WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR
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◈ Escaping the Mystery Hotel ◈
Episode 33: Room 103, The Cursed Room - ‘Athanasia’s Human Ranch’ (2)
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[User: ㅁㅁㅁㅁㅁㅁ
Day: ㅁㅁ
Current Location: Level 1, Room 103 (Curse Room - Athanasia’s Human Ranch)
Sage’s Advice: 3]
I stood there blankly, watching the people.
Enormous, pure-white structures, too vast to take in at a glance.
Between them hurried the beings we had thought were Goblins, their true forms revealed as white giants with countless tentacles.
There were countless machines I couldn't understand.
Some looked like enormous smartphones, while others had no fixed form at all.
They all had one thing in common.
Each wore a silver bracelet on one of their tentacles.
Whenever a strange holy light flickered from those silver bracelets, changes came over the people.
Were they tools for controlling humans?
Within the spaces created by those structures, people wearing collar-like restraints around their necks lived inside their own illusions.
At first, they were probably assigned human roles and made to live in those illusions.
Then, as their souls were gradually drained away, they would one day be trapped in animal bodies. In the end, they would be used up after being assigned the roles of beings whose intelligence had vanished, lower even than insects.
I was witnessing a world where humans had truly become resources.
The last day of Animal Farm had grown hazy even in my memory.
Everything had crumbled, and our small rebellion had vanished with a single gesture from the giants.
What if I had died then?
At least I wouldn't have had to endure a life of suffering like this.
Cows, pigs, cats, dogs, snakes, wolves, and rats were all crushed in an instant and assigned “new roles.”
Only the goose had escaped that cursed cycle.
The being who pulled me out was a pure-white giant.
Only after quite some time had passed did I learn that the other giants called him Theodus.
Theodus reset the “ranch” and pulled out only me.
Why?
I couldn't ask a giant with whom conversation and communication were impossible, so I thought about it alone, over and over.
‘Affinity.’
The Blessing the Hotel had given me.
The Blessing of Affinity had kept the bizarre monkeys from attacking me on the first day. This time, it had made a monster that devoured human souls take a liking to me.
Perhaps the giant's feelings toward me were...
Like a person who runs a chicken farm spotting an especially cute chicken and keeping it as a pet.
People eat chickens without pause and send hundreds of thousands of chicks into grinders every day, yet many also keep pet chickens.
Even humans are creatures with such complicated sides. Beings that clearly surpass humans couldn't possibly be simple.
That was the closest comparison I could make within the limits of my understanding.
Was that fortunate?
Theodus didn't particularly abuse or torment me.
If anything, he would tap my head whenever he passed by, as if treating me like a cute pet. Before long, a few other giants began doing the same.
The water and meals weren't given to me in any particularly humiliating way, either. There were always ordinary-tasting energy-bar-like things and cups of water.
Then again, if my guess was right, I was a pet.
There probably weren't many people who would abuse a pet they had specifically rescued from a chicken farm.
If all of this was because of the Blessing the Hotel had given me, then I had received an incredible Blessing.
----------Beep
A signal rang throughout the entire building.
I knew what that sound meant now.
The silver bracelets worn by the giants moving through the structures gave off a pure-white glow.
Countless humans, each lost in their own world and illusion, walked out.
Even as they walked out like this...
They were still trapped in their illusions.
Their minds remained sunk in endless fantasies, while only their bodies moved on their own as they waited their turn to be “harvested.”
After some time, a gray giant with a grotesque form appeared.
The other giants had roughly humanoid shapes, with several tentacles in place of arms.
That being didn't even have legs. It was nothing but countless tentacles.
It looked like a spider starfish enlarged a million times over, with tentacles growing from its body.
What was it?
Why was that being so different from the other giants?
Even Teacher didn't know. In truth, Teacher's circumstances weren't fundamentally that different from mine.
Teacher had simply been trapped in this facility far longer than I had and learned more as a result.
Tentacles shot out and pierced the people's heads.
At first, seeing it had nearly made me cry. Now, I just found it strange.
Why didn't a single drop of blood come out when they pierced people's heads?
And there shouldn't be anything inside a human head except a brain.
How did those tentacles pull “that thing” out of their heads?
That thing.
A pale lump.
At a glance, it looked like a tiny cloud.
Then again, it looked like a shining stone giving off light.
Something strange that seemed to combine the traits of liquid, solid, and gas in just the right measure.
‘Fragments of Reason.’ ‘Junction of Soul and Body.’
That was how Teacher had described it.
The full explanation was endlessly complicated, but simply put, the more of it was extracted, the more human intelligence was squeezed dry and brought closer to that of an insect.
That, apparently, was why the Athanasia of this world raised people.
There were supposedly several ranches where intelligent beings other than humans were squeezed dry as well, though I had never seen them.
I only ever went back and forth between the human ranch and the underground. I had named it the underground myself.
If I had been alone, I would never have had any way of learning what it was.
I hadn't known anything until Teacher told me.
I watched vaguely as they extracted reason from humans who still possessed high intelligence, then “disposed of” humans whose intelligence had fallen closer to that of animals and whose productivity had begun to decline.
How long did I have to keep watching this?
Time passed endlessly.
I wasn't even sure how many days had gone by. I thought I had counted up to ten...
This white desert, awash in white light, was a hell for emotionless people.
Even counting the days was painful, so I gave up.
------Whiiiiiir
The humming mechanical sound was familiar now. I had heard it so often.
Whenever I heard it, Theodus appeared.
Ah, what a relief.
The one reason I could still hold on to my mind in this hell.
The only being I could communicate with.
It was time to see Teacher.
Every time I went underground, I wondered about something.
Of course, I didn't even know whether the place I was going was underground. But assuming it was, how exactly did the Athanasia travel?
The silver bracelet at the end of Theodus's tentacle flashed, and my location had already changed.
From what I had observed so far, the bracelet's function was to twist the minds of intelligent beings like humans.
In other words, Theodus temporarily put my mind to sleep each time before moving me.
So there was no way to know where I was going, but I called it the underground because the place I was taken to was always dark.
A vast space with nothing but dim lights.
At least twenty Athanasia operated huge devices beyond my comprehension.
In the middle of the room stood something like an enormous tank.
Inside it...
There was something so overwhelmingly huge that even the white giants looked as small as fingers beside it.
The white giants were roughly six to eight meters tall. That thing might have measured fifty meters.
I couldn't truly judge its size by eye.
It was beautiful.
I always felt this way, but Teacher was an unbelievably beautiful creature.
The source of the dim light filling this enormous room.
It came from Teacher's body.
It was like an unimaginably huge whale with countless crystals jutting from it, shining particles drifting endlessly between them.
Along the edges of its body, things resembling unknown lifeforms constantly formed, only to be absorbed again.
Rather than a single creature, it was a small universe.
A cycle of reincarnation where birth and death repeated without end.
My inadequate ability to describe it couldn't possibly convey what it was like.
It was simply beautiful.
That being felt like the most beautiful creature in the world.
After I stared blankly at the only radiance in this painful world for about thirty seconds, I heard a “voice.”
“My child... you have come to see me again today.”
“Yes, Teacher. I've come to see you again today.”
“Did you swim through suffering again today?”
“I watched people wither away and die without end again today.”
“Suffering shall not last forever. Endure, and endure.”
“If you wait without letting them notice that your intelligence has recovered, the time will come.”
The recovery of intelligence. Strictly speaking, it would be more accurate to say that the extraction of my intelligence had stopped.
I only learned after meeting Teacher that the fact my “extraction” had stopped in the first place was nothing more than an accident.
When I was a goose on the farm, the day the farmer had probably tried to pluck my feathers, my collar was somehow slightly damaged. From then on, the extraction of my intelligence stopped.
But if this was a chicken farm, it was like a chicken suddenly stopping its egg production. Why hadn't I been disposed of? I still didn't know that part.
More than that...
When would the “time” when the suffering ended finally come?
“When, when will that time come? I think about it all the time. Aren't these beings gods or demons?”
“Could I ever escape beings who toy with people's minds with a single gesture and imprison them forever in an inescapable prison of illusions?”
“To a chick, an eagle is like a god. To a puppy, a human is like a god.”
“Your salvation is not far away. For now, simply sleep peacefully.”
--------------Ah.
The moment I heard those words, my eyes grew heavy.
As I fell asleep, I prayed.
Please, let the one hope I had left come true.
Let the day come when I could leave this Pain Farm and meet everyone again...
Footnotes:
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