WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator/Editor: Hydrogen B

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◈ How to Die in the Office Labyrinth ◈

Chapter 26: Cheonok HUB

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Chae Jae-ha led the way.

"I remembered it because the name Samadhi Delivery was new to me. Seemed a little odd, you know? The tenants in this building all use the same set of couriers."

Yu Hyun-jae, who had been exploring the same zone as Chae Jae-ha, said nothing.

Then again, he had no reason to keep track of which logistics companies came and went from the building.

"Yeah, this is it. Samadhi Delivery."

The word "Samadhi Delivery" was printed in large orange letters on the rectangular cargo container Chae Jae-ha pointed to.

Bae 9502, white box truck, E02.

Just in case, I photographed the vehicle details and location and committed them to memory.

"Would it be all right if we opened the cargo door?"

"It isn't locked?"

"No. The latch looks like it's undone."

As Hwang Ju-yeon said, it looked like you could open it just by grabbing the lever-style handle and pulling. Rather than assuming the driver of this suspicious truck had simply forgotten to lock up today, it made more sense to chalk the whole thing up to the Labyrinth.

"Then I'll open it. Something strange might jump out, so please stand back."

Chae Jae-ha and Hwang Ju-yeon covered Ji-ho's eyes and stepped aside.

Yu Hyun-jae stood behind me with an expression that was slightly tense but undeniably curious. I wasn't expecting him to help open the door.

Thunk.

I grabbed both handles and pulled.

Creeeak.

The door swung open slowly, and the faint beam of a flashlight crept in through the widening gap into the dark cargo hold.

The moment the light reached all the way to the back.

"Oh...!"

A startled sound escaped me before I could help it.

"What, what's wr-- ugh...!"

"It's fine. Just a mannequin."

Inside was a human-sized figure in flesh-toned plastic, its joints twisted at grotesque angles.

The mannequin-like shape sent a chill straight down my spine.

I tried not to think about the mannequin with the golden scale for a head. Or the equation it had been working through, adding and subtracting the weight of each part of my body.

"It's a dummy."

Creak.

Yu Hyun-jae climbed into the cargo hold without hesitation and examined the figure.

"A dummy?"

"Yes. A crash test dummy. Do you see that round mark on the temple, yellow and black mixed together?"

I pushed the thought away and pulled myself up into the hold to get a closer look.

The arms and legs were flung out at random angles, and the hip and thigh area in particular was badly twisted.

No matter how I looked at it.

"It looks like it was hit by a car. Severely."

I know how to calculate what it takes to do that to a person.

Make of car, distance between the car and me, speed, the moment the driver registers my presence and the resulting reaction time, braking point, and so on. For every combination of conditions.

It was a very old habit.

So old it had carved itself into my bones. Old enough that I could barely remember the faces of my parents, who had died in an accident.

"Severely hit... This is probably a clue too. Any guesses?"

"Yes."

This dummy wasn't adult-male-sized, so it was shorter than me, and we were short on other evidence, but.

There was somewhere I could direct a guess.

"Those skid marks we saw earlier. At the speed needed to leave marks that size, this is the kind of damage you'd get."

"So these are pieces of evidence from an incident scene."

Yu Hyun-jae nodded as if the pieces had clicked into place.

"An incident? Not an accident?"

Chae Jae-ha called in from outside, unable to bring himself to actually step in, leaning just his upper body into the cargo hold.

"Wait, are you saying this is something that actually happened, Representative? A real incident?"

"That, I'm not sure. It might not be. But if it did really happen, it would be an unsolved incident."

"Unsolved? Why's that?"

Yu Hyun-jae, a guild representative who made his living off Labyrinths, pulled the corner of his mouth up as if Chae Jae-ha's question were some kind of obvious joke.

"Because the Labyrinth is a graveyard of unanswered questions. And they wait, all of them, for someone to finally solve them."

Poetic, and at the same time utterly blunt.

For the first time, I understood that Yu Hyun-jae wasn't just sitting in a cushioned office chair, studying Labyrinths inked on paper. He had been looking clearly at the real ones too, the ones that existed beyond those documents.

"Huh? Ji-ho, what's wrong? What's over th-- aagh!"

A scream came from outside without warning.

"Hwang Ju-yeon-ssi?"

"Are you all right?"

I rushed out of the truck to find Hwang Ju-yeon sitting on the ground with her teeth clenched. Jeong Ji-ho was crouched beside her, face crumpled, fidgeting anxiously.

"What happened?"

"Ngh..."

Hwang Ju-yeon pulled up one pant leg and winced.

Tiny beads of blood were forming on her ankle and beginning to run, like two small points had been pricked with a needle.

"A snake, a snake..."

"There's a snake?"

"Ow, over, over there..."

Where Hwang Ju-yeon pointed was under the truck.

And sure enough, a single snake was coiled there, watching us.

"Wait, that's actually a snake?"

Chae Jae-ha recoiled in alarm. I quickly pulled off my necktie and wrapped it above the wound, tying it tight to compress it.

Current time: 4:17.

It didn't look like a venomous snake, but this was the Labyrinth, so I couldn't be certain. I needed to see how long it took to stop the bleeding.

And if the monster came before then.

"This, um, this isn't going to... kill me, right?"

122, 116, 109, 113, 120...

The numbers on the small screen at Hwang Ju-yeon's wrist lurched up and down.

She seemed worried about the scream she had just let out.

I was certain from experience that the fake Buddha came running not for screams but for heartbeats, but I didn't say that to them as a hard fact.

They wouldn't have believed me at that moment.

"Don't worry about the scream for now. Try to calm down first. If that monster comes because it hears your heartbeat, you're still okay."

Thinking back, there had been plenty of moments where everyone was startled, and the statue hadn't shown up every single time.

When it did come, it also hadn't come the instant someone's heart rate spiked. It had always been after some time had passed.

"If it doesn't come right away even with a heart beating this hard, that means there's an additional condition tied to time, not just heart rate. So please try to relax. Breathe slowly."

"Huh, ngh..."

But Hwang Ju-yeon's heart rate kept bouncing between roughly 110 and 125.

"The bleeding, ugh, the blood won't stop...!"

"Pardon?"

I looked down at her ankle in surprise.

The bleeding had mostly slowed by now. Just a faint bead of blood sitting at each of the two bite marks.

"I was bitten by a venomous snake...!"

"No, it's not venomous. I don't know what you're seeing, but whatever it is, it's not real...!"

Hwang Ju-yeon was seeing a Labyrinth hallucination.

"Hwang Ju-yeon-ssi, Seon Yu-han-ssi is right."

Yu Hyun-jae helped me out, trying to soothe Jeong Ji-ho, who had started trembling along with her.

"It's an ordinary snake. Venomous ones have triangular heads, apparently."

"You're ly--"

--Clank.

"Damn it. Hwang Ju-yeon-ssi, please. Please calm down..."

"Seon Yu-han-ssi, it's too late. We need to move."

The bloody-smelling statue was closing in.

"I come from the cracks between what you cherish, what you fear, and what makes you bleed."

Yu Hyun-jae pulled me by the arm and dragged me behind a pillar on the far side.

Chae Jae-ha and Jeong Ji-ho had already huddled down and were hiding.

"You cannot sever the One Hundred and Eight earthly desires yourself, nor escape them to reach enlightenment, for you do not even perceive that your heart is bound by them."

Crack, splat.

"Ngh, aaagh!"

I stood behind the pillar and watched all of it.

Without closing my eyes. Without covering my ears. Without covering my mouth.

"......"

The heart that had been hammering away gradually returned to its own pace.

It was a sensation that was deeply, skin-crawlingly unreal, and yet familiar enough to almost feel like comfort.

The feeling of an instant when, unable to endure terrible violence any longer, the substanceless self that is "I" forcibly splits from the physical body and steps free of the pain.

Strangely, I felt that this was the most human thing of all. And at the same time, the most alive.

"Seon Yu-han-ssi. Seon Yu-han-ssi?"

"Ah. Oh..."

When I came back to myself, everything was over.

The white box truck had turned red, and the monster was gone.

"Seon Yu-han-ssi, are you okay?"

"Ah, yes..."

I looked blankly down at my phone.

4:19... 4:20.

Subtracting the time it had taken to approach and the time until actual death, from when Hwang Ju-yeon was bitten by the snake to when we heard the first footsteps...

"About a minute and a half, maybe two minutes."

The words slipped out in a murmur, like reciting a prayer under my breath.

And somehow I had the feeling I'd heard something similar before.

"Oh? Hey, hey, Representative, Seon Yu-han-ssi...! The snake came out...!"

Then Chae Jae-ha's sudden shout snapped me back.

The snake had come out from under the truck and was moving somewhere.

"Seon Yu-han-ssi, if you're struggling, you can stay here and rest with Ji-ho-gun. We'll go follow it."

Yu Hyun-jae glanced toward Chae Jae-ha as he said it.

"Huh, m-me?"

"No. I'll go. Chae Jae-ha-ssi, I'd appreciate it if you kept an eye on Ji-ho."

"Oh, sure, yeah. I have a nephew, I'm really good with kids."

Leaving behind Chae Jae-ha, who was holding the trembling child and trying to calm him down, I followed the snake with Yu Hyun-jae.

It wasn't particularly fast, so we were able to trail it at a comfortable distance.

"That car, maybe?"

When the snake stopped in front of a car ahead of us, Yu Hyun-jae made a strange expression, the look of someone not quite sure whether to laugh or not.

"Oh...!"

Thwap.

The snake, which had been watching the two of us, suddenly leaped and disappeared into the car's emblem.

So a snake about the length of a forearm had slipped into a flat emblem no bigger than a palm and become a picture of a snake.

"That brand's logo originally has a snake on the right and a cross on the left..., well, not really important."

Seo 8102, red sports sedan, A11.

While I was memorizing the vehicle details and location, Yu Hyun-jae started rambling some trivia and then let it drop.

"Let me try the door."

Click.

It opened easily, as expected.

I sat in the driver's seat and searched the sun visor, door pocket, and center console, but found nothing.

"Oh."

Yu Hyun-jae opened the glove compartment on the passenger side and pulled something out.

"There's a catalog. A car catalog."

It was a catalog describing various models from a domestic brand.

"I wonder if there's a clue in here about the next car..."

The moment Yu Hyun-jae opened the catalog.

Slam.

Click.

Both doors shut at the same time and locked immediately.

"Ha..."

Damn.

I barely swallowed the curse and tried the handle, but it was pointless. Naturally.

"So it's not just my hallucination. It won't open on this side either."

Then.

Crackle, crackle...

The radio switched on, and static filled the car.

"Cheonok" (천옥) appears in the chapter title as a named hub or zone designation within the Labyrinth. The meaning of the word in Korean can carry connotations of a heavenly prison or celestial cage, which may be thematically significant.

Footnotes:

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