WeTried Translations

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◈ Escaping the Mystery Hotel ◈

Episode 24: Room 102, The Cursed Room - ‘House of Horror’ (10) Final

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- Kim A-ri

Creeeak!

I opened the mansion’s front gate and stepped inside.

Ah, I really didn’t want to come back here. Living as a maid in this exhausting mansion had been unbearably boring.

Still... it was almost over now. We were less than half a step away from escape. Only one thing remained, and of course it had to be the most painful part.

A moment ago, Ga-in had left after drawing the Elder’s attention.

As I walked through the empty mansion, I recalled what had happened several hours earlier.

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“Stop... Stop it. What kind of look is that?”

“You couldn’t make up your mind, so I was trying to help. Yet you insist on resisting. If you’d just accepted it, this would’ve ended easily for both of us.”

“I have a better plan!”

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A better plan.

It involved some risk compared with the completely certain escape method of “kill yourself immediately”...

Still, you couldn’t survive in this hotel by doing only safe things. If something was worth gaining, taking a risk was safer in the long run.

That was why I had been persuaded by his plan.

This was the first time I had been alone since entering the mansion.

It really was enormous. Maybe it felt even bigger because I was in a child’s body. After walking for a while, I naturally arrived at the Elder’s study.

It was probably here, right?

My memories weren’t clear.

According to the memories of the “personality” the hotel had implanted, the priest’s granddaughter had once come to persuade the Elder. Then she saw “something” the Elder showed her, and her mind and body broke down.

Then the priest surrendered. In return, the Elder restored the priest’s granddaughter...

During the recovery process, her memories of the “something” she had seen became hazy. Blurring those memories had been part of the recovery from the start.

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“I’m not saying we shouldn’t die. I’m saying we should do a little more before we die.”

“Is there something else you want to do?”

“When I saw the message after leaving Room 101, I had a suspicion... Then, after playing cards with you recently, I became certain.

Escape isn’t the end of a Curse Room. It’s only a means.

At least one of us needs to escape. Then we keep trying, exploring the Curse Room until we eventually eliminate the Source of the Curse, right?

So even if we’re going to die, we need to learn as much as we can first.”

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I had decided to go and be killed in what might be the most horrific way in the world.

When I entered the study, I saw piles of papers scattered everywhere.

Where was it again? My memory was blurry. Maybe around here? I lifted a painting on the wall and found a lever. It was strangely old-fashioned in little ways like this.

When I pulled the lever, the bookshelf turned as though it were the most natural thing in the world, revealing a wooden door.

There were stairs beyond it. So many that I couldn’t see where they ended.

There wasn’t even any lighting.

Did I really have to go down there?

I had seen every kind of horror in the world countless times. But no matter how often I experienced things like this, I could never get used to them.

The stairs. I kept going down and down without end. To the bottom of hell.

The air rising from even farther below felt as though it were eroding every corner of my lungs.

How far had I descended?

It felt like at least an hour had passed, but I couldn’t be sure. In a place like this, my sense of time was bound to blur.

At the bottom of the stairs, I saw a bluish glow for the first time. Beneath it stood an old iron door, nearly rusted through and falling apart.

I forced the door open and stepped inside.

There was a book glowing blue.

The instant I saw it, I knew. That was it.

This was probably the final reward of this room.

The moment I touched it, I would learn something and die horribly. But it was too late to just turn around and go back up, so I had no choice.

The book looked ordinary. Its cover was made of some unknown black leather.

Unknown letters were engraved on it.

I opened the book.

Darkness swallowed me.

I fell endlessly.

A bottomless hole. Eternal free fall.

A place where I could fall for ten million years and never reach the ground.

Just as there was no north beyond the North Pole and every direction led south...

There was no beginning or end here, no distinction between up and down.

Every direction was “down.”

There was clearly no light source, yet I could somehow see the shapes on the walls.

Black, red, writhing walls. Grotesque things like the insides of a living creature.

I was nothing more than an insect falling between a creature’s organs.

For reasons I couldn’t understand, my fall stopped in midair.

I saw something in the distance.

How far away was it? I didn’t know. It seemed impossibly distant, yet I could make out its shape.

Maybe it was closer than I thought. Or maybe it was simply too enormous. I couldn’t tell.

A writhing shape came into view. It was like an insect crawling up an outer wall without stopping for even a moment.

Every time one of its arms touched the wall, the arm melted away, only for more arms to rise endlessly in its place.

Ah. It was like watching a parasite crawl between organs.

The sensation of hundreds of millions of insects crawling upward while filling my stomach. Disgust boiled up inside me.

I should force myself to think of something else.

The mansion, no, most of this hotel was fake.

The mansion, the mountain, the river, all of it was no more than a stage the hotel had molded from clay.

Yet even in a movie, the actors on the set existed in reality.

There were “real” things in the hotel.

Why had the hotel been created?

Someone had said it was a process for selecting heroes through trials.

Someone else had said it was a process for giving great treasures to suitable people.

Perhaps the hotel was a breeding ground.

A hell that kept monsters too dangerous to release into the world imprisoned forever, maintaining them by periodically scattering people as feed.

The crawling thing turned its gaze toward me.

Had it always had eyes? It wouldn’t need something like eyes in a place like this, so had it made them?

The Elder worshipped that thing like a god.

How ridiculous.

To an ant, even a chicken would look like a god. But once it was in human hands, it was nothing more than a snack to go with a drink.

No matter how impressive it was, it was ultimately just a shabby abomination trapped inside the organs of something far more unfathomable.

I felt everything in my vision begin to crumble.

Now I had truly reached my limit.

The moment I forced my gaze upward, something rose from the “organs” and approached me.

He made me do something this horrible and called it a “better plan.”

The moment I got out, I was going to land one good punch on him.

The mansion’s long night came to an end.

/You have successfully escaped!

Unauthorized participation! You clearly broke the rules, so you were punished and began at a disadvantage.

Even so, you did your best and helped a participant at a critical moment.

That strategy of choosing to kill the sacrifice instead of the demon without a shred of pity! Still, there are times when such decisiveness is necessary.

With this, the demon-tainted mansion owner’s ritual has failed.

You have escaped the curse. Yet you can still feel that the Source of the Curse remains.

A companion has successfully escaped! Congratulations! Since an escapee has emerged, all members will return safely./

* * *

[User: Han Ga-in (Wisdom)

Date: Day 8

Current Location: Level 1, Corridor

Sage’s Advice: 0]

- Han Ga-in

Feeling dizzy, I got to my feet. Like when I had left Room 101, it felt as though I’d suddenly been thrown outside the door, passed out, and then regained consciousness.

Looking around, I saw “seven” people flailing about like I was.

Elena, Cha Jin-cheol, Lee Eun-sol, Yoo Song-i, Park Seung-yeop. And the two people we now needed to have many conversations with.

Scenes of people dying miserably in the hotel flashed through my mind. My heart pounded without warning, and emotion surged up inside me.

Elena had died by strangulation, Eun-sol had been impaled on a skewer, Jin-cheol had died from poison, and I had killed myself with a Dagger. How had Seung-yeop died?

I pushed those horrible memories aside.

This was the moment. This very moment.

How often had I imagined all of us leaving the room and meeting again with smiles on our faces...?

Today’s meal at the hotel would probably turn into a flood of tears. Even I felt my eyes growing damp as emotion welled up.

Come to think of it, one question had been answered.

Even if we died at different times in the Curse Room, we all came out at once.

Of course, this was only the beginning. We had far too many questions to answer together.

Setting aside the secrets the hotel held, didn’t we know far too little about one another as well?

Just as I was thinking over the things we needed to uncover, one by one, someone approached me.

It was a familiar figure I had seen throughout the mansion. Their appearance was much the same as it had been in the mansion.

“You’re awake? You... Is your name still the same? So-”

A stinging punch came flying at me without mercy. I fell to the floor again.

Footnotes:

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