WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Natty
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ How to Rewrite Ghost Stories ◈
Episode 26: A Safe Place (1)
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As I grabbed the white ladder and started climbing, a strange sensation gradually clung to my body.
It felt as though I were forcing my entire body through a tough, sticky membrane. The resistance was revolting, yet at the same time, it felt cold and refreshing.
When I opened the door at the top of the ladder and stepped out, the sewer stench that had nearly numbed my nose vanished in an instant. In its place came the smell of temple incense mixed with something like motor oil.
‘I made it.’
I pulled myself all the way out. The bustle and lights of Twilight Market disappeared at once, and the sewer cover vanished without a trace between the white tiles, as though it had never existed.
‘This is incredible...’
The scene before me was a ghost story that had never once been described, existing only as a setting in someone’s imagination. Perhaps because of that, it felt more unreal and more daunting than any ghost story I had experienced so far.
An alien, dazzlingly white corridor.
White stone pillars engraved with unreadable writing stood at regular intervals, supporting a massive vaulted ceiling.
More than anything, there was the sound.
I raised my head at the faint mechanical hum that vibrated through the space strongly enough to overwhelm even Hertz’s old jazz.
The high dome above, decorating the space where the sky should have been, held tens of thousands of gears intertwined like a vast model of the solar system.
White, black, and gold gears in every imaginable shape turned, some slowly and some furiously.
It was grotesque. Yet at the same time, it was magnificent and sacred.
This was the “safe place” I had been looking for.
- Partner, this does not particularly feel like a safe place.
As though Hertz had read my mind, they slipped in a small jab. I gave a light shrug.
‘Of course it doesn’t. If ghost stories were ranked by their psycho index, cult stories would definitely make the top five. And this is a cult ghost story created by the original author.’
- And how did you find this place? Can you tell me now?
‘Ah, that.’
It began with a simple question.
The original author had created a market where anything could be sold, so why ban the most interesting religious hook?
Just the idea of a religious alley would have produced countless sacred relics, forbidden items, and similar things.
Because it would ruin the balance?
Humanity’s collective intelligence usually weeds out anything too Mary Sue.
Because it did not suit the concept?
But fan-made pages for knockoffs based on existing religious items had appeared from time to time.
That meant the ban had been intentional, and the original author’s ghost-story series would contain the clue to that intention.
So I went back and read through every post the original author had written. There were more than twenty lengthy entries, and I found something they all had in common.
The oddly broken paragraph layouts and symbols like ■■■.
At first, I thought they were merely effects meant to show the usual system errors or madness of a ghost story.
‘But what if it was an elaborate cipher?’
The unusual placement in each post of the notice identifying it as a post by XX. Symbols and letters that replaced only particular characters. Symbol substitutions that never exceeded the number of letters in the alphabet. The recurring “guidance.”
In other words, it was a codebook cipher.
A codebook cipher uses a reference book to encrypt and decrypt messages. By checking the strings that replace individual words or phrases, the message can be decoded.
The book used for encryption and decryption can be any text shared by sender and receiver. The Bible, atlases, and even subway maps have been used for such ciphers.
- Then what was the codebook for decoding it?
‘The fan-creation guidelines.’
It was the only page of meta-information stating that fan creations and free writing were allowed. Anyone could access it. It always stated facts, with no room for anyone’s opinions or suggestions. It was an exclusive, perfect space belonging solely to the original author.
The announcement itself had been the codebook.
After gathering the guidelines’ sentence arrangement, the wiki order, the clues in the announcement, and every distorted sentence, symbol, and code from the ghost stories, then comparing them through the codebook cipher, I got this:
Those who can read the true writing, head to the lowest place.
Pass through the Eight Sacred Shields and Five Territories that guide you, and grasp the leg of the soaring hawk.
At the place you climb to, sacred language and watchful wheels will greet you.
In the end, no matter how many times they turn, all paths will connect in one place, and all paths will lead outside.
‘The true destination of this market that the original author wanted people to discover.’
It might have looked as though I had crawled through the sewers without much thought, but the sewers had been the only route here.
The eight shields referred to eight water gates, while the five territories were intersections where major sewer channels overlapped after passing particular gates.
The spiral gear shapes I had seen whenever I passed through a water gate or intersection.
It was brutally elaborate foreshadowing.
And why could a cult be a safe route?
Because this place held the safest and only way out, one that did not require passing through Twilight Market again.
‘But first, I need a disguise.’
Using the blue-and-red lantern would have been ideal, but it would cut off Hertz’s radio too. I couldn’t casually take it out in a place where mental contamination attacks were so severe.
The lantern would stop anomalies from finding me, but that didn’t mean I could wander freely among them like an invisible person.
I hid behind a pillar and surveyed the area. A few people walked along the corridor.
They wore white, sack-like monastic robes and thick white veils that covered their entire faces, making it impossible for them to recognize one another.
‘Don’t get caught...’
Keeping myself within the pillars’ shadows, I gradually moved toward the outer edge.
I found the place with the fewest people around and crawled behind a stack of boxes that smelled particularly strongly of oil. The piled bags contained a mixture of white monastic robes and ordinary clothes.
‘They probably stripped these off dead people...’
No. Let’s not think that far.
“Who’s there?”
A voice suddenly called out. There was nowhere farther back for me to hide. The bag of clothes was too small to crawl into!
“Is someone there?”
Footsteps approached with the voice. There was no time. I quickly pulled on one of the monastic robes and draped the veil over my head.
“Brother?”
Only after the veil had barely blocked my vision did the owner of the voice appear, casting a shadow over me.
The veil allowed me to roughly see my surroundings, but it clouded my view too much for either of us to properly see the other’s face. Judging by the voice, the person in front of me was probably a woman.
“What are you doing here?”
“...Ah, um...”
My thoughts spun desperately. This was outside the original plan. I had meant to leave through the route used to dispose of this “waste” and get back outside.
‘I can’t gamble on whether I’ll get out of here alive or dead.’
“One of the things I was carrying rolled this way, so I was looking for it. Thank you for coming to find me.”
Then I would have to go with the second escape plan.
Pretend to be a prospective member of this cult.
I rose with the most harmless body language I could manage. The cultist in front of me watched for a moment.
“Did you find it?”
“No. But it probably wasn’t important.”
That must have been a good answer. Even though we both wore veils, I could easily tell that the wariness the other person had held toward me vanished in an instant.
“You’re a candidate, right? Are you here for the final confirmation of the faithful today?”
I had no idea what that meant, but I nodded anyway.
“I knew it. You have such a clean, lovely air about you. You must be the foremost wheel, right?”
The person in front of me looked truly delighted while mixing in all sorts of incomprehensible cult terminology.
“Come on. It will soon be the Time of the Faithful. This way.”
“...Thank you.”
The enormous gears in the ceiling above tilted sharply and began turning in a new direction. At the end of the corridor, where I arrived with my cult friend, was a small plaza.
Every wall of the plaza was engraved with intricate equations and geometric patterns. Beneath them, veiled cultists traced the patterns with their fingers and muttered to themselves.
“The last faithful has arrived. Let us move together toward enlightenment.”
Apparently, the cultist who had brought me here was a group leader.
I had planned to quietly slip to the back and escape somewhere along the way, but my cult friend placed me right at the front.
“Now, let us proceed toward our faith.”
“May intellect and praise be with us, and may only light lie ahead.”
With the prayer chanted by many voices, the cultists in the plaza began walking in one direction all at once. Naturally, as the one at the very front, I had no choice but to follow the group leader.
‘At this point, I have no choice but to take the candidate-failure route...’
In this ghost story, only baptism remained before one became one of the faithful, meaning a cult member. Getting baptized was practically suicide.
The only option worth considering was remaining a candidate. Candidates went through three stages of confirmation to determine whether they were suitable for baptism. If they failed even once, they could supposedly return to reality under the pretext of a “maintenance process.”
‘It is a little strange that, for a cult, they do not just gather people up and keep brainwashing them...’
Maybe the original author had some other intention in creating that setting. For now, there was no established setting from the original author, which meant there might be a part I could twist to my advantage.
A massive door stood at the end of the corridor. The huge letters spelling AGORA slowly meshed and turned like gears themselves.
The sound of machinery echoed around us like a slow hymn.
“...All causes and effects interlock, so this exists, and because this exists, that exists. To turn is to return. We turn back in order to leave, and leave in order to return.”
“These are the words of the Prophet.”
After the group leader recited the chant, the cultists all joined in. Cold sweat ran down my back, but I kept my breathing as steady as possible.
‘I can’t hear anything. I can only hear Hertz.’
I turned the volume as high as I could without letting the sound leak out.
The doors opened, and the long line of cultists in white veils entered a huge, circular hall beneath a dome. The sound of gears turning came from everywhere, but no gears were visible.
Instead, white veils hung everywhere. Pale light rippled through the gaps, casting golden shadows.
At the center of the hall stood a high altar, several high-ranking figures who appeared to be priests, and a baptismal font filled not with clear water, but with a silver liquid that rippled faintly.
‘That isn’t mercury, is it?’
If I had been somewhere in the middle of the group, I might have been able to quietly make my way into the line of unqualified candidates. Tragically, I was at the very front.
‘God, Buddha, please help me out here. Please.’
I prayed to gods I didn’t even believe in. It was a desperate hope that my prayers might work better than a prayer to some ghost-story cult god.
“One Who Goes First, come up here.”
It felt as though invisible hands pushed me forward. Hundreds of eyes fixed on me. The moment I said one wrong thing, I felt like a skewer would shoot out from somewhere and pierce me.
“One Who Goes First, hold out your hand and prove your faith. If your faith accords with your path, you will be rewarded.”
The silver liquid in the baptismal font lapped softly. I had to put my hand in there. My hand...
I swallowed hard and brought my hand out from beneath my long sleeve.
Flash.
For one moment, a light strong enough to blind everyone rippled outward.
Then flash.
“...!”
The surrounding noise vanished as if it had never existed.
The steady rhythm of the gears stopped. The cultists’ prayers were cut off. The priests froze stiffly in place.
Everyone’s gaze turned toward me.
No, more precisely, toward the jewelry around my hand, which had slipped out from beneath my robes. The bracelet and rings connected by a thin silver chain gripped my wrist tightly like a snake.
The metal staff held by one of the priests fell to the floor with a sharp sound. Everyone standing nearby dropped to their knees at once and bowed their heads to the ground.
Murmurs spread like waves. I could feel thousands of gazes pouring toward me through the veils.
‘...I’m fucked.’
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