WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR
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◈ Escaping the Mystery Hotel ◈
Episode 145: Rest and Reorganization (1)
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[User: Han Ga-in (Wisdom)
Date: Day 74
Current Location: Level Basement, Ski Resort
Sage’s Advice: 3]
- Han Ga-in
My body sped down the ski slope through the swirling snow.
I focused every bit of my attention on a single point ahead. Amid the scenery rushing past, I could see everyone watching me with worried expressions.
Now.
The Feather Tattoo on my shoulder grew slightly warm, and I was transported with the sensation that an invisible hand had grabbed me by the collar and hurled me away.
...
When I came to my senses, I found myself floating in midair.
“Aaaaaaah!”
--- Crash!
Some distance away, I heard the snow-covered ground burst apart. A giant who looked nearly two meters tall leaped into the air and caught me.
--- Thud! Flop!
The sturdy older guy absorbed most of the impact when we hit the ground, so I landed without getting seriously hurt.
“Ah, why is this so hard? Thanks, Jin-cheol. If it weren’t for you, this kind of practice...”
Something felt strange as I spoke, so I turned to look at him. He seemed lost in deep thought.
“Jin-cheol?”
“Ah, it’s nothing. More importantly, Teleportation seems pretty difficult. I’ve watched you do it seven or eight times over the past two days, and almost half the time you end up somewhere strange.”
“I’m sorry.”
“We agreed to this practice, so there’s nothing to apologize for. But do you really have to do it while skiing?”
“After trying it a few times, I found it easy to use while standing still. It gets harder while moving, and even harder when I’m moving quickly.”
“Is that so? Well, there’s a point to making practice difficult on purpose.”
Whoosh!
A-ri arrived with a graceful slide down the slope. Song-i and Elena soon followed.
The moment she arrived, A-ri pointed something out with an amused look.
“Whenever you make a mistake, you’re mostly accurate forward, backward, left, and right. But you keep teleporting upward.”
“You’re right.”
“This is just my guess, but aren’t you instinctively aiming upward because you’re afraid of ending up underground when you focus your Teleportation?”
“Hmm...”
“Think of it this way. When you choose the direction you’ll move from your starting point, you probably tilt it up a little without realizing because you’re afraid of going underground. It’s only a slight adjustment, too small for you to notice, but since you move more than ten meters in that skewed direction, the error becomes huge by the time you reach your destination.”
“That’s a convincing analysis.”
It was nothing new, but A-ri had more experience using supernatural powers than I did, so she came up with a fairly plausible theory.
As I thought it over, someone brushed the snow from my hair and clothes after I had fallen and rolled around on the ground.
The touch felt soft, so I turned my head and saw Elena absentmindedly brushing off my hair.
...
The moment our eyes met, we both got flustered and took a step back. It didn’t seem like Elena had acted with any particular intention either.
“Ah, there was so much snow on you that I did it without thinking...”
“Th-thank you.”
“...”
“...”
An awkward silence fell. Thankfully, A-ri broke it.
“Practicing Teleportation with your own body every time seems pretty dangerous. Jin-cheol can’t stay near you to save you every time. What about borrowing Pero’s body? Even if it teleports into the sky, it can just flap its wings and come down.”
Song-i’s mouth fell open. Then she whispered something to Pero.
--- Screech!
“Aah! Aah! Song-i, take this one away!”
Soon, the furious parrot began yanking out A-ri’s hair. Laughing like mad, the rest of us started leaving the ski resort.
Funny as it was, the suggestion had no real value.
The source of my Teleportation ability was the tattoo engraved on my body.
I couldn’t use it during Possession. I had already confirmed that yesterday, before A-ri suggested it.
We had been given a week of rest after clearing the Gate Room.
A-ri’s blessing had already confirmed there were no more places to explore on the first floor, so we simply took it easy.
At first, I didn’t understand why the Hotel would wait a week to open the second floor instead of opening it right away. As time passed, though, I naturally came to understand.
If the second floor had opened early, we would have spent our time exploring it instead of resting. That was probably why the Hotel had deliberately given us time to rest without opening the second floor.
Everyone went to the facilities they wanted to enjoy.
After learning about the darkness hidden in Elena’s heart in Perfect Life, Song-i eagerly led us to the ski resort. We all spent the first day there together.
Of course, not everyone liked skiing. About half of us began visiting other facilities the next day.
That was how we rested in the places we wanted while preparing for the second floor.
Still, this was the Hotel, a place where countless trials awaited us.
We couldn’t truly rest at ease.
There were several important tasks we had to settle during this time.
* * *
“Achoo!”
“Jin-cheol, are you okay?”
“Ah, I’m fine. I’m coughing because I rolled around in the snow to save some guy.”
I felt a pang of guilt.
“... I’m sorry.”
“Forget it. Let’s eat. By the way, this is my first time at the ski resort. It’s strange. It feels like clouds are wrapped around the whole mountain.”
Song-i turned her head this way and that, looking around with interest.
“What do you think is outside the clouds?”
“Maybe there’s surprisingly nothing out there. Like the Hiking room. If you went too far from the mountain there, you returned to the starting point. It might be similar.”
After that brief exchange, we started eating the simple sausages, hot bars, fish cakes, and other food prepared at the ski resort.
After some time passed, the conversation naturally turned to the topic we had discussed most often since our rest began: Sealing.
Jin-cheol spoke first.
“I am worried, though. Things will be incredibly difficult if we don’t have Ga-in.”
A-ri answered with a worried expression.
“Right. It’s a shame to lose the other abilities too, but Scenario Understanding is the biggest problem. Can we keep going without that ability...?”
Everyone seemed worried about my absence, and that made me feel strangely good. Still, I couldn’t hide my own worry. What if everyone failed while I was gone? Would I die without being able to do anything?
“Keep your spirits up, everyone. If you think about it, we cleared all the Curse Rooms without Scenario Understanding.”
Jin-cheol let out an even deeper sigh.
“We cleared them by dying our way through them like idiots. So we’ll have to do it that way again.”
One fact underlay the conversation between my companions and me.
The person Sealed in the first room on the second floor would definitely be me.
I possessed an Inheritance, and aside from that, I had gained all sorts of abilities and tools, including Descent, the pen, and Teleportation. I had also enhanced my blessing more times than anyone else and gained the powerful ability called Scenario Understanding.
I couldn’t compare myself to the people from A-ri’s first run through the Hotel, who had apparently obtained two or three Inheritances each, but even now, I had grown far more than the others.
A-ri spoke again.
“We can’t just worry about this and leave it at that. The others need to find ways to grow without Ga-in.”
Song-i answered anxiously.
“That makes sense, but is there a way? The second floor only opens five days from now.”
“There’s still a room left on the first floor.”
The last remaining Curse Room on the first floor.
Room 104, Hotel High, the Prestigious Academy.
Everyone fell silent when that room came up.
Why were we reluctant to enter Hotel High?
When there were still many Curse Rooms left, we avoided it because it was the hardest one. At this point, though, the room’s difficulty was no longer the problem.
We had already cleared the Gate Room, which was a higher stage than Hotel High, and gained countless rewards.
The threats we already knew about in Hotel High could be dealt with easily.
The cultists in the Old School Building? If Jin-cheol used the Star, he could sweep them all away by himself.
If I used the Grimoire’s Possession well, it would take some time, but I could deal with most of them too.
The problem was the Lord. More precisely, Descent itself, which the Lord had left within me.
I decided to honestly say what everyone had been worrying about.
“Are you all worried that Descent might cause something strange to happen to me?”
A-ri admitted it right away.
“Right. We really don’t know what could happen. In the worst case, you might lose control to the Son of Heaven and turn against us entirely.”
“...”
“If we still had the Red Pill, I would have suggested making you take it before re-entering Hotel High... Of course, Pero already ate it, so there’s no point.”
Song-i weakly protested.
“Pero ate it and played a huge role in the Gate Room.”
It was true, so no one argued.
Elena answered with concern.
“Can we really say for certain that something like that will happen?”
“I’m only talking about the worst possibility. The problem is that this Hotel tends to make the most horrific and ominous possibilities real. Can’t you ask with Sage’s Advice?”
“I already asked yesterday. The answer wasn’t very meaningful. It told me to decide after careful consideration.”
“Sometimes your Sponsor, Owl, is even less helpful than Pero.”
A-ri spoke as if it were only a guess based on a vague feeling.
...
Still, I understood that A-ri wasn’t speaking from a simple hunch.
She just didn’t want to explain every uncertain detail, so she put it that way.
I had come to a similar conclusion through my own reasoning.
The true nature of Descent. The inhuman personality of the Son of Heaven I had already experienced.
And the advice Owl had given during the Gate Room, even going so far as to make a risky move.
If I entered Hotel High, there was a very high chance I would turn into something else.
How could only the Lord attempt something strange that even the other Prisoners could not?
He had some kind of secret.
I lightly shook my head and pushed the unanswerable worry to the back of my mind.
Jin-cheol seemed to think it was another pointless conversation, so he changed the subject.
“Haven’t we discussed this several times already? And given up every time? Like A-ri said, if there’s a chance Ga-in will betray us because of that thing called the Lord, we can’t enter while Ga-in is the strongest among us. Let’s find another way.”
In the end, we returned to the original problem.
It was almost certain that I would be Sealed in the first room on the second floor.
Was there any way for everyone except me to grow during the rest period?
Entering Hotel High, the first option, had been rejected again.
We suspected it was a room where I, the strongest member of the group, might betray everyone.
We couldn’t be sure unless we entered, but if it were true, it would be even worse than my being Sealed on the second floor.
Then what was the second option?
I remembered the idea Grandpa Mook-seong had brought up yesterday evening.
Elena, who had thought of the same thing, spoke.
“I think it would be best to use Eun-sol’s Monkey’s Paw once more. Something on the level of the Nightmare Butterfly event shouldn’t be too difficult.”
A-ri pointed out her mistake.
“Elena, it’s not Monkey’s Paw. It’s Greedy Hand.”
“Oops!”
Greedy Hand was an ability that brought only rewards to its owner, without any penalty at all.
Eun-sol had been reluctant to use Greedy Hand because of that selfish trait, but everyone agreed that it was far more useful than it looked.
There were fewer ways to grow in the Hotel than one might think.
Unlike games that encouraged grinding, you couldn’t grow forever by endlessly hunting in a hunting ground.
The only places where you could farm rewards were basically Curse Rooms, and they disappeared as soon as they were cleared.
In a place where means of growth were so limited, Greedy Hand was practically an ability that regularly created a mini hunting ground.
That concluded our brief meeting at the ski resort.
* * *
- Han Ga-in
We left the ski resort and returned to the first floor of the Hotel.
Perhaps because it was evening, the people who had been resting elsewhere began returning to Room 105 one by one.
We exchanged light greetings and entered Room 105, only for everyone to fall silent at once.
The enormous Protective Suit placed near the entrance.
What were we supposed to do with that thing?
It was already the third day since obtaining the Protective Suit.
For three days, the Protective Suit had made us blind despite our open eyes.
The nearly human-sized outfit seemed to be saying, ‘Do something with me already,’ yet everyone walked past it as if they couldn’t see it. If someone accidentally touched it, everyone flinched.
The issue of the Protective Suit was something we had to confront.
Impervious to blades, water, and fire!
That outfit wasn’t just an escape tool. It was incredibly useful armor.
We couldn’t avoid it like this forever. That was why we had placed it at the entrance of the room, so we could never forget it.
“Wait! Listen up!”
The third day since obtaining the Protective Suit.
At last, A-ri took charge and spoke.
Footnotes:
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