WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR
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◈ Escaping the Mystery Hotel ◈
Episode 39: Party Time! - In Search of the Secret
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[User: Han Ga-in (Wisdom)
Date: Day 14
Current Location: Level 1, Corridor
Sage’s Advice: 3]
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
My footsteps echoed through the corridor. It was a strange feeling. With everything around me so quiet, even my footsteps sounded deafening.
I had never wandered around alone like this since arriving at the hotel. After all of us came out of Room 103 yesterday, we spent the day eating, resting, and experimenting with Diverse Perspectives.
The following morning, we began exploring the hotel.
This wasn't our first time exploring it. But it was the first time we had all split up. The hotel was full of dangers, and we had always relied heavily on Sage’s Advice while exploring, so we never went our separate ways.
But the next two days were the hotel's announced “days without danger.” If there was no danger, was there any reason to explore together?
Naturally, everyone split up.
* * *
The hotel's secret, said to reveal itself only during “Party Time!”
Where could it be?
Everyone except me went down to the basement first. Unlike the first floor, which held only the front desk, the main entrance, and a corridor with seven rooms, the basement was packed with over a hundred rooms. Each one contained facilities far too large to fit inside a normal room.
There was a zoo, botanical garden, bar, PC café, billiards hall, swimming pool, photo studio, and bathhouse. Ridiculously enough, there were even places called amusement park and mountain climbing.
What exactly was mountain climbing? Would you open the door and find a mountain inside?
Since there was a high chance the secret was somewhere in that vast space, everyone headed underground. Still, someone had to search the first floor, so I stayed behind.
* * *
[User: Han Ga-in (Wisdom)
Date: Day 14
Current Location: Level 1, Room 105 (Rest Room)
Level Information(*)
Room 101 (Curse Room - Strange Family)
Room 102 (Curse Room - House of Horror)
Room 103 (Curse Room - Athanasia’s Human Ranch - Resolved!)
Room 104 (???)
Room 105 (Rest Room)
Room 106 (???)
Room 107 (???)
Sage’s Advice: 3]
I checked the Level Information for the first time in a while.
The “Resolved!” in the middle stood out. Room 103 really was completely over.
I walked up to Room 103's door. What would happen if I entered a resolved room again? It wasn't like I'd suddenly fall into outer space, right?
I was a little worried, but Sage’s Advice didn't react at all, so I opened the door to Room 103.
There was nothing inside. It was an empty space with only a door. Nothing even hinted at a secret. It seemed that once our party cleared Room 103, it became a meaningless space.
I walked farther, passing Room 104, the Room 105 we entered every day, and Room 106. Then I saw only Room 107's plaque.
I recalled what A-ri had told me a few days ago.
“We used to call it the Gateway Room. You can enter it once you've achieved a certain level of success in all the other rooms, and clearing it lets you move up to the next Level.”
The Gateway Room.
It was probably Room 107. Room 107 didn't have a door at all, only a plaque. Maybe the door would appear once we achieved enough in Rooms 101 through 106.
I went all the way to the end of the corridor but found nothing. Other than the rooms, there were only walls. I couldn't enter a Curse Room alone, so there probably wasn't anything on this side of the corridor after all.
I should check the front desk and main entrance, then join the others downstairs.
!
When I turned around, A-ri was standing there without a sound, as if she had been waiting.
“Gah! You scared me. Why do you walk around without making any noise?”
“Did you find anything?”
We had gotten used to speaking casually whenever it was just the two of us.
“I opened Room 103, but there was nothing inside. Room 107 is probably the Gateway Room. That's about it.”
“So you didn't find anything.”
“Yeah. Come to think of it, you seemed to know quite a lot about the hotel when you arrived. Do you know what the secret that appears only on Party Day is? It'd be easier to find if we at least knew whether it was an item, a person, or a room.”
“I don't hide knowledge that might be needed. If I haven't told you something, it's either because I don't know it or because knowing it would be pointless. In the first place, the Management Bureau only knows the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this hotel.”
A-ri continued, “To answer your question, all of those are correct. There have been cases of people finding treasure, encountering an unknown companion, strengthening a Blessing, or opening the next Level without passing through the gateway. There are endless possibilities. You already know a few of them.”
Two things immediately came to mind.
“The Resurrection Room and Buddha?”
“The Resurrection Room is right. Buddha is a concept we know nothing about. We only heard of it for the first time after coming here. You can probably tell from the name what the Resurrection Room does. I heard it's a room that revives participants who lost their chance after being defeated in the hotel, then gives them another opportunity through some kind of procedure. Though that procedure seems to change every time...”
“What other secrets are there?”
“Too many. They change every time, so there's no point explaining them. In the end, we'll have to find something ourselves and figure it out.”
I had learned a lot, yet it felt like there was even more I didn't know.
In the end, we'd have to find the answers ourselves.
* * *
A-ri kept following behind me as I walked toward the front desk.
“You're not going down to the basement? There's nowhere on the first floor for anything to be except the front desk and the main entrance. Wouldn't it be better to search somewhere much bigger?”
“There's no guarantee that secrets are hidden only in large places. I just... have a feeling there's something on the first floor.”
The front desk.
At a glance, it looked no different from an ordinary hotel front desk. There just wasn't anyone there. There was no staff, only a pointless reception counter and a huge display above it.
- Click.
????
- Click.
The area darkened with the sound of a button being pressed, then brightened with another click. Startled, I looked at A-ri and found her fiddling with a light switch.
- Click.
...
- Click. Click. Click.
“You're not a little kid. Could you stop playing weird pranks?”
“...”
I tried touching various things. When I stepped behind the desk and opened a drawer, I found a note.
‘87439124’
An unexplained eight-digit number.
Could this be...?
Instinctively, I slipped the note into my pocket and looked toward A-ri. She was still examining the switches near the main entrance.
My heart pounded. Could it really be a coincidence that a sequence of numbers that could only be a password had been hidden in the desk drawer, as though it had been waiting for me?
The elevator's escape button. It had said to wear a Protective Suit and enter a password.
I decided to forget about it. It was meaningless without a Protective Suit anyway.
Was it right to hide this from everyone?
* * *
I found nothing else at the front desk. Every other drawer was empty, and no matter how hard I looked, I couldn't find anything hidden.
Could there be something near the main entrance? It was just a massive door, so it seemed to have even fewer places to hide something than the front desk. Yet A-ri had been wandering around it for quite a while.
“Did you find something?”
“Come look at this.”
Was there really something?
- Click.
“Ah! Seriously, that's such an elementary school prank-”
“It's not a prank. Come look.”
The moment the lights went out, the entire first floor turned dark.
Only then did I realize what had been strange this whole time.
Thinking it was natural for the room to become dark when the lights went out was a huge misconception. There was a transparent glass door here. Beyond it, we could see the sky, and there was a sun in that sky.
Naturally, even if the hotel lights were turned off, sunlight should have streamed in through the glass door.
Yet the moment the lights went out, it became dark outside the hotel as well.
As though the space beyond the glass door had changed into a different place the instant the lights were turned off.
“Should we... try opening the main entrance?”
“I was waiting because I couldn't tell.”
“You couldn't tell? Didn't they say there wouldn't be any dangerous events today?”
“I think that depends on how you interpret it. It probably means the hotel won't create separate ‘dangerous events.’ But does that mean danger disappears even if we enter a place that was dangerous to begin with? I don't think so. If that were the case, we could enter Curse Rooms every Party Time without any danger, and there's no way the hotel would allow that.”
“So there's a chance that beyond this door is a place that was dangerous to begin with?”
“I'm saying it could be. You try holding the door.”
Slowly, I grasped the door while keeping my eye on the Advice in my Status Window.
Nothing appeared.
Still, as I had learned at the pool, I couldn't trust the Advice completely. It only activated right before danger struck. If a monster attacked a minute after we entered a room, the Advice wouldn't warn us at all.
“Let's call everyone back first.”
“...”
A-ri didn't seem pleased, but she didn't stop me from heading downstairs.
* * *
Click. Click.
“It really is true. How did you guys even find something like this? We wasted all our time in the basement.”
“You didn't find anything either, Eun-sol?”
“No. The people in the basement met up regularly and talked about searching here and there, but... the basement is huge to begin with. I even entered mountain climbing and got lost, so the others had to come find me.”
“Let's go in for now. Looks like we'll have to see what's there with our own eyes. I'll lead the way.”
“Jin-cheol, wait a moment.”
Song-i approached Jin-cheol and did something.
“What did you do? Nothing feels different.”
“I fixed the perspective your senses receive, so the information you perceive won't be distorted.”
“Sorry, but explain it simply. I'm not that smart.”
To be honest, I didn't understand it at all either.
“I took measures to stop something from distorting your senses. Since there's no guarantee that a dangerous element will be something physical.”
“Can you do something like that? Sounds incredibly useful.”
“I can only do one person at a time, and only for about ten minutes.”
Ever since entering the hotel, I had lost count of how many times I thought we were too vulnerable to attacks that disturbed the mind. At last, we had one countermeasure.
Diverse Perspectives really seemed to have no end to its functions.
With Jin-cheol temporarily strengthened in both body and mind at the front, we headed toward the strange space beyond the main entrance that appeared when the lights went out.
The moment we entered, everyone fell.
[Congratulations on reaching the Sanctuary of Blessings!]
Footnotes:
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