WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ Escaping the Mystery Hotel ◈
Episode 507: Room 207, Gate Room - Third Trial ‘Miskatonic University’ (9)
──────
- Kim A-ri
In the murky darkness, the foul smell of an unfamiliar underground cavern stung my nose.
It was the stench of a bizarre ecosystem born from the damp environment, mixed with nearly rotten flesh.
“Just a little farther. Just a little more.”
Sophia moved slowly ahead, shining an odd-looking flashlight, not something that seemed to be a product of science, as increasingly horrific sights came into view.
Huge, sticky masses of flesh emerged beneath the beam.
They filled the entire outer walls of the cavern and writhed without pause. It felt as though we had arrived on an alien planet.
“... Good grief.”
Mook-seong grimaced, then curled and uncurled his fingers where only I could see, forming the number 203.
It certainly looked vaguely like the Hatchery from Room 203, A New Beginning.
--- Squirm!
“Urgh!”
A tentacle suddenly shot out of the floor and crawled up Mook-seong’s leg.
Unlike me, floating through the air with Wing Boots, and Sophia, who knew the terrain well enough to avoid it, Mook-seong was here for the first time and had no way to fly. The tentacle caught him.
Sophia soon drove it off by emitting a strange light from her fingertips.
“Be careful. Every step in my master’s lair is full of danger.”
“Miss Sophia, can’t you contact your master and ask her to clear away things like this?”
“Of course I could, when she was still well.”
“...”
The fact that we would have to pass through this Hatchery-like place again on the way back lodged itself firmly in my mind.
The urge to turn around immediately rose within me, but there was too much we needed to learn from Yumi. Retreat was not an option.
The air grew heavier the farther we went, and nauseating sounds of mucous membranes writhing came from every direction.
“Why does Yumi, I mean, your master, live in such a bizarre place? With all the wealth she’s gathered over such a long life, she could’ve just built a mansion!”
Sophia answered Mook-seong’s complaint with surprising seriousness.
“Lucas and I wondered about that too. The Nest Defense System did not act so unpredictably back then, but this place was still quite horrible.”
“Was there a reason?”
“There was. My master never explained it, but I came to understand on my own.”
Why had Yumi made this Nest so horrific? I was curious too.
“My master slept for a very long time.”
Huh?
“This cavern is, so to speak, a massive hibernation system.”
“Hibernation?”
“A place where my master could sleep for decades or centuries. These unpleasant masses of flesh are also meant to keep intruders out, but their basic purpose is to provide nutrients and remove waste.”
“...”
“Do you know what is really remarkable? They say that even aging stops while you sleep in this cavern. Isn’t that fascinating?”
“That’s incredible.”
This was a place where a human could hibernate for decades or centuries without leaving.
I understood perfectly why Yumi had created such a place.
Even if humans gained eternal youth and immortality, there was no way they could remain sane for thousands of years.
This was a facility Yumi had made to hibernate, either alone or with Seung-yeop.
Judging by the circumstances, it had probably been used many times before.
No matter how extraordinary Yumi was, she could not have endured three or four thousand years while fully conscious.
Perhaps Seung-yeop had used this facility many times as well.
“... That must’ve been rough.”
As I nodded, I glanced toward Mook-seong.
Interestingly, he was looking at me too, as though he had come to the same conclusion.
According to the Hotel, One More Chance was an object meant to save the world.
The fourth trial Ga-in had seen during the Dinner Party resembled the dangers of reality.
It was as though the Hotel wanted us to study the dangers we’d have to deal with once we got out!
Mook-seong spoke with his eyes.
‘Don’t tell me I’ll have to come in here at the end?’
I answered with my own gaze.
‘Who knows?’
...
That was what we had just communicated, right?
Sometimes we went pew, pew! with our eyes like that, only to check later and find out we had been thinking completely different things.
Deep inside the cavern, Sophia stopped before the place where Yumi stayed, or perhaps was imprisoned.
“I told you that my master collapsed 180 years ago, right?”
“You did.”
One hundred eighty years ago, Fortuna, who grew stronger every time she awakened, had finally defeated Yumi and critically wounded her.
“Then who do you think made my master like this?”
“Hm? Wasn’t it obviously Fortuna?”
“I didn’t explain this part in detail. No, it wasn’t.”
Fortuna had defeated Yumi, but had not caused her current state?
“Though my master lost, Fortuna also suffered a critical blow and retreated.”
“Then who brought your master down?”
Sophia stared silently at Yumi’s dwelling, her expression gloomy.
“... The Holy Mother.”
“What?”
“Holy Mother Aedia. Have you heard of her?”
“Not at all.”
In the Holy See of the real world, the Holy Mother naturally meant Mary. I had never even heard a name like Aedia.
“It makes sense that you wouldn’t know. She is a figure hidden beneath the surface, someone known to only a few even within the Holy See.”
“Miss Sophia, what kind of being is this Holy Mother Aedia?”
“The true head of the Holy See. A dictator.”
Holy Mother Aedia was said to be the real leader of the Holy See, a secret figure with no public identity.
She could be seen as the counterpart to Yumi, who had once controlled Lucas from behind the scenes.
Mook-seong continued questioning her.
“Then what about the Pope?”
“Just a figurehead. Wouldn’t it look too strange to ordinary people if an immortal monster remained Pope forever? She only puts forward subordinates at regular intervals.”
“... Unbelievable.”
Unlike Mook-seong, who was dumbfounded, I was not very surprised.
After all, the Holy See of Room 207 was the equivalent of the Management Bureau in reality.
The Holy See probably had figures similar to The Silent, the leadership of the Management Bureau.
“After Fortuna withdrew, my master hid away for a while and focused on recovering her strength. Then one day, Holy Mother Aedia came in person...”
There was unmistakable fear in Sophia’s low voice.
A being even Yumi, the master she had respected all her life, could not withstand.
Holy Mother Aedia.
“What happened next?”
“I don’t know. My master told Lucas and me to leave. Aedia didn’t stop us either.”
Mook-seong nodded.
“Their interests must have aligned. Yumi would have wanted to avoid a situation where Miss Sophia and Lucas died as well, while Aedia would have wanted to avoid being attacked by you and Lucas together.”
“I think so too. By the way, you’re quite comfortable calling her ‘Yumi.’ My master disliked it when others used that name.”
“...”
She disliked it when others called her Yumi...
Many people only allowed close acquaintances to use their given names, but the Yumi we knew had never shown that tendency.
It was a small difference, but it probably meant Yumi had changed greatly over time.
“After that, my master split into hundreds, perhaps thousands of pieces for unknown reasons.”
It was what we had heard yesterday.
“Chunks of flesh containing my master’s memories scattered across the entire planet.”
“...”
“The chunks of flesh soon burrowed into nearby people. As a result, countless madmen carrying Fragments of my master appeared throughout the world.”
“...”
“Lucas and I wandered the world for over a hundred years. We gathered my master’s pieces again and again. We found around ten and succeeded in restoring that thing, but...”
“But?”
“Now, I think all the rest are gone. I told you we wandered for over a hundred years, right? The remaining pieces must have disappeared as their hosts grew old and died.”
“... You’ve been through a lot.”
“Thank you.”
Sophia spoke calmly, but her voice carried pain beyond words.
The horrific destruction of the master she had served all her life, the efforts and failures of disciples trying to restore her.
I could faintly feel a piece of that sorrow.
“How could something so bizarre even be possible?”
How had Holy Mother Aedia brought Yumi down?
“Good question. I’ve wondered about that for the past 180 years too. I’m sorry, A-ri, but I still don’t know the answer.”
Sophia did not know either.
Which meant we had to find the answer.
“Let’s go in. Master! Can you hear me?”
* * *
The sight of an old companion we had finally found after so long made Mook-seong and me feel miserable.
Yumi had originally looked like a teenage version of Aurelia from Room 104, but she was now something completely different.
That much was not surprising.
According to Sophia, Yumi had switched bodies several times.
The problem was that perhaps from recklessly twisting her body while alone in the cavern, she looked less like a human and more like a horrific spider-human no matter how I looked at her.
“She has become stranger than before. Don’t be surprised! My master may look like this now, but she was originally very dignified and wise...”
“It’s fine. Just calm her down first.”
One moment, she seemed to be making strange noises and causing a commotion. The next, she became quiet and absorbed nutrients offered by the tentacles like a child.
She seemed excited when she saw Mook-seong and me, twisting her head 360 degrees, then whined like a child at Sophia beside her.
No matter how kindly I tried to frame it, she was a deranged Chaos Entity.
Mook-seong and I looked grim for a while, then turned to Sophia. Seeing the desolate expression on her face left us speechless.
Thinking about it, that made sense.
Yumi had spent overwhelmingly more time in Room 207 than she had spent with us.
Sophia and Lucas’s feelings for Yumi must have run far deeper than ours.
That thought made me even more depressed.
Sophia said her master was alive, yet called Yumi’s pieces ‘that thing.’
Lucas had spent over a hundred years struggling to restore Yumi, yet still shouted, “Do you still respect that fool who searched only for Horus until the very moment of death?”
“Phew... A tragedy. What a tragedy...”
Sophia answered Mook-seong calmly.
“I’m fine, so go in. Didn’t you come here to do something?”
“... Sophia, could you leave us alone for a moment?”
“Why? Do you need to talk among yourselves?”
“...”
“All right. I’ll leave.”
After Sophia left, I spoke with Mook-seong.
“A-ri, it doesn’t look like a normal conversation will be possible with that thing.”
“That’s what I see too.”
“It seems like you’ll have to enter Yumi’s mind and get something out of it.”
“...”
That was a being Sophia and Lucas had defragmented and forcibly reassembled after the original Yumi had split into hundreds or more pieces.
I did not know how many pieces there had originally been, but it could not have been even ten percent of the original. There was no way to restore a being that broken.
Still, extracting memories was a different matter.
The power of Old Blood allowed me to enter another person’s mind.
I had used this power to enter Ga-in’s mind before, and Mi-ro’s as well.
“What do you think?”
“First, entering the mind of someone that insane is extremely dangerous.”
“Hmm, you could get caught up in it too?”
“That’s right. Do you remember what happened after we escaped Room 201, long ago? Ga-in entered Elena’s mind after she went mad from witnessing the Zero-Dimensional Eye.”
“... I remember. Ga-in almost went mad too.”
“There’s another problem.”
“What is it?”
“It will take a very long time to find meaningful information. If she is that far gone, the information will obviously be scattered everywhere.”
“...”
Mook-seong sighed, and I added,
“Still, we have to do it. We should ask Sophia to forcibly restrain that thing, um, Yumi’s remains. And...”
“And?”
“Wake me immediately if anything happens.”
“Understood.”
I slowly sank into the frenzied chaos remaining within the Yumi Fragment.
Soon, part of the shattered memories unfolded like a panorama.
* * *
The first thing I saw was a Mirror.
It was something that occupied the largest part of all Yumi’s memories.
She thought of the Mirror this way.
‘The cause and answer to every problem in the world.’
Footnotes:
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