One Stat To Rule Them All

When life gives you tentacles . . . Arcen Henwick wasn't always an octopus man. He used to be a scrawny fifteen-year-old nerd scoring straight A's in every exam. Just when he thought life couldn't be any more boring, the sky vanished, blood rained for twelve days straight, and his mother turned into a tree. The survivors called it The Mayday, a biblically bad shitshow that left Arcen a mutant with a head full of tentacles. Eight years passed, and the world is now a totalitarian dystopia. New gods hide behind the fake sky, dropping colossal towers as a challenge for humanity to climb them. Many struggled for glory and wealth in the Tower Gold Rush, but Arcen had a different plan. He went for a soul-crushing, mind-numbing corporate job at Helviter Industries. He works, he gets blackout drunk on the weekends, and he wants to die before retirement age. Absolutely no tower climbing, no thanks. He could always kill himself in far less painful ways. This worked just fine for him until one day, an oil-drenched, slimy girl blackmailed him into accepting a dangerous project offered by his boss. An alien egg was found in a tower, and Arcen has to analyze what grows inside it. Caught in a wild gambit beyond his wildest nightmares, Arcen must adapt or let the tower swallow him whole. ⚠️Warning: this story is dark, wild and unhinged. Non-spoiler content warnings below.  Release Schedule: INACTIVE. WORKING ON A REWRITE. PLANNING A RELAUNCH. What To Expect - Mutant MC who goes from a corporate wageslave to a tower climbing antihero.- LITRPG System apocalypse + Tower climbing set in a post apocalyptic dystopia.- Dynamic ecosystems inside 1000 floor towers that bridge the sky with earth.- Teaming up with unlikely allies against dangerous enemies.- Brutal, visceral combat with powers contracted from the new gods.- Sci-fan, as in soft sci-fi + low fantasy. - Some horror elements in the cosmic, existential, and body variety.- Meaty chapters averaging 3k words. Above 2.5k and below 4k.- Extra large backlog from the start weighing in at ~270k words. - Mid-slow burn, not really slow burn. - Dark satire + black comedy. Funny where it shouldn’t be—specially where it shouldn’t be. What Not To Expect - Romance, harem. None of that.- Blank slate MC for self insert. - Total moral clarity—this is not a superhero story.- OP MC dedicated to aura farming. - Typical linear progression. There is no clearly stepped A-Z baby steps path to power. There is no benevolent tutorial. The MC is not a special boy with yellow paint quests.- Pure horror, or grimdark. Inspirations - Chainsaw man- Severance- Made In Abyss- Scavengers Reign- Final Fantasy Content Warnings - Are there for a reason. No punches will be pulled.- All encompassing disclaimer covering all others except anything sexual. - There will be no granular warnings per each chapter.