WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ Escaping the Mystery Hotel ◈
Episode 667: Room 301, Curse Room - ‘On the Origin of Species’ (11)
──────
「User: Han Ga-in (Wisdom)
Date: Day 5
Current Location: Level 3, Observatory - Room 301
Sage’s Advice: 3」
- Han Ga-in
--- Rumble!
Soon after the Resolution Party entered the room, a door leading to the Observatory appeared in midair.
This time, everyone walked toward it with the ease of familiarity.
--- Clank!
As if it were only natural, the door locked.
What came next again?
Ah, the telescope had to focus.
--- Whirr...!
Before long, the telescope's noise stopped.
“Let’s begin right away.”
“Ga-in first again?”
“Let’s do that.”
As Sang-hyeon nodded, he glanced back with a faintly uneasy look.
“What’s wrongy?”
Mi-ro opened her eyes wide as if asking what was wrong, and I couldn’t help smiling.
I thought it every time, but she really was cute.
Behind her, Seung-yeop had already summoned a pizza and sat down at the table.
Sang-hyeon fell silent for a moment, as if at a loss for words, then muttered with a sigh.
“There are only four people in the Observatory.”
What I heard was this.
‘There are only two people in the Observatory.’
“But lots of people went in instead! We just have to work hard together!”
Mi-ro’s spirited words still made me laugh.
“Right. Let’s work hard. Now, let’s begin observing.”
* * *
The phenomenon began the instant I put my eye to the eyepiece.
It felt as though my consciousness left my body and traveled to a distant world.
It wasn’t my first time experiencing it, so I didn’t panic, but it was still mysterious.
Soon, I arrived in a mystical space filled with pure white.
The Upper Realm, soaring endlessly high.
The ultimate paradise, physically impossible to reach.
An intense certainty beyond logical explanation flashed through my mind.
This place, accessible through the Observatory’s telescope, was clearly a domain that even beings like gods of the universe could not easily approach!
Across the center of that brilliantly white space - I immediately shut my eyes.
Hadn’t I already experienced this during Ascension?
Observing that line was extremely dangerous.
Still, I vividly remembered what the Owl had said about it.
It had called it “everything,” hadn’t it?
“...”
Soon, an unknown force pulled me toward a black, murky line, followed by a dizzying stretch of endless falling.
When I came to my senses, I could choose between the viewpoints of two people.
It was like two surveillance cameras in a dark room, with an observer able to choose one to watch.
“I can only choose Eun-sol and Song-i’s viewpoints.”
Only those two had entered during the first attempt, but this time A-ri, Grandpa, Jin-cheol, and Elena had entered as well.
Even so, the only viewpoints available were Lee Eun-sol’s and Yoo Song-i’s.
It felt as though those two were the only “lead actors” of Room 301.
I checked Song-i first.
--- Whirr...!
The time was around 4:10 in the morning.
Song-i was rubbing her sleepy eyes in bed while another girl poked her.
A-ri had already used Kingdom of Dreams to join Song-i.
‘...’
One question came to mind at that point.
When did Room 301 actually begin?
The clock in Song-i’s room said 4:10 a.m., so did it begin then?
That was a misconception.
I couldn’t overlook the fact that A-ri had already joined Song-i.
The user had to be asleep to use Kingdom of Dreams, and unlike me, A-ri couldn’t fall asleep instantly.
Considering the time needed to prepare, A-ri must have begun around 3:30.
Did that mean Room 301 started at 3:30 a.m.?
That was wrong too.
The answer was that nobody knew.
Observation began from the moment Room 301’s leads, Song-i and Eun-sol, regained consciousness, so there was no way to know what happened before then.
As I got lost in those thoughts, I heard Song-i and A-ri talking.
‘You want to watch my parents?’
‘... This house too. They might be more special people, and this might be a more special house, than you think.’
‘Fine. Let’s do that.’
Song-i accepted it readily, and A-ri treated that as natural.
In truth, it wasn’t natural at all.
Song-i considered the parents in Room 301 to be “real.”
Among the possibilities I saw through Insight, there was one where Song-i was quite upset by A-ri’s somewhat blunt words.
That was why I had told Song-i in advance last night.
She seemed to need time to prepare herself for the fact that her parents would be watched.
‘Let’s begin.’
At 4:25 in the morning, A-ri and Song-i began looking through the house.
I checked the apartment with them.
Suddenly, I remembered the first half of the sentence written on the ceiling of the Guest Room Area.
‘From within, you cannot see the whole,’ was it?
If you reversed it, there was room to interpret it as, ‘From outside, you can see the whole.’
Logically, of course, those two statements weren’t equivalent.
Still, in terms of observation, we watching through the telescope had a greater advantage than those going through it.
Our viewpoint was that of a third-person observer.
Song-i was the focus, but I could rotate three hundred and sixty degrees to see around her.
Since the people inside were human, they could only see ahead of them. We were the only ones who could see beside or behind them.
They were also experiencing the situation themselves, so all sorts of thoughts would distract them.
For example, Song-i was probably thinking things like, ‘When will my parents wake up? What will happen when it gets light? Do I have to go to school after the weekend ends?’
They couldn’t focus solely on observation as we could.
To put it simply, it was like a spectator seeing an obvious move that a player in the middle of a game couldn’t see.
Just like right now!
What were Song-i and A-ri doing?
The outer wall connected to the veranda was rippling ominously!
Why were they just looking behind the TV for no reason?
I immediately focused my entire mind.
“...!”
Could Song-i and Eun-sol understand what I was feeling now?
If I had to put it into words, it felt like a giant shaking a dollhouse with their little finger.
Any delicate manipulation or detailed message was impossible.
Eun-sol hadn’t understood this feeling during the meeting, so she had said something like, ‘Can’t you tell us through the number of tremors? One shake means stop, two shakes means keep going?’
In reality, it was completely impossible.
What felt like one tremor from inside wasn’t actually just one.
To trigger Poltergeist, I had to shake the dollhouse wildly more than ten times before the people inside finally went, ‘Huh? A book fell.’
It was hard to make someone understand without experiencing it firsthand.
In any case, once several books fell in succession, the people inside finally reacted.
A-ri immediately activated The Unremarkable Girl and disappeared beyond the range of perception. Song-i took Pero out of the Birdcage and pressed herself against the wall.
‘T-there was a door like this?’
Song-i sounded flustered.
A door? It could look that way, but to me, the one who found it first, it wasn’t a door.
It felt more like a passage to hell had appeared in an ordinary wall.
Soon, pale fog flowed in from beyond the rippling outer wall.
It was a chilling sight worse than most horror movies. An ordinary person would probably have screamed and collapsed by now.
Fortunately, my companions weren’t ordinary people.
Song-i calmly retreated toward the kitchen, while A-ri stood between Song-i and the fog, ready to fight if necessary.
But those preparations had little meaning.
The pale fog didn’t go near Song-i, let alone target her.
It hadn’t entered to target people in the first place.
Its targets were the animals scattered around Song-i’s veranda and living room!
The fog drifted through the veranda and living room, brushing past each animal once before disappearing back through the wall.
‘... What was that?’
‘It doesn’t seem like it was targeting us.’
Song-i sounded baffled, and A-ri reappeared with a puzzled look once the fog vanished.
‘Was it some kind of spell used by the Yith race?’
‘...’
‘Like taking a person’s soul and putting it into an animal?’
‘I don’t know. Was this phenomenon even caused by the Yith race in the first place?’
The two spoke in whispers.
I was curious about the fog too, but another thought occurred to me at the same time.
That fog had caused Pero’s aggressive reaction during the first attempt!
Back then, Song-i had noticed Pero acting aggressively but hadn’t felt anything strange about it.
She had thought it was simply Pero expressing frustration at being trapped in a Birdcage with foolish animals.
Song-i had Telepathy. Might she have learned something if she had clung to Pero and tried communicating?
Then again, it wasn’t fair to blame Song-i for being slow.
None of us, including me watching from outside, had noticed.
Moments like this made it really frustrating that Pero was a parrot who couldn’t speak.
...
Once day broke, A-ri vanished after using Kingdom of Dreams. She had probably rejoined Grandpa Mook-seong.
That was where the situation on Song-i’s side settled down for now.
The current time was 5:30 a.m.
Eun-sol would wake up in another hour to an hour and a half, so I should switch out before then.
* * *
“Whew...!”
The moment I pulled my eye away from the telescope, dizzying exhaustion washed over me.
In terms of time, it had only been a little over an hour, but my head already felt like it was splitting apart.
From experience, simply observing didn’t tire me out this quickly.
This pain came from triggering Poltergeist.
“You’ve worked hard. Next, I’ll...”
“Wait, just a moment.”
I roughly summarized what I had learned while observing.
As Sang-hyeon listened carefully, he reacted with surprise.
“I often think this, but you’re remarkably sharp, Ga-in.”
“Huh?”
“I mean your thoughts about when Room 301 began. The instant you began observing, you saw Miss A-ri already beside Miss Song-i, and the thought immediately occurred to you...”
“...”
“Now that I hear it, the same thought occurs to me. Observation begins after Miss Eun-sol and Miss Song-i regain consciousness. Yet Room 301 was already progressing before that.”
“Like when the fog attacked Pero while Song-i was asleep.”
“I think this issue will come up often from now on. Things that happened before the Resolution Party regained consciousness.”
After giving me a meaningful look, Sang-hyeon added one more thing.
“It’s similar to what we experienced in Room 203. A secret from before the beginning. And...”
“And?”
“What you said about Pero at the end. Pero saw the strange fog, yet didn’t actively tell Miss Song-i about it.”
“Yes.”
“When I first heard it, I thought Pero was an animal after all, and found it frustrating...”
“That’s what I thought too.”
“But thinking about it more, another possibility occurs to me. Didn’t Pero come into existence in the Hotel?”
“...”
“Pero’s standards for what is strange and normal differ from ours. We might think, ‘Why didn’t Pero actively tell us after finding something unusual?’ But Pero might be thinking, ‘Why is fog coming through a wall something unusual?’”
It was a reasonable analysis.
“I’ll observe now. Let’s check on Miss Eun-sol.”
Footnotes:
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