwan calls it the First Nightmare because effort offers no guaranteed route to transcendence and mortality limits how long a person can search for one. He studies, works, loses his mother, and gradually accepts that stories cannot simply overpower reality. Teacher moves in the opposite direction, coming to believe that Jaehwan's world may truly exist and protesting a social order that labels other worlds impossible. (Chapters 256–260)

After Teacher collapses during the protest, he survives long enough to give Jaehwan the counseling journal in which he recorded Jaehwan's world and repaired his own short story. He tells Jaehwan that reality cannot be defeated alone: other people must be invited to share the world. Jaehwan then begins writing the story of the man who did not regress, using fiction as the means by which one world can reach another. The act recreates forgotten companions and gives his vanished history a form that may change at least one reader's world. The epilogue answers with a crack in Sirwen's Tower, suggesting contact between the realities without settling which one is primary. (Chapters 261–262)

In the Revision, Jaehwan is an older web novelist offered the chance to rewrite his work. He applies the stages of Awakening to prose—doubting, understanding, forgetting, hypothesizing, proving, and editing—and relives the journey through revision. A sudden earthquake traps him beneath a collapsed building with a child. Though this reality gives him no supernatural body and no certain rescue, he shields her and refuses to call the disaster an ending. (Chapters 263–265)

A mysterious man tells him there is no next floor in the simple sense. Jaehwan realizes that a universe without a known beginning or end cannot be destroyed as if it were merely a Tower. He nevertheless performs Stab against the cracked ceiling, opens a way into the light, and carries the girl out. His final decision is to follow the new path because the World After the Fall has not yet arrived. The corpus closes with both readings intact: Jaehwan is a survivor who turned his lost world into a story, and the destroyer whose work continues through that story. (Chapter 266)

Appearance and personality

Jaehwan is first defined visually by attrition. His years alone in the Tower leave him ragged and dependent on an assortment of equipment inherited from dead companions. After cutting his Pineal Thread, he appears in the Abyss as a soul form with an imposing, heavily muscled body, especially pronounced arms and forearms. He often travels without Clothes in both the literal and metaphysical senses, which makes his nakedness a running source of confusion while also expressing his refusal to let the System supply his identity. Gestalt's Eye later appears as a serpent-shaped Ouroboros turning within his left iris.

He rarely cares about his own reflection. Alienation shows him younger, military, and otherwise divergent versions of himself, making his appearance less important than the beliefs by which he recognizes a self as Jaehwan. The final reality shift places him first in a ten-year-old body and later in an ordinary adult body subject to fatigue, injury, aging, and death. These changes are not presented as simple disguises; each tests whether his identity survives without the power and history that once made it legible.

Jaehwan is taciturn, blunt, and outwardly impassive. He distrusts promises, legal authority, gods, and systems that demand obedience in exchange for security. His skepticism is not passive cynicism: when he decides that a structure is false, he trains until he can strike it directly. This makes him extraordinarily persistent, but also stubborn enough to impose enormous consequences on himself and others.

His early solitude encourages him to think that only his own refusal can be trusted. Mino's loyalty, Karlton's integrity, Chunghuh's care, and the voluntary sacrifices of his companions slowly change that position. He becomes capable of asking advice, building public trust, teaching, accepting Followers, and drawing strength from other people's worlds. He never becomes sociable or interested in conventional rule, but he learns that an existence maintained by relationships is not less authentic than one maintained alone.

Jaehwan's compassion is most visible in limits he places on his own power. He changes tactics when hostages are present, remembers the dead individually, refuses the Metaverse's command to kill fellow passengers, and learns to sever a divine Link without annihilating either participant. At the same time, he does not hide from the casualties caused by destroying Towers and worlds. His sense of responsibility is severe rather than consoling: the dead become a reason to continue challenging the machinery that consumed them, even when he cannot claim that his choices were purely right.

Powers and limitations

Awakening and perception

Jaehwan begins with the System-recognized Skill Stab, but becomes an Awakened One by rejecting the data that claims to define its limit. Doubt lets him see flaws, seams, Links, and hidden structures in apparently solid phenomena. It enables him to dismantle matter, read concealed System operations, and identify the connection sustaining a possession or incarnation. Understanding follows that perception, allowing him to grasp and reproduce principles such as Forgotten One Severance rather than merely copy their surface form.

Selflessness suppresses the ordinary boundary of the self and greatly accelerates his perception and movement. Alienation exposes alternate Jaehwans and possible histories, initially threatening his certainty but eventually giving him access to the beliefs shared across those selves. Creation lets him establish a Hypothesis as a real Unique World. Later stages described as Proof and Editing move that reality beyond private conviction toward something that can endure or alter the agreement of other worlds.

These stages are neither automatic upgrades nor proof of infallibility. Doubt can be resisted by beings with stronger or more deeply established worlds, and what Jaehwan perceives still requires interpretation. Alienation can destabilize the identity it expands. Selflessness does not erase the limits of his vessel or available World Power. Creation is strongest when others genuinely share its premise; coercing belief would undermine the world Jaehwan is trying to build.

Stab and its developed forms

Jaehwan's central technique remains the simplest thrust. He repeats it beyond the proficiency acknowledged by the System, treating every supposed cap as another claim to doubt. Normal Stab is the direct foundational attack, while Hard Stab concentrates force for targets that cannot be overcome by speed or repetition alone. He can drive a Stab through air, sound, matter, souls, Links, Settings, and eventually the boundaries of Towers and worlds.

World Stab carries his Unique World through the thrust. It is less an enhanced sword strike than an intrusion of Jaehwan's reality into another one, which makes it effective against Sanctuaries, floors, and world-scale rules. Star Stab arranges the World Power of many supporters into a formation powerful enough to break the Metaverse's ceiling. Repeated or accumulated Stabs also let Jaehwan build force far beyond what a single motion appears to contain.

Way of Wave is developed after long training in the Metaverse. It partially draws on Constellation Rending and amplifies force according to the surrounding situation, but has limited range and can rebound dangerously on the user. Constellation Rending is a more extreme concentration of World Power, capable of threatening opponents far above Jaehwan's ordinary level at the cost of severe strain and depletion. Jaehwan's greatest feats generally require preparation, accumulated strikes, outside World Power, or a target whose underlying rule he has first understood.

Destruction, Soul Erasure, and Sanctuary

Destruction is Jaehwan's Unique World and Setting: a black reality born from his Fourth Awakening that breaks Settings and causes the Worlds and Links dependent on them to collapse. It can extinguish gods, consume another Unique World, and invalidate rules presented as absolute. Its force grows as Jaehwan's Stabs carry it into a target and as other beings accept his world as real.

Soul Erasure is a precise application of the same principle. Rather than annihilate a god and Vicegerent together, Jaehwan can sever the Link between them, as he demonstrates against Russell. Cognitive Dissonance later supplies the inverse operation, restoring broken Links through Gestalt's Eye. Both uses demand that he correctly distinguish the relationship from the beings joined by it.

Sanctuary Manifestation externalizes his Unique World over an area. Jaehwan can manifest it without fitting the Abyss's conventional categories of god and Vicegerent, and later completes it with the Fortress of Regret and restored Metaverse as sources of World Power. A Sanctuary remains a contest between realities: Maiad defeats Jaehwan's first complete manifestation by bringing seven Towers and vastly greater reserves to bear.

Clothes, Gestalt's Eye, and borrowed power

Molting allows Jaehwan to shed Clothes, the selves and powers produced through contact with the System. Removing them can expose a more fundamental existence and release enormous World Power. Gestalt's Eye lets him perceive those layers, draw power from the many Jaehwans within them, see through imposed rules, and perform Cognitive Dissonance. It is crucial to his victory over Jerome and his restoration of the Record of the Abyss.

Clothes are not an infinite resource. Excessive Molting can erase the main body or leave no stable person to benefit from the power released. The Time Waterfall demonstrates the deeper cost: countless Jaehwans endure and are discarded so that one existence can reach Panopticon. Their later decision to help him is voluntary, not evidence that the sacrifice was harmless.

Jaehwan can also use power carried through specific relationships. Soul contamination permits Catastrophe to descend through him for a short, devastating assault, while their restored Link later gives him temporary access to the Void Sword. These powers are dangerous and conditional. Catastrophe's descent threatens Jaehwan with loss of self and requires Chunghuh to retrieve him; the Void Sword disappears when the borrowed connection or purpose ends.

Power progression

Relationships

• Kim Yoonhwan is Jaehwan's closest surviving connection to the original Carpe Diem. Yoonhwan's apparent regression on the ninety-eighth floor lets Jaehwan continue, and rescuing him becomes Jaehwan's reason for entering the Metaverse. Their reunion confirms that the abandoned timeline and the people who chose it were never meaningless.

• Chunghuh is teacher, companion, and one of the people who keeps Jaehwan from disappearing into his own power. Jaehwan learns the principle of Forgotten One Severance from him, later trusts him to reverse Catastrophe's descent, and repeatedly relies on his blunt counsel. Chunghuh follows without surrendering the right to challenge him.

• Runald first follows Jaehwan through Andersen's trust, then becomes Jaehwan's own Follower. Jaehwan's decision to ask whether Runald accepts the future risks makes their bond one of his clearest departures from solitary leadership. Runald, in turn, inherits fragments of Naked, Stab, and Destruction without becoming a copy of his god.

• Andersen teaches Jaehwan to choose indirect action when Yoonhwan's safety requires it and connects him to the ordinary lives hidden beneath the Abyss's divine hierarchy. Her sacrifice against Maiad drives Jaehwan toward the Great Forest, but her faith also prevents him from wasting that sacrifice in an immediate revenge attack.

• Karlton earns Jaehwan's respect through unwavering integrity rather than strength. He follows Jaehwan into the Abyss, continues calling him Citadel Lord after Jaehwan rejects the title, and eventually manifests Citadel Gorgon to connect the World Power of Chaos to him.

• Mino is one of the first people in Chaos to make Jaehwan question his belief that its souls are merely corpses. Her refusal to betray him and the danger to her hostages force him to temper destructive efficiency with trust and restraint.

• Cayman embodies the autonomy Jaehwan wants his followers to possess. Jaehwan permits him to enter the dangerous Carpe Diem training after explaining its risks, then trusts him to remain behind and protect Chaos rather than treating loyalty as physical proximity.

• Catastrophe begins as an Ancient God possessing Gorgon's Lord and becomes a hostile but vital counterpart linked to Jaehwan's soul. Jaehwan uses that bond as a weapon against the Lords, later borrows the Void Sword through it, and gradually encounters evidence that the Ancient Gods were also broken by the System they helped shape.

• Maiad van Declan is both patron and principal ideological rival. Each wants to oppose Big Brother, but Maiad concludes that competing worlds must be forced into Only One World, while Jaehwan insists that no peace can justify erasing all alternatives. After defeat, Maiad gives him the knowledge needed to continue the challenge they could not complete.

• Mulack Armelt leaves the records that guide Jaehwan from the Tower to Panopticon. When they finally meet, Mulack has become a Big Brother and defender of cultivation's stability. Their conflict turns the distant predecessor Jaehwan once followed into the final example of why transcendence without personhood cannot be his answer.

Items

• Solitary Unbowed is Jaehwan's principal sword after the Tower. Forged and repaired through several transformations, it contains Beastrein's evolving consciousness, devours World Power, carries Destruction, and eventually speaks to Jaehwan during the Time Waterfall. Their long confinement changes the weapon from a captured enemy into a difficult companion.

• True Dragon Sword is among the inherited equipment Jaehwan uses during his decades-long battle on the ninety-ninth floor. Its connection to the Ice Dragon also lies behind the form from which Solitary Unbowed is later recreated.

• Stone of Regression is important because Jaehwan refuses it. The stone offers a return to an earlier timeline but cannot preserve the present world or the exact people who use it, making it the first concrete System shortcut he rejects.

• Wraithstone is one of the rare materials Jaehwan encounters after entering Chaos. Its value lies in interacting with souls and the equipment made for beings who no longer possess physical bodies.

• Record of the Abyss contains Mulack's memories and account of the Abyss. Jaehwan restores it with Gestalt's Eye, uses it to reconstruct the history of the Phantasmal Tree, and consults it during the Time Waterfall, though its record ends before Mulack's own meeting with Big Brother.

• Moya Moya Crow lets Andersen communicate with Jaehwan inside the Metaverse. After her apparent death, he releases its remaining World Power at her old Fishing Spot and recovers a golden feather that suggests some trace of her may remain.

• Solitary Existence is the black-adamantium spirit sword Jaehwan borrows while Solitary Unbowed is under repair. It is naturally suited to his Stab and survives enormous force before Maiad's weapon breaks it.

• Gestalt's Eye is the Ouroboros-bearing left eye through which Jaehwan perceives Clothes, accesses their World Power, penetrates false rules, and uses Cognitive Dissonance. Although treated as one of the divine artifacts, it becomes integrated with his body and Awakening.

• Void Sword is Catastrophe's weapon, not Jaehwan's permanent possession. A restored soul Link allows him to call and wield it briefly against Jerome before it dissolves.

• Deus Ex Machina is first the supposed prize around which Maiad arranges the Grand Auction and later the machine supporting Maiad's Only One World. Jaehwan does not become its lasting owner; his Destruction shatters the artifacts sustaining it during their final battle.