WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR
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◈ Escaping the Mystery Hotel ◈
Episode 239: Room 202, Curse Room - ‘The Little Mermaid’ (17)
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[User: Han Ga-in (Wisdom)
Date: Day 102
Current Location: Level 2, Room 202 - Curse Room ‘The Little Mermaid’
Sage’s Advice: 2]
- Han Ga-in
The Sea God was angry at the Merfolk’s sin, yet the Merfolk themselves didn’t know why he was angry. It was a truly strange situation. Serenade had dismissed Song-i’s theory that environmental destruction might be the cause, but A-ri asked her to confirm it once more.
“Sometimes the obvious answer really is the right one. Modern civilization can’t exactly keep going without harming the environment. Are you sure that’s not it?”
“No. Naturally, that was the first possibility we considered. For the past twenty years, we’ve moved every factory and facility that could cause problems to the mainland.”
“... To the mainland?”
“You could say we’ve completed the outsourcing of environmental destruction.”
They had moved every environmentally harmful facility to the mainland. It was a clear answer, though it only meant the environmental destruction had been relocated. Still, it was hard to imagine the Sea God holding the Merfolk accountable for the destruction of Earth’s entire environment.
Wasn’t the timing of his anger important?
“You said you sensed the Sea God’s anger twenty years ago, right? I think it must be something that began then and has continued ever since. What happened around that time?”
“Of course, we considered that too. But we truly don’t know. It’s not as though nothing happened twenty years ago. This island had a population of over five hundred thousand even then. All sorts of things happened every day. We don’t know which of them angered the god.”
The conversation was starting to go in circles. What did it mean that they had sensed the Sea God’s anger for twenty years? It meant the Daughters of the Sea God had spent two decades researching its cause. We couldn’t solve that problem by talking among ourselves for a few minutes.
A-ri seemed to think the same thing and cut in.
“Let’s leave that topic here. Gods don’t think like humans. Sometimes they decide to wipe out humanity for reasons that seem utterly trivial to us, so we won’t figure it out by holding a meeting. And...”
“And?”
“Never mind. Either way, the immediate problem is the unidentified ritual Lee Su-ho is carrying out on this island. You’ve been pursuing him for months, right?”
“Yes. As you seem to know already, Elena made a serious mistake after being swayed by her emotions in the moment. Since then, at least five trained Merfolk have pursued him at all times.”
“Good. Can you mark every location you’ve already checked on a map and give it to me? Management Bureau drones will search the island and the surrounding area soon, so we should save time where we can.”
Before long, Serenade sent us several sets of data. While A-ri reviewed them, I brought up something important.
“From here, we’re going to retrieve Elena.”
“... You’re very confident. To borrow your expression, it seems you already met Elena before traveling through time?”
“That’s right. We need her.”
“Then let’s go together. You’re leaving immediately, correct? We’ll meet at the hospital.”
With that, we finished exchanging information with Serenade, left the Provincial Government Building, and prepared to head to the hospital where Elena was.
“The hidden history from eight hundred years ago, the true nature of the Merfolk, and the ecology of Rudah all seem interesting and valuable, but we haven’t learned anything about the immediate threat of Kadarudah’s Descent. We don’t know why Kadarudah is angry, and we can’t even estimate Lee Su-ho’s location. Should I use Sage’s Advice?”
“Save it. Have you forgotten how Serenade nearly caused your instant death earlier? There’ll be plenty of danger today.”
As soon as we got into the limousine, Song-i cautiously asked.
“A-ri, weren’t you about to say something earlier? You stopped while we were talking about why Kadarudah is angry.”
“... This is just my thought.”
“Go on.”
“What if it’s already something that can’t be undone?”
“Huh?”
“I tried thinking from the Sea God’s perspective. He mainly communicates with the Daughters of the Sea God through dreams, right?”
“Right.”
“Then is there any reason for him to use those dreams just to say, ‘I’m angry!’? He could directly send them a message saying, ‘Something you’re doing has angered me.’”
I hadn’t thought of it that way. The beings called gods I’d encountered since entering the hotel had been nothing more than demons or monsters in the end. But after hearing A-ri, I understood.
Kadarudah wasn’t an incomprehensible demon that never communicated with mortals, like the demons we had faced before. He communicated through dreams, and according to Elena, he could even convey strange concepts like ‘cycles’ or whatever in a way humans could understand.
Once I realized that, the next thought came naturally. With such excellent communication skills, couldn’t he simply tell them why he was angry?
A-ri wasn’t finished.
“So I thought, what if there was no point in telling them?”
“No point?”
“Something irreversible happened twenty years ago. Those twenty years may have been the period Kadarudah spent gathering power to unleash his anger.”
It was an ominous thought. If that theory was right, there was no point in analyzing why he was angry. It was already too late to undo it.
Jin-cheol, who was driving, gave his opinion.
“Do we need to overthink it? No matter why he’s angry, all we have to do is prevent his Descent. We just need to find Lee Su-ho. Looking at the sky makes me feel a little better.”
The sky, out of nowhere?
Wondering what he meant, Song-i and I looked outside. Blue lines stretched across the sky in a lattice, making it seem as if the entire sky had become a massive checkerboard.
“What is that? Management Bureau drones?”
Weren’t about twenty drones supposed to fly around and search the island? A-ri answered as if it were nothing.
“Did you think the drones would fly around the island carrying cameras themselves? You’d need more than two thousand of them to search an island as large as Jeju Island that way. Besides, there are plenty of places drones can’t enter.”
“Then what are they doing?”
“It’s roughly like taking an X-ray of someone’s body. You don’t put a camera directly inside their body, right? I don’t know the engineering principles behind it either.”
It was a spectacular sight. Twenty-two drones created a checkerboard of blue lines in the sky, and the grid began sweeping over the island as though scanning it. Before long, the drones flew somewhere we could no longer see them.
Song-i murmured blankly.
“If they search like that, won’t they finish quickly?”
“Even so, it’ll be close. We’re terribly short on time. Everything will end sometime between dawn tomorrow and later tomorrow morning.”
“We’ll need luck, then. Lee Su-ho needs to be in the area they started searching first.”
Around then, a message arrived from our other companions.
“They say they’re about to arrive on the island. And a tidal wave has hit Busan.”
“The disaster Seung-yeop mentioned?”
“Yes. Busan is in chaos. It’s... two thirty now. Around four, strange cries will be heard again, and contact with the outside will be cut off. I told them to come to the hospital.”
“It’s fortunate we contacted them before then.”
When we reached the hospital, Serenade had already arrived, even though we should have left first. Did the Daughters of the Sea God have some shortcut reserved only for them?
“You’ve arrived. Shall we go in?”
Jin-cheol stepped forward.
“Our companions will arrive soon, so let’s go in together.”
After Elena was released from Sealing, she would be in an extremely dangerous state until Clear Mirror, Still Water restored her mind. It seemed better to wait for the others than to go in by ourselves.
Our concern turned out to be meaningless.
* * *
Elena woke peacefully, as though she were waking from a nap. Unlike before, Ominous Imagination didn’t run wild the moment she woke and create bizarre phenomena.
That was because Serenade, whom we had brought, and Riringanor, whom the companions who had just arrived from outside had brought, were both playing their Flutes. These Flutes given to the Daughters of the Sea God were said to have the power to suppress the madness originating from Primordial Memory.
This peaceful awakening wasn’t entirely positive, though. When Elena woke for the second time, she had gained no additional information. It seemed the Flutes temporarily suppressed the connection between the Daughters of the Sea God and Kadarudah.
Elena muttered regretfully.
“Next time-”
Han Ga-in: Chat Window. Riringanor is nearby.
Elena: Next time, wake me without the Flute.
Already talking about a next time... That was far too ominous.
“I just got word from Chief Park. He says the Assault Team won’t be able to deploy until eleven tonight.”
“Can’t they come any sooner? As you know, by dawn-”
Grandfather sighed.
“I told them that, but to anyone else, saying the world will end at dawn tomorrow just sounds like you’re making a fuss.”
A-ri replied.
“It’ll be nice if the Assault Team comes, but if they don’t arrive in time, there’s nothing we can do. The drones are already here.”
It felt as though we had done almost everything we could. Finding Lee Su-ho, the most important task, was no longer in our hands. It depended on the drones in the sky.
Eun-sol, who had arrived, cautiously spoke.
“Should we search too?”
A-ri shook her head.
“When a doctor is treating someone, an amateur helping at their side doesn’t help. They only get in the way. Leave it to the drones. We’re a whole group of people with supernatural powers, so we’re perfect for confusing them.”
In the end, we went into a nearby cafe and exchanged the information we had gathered. The topic everyone was most interested in was undoubtedly why Kadarudah was angry, but no one could find a convincing answer.
At 4:20, cries echoed across the entire island, and contact with the outside was cut off. We could no longer contact Chief Park either.
At 6:40, the drones identified a location where there was approximately a 94.3% probability that a Chaos Phenomenon was occurring.
The limousine carrying all of us headed toward a farm in the island’s northwest. Serenade also told us that she would bring the Merfolk. Eun-sol seemed rather bewildered.
“According to the map, this place is a tangerine farm. What kind of ritual could possibly take place somewhere like that?”
“He’s the Saint of the Sea God, after all. Every Daughter of the Sea God has supernatural powers, so the Saint probably has some strange power too. I think he used it to hide the place.”
“Then we won’t fail to find it even after we get there, right?”
At 7:10, we finally arrived at the farm. As evening approached, everyone began to feel anxious. Did we even have eight hours left until Kadarudah’s Descent?
The moment we arrived, a strange-looking drone floating in the air led us to a door.
“This is...”
It was a desolate farm without a soul in sight. Plants grew wildly in every direction, and a small, crumbling house stood among them. The drone pointed to the door leading into the house’s living room.
Everyone let out low groans as they stared at the door. At that moment, I would have wagered an arm that there was an unidentified alternate space behind it, not a simple living room.
Grandfather sighed.
“Of all ways... If he relied on a physical facility, I was going to ask Serenade whether she could blow it up with explosives. But an eerie alternate space? Isn’t it obvious there’s going to be some hellish place behind that door?”
The person who unexpectedly stepped forward with confidence was the doctor.
“There are times in life when you have to enter a trap even when you know it’s a trap. I suppose this is one of those times. Let’s go in. Time is short, isn’t it?”
--- Creeeak!
The sound of the door opening was strangely ominous.
Footnotes:
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