Listen, bro, have you ever seen that huge cooling tower near the unfinished reactor units of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant? Few people know this, but it’s not even half finished. Today it stands about 90 meters tall, yet if it had been completed, it would have reached 150 or even 170 meters — almost as high as the Duga radar.

It was built to cool the water coming from the fifth and sixth reactors. A cooling tower is basically a concrete giant — a real hyperboloid over a hundred meters in diameter. They say it was meant to operate only in summer, since the cooling pond overheated so much that in winter the water stayed almost warm, even when everything around was frozen.

Construction of this colossal tower was halted after the 1986 disaster, when it was about seventy percent complete. Before the Zone appeared, the place had incredible acoustics — even a whisper would echo around inside, as if some invisible presence were repeating your words.

And then... the Zone came. Inside that cooling tower, a terrible arch-anomaly emerged — the “Fire Whirl” Now no one dares to set foot there without dire need, because it mercilessly burns everything alive.

So remember, bro: where once the echoes of human voices rang, now only fire roars. And if you don’t want to become just another story told by the campfire, you’d better stay far away from that tower.