WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR
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◈ Escaping the Mystery Hotel ◈
Episode 487: Room 207, Gate Room - First Trial ‘Eternal Life and Resurrection’ (5)
──────
- Kim Sang-hyeon
As we headed for the Royal Tomb, I organized everything that had happened so far in my head.
The setting was unified Ancient Egypt, created through a truce between the superhuman Pharaoh Menes and the Evil God Malkab.
For a long time, the Pharaoh’s bloodline and the Evil God’s forces had maintained a balance.
Then Omar, the current Pharaoh, failed to overcome his fear of death and submitted to Malkab, shattering that balance.
Now, Malkab was destroying, or rather “harvesting,” Egypt in real time.
Aedia had suggested awakening the great Menes to stop Malkab.
Worried that this was like calling a tiger because we feared a wolf, I opened the envelope Ga-in had given me and found this inside.
「Please respect the course of history as we know it.」
The moment A-ri saw that sentence, she decided we should awaken Menes.
Why?
I hadn’t understood at the time, and A-ri, unwilling to waste the Time Lender’s power, disappeared without explaining.
As we traveled to the Royal Tomb with Aedia, I began to vaguely understand the answer.
After experiencing the A Midsummer Night’s Dream event and learning about the state of the outside world, we often talked about the realities each of us remembered.
The closer those memories came to the present, the more they differed.
It ranged from the names of politicians to the names of cities and the course of historical events.
Put another way, the further back we went, the more similar they became.
It was hard to pinpoint an exact period, but everyone’s knowledge of history before the 1900s was similar, wasn’t it?
Ancient Egypt naturally fell into that category.
Menes, Narmer, or the Scorpion King.
He was a real historical figure, the first ruler to unify Egypt.
In effect, he was the first Pharaoh and the founder of Ancient Egypt.
What about Malkab?
Before entering Room 207, I had never even heard of a god like that.
When people thought of Egyptian mythology, they thought of Horus, Anubis, Isis, Osiris, and all those -us and -is names, not Malkab.
If we took the history we knew as correct and assumed the Ancient Egypt inside Room 207 was a “distorted history,” then the Malkab Cult was something that had to be buried in the darkness of history without leaving even a trace behind.
Menes, on the other hand, had left his name behind thousands of years into the future.
If we had to choose one, shouldn’t we help Menes and wipe out the Malkab Cult?
* * *
“This way! Come this way! I’ll handle the guards-”
“Aedia, um, I don’t think we need to worry about the guards.”
“... They all have their tongues hanging out and are just drooling. Let’s go inside!”
The pressure from Malkab’s skull sigil in the sky was more than ordinary humans could endure. The guards protecting the Royal Tomb were no exception.
Looking at it another way, Aedia was the strange one. She had no Hotel experience, yet she was keeping pace with us as though nothing was wrong.
“Aedia, are you okay? Don’t you feel like throwing up when you look at that sigil?”
“I’m fine.”
“Don’t you feel like kneeling and praying to it?”
“It’s the common people who worship Malkab like a god. Our bloodline doesn’t.”
“Mm, that’s not what I meant... Never mind. Let’s go.”
Mi-ro’s question had nothing to do with whether Aedia had worshipped Malkab in the past. She was asking whether Aedia could feel the magical power the sigil was exerting right now.
Aedia hadn’t understood what she meant at all, which meant she felt no pressure from it whatsoever.
“...”
Aedia really was special.
She was far too remarkable to dismiss as an extra brought along to explain things.
Was that simply natural because she was a descendant of a superhuman Pharaoh?
I didn’t think so.
She clearly had some important role to play...
“We’re here!”
The guards inside the Royal Tomb seemed not to have seen Malkab’s sigil. They were perfectly fine.
“W-Who goes there! This is the hall of the great kings-”
“It’s me!”
“Lady Aedia? What is the matter?”
“Sorry, but step aside. We need to go down.”
“Even if it is you, that is impossible. I don’t know what has happened outside, but- Urk!”
I had no intention of wasting time, so I immediately ambushed them and took them down one by one.
Aedia looked bitter, but she didn’t try to stop me.
“... Let’s go down.”
Song-i asked Aedia something important.
“You know where Menes is, right? I’d rather not search this entire massive place.”
“I do. To us, he is half ancestor and half god-”
“That’s good. You don’t need to explain.”
We walked with Aedia for nearly fifteen minutes after that.
We were in a hurry, but it was dark and narrow everywhere, with arrow traps and the like set up throughout the place. We couldn’t move carelessly.
More than that, the Royal Tomb itself left us bewildered.
“This... Um, does this make any sense? How could a building constructed in ancient times...?”
Song-i couldn’t hide her confusion. Mi-ro and Seung-yeop also touched the walls as if fascinated.
“Ancient? What do you mean by that? So even you can act this naive? You must be amazed by the grandeur of the Royal Tomb.”
“...”
“I understand. Everyone who comes here for the first time acts like you do. Want me to show you something even more amazing?”
--- Click!
The moment Aedia pressed a “switch” installed in the wall, the entire Royal Tomb, which had been pitch-black, lit up.
“Ta-da! Surprised? You’ve never seen anything like this in your lives, right?”
“...”
“We call those round objects that give off light ‘cold fire.’ Ah, they aren’t actually cold if you touch them. They’re just colder than real flames, so-”
“... They’re light bulbs. They even have filaments.”
“What? Fila-mids?”
“No.”
We were all surprised, but not for the reason Aedia thought.
It wasn’t that we didn’t know what light bulbs were or found them fascinating. We were shocked because there were light bulbs in Ancient Egypt.
“No, no... The light bulbs aren’t the issue. Is electricity running through this place? Is there even a power generation facility? What is this-”
I firmly grabbed Song-i’s upper arm as she began blurting out knowledge that didn’t belong in this era.
“You should calm down.”
“Ah. Um, sorry. Aedia! Stop looking around and let’s move.”
“Everyone, come this way!”
Fortunately, Aedia hadn’t noticed Song-i’s strange reaction.
Even if she had, there was no way she could realize we were from the future based on a reaction like that alone.
* * *
At last, we reached the deepest part of the Royal Tomb, the burial chamber where Menes slept.
“Here! That person over there is Lord Menes.”
“Then is that coffin the Immortal Sarcophagus?”
“Probably. I never knew the sarcophagus itself was special. Did Father know...?”
Aedia examined the area around the sarcophagus for traps, then opened it.
“...”
We shone a light into the Immortal Sarcophagus.
What first caught my eye was a thick, cloudy liquid with the texture of crude oil and a vague shape submerged within it.
Menes had clearly been sealed in the sarcophagus for hundreds of years, yet he retained a human body rather than becoming a mummy or skeleton.
Well, with this much power, it made sense for the sarcophagus to bear the grand name Immortal.
“Lord Menes! I am Aedia, your distant descendant, and-”
Then, the Great Pharaoh spoke for the first time.
“My head hurts, so be quiet.”
“... Yes.”
The man lying in the sarcophagus slowly raised his upper body, then grimaced for a moment as though he had a headache.
He was around 178 centimeters tall, which was tall for an ancient man.
Perhaps because he had gone so long without eating properly, his body was thin.
He looked to be in his late fifties or early sixties, and his face gave off a somewhat harsh impression.
If I ran into him on the street, I would have thought he was an irritable old man-
“Thank you. That was quite the objective assessment. I was rather irritable, yes.”
“...”
They said he possessed all kinds of supernatural abilities. Did mind reading happen to be one of them?
“You aren’t surprised.”
“... Please forgive my rudeness.”
Perhaps all the hardships we’d gone through in the Hotel hadn’t been for nothing. Everyone reacted quickly.
Since Mi-ro and Seung-yeop had no way to counter mind reading without a Blessing like Immutability, they immediately stepped back. Song-i approached with her bracelet glowing.
I took three steps back and steadied my mind.
Yesterday’s lunch was disgusting bean stew, and while an unreasonable patient was asking me to look at their knee because it hurt, rain fell from the sky, puppies barked while shitting, pork prices went up a lot, chickens took time to incubate their eggs, and the girl next door changed men again-
“Enough, enough. Keep it reasonable. Have you learned some method of countering miracles? It seems the world changed quite a bit while I slept.”
“...”
“You there, did you say your name was Aedia?”
“Yes? L-Lord Menes!”
“Come closer, child. And as for you guests, if my power makes you uncomfortable, simply stay farther away.”
Menes clearly distinguished between Aedia and us, beginning to call us “guests.”
“Lord Menes, the situation outside is-”
“Child. What in this world is less trustworthy than words?”
“...”
“Simply recall it. There must be a reason you awakened me.”
As Menes began to understand the situation, faint words appeared in my field of vision.
Song-i was sending us a message while staying out of Menes’s hearing.
「No matter how I look at it, the Royal Tomb isn’t a building that belongs in Ancient Egypt.」
Of course it wasn’t.
Song-i had been surprised by the light bulbs on the ceiling, but even before that, the material of the walls wasn’t ancient.
「How could this be possible? Did Menes create this building with supernatural powers?」
Did you know that science fiction novels before the 1990s didn’t contain anything truly similar to smartphones?
People in the 1800s imagined the future by drawing scenes of pigeons flying at supersonic speeds to deliver letters.
Predicting the future was that difficult. Human imagination couldn’t escape the limits of its era.
That meant no matter how incredible Menes’s supernatural abilities were, it would be difficult for him to conceive of light bulbs, electricity, or power generation.
「Could Menes have had foresight?」
“... foresight.”
Unlike other supernatural abilities, foresight was a little different.
What if he hadn’t imagined future technology but had actually seen it?
No, even that would be impossible.
I knew this better than anyone else.
I had gone through years of hardship and built up a civilization myself!
In Room 203, I had been the very image of a modern person carrying knowledge of the future who had fallen into ancient times.
The level of civilization I created over hundreds of years had, sadly, only reached the level of ancient Rome at best.
It was obvious.
Knowing the concept of a light bulb didn’t mean I could make one.
Even a university professor who had studied architectural engineering their entire life would struggle to build even a log cabin if dropped into ancient times, let alone a modern concrete building.
Forget engineering. Wouldn’t they first need to make concrete and rebar?
To make rebar, they would then need to find a blast furnace and coal.
To make A, you needed B and C. To make B, you needed D, E, and F.
At that point, my suspicion, no, the Hotel Party’s suspicion, became certainty.
The Royal Tomb wasn’t built with Ancient Egyptian technology, and Menes wasn’t a man of ancient times.
He was a supernatural being who wielded miracles while also possessing knowledge of the future.
That wasn’t all.
There was some unknown force behind that incomprehensible being, one that had allowed him to create a future structure like the Royal Tomb.
“You guests, come over here.”
Song-i approached with her bracelet glowing.
“I hear you are priests who serve Horus?”
“Pardon?”
“We’re all busy, so don’t hide it.”
“Uh... Um. Let’s say we are.”
Priests of Horus?
For a moment, I wondered what he meant, but I soon understood.
Apparently, when Yumi first met Aedia, she had half-jokingly called her a “daughter of Horus.” Aedia and Menes seemed to have taken it seriously.
Menes had already experienced a conflict with Malkab.
Perhaps he thought Horus was another similar kind of native god.
“What you desire from me is the construction of the Temple of Horus?”
“Uh... Uh... Uh...”
“You aren’t a fish, so stop opening and closing your mouth. I cannot read your thoughts, perhaps because of that bracelet’s power.”
Song-i was so completely caught off guard that she couldn’t speak.
For Menes, who had likely negotiated with the Malkab Cult in the past, it was a reasonable conclusion.
I stepped forward in place of the flustered Song-i.
“Let’s negotiate later. What matters now is putting an end to Malkab.”
“Good. You are refreshingly direct. Then shall we begin by discussing Malkab?”
About ten minutes later, Menes awakened the Guardian of Egypt and left the Royal Tomb.
“...”
The Guardian of Egypt.
It was clearly a robot created with science-fiction-level technology.
At this point, it wouldn’t have been strange for tanks or helicopters to appear next.
Now I understood why even the Evil God Malkab had found Menes difficult to deal with.
Footnotes:
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