WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ Escaping the Mystery Hotel ◈
Episode 679: Room 301, Curse Room - ‘The Origin of Species’ (23)
──────
- Yoo Song-i
It was my third day living as the high school girl Yoo Song-i.
I realized my past self had been a pretty lazy person.
--- Whoosh!
“Yoo Song-i! Who puts their head down and sleeps during class... Huh?”
“Ah.”
Without even properly looking at the flying chalk, I knocked it aside with one hand.
The other students snickered as though they found it amusing, while the teacher looked dumbfounded.
They probably thought it was an accident, right?
Honestly, I felt a little proud just then!
I could knock aside flying chalk with my eyes closed now!
“Sorry.”
What a useless ability.
It wasn’t like I could knock aside bullets. What was the point of being able to deflect something as slow as a piece of chalk?
Anyway, after wasting time like that, class ended.
The moment I wandered out of the classroom, A-ri appeared.
“Do you feel anything? Are mysterious memories coming back to you or something?”
“Not at all.”
“... Don’t say it so casually. I thought you would’ve realized something by now.”
“What am I supposed to do if I don’t know?”
A-ri looked dumbfounded, and I just shrugged.
“The more you keep asking, the less I know.”
“... Watching you these past few days made me realize something.”
“What?”
“You seem to live without any purpose.”
“...”
“You don’t study hard, and you don’t exercise hard either...”
Most high school students were like me!
“Just a life spent wasting time? A life where you nap all day like a lazy cat...”
“You’re trying to pick a fight with me, aren’t you?”
“You only figured that out now?”
A-ri giggled, then dragged me into an empty classroom by the arm.
“Come on. People notice when you and I talk, so at least be mindful of who’s watching.”
“...”
“Seriously, I noticed you don’t usually go straight home after class. It’s not like you seem to be doing anything in particular, either.”
“I’ve always been like this.”
“Right. You’re repeating those actions because that’s how you were. What I’m asking is why you don’t go home.”
“... Because I don’t want to see my parents. Mom has been home a lot lately.”
“Ah, I understand.”
A-ri tilted her head as she thought for a moment.
“Then did your past self stay out until night and experience something?”
“... Maybe.”
“If we just keep passing time, there’ll be no end to it. Let’s do this.”
* * *
- Lee Eun-sol
Thanks to Grandpa Mook-seong turning back time, everyone realized one thing!
Plan A, which had been made outside, was a one-way ticket to a Bad Ending.
So the simple Plan B my companions improvised inside the Room was this.
Live not as Participant Lee Eun-sol, but as Executive Director Lee Eun-sol of Daeyang Group, and find out what the Original Wish was.
Three days had passed, and I had realized one thing clearly.
My siblings were kind of awful people.
“Haha! Eun-sol, I heard the news.”
“...”
“The Shanghai Project fell through, didn’t it? Wow... This is serious, isn’t it? Didn’t the whole Group have high hopes for it?”
“...”
“Hey, hey! What are you going to do? You spent over a year trying to work with Shanghai Tejin Group, didn’t you?”
The man openly mocking me on the day my business deal had gone wrong was Lee Jin-uk.
He was the Daeyang Group chairman’s proud second child, and my older brother.
“What are you going to do? Our Executive Director Eun-sol must be under so much stress! Should your big brother help you out?”
My brother was openly needling me.
At that moment, what I felt was less annoyance than unfamiliarity.
To begin with, I had no idea what the Shanghai Project even was.
According to my brother, it was a project I had worked on for over a year. It seemed I had completely forgotten it while struggling through the Hotel.
Besides, fighting someone over something so trivial didn’t feel real to me.
Maybe that was why I muttered without thinking.
“How did we end up like this?”
Jin-uk looked slightly flustered.
Or maybe what I’d just said made him feel a little ashamed.
“What do you mean, like this... Ahem! Eun-sol, Father seems disappointed. Prepare an answer.”
My brother had mocked and taunted me the entire time, but when he warned me that Father seemed disappointed and I should prepare an answer, I could feel maybe one gram of genuine concern.
That was the basic emotion shared by all four of us.
Competition with one another, and fear and resentment toward Father.
“...”
Father, Lee Seok-hwan, chairman of Daeyang Group.
A problematic man who always stirred up competition between his children.
According to Grandpa Mook-seong, he was also an incomplete Regressor who mistook memories of previous Loops for Prophetic Dreams.
“Prophetic Dreams...”
“What?”
“Never mind. I’m busy now, so...”
“Prophetic Dreams? That’s something Father used to say sometimes.”
I was startled.
“What? Father talked about Prophetic Dreams?”
Jin-uk looked at me in puzzlement.
“You heard it with me several times, didn’t you?”
“...”
“Wasn’t that something Father said sometimes when he drank? That he relied on dreams when making important decisions.”
“This can’t be.”
“What’s wrong? Did you start drinking at lunch today?”
Now that I thought about it, he was right.
As he said, Father would occasionally talk about dreams when he was drunk.
Back then, I had simply let those words pass by.
I thought regression and Loops were things that only happened in movies, and that Chaos Disasters were something only the Management Bureau needed to worry about.
Could that be the only memory I had carelessly ignored, despite some great secret hiding within it?
“Jin-uk, can’t you remember anything else?”
“What?”
“Strange memories. Ridiculous things you experienced in life. Bizarre phenomena you sometimes wondered about. Anything like that?”
My brother hesitated, as if startled.
“No, why did the topic suddenly turn into this?”
Only then did I come to my senses.
A mistake! Plan B was supposed to be living as a Daeyang Group executive, not as a Hotel Participant!
What I had just done was too much like a Participant.
“... Forget it. Just leave.”
I waved him away, and just as he was about to leave with a dumbfounded look, he suddenly stopped at the door and muttered.
“Come to think of it, your words remind me of something.”
“Something you remember?”
“We traveled a lot when we were little, didn’t we?”
“Did we?”
“You and Hee-yoon might have forgotten because you were too young. Mother really likes traveling.”
“I think so.”
“I think there were a lot of unusual trips.”
“...”
“Was that Mother’s taste? I don’t know.”
“What was unusual about them?”
“Now that I’m trying to say it, I can’t remember well. Ask her when you get home.”
* * *
Left alone in my office, I thought of several keywords.
Lee Eun-sol, Executive Director of Daeyang Group, not a Participant.
The Original Wish made to the Hotel.
They all concerned memories from before coming to the Hotel.
It applied not only to me, but to many of my companions as well. Our memories from before the Hotel had grown very hazy.
Our experiences in the Hotel had all been experiences so shocking that ordinary people could never imagine them.
In the end, most of the memories belonging to the ordinary person called Executive Director Lee Eun-sol of Daeyang Group had long been swept away by the tides of oblivion.
That was why I failed to anticipate what happened next.
“Oh my, oh my! I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”
“...”
At first, I didn’t understand why my secretary was apologizing.
Fortunately, the secretary whose name I could barely remember soon made the reason clear.
“I should have prepared your coffee in advance...! I was, um, organizing your schedule for tomorrow, and for a moment...”
Only then did a vague image of my past self return to me.
I had been someone who always needed warm coffee on the table while working, right?
What did that mean?
It meant that whenever my cup was empty, or before the coffee cooled, my secretary had to replace it with fresh hot coffee.
The beans always had to be Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, and the temperature had to stay between seventy and eighty degrees Celsius.
After remembering that much, I blankly looked at my right hand.
Forget coffee beans, it was a Maxim Mocha Gold coffee mix, and it had gone cold ages ago.
No wonder my secretary was terrified that I would chew them out.
“Executive Director, I’ll get it right away...”
“It’s fine, it’s fine.”
“Pardon?”
“It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it.”
Seeing my secretary openly fail to hide their relief at not being scolded made me laugh hollowly.
What even were Ethiopian Yirgacheffe beans?
Just drink instant coffee!
What was all that about the proper temperature?
Would I freeze to death if the coffee cooled down a little?
Past Eun-sol had been such a ridiculous person.
“...”
No, no! Wasn’t I supposed to get annoyed right now?
The past would only play out the same way if I lived exactly as I had before.
“Hey!”
“Eek!”
“What are you even paid for? What kind of secretary can’t make a single cup of coffee properly?”
“I-I’m sorry!”
Sorry, secretary whose name I can’t remember.
There was nothing I could do if my past self had been this kind of person.
I was glad I had never shown this side of myself to my companions.
Then again, in a place like Hotel Pioneer, mistreating the people around you wouldn’t be a character flaw. It’d be an intelligence problem.
* * *
“I didn’t know Miss Eun-sol had this side to her.”
“Some memories are coming back.”
“Has something similar happened?”
“When I saw memories related to the Original Wish, I saw myself naturally ordering employees around.”
“Good grief!”
* * *
Late in the evening, I left work earlier than usual and returned home.
There had been quite a few uncomfortable moments at the office.
For a moment, I wondered if this was really okay...
Thinking back, though, on days when I was annoyed, I used to just ditch my meetings and go home.
Could an executive director act like that?
The chairman’s daughter could.
Sitting in the office attached to my room, I absentmindedly scribbled over the documents I had brought home and thought.
What kind of person had the past me, Executive Director Lee Eun-sol of Daeyang Group, been?
From my hazy memories and the attitudes of the people around me, I could tell a few things.
I feared Father while resenting him at the same time.
I felt a strong sense of rivalry toward my siblings.
I did not hide my greed for Daeyang Group, while also wanting to build a business of my own.
How did these things connect to the Original Wish?
Would I naturally find out if I continued living as an executive director?
“...”
Wasn’t this analytical approach itself something a Hotel Participant would do?
The real past me wouldn’t have even known words like Original Wish!
This situation felt exactly like “Don’t think of an elephant.”
The harder I tried not to think of A, the more fixated on A I became.
“Whew...”
As I sighed and looked for something to eat in the refrigerator in my room, I heard a welcome voice.
“Eun-sol, you came home early today?”
“Yes. There are some things I’ve been thinking about.”
--- Scrape!
“Huh?”
The room seemed to shake slightly.
For a moment, I wondered if my companions outside were warning me through Poltergeist activity...
But it had been too brief for that.
As I stood there, confused about what it was, Mother’s warm, or perhaps amused, voice reached me.
“I was a little surprised this time.”
“Pardon?”
“It seems things aren’t going well... Isn’t that right?”
It seemed Jin-uk had already told her something about the Shanghai Project.
It had nothing to do with the current me, though.
“It’s nothing, so please don’t worry.”
“I’m glad you say that. You know I’m always supporting you, right?”
“Of course.”
“... Trying again wouldn’t be a bad idea. I’ll help you.”
Footnotes:
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