WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR

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◈ Escaping the Mystery Hotel ◈

Episode 464: Rest Day - Reflection on the Solution (3)

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[User: Han Ga-in (Wisdom)

Date: Day 552

Current Location: Level 1, Corridor

Sage’s Advice: 3]

- Han Ga-in

「The Second Discussion on the Perfect Solution for Room 206」

... Is it the second discussion because yesterday's meeting counts as the first?

Despite the playful title Eun-sol had written on the whiteboard, everyone was deadly serious.

“About the spaceship escape plan Mi-ro mentioned yesterday, I thought about it all night, and...”

Sang-hyeon had apparently spent the night seriously considering how to build a spaceship, or more precisely, a space habitat, within a hundred days.

It was such a technical topic that A-ri was the only one who could even somewhat understand it. No matter how hard they tried, though, they concluded that a hundred days was impossible.

“The Ruler of Time can turn back time, right? Couldn't we go back to before the Demon King arrived on Earth?”

Mi-ro, who had inherited the Director's memories, sadly refuted Song-i's seemingly plausible suggestion.

“It can't go back that far... At most, maybe a year?”

“Gasp!”

The ideas ranged from something only a Romanian dictator pursuing a forced-birth policy might come up with, like somehow buying time before implementing it, only to have it dismissed because there was no way to buy time, to a sci-fi movie fantasy of transferring humanity's minds into computers.

Right from the start, it was an astounding parade of ideas.

Still, many of the opinions had glaring holes if you thought about them for even a moment.

That was only natural.

If there'd been an easy solution, the Order of Reason would've thought of it already.

Then Seung-yeop raised his hand with an unusually determined expression.

“Um, excuse me!”

“Seung-yeop?”

“I came up with an amazing idea after thinking about it all night!”

Sorry, but the moment I heard he'd thought about it all night, it somehow sounded less trustworthy.

“People's thoughts and beliefs affect the Demon King, right? So the Order's solution was to worship it as a divine being, so it wouldn't harm people!”

“That's right.”

“What if we believed it was something other than a god? Like, um, a barrier protecting the world? Or an enormous shield? Or some great tool created by the Order?”

“...”

Everyone fell silent.

Not because it sounded ridiculous.

Because it sounded extremely plausible.

Rather than worshiping the Demon King as a god, submitting to it, and entrusting their fate to it, what if we spread the perception that it was a tool or an inanimate object?

If it worked, the Demon King wouldn't harm humanity, and humanity wouldn't be surrendering its fate to the Demon King. It would be a superior version of the Demon King worship plan.

“...”

But I had a strong feeling this wasn't the right direction.

Unlike me, my companions couldn't feel that sort of intuition, and they responded positively.

“Oh! Seung-yeop, this actually sounds plausible. What do you think, sis?”

“It doesn't necessarily have to be an inanimate object, does it? The people in Room 206 worship the Progenitor, so if we insist the Demon King is something like a spirit contracted to the Progenitor-”

Unfortunately, that wasn't the answer.

But I didn't know why it wasn't.

I intuitively knew it was wrong, yet I couldn't logically explain why.

Suddenly, I wondered what A-ri had been thinking about. She'd been quiet this whole time.

“...”

As I kept glancing at her, I thought about it.

Why had A-ri tried to enter Mi-ro's dream yesterday?

“...”

Was she not going to tell us?

It couldn't be for some trivial reason-

Tap!

A-ri lightly tapped the table and raised her head.

“I thought of something while talking to Mi-ro yesterday.”

Seeing Mi-ro flinch, I realized something.

Given the circumstances, the Mi-ro A-ri meant wasn't the middle school girl in front of us. It was another Mi-ro.

“I don't know about a solution for Room 206. It's more of a thought about the Demon King itself.”

A thought about the Demon King itself?

What came next sounded very familiar.

“Why does the Demon King act like a god? Before that, why does it react to human imagination in the first place?”

It was a question Ipsissimus, the Order's leader, had posed to Sang-hyeon. Sang-hyeon had passed that question on to me.

I had my own answer.

“‘We’ analyzed it as a form of mimicry. Like a wolf wearing sheep's clothing to hunt.”

A form of mimicry, and fundamentally, a hunting method.

“Some snakes wiggle the tips of their tails to imitate small insects or worms. They do it to hunt prey that approaches to eat them. Some fish create small lights in the deep sea to lure in prey.”

Sang-hyeon nodded as if he understood.

“So you're saying the Demon King reacts to human imagination, and sometimes acts like a god, in order to prey on humans?”

“Rather than humans, it'd be more accurate to say small prey, small intelligent species. According to the Order's records, the Demon King came from space.”

Until the Order collapsed, humanity in Room 206 had never managed to create a means of escaping their planet.

But Athanasia in Room 103 and the future humans in Room 203 had developed ways to escape their worlds.

The Demon King had evolved to prevent prey like that from escaping.

If its prey regarded the Demon King as something mysterious or an object of worship, they wouldn't escape. They'd gather around it instead.

“Thinking of it that way, Seung-yeop's idea would be difficult to make work.”

“Ah.”

“Still, Seung-yeop, I was honestly surprised. This idea was really plausible.”

“... Yes.”

The Demon King reacting to human imagination was only a kind of hunting method.

That meant the Demon King would accept mimicry that turned it into an urban legend that killed humans, or a god that spiritually exploited them.

But it would never accept mimicry that made it serve humanity purely for humanity's sake.

“...”

It was a completely different analysis from mine.

My hypothesis was based on the vague insight into divine beings that I'd gained while using the Sacred Sun. A-ri's hypothesis was typical Management Bureau reasoning.

The approaches were so different that it was hard to say whose was right or wrong.

Perhaps feeling sorry for Seung-yeop, who had wilted, Eun-sol and Grandpa patted him and praised him.

“You usually don't say much in meetings, but you've been really active yesterday and today! You've already shared three opinions. At this rate, you're a complete Hotel expert. You could go out there and become an agent, right, Grandpa?”

“Of course. You're still much better than those idiot juniors!”

Seung-yeop had already shared three opinions?

Had the Sacred Sun muddled my mind so much that I hadn't noticed?

“What were the first two?”

Seung-yeop replied awkwardly to my question.

“Hyung, the first two were just things I blurted out without thinking-”

“Without thinking? You blurted them out?”

“W-well, I felt awkward being the only one staying quiet...”

“You came up with them on the spot because you felt awkward?”

“Gasp! H-hyung, why are you like this?”

Seung-yeop stepped back in alarm, apparently thinking I was interrogating or scolding him.

But someone else had noticed something strange in what I said.

“... Two ideas you threw out without thinking, on the spot, carelessly, and both happened to be exactly the same.”

As A-ri emphasized that, the others gradually realized something too, their eyes widening.

“Seung-yeop, what did you say yesterday?”

“Huh? Huh?”

Ridiculously enough, Seung-yeop couldn't remember what he'd said himself.

Of course, nobody else had forgotten.

“... You said we should kill everyone, then turn back time and bring them back.”

Kill every person in the city, no, on the entire planet, then revive them.

It was an absurd idea, but it was possible in Room 206.

The Order had confined all survivors to cities in order to control humanity as a whole with a single button, and there was an actual method to turn back time.

In the first place, if you separated “kill them all” and “revive them,” both had already happened in Room 206.

During the second and third runs, we had slaughtered 2.34 billion survivors and escaped. During the first run, the mayor had used One More Chance to revive those who had died in Paradise.

There was a serious flaw in this method.

“Huh? Huh? Am I confused? People offered to Indomitable Reason can't be revived, right?”

Song-i was right.

If people were offered to Indomitable Reason to suppress the Demon King, they wouldn't come back even if time inside the room was reversed.

Their souls themselves had disappeared.

Even the Ruler of Time had that limitation.

Offer people to Indomitable Reason or the Demon King, turn back time to revive them, then offer those revived people again.

A perpetual-motion human sacrifice like that was impossible.

For someone to be revived, at the very least, their soul had to remain intact.

At that point, everyone stopped again.

It felt like we'd come up with a strange idea. An idea the Luckiest Man Alive had emphasized twice!

So what were we supposed to do with it?

“What is this? What is this? Seung-yeop, what does this mean?”

“...”

Even Seung-yeop, who had first voiced the thought, looked like he had no idea.

That was when everyone fell into confusion.

“... I think I just thought of something.”

A-ri raised her hand with a somewhat dazed expression.

...

...

...

It was a bizarre idea.

A strange solution created by mixing the Mi-ro from the dream's thoughts on the Demon King's true nature with Seung-yeop's idea of resurrection through reversing time.

It wasn't so much a flawless, perfect plan as one with so many holes that I didn't even know where or how to refute it.

Put positively, it was creative. Put negatively, there was no telling how the Demon King would react.

At the very least, it seemed worth trying.

* * *

[User: Han Ga-in (Wisdom)

Date: Day 552

Current Location: Level 1, Room 105, ‘Rest Room’

Sage’s Advice: 0]

It was late, and everyone was exhausted from the long meeting.

I returned to Room 105 for a while and sprawled across the bed.

“Since yesterday, my mind feels clearer.”

It was a relief that my strange thoughts about my companions had stopped.

“... In Owl terms, is it because the black paint has increased?”

The Grimoire's authority had grown stronger, causing the Sacred Sun to take a step back.

I felt like a shrimp suffering between two Inheritances fighting for dominance.

Either way, I realized one thing during the process.

“Is the Grimoire a little more rational?”

The Grimoire fundamentally sought liberation from the constraints of the body.

The body was no more than a slightly expensive outfit that could be changed at any time.

Yet most human desires depended on the body.

Appetite and the desire for sleep, as well as urges like sexual desire, were impulses created by the flesh.

The Grimoire didn't particularly pursue asceticism, but because it regarded the body as insignificant, desires stemming from the body also became faint.

That was why the closer one became to the Grimoire, the more hyper-rational one became.

The Sacred Sun was different.

It endlessly consumed the prayers and longings of its believers, expanding its self.

Most prayers took the form of, “I want this,” or, “I want that.”

How could a being that grew powerful by devouring desires ever be free from desire?

“... What do you think? That's my Enlightenment.”

Suddenly, I laughed.

I was lying alone on a bed, lost in fantasies, and talking to an imaginary secret friend. It was exactly the sort of thing a second-year middle schooler would do.

Except I really did have a secret friend.

Crackle!

Another me appeared in midair.

“It is your Enlightenment, but it is also mine.”

He wasn't a living organism made of protein.

He was light and shadow, hollow imagination, something that couldn't be contained within the concept of matter.

If I was something closer to the Grimoire, he was a being closer to the Sacred Sun.

“Yesterday, we sought Mi-ro's advice about the Sacred Sun's encroachment.”

“...”

“She gave us two answers.”

“...”

“Shouldn't we test one of them?”

Flames appeared in midair.

My second Inheritance, the Sacred Sun, the beginning of all these problems.

A man burning like fire.

The other me smiled as if he found it amusing.

“Yes, what do you think? Do you feel like worshiping me?”

“Hey, you need to fix the way you talk first.”

“...”

Footnotes:

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