WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ Escaping the Mystery Hotel ◈
Episode 203: Party Time - The Power of the Avatar (1)
──────
[User: Han Ga-in (Wisdom)
Date: Day 95
Current Location: Level 1, Room 105, Rest Room
Sage’s Advice: X]
- Han Ga-in
It did not take long for me to understand what Eun-sol meant when she said our ninth companion, Kim Sang-hyeon, possessed medical skills beyond remarkable, bordering on the supernatural.
“Did you say your side hurts whenever you straighten your back?”
“It does not hurt the moment I straighten it. But after I stretch all the way out and twist from side to side...”
--- Riiip!
“Urgh!”
“Your side muscles seemed somewhat twisted, so I corrected their alignment. How does it feel now?”
“Much better! Really, much better!”
From just a few vague words from the patient and a quick examination, Kim Sang-hyeon immediately determined what hurt and what had caused it. That alone was incredible, but what came next was even more astonishing. Whenever he performed some kind of “treatment,” his hand seemed to sink into the patient’s body before coming back out, leaving everyone watching with their mouths hanging open.
I had never gone to medical school, but one thing was certain. Even the world’s best medical school could not teach skills like that. It had to be a supernatural ability obtainable only in the Hotel. His healing blessing was more than enough to earn him the title of divine physician. One after another, he treated Grandpa’s aching back, Seung-yeop’s already visible forward head posture, and Song-i’s headaches that had been bothering her for some time.
A-ri, who had been watching nearby, asked with fascination.
“How do your hands even go in and out like that?”
“Miss, I do not know either. I simply found myself able to do it one day.”
“That could be useful offensively too, couldn’t it? Like slipping your hand in and pulling out someone’s heart?”
“It is possible.”
“Ooh! It is?”
“Still, for killing, it is far more practical to pull the trigger one more time from a distance than to approach someone and spend time inserting my hand.”
“That would be true most of the time, but there will be moments when it comes in handy.”
“I hope it proves useful.”
The next patient was Eun-sol.
“You said it is a little difficult to close your eyelids?”
“That’s right. Didn’t you attach this eye to me in the first place, Mr. Sang-hyeon? Did you really have to make it look this awful?”
“I can only apologize. As I said before, most of my memories from when I was an NPC have disappeared, so I do not know why my past self attached your eye in such an unsightly way. I do not think it would be difficult to make it look like an ordinary eye.”
She usually acted as if she did not care, and I had grown accustomed to seeing it, but Eun-sol seemed to have been quite bothered by how grotesque her eye looked. As soon as Kim Sang-hyeon began examining it, she quickly warmed to him, even changing the way she addressed him to “Mr. Sang-hyeon.”
“Hmm... Having examined the structure of your eye, I believe this requires a little more thought. You said it was the eye of a One-Eyed Giant Bird, correct? This unusual eye contains three small pupils, or objects resembling lenses, like a specialized camera.”
“A-ri explained something similar to me.”
“It seems all three lenses must be exposed for it to perform properly. That means you need to open your eye far wider than an ordinary person would. That must be why my past self performed such an excessive procedure on your eyelid.”
“Is it hard to fix?”
“Fixing it would be easy. The problem is that doing so could reduce the eye’s performance.”
“Then that’s a stupid idea. Keeping the eye’s performance is obviously more important.”
“Then let’s take some time to think it over. I’ll consider ways to improve it whenever I have the chance.”
“I’m grateful just for you saying that!”
...
Watching from a distance, I could feel it. Only a few hours had passed since his revival, yet Kim Sang-hyeon had already blended in well with us. His outstanding abilities as a doctor, no, a divine physician, were enough to impress every companion. Seung-yeop and Song-i had already started calling him Doctor, and Eun-sol was naturally calling him Mr. Sang-hyeon. At least for now, it did not seem like there would be any major problems.
At this rate, it should be fine to return to the snowfield.
Once I started heading there, countless concerns soon filled my head.
How could we deal with the doctor’s undisguised desperation to escape, and Eun-sol’s unease about it?
What exactly were the Wing Boots the Mysterious Craftsman was supposed to make?
What secrets were hidden in Room 104?
What did the final hint, which we still could not interpret, mean?
What scheme was the Lord plotting?
What did a situation where everyone benefited mean?
...
With every slow step I took, I tried to shake away all those concerns.
Shake them off. I had to shake them off.
This was not the time to think things over with my companions, nor was it the time to think about the next room.
Sorry to say it, but the others could handle those concerns.
Sometimes, personal growth itself was the best teamwork.
This was one of those times.
I cleared every minor concern from my mind and engraved a single word within it.
‘Avatar.’
* * *
For all my grand resolve, I had no results for quite a while. I opened the Grimoire and flipped through it, but the writing inside still looked like nothing more than indecipherable symbols or an alien language.
I was sure the Owl’s advice had been aimed at the Grimoire, so why was I still seeing no change? I thought I vaguely understood the reason.
[User: Han Ga-in (Wisdom)
Date: Day 95
Current Location: Level 2, Snow Globe Snowfield
Sage’s Advice: X]
I looked at the opaque window that always protected me.
When I had first learned how to use the Filter, I had needed to concentrate quite hard to change its shape. At some point, though, I had begun controlling it by instinct.
Whenever I sensed something suspicious, the Filter would naturally cover the front of my vision without me even thinking about it.
Of course, the Filter had been covering my vision from the moment I opened the Grimoire.
“Could that be the problem?”
The Filter in the Status Window protected my mind when evil information invaded it.
But right now, I needed to understand the great truth contained within that very evil information.
After moving the Status Window to one side of my vision, I turned my gaze back to the Grimoire.
The moment I withdrew the Filter’s protection, my head suddenly felt heavy and a dull headache set in.
I forced myself to focus, studying each character as if I were deciphering it.
...
In an instant I felt my mind sinking into a vortex as crackling strings of characters pierced my eyeballs and tore through my brain in a bizarre sensation, and I let go of myself -
“Argh!”
Blood flowed from around my eyes. Had my eyeballs been damaged? My vision had not disappeared completely. Ridiculous as it sounded, that was not a big deal in this Hotel. More importantly, I had seen something just now.
When I picked up the Grimoire I had dropped, a single sentence stood out clearly.
Accept that no unchanging self truly exists.
I recalled the conversation I had once had with Arima in the Gate Room.
‘The human mind is like a flowing river. Just as river water flows, the mind endlessly flows and changes.’
‘The unchanging self ordinary people imagine is no more than a handful of river water scooped up at a specific time and place. If you scooped water from the same spot at the same time a day later, the river would be completely different.’
... I thought I vaguely understood. Back then, she had truly understood a fragment of the great truth contained in the Grimoire. But what about me? Could I say I had reached an incomprehensible truth?
The words from the Grimoire, engraved in my mind, struck my head like a hammer, and a mass of knowledge long locked away in a safe began to flow out.
The self is like flowing water, never still for a single moment.
What the hell was that supposed to mean?
If Possession is the movement of the mind, then an Avatar is the expansion and division of the mind.
Please, say something I can understand!
A strange sensation came over me, as though I had split in two. On one side was me, unable to accept or understand wisdom. On the other was me, soaring endlessly and beginning to shed the shell of a human.
I could not tell which was the real me. Perhaps the distinction itself had no meaning.
As I clutched my head and rolled around in the snow in confusion, a bird approached me.
Pero! Ah, Pero! The Hotel’s child, born from the Golden Egg. You must still have countless unsolved secrets too. Did you have anything to say to me?
“Come into me.”
I heard human words come from Pero’s beak. Had the mysterious bird born from the Golden Egg finally learned to speak human language? Or was my mind, driven mad as it vaguely understood the Grimoire’s wisdom, creating a foolish auditory hallucination?
“If a cook wants to grill steak well, they have to become a cow. So if you become a parrot too, you will get smarter.”
“Hearing a parrot say crazy things, I really must be insane.”
My vision blurred. The cost of repeatedly looking at the Grimoire without the Filter’s protection was beginning to manifest as blindness. My eyes would recover after a good sleep in Room 105, so it was not a big deal. I could not stop here in my effort to accept the Grimoire’s wisdom.
“Fine. I’ll borrow your body.”
--- Screee!
Pero, who had just told me to come into it, turned and tried to flee the moment it heard my words. Had Pero speaking really been an auditory hallucination? If it was, why had it approached me in the first place? I did not know. And it did not matter.
--- Thud!
The moment I borrowed Pero’s body, its flight ended and it tumbled through the snow. I had borrowed its body dozens of times already, but I still did not understand how birds flew. Shouldn’t flapping wings make the body rise? Why did it fall backward instead?
Following whatever thoughts came to mind, I approached my real body sprawled on the ground and the Grimoire.
--- Twitch!
...
My body twitched. My body, which had collapsed like a homeless person who had lost consciousness from drinking in winter, writhed and convulsed. My breath stopped. I felt a crushing terror beyond every fear I had ever experienced.
I had definitely entered Pero’s body! Then what was left inside that thing?
This could not be happening! It could not be. I was definitely one person! A human being had to be one person!
The human me slowly stood up, and the parrot me blankly met its gaze. At the same time, we, or I, realized it.
We were two, and yet one.
Only then did I realize that my mind was no longer bound to either the human body or the parrot body.
I felt that my mind was above them.
Like a puppeteer controlling two puppets with both hands, I felt my will controlling both bodies at once.
The human looked at the parrot. The parrot looked at the human. The human looked toward the Hotel. The parrot looked up at the sky. I saw my companions running toward me from the Hotel.
Amid overlapping visions, mixed sensations, and that storm of information, I felt my consciousness fading.
I knew I might no longer be just one person.
Footnotes:
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