The question lingered, a profound tremor through my very being. If all other humans had just awakened the Tongue of the Beginning through Babel, what did that make me, with my -80% proficiency in the Tongue of the End, a power I had been honing through two years of ceaseless death and rebirth? I was an anomaly. An outlier.
The Tower's narrative had explained that I wasn't summoned because I had died that night, desperately trying to protect my family. But my death, that initial, brutal cessation of life, hadn't simply ended me. It had ignited something. While others received a gentle awakening, a slow reintroduction to their lost heritage, my rebirth had been violent, a forced immersion into the very end of things. The monster that poverty had forged in me had, inadvertently, tapped directly into the true, terrifying potential of humanity's hidden power.
My new insight into the Tongue of Beginning felt like a delicate sapling beside the gnarled, ancient tree of my Tongue of the End. The Beginning whispered of new paths, of creation, of pulling possibility into existence. The End roared of annihilation, of absolute cessation, of pushing things into oblivion. They were two sides of the same coin, yet I had grasped the dark, final side first, by chance, by trauma.
The implications were staggering. Was I a different kind of human? A unique catalyst? Or simply a broken shard of humanity's past, destined to wield the ultimate power of destruction? The fear of not understanding myself, of being an unknown variable in this grand cosmic game, gnawed at me. My path here hadn't been orchestrated by Babel's grand plan; it had been a desperate, personal evolution, a direct consequence of a world that left me no other choice but to become something more.
The silence of the chamber returned, but it was no longer empty. It was filled with the weight of this new understanding, of my unique, isolated existence. I was here. I had reached Babel. And I was the only one who truly understood the Tongue of the End, the power that had once made humanity feared across the multiverse.
The -80% mark on my hand pulsed, a cold, hard beacon. It wasn't just a number; it was a challenge. A reminder of the power I possessed, and the greater depths I had yet to unlock. My journey within Babel was only just beginning, and with it, the terrifying question of what I truly was, and what the ultimate 'End' would bring.