WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Natty
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◈ How to Rewrite Ghost Stories ◈
Episode 61: Geochilsan Express Train (7)
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By the time I reached the engine room, I felt as if my body had dried out.
Maybe my mind was affecting my body. It should not have been possible to dry out. This was a place where people did not die and time did not pass.
With every step forward, a strange sensation ruled the train, as if everything were slowly crumbling away.
I might have been more familiar with the organic stickiness and revulsion of passing through a monster's guts or slimy esophagus. That was within the range of the grotesque things countless ghost stories had already twisted and reworked.
But this place had thrown an entirely different curveball. It felt as if I had been wrapped head to toe in the brittle, crumbling linen shroud of a mummy, dried and shriveled after being stuffed in a coffin for thousands of years, until it tightened around my throat.
A dry, crackling sound of something breaking beneath my feet kept echoing. It was like jumping into fallen leaves, or like a pit of dust might collapse and swallow me whole.
“Hertz... how many minutes has it been now?”
My throat was dry. I should have searched the dining car for water or something.
Partner, only four minutes have passed.
Already that much?
“...Tell me every minute from now on. I think we're running out of time.”
Of course.
There was no time to go back. I forced down the saliva I had gathered, then shone my flashlight at the engine room.
The leather-like texture of the walls had completely vanished around here. In its place, countless wires and thick cables tangled like raised veins over skin, covering the floor and ceiling.
Most of them were black, but if I stared long enough, I felt as though I could hear a pulse thudding within them.
“...There’s no way to see inside.”
The thick, heavy iron door was pitch-black, swallowing all light. There was no window in it.
'It looks less like an engine-room door and more like someone tore off a bank vault door and stuck it here.'
What an interesting pattern.
A pattern?
When I shone the light closer, I saw dense, unfamiliar geometric engravings across the iron door. They seemed to hold meaning beyond a simple arrangement of shapes. Some even looked like written characters made of shapes.
“...Where have I...?”
I had seen it somewhere. The largest pattern, covering the whole door, felt familiar. A spiral that seemed to surge upward in a huge whirl toward the sky. Where had I seen it?
Another minute has passed, Partner.
“Ah, thanks.”
I did not have the leisure to investigate the origin of this pattern. First, I had to deal with the inside of this engine room as quickly as possible.
I shone the light around and ran my hands through the gaps in the patterns. I sharpened my senses along the spaces between tangled wires and the cold grain of the iron.
As I felt around from the top of the door to the bottom, then from the side to the top again, with the flashlight clenched between my teeth, I found an unnaturally smooth groove amid the heavy texture.
Click.
When I pushed the groove sideways, one of the patterns slid open. A round hole appeared, unlike any ordinary keyhole, with several gears intricately interlocked inside it.
This was probably the keyhole. I took out the key Officer Ryu Hyeon-u had hidden behind the terminal. Slowly, I pushed in the key, which bore a spiral pattern instead of grooves, matching it to the openings and surrounding pattern.
Slide.
The key seemed to be drawn smoothly inside as though pulled by a magnet. Then it moved on its own within the lock, and a series of clicks sounded as the solid metal meshed perfectly with the device inside.
“...It worked.”
The entire enormous vault door trembled like a person, then split apart to either side with a sliding sound like a hydraulic cylinder.
“Urgh...!”
My breath caught. Terrifying heat, held back inside, burst out at me. It was almost like boiling, humid steam.
Even standing before a high-temperature wood-fired sauna furnace would be cooler than this. Going in bare-skinned was certain suicide.
I took a deep breath, stepped back a few paces, and made sure my body had cooled down before putting one Eyeball That Never Sleeps in my mouth. Once the stinging heat began to subside, I forced my way into the engine room, where heat surged like waves.
“...I really feel like I'm going to die.”
The next time I went to the Twilight Market, I needed to look for something like a protective barrier item rather than something that restored my condition. Every time I used this, I still suffered all the pain. It just kept any wounds from lasting.
White steam rose from my skin like clouds, beginning to form a kind of membrane.
In response to the state of my intact body and this place's insane heat, horrific burns continuously appeared, healed, and appeared again.
In other words, it was fucking hot and fucking painful, but my body was unharmed. I was being cooked alive and resurrected at the same time.
Partner. Don't stay there too long.
“I was already planning to, even if you didn't say so...”
The candy was melting far faster than usual, too. This was on a completely different level from the scales. I grew anxious.
'Let's see...'
As expected, the engine room looked nothing like the control cabin of a modern express train. It seemed to be from around the same era as the dining car, like a steam locomotive's boiler room and coal car combined into one.
Something like a boiler room covered an entire wall, spewing blazing red flames and insane heat.
Beside it, thick wires melted completely out of shape from the heat, along with iron chairs and desks, had fused into a single hardened mass. Only the control wheel and a few levers barely retained their shapes.
I crawled between them and pushed through the tangled wires and sticky melted mass with all my strength. If there was a clue in this engine room, it would be inside that lump of heat or somewhere here.
“...!”
Then my hand caught on cold metal.
'There you are.'
I immediately pulled it out. A square electronic clock with several wires connected to it came free. It was larger than I expected and crudely shaped, but it was working properly.
That was to say, it showed the remaining time. Red letters ticked down like the timer on a bomb.
[Time remaining until the terminus: 5,324 years, 9 months, 2 days, 17 hours, 34 minutes / 1 hour, 58 minutes, 37 seconds]
“...Wait, this.”
I rubbed my eyes and looked at the display again. The numbers had not changed.
“...Hertz, what time is it now?”
It's 4:10. Ah, it was 4:00 when you found the engine room, and about three more minutes have passed since you entered.
“...We boarded the 3:40 train, right?”
We were due to arrive in Busan around 6:10, two and a half hours later. Then the latter number, 1 hour, 58 minutes, and 37 seconds...
It matched the actual time remaining until our train reached Busan Station, its final destination in the real world.
“...These five thousand years must be the remaining time converted into the time assigned to the 100 Million Years Train...”
That much I understood. But something felt wrong. There was a huge contradiction.
“Then it doesn't add up.”
Ryu Hyeon-u's records, which I had found in a pile of dust. The final journal had clearly continued for nearly one million days. Converted to years, that was around three thousand years.
Considering that nearly twenty more minutes had passed while I was traveling through the train, less than a thousand years should have remained on this train.
But now the timing was completely scrambled. It meant that around thirty minutes after this train departed, I had received Ryu Hyeon-u's belongings, from three thousand years later, at a point only two thousand years in.
'Stay calm. Think it through again.'
If I figured this out now, I felt I could solve both the mysterious missing ten minutes and what that clock meant at once. I laid out every premise I knew as a hypothesis, one by one.
First. The engine room and dining car where I stood were not spaces inside the 100 Million Years Train.
If Ryu Hyeon-u's records were correct, the belongings of the people trapped on the 100 Million Years Train, and probably the state of the living-yet-dead walls, were events that happened after several thousand years had passed.
Ryu Hyeon-u had apparently headed for the engine room but failed. Instead, Ryu Hyeon-u found the engine-room key inside the 100 Million Years Train.
I fitted the fragmented puzzle pieces together in my mind. The past and future, and the absolute time that should truly be passing.
At last, only one unbelievable, insane hypothesis began flashing in my mind as the perfect answer.
Had Sherlock Holmes said it? Once you eliminate all impossible factors, whatever remains, however impossible it may seem, must be the truth.
“Time is tangled and overlapping... If the original time outside is the absolute time axis, then it stretches that out across different coordinates and massively inflates time somewhere.”
In that process, it could pass through the same coordinates again. Then the present, past, and future of passengers who had just boarded and passengers who had endured thousands of years would all exist at once.
“That’s why everyone spends seven thousand years on the train even though they get off at different stations. After seven thousand years, they get off where things overlap at the next coordinates, whether that’s Daejeon or Gyeongju.”
Old trains had dining cars. Their engine rooms looked old like this, too. It was a kind of train no longer found on today's KTX. Yet they existed at the same time. Passing through the same coordinates at different times, they overlapped.
Then what?
The current train carrying passengers had 100 million years fixed within it. At the same time, an old train had been jammed into it, coexisting and accumulating another span of time all at once.
It was not some third ghost story. This and that were all the same train. Things that existed at different times had simply piled up in one space.
Partner, behind you.
“?”
When I turned around, the boiler room stood half-open, pouring out heat. It was so hot, and my eyeball was still holding, that I had not even realized my back was repeatedly burning and healing.
“...Ah.”
I remembered where I had seen it. The answer had been proudly flaunting itself from the beginning.
Above the firebox where flames surged stood the exact same pattern I had seen on the door, engraved in huge lines.
A bizarre, intricate spiral, seemingly whirling upward toward the sky in a massive vortex, with no end in sight.
Of course it had felt familiar. It was a symbol I had seen before. But to be certain, I took out my phone, aimed it at the spiral pattern, and pressed the shutter button.
Click.
Along with the shutter sound came an unfamiliar yet familiar notification.
〈The Depth Gauge has been updated!〉
A short line of text appeared on the app screen.
“...The Helical Cult.”
The chain that would not leave my left hand felt cold. The identity of the third ghost story, and the time thief, had been revealed. That strange cult ghost story!
'But why?'
Why would the Helical Cult need time? Were they trying to achieve some kind of religious ascension in here? But everyone arrived without a problem. If even one person had gone missing from the train, the Corporation would have noticed.
It was probably right to assume they had used a crude method to create the missing ten minutes. For now, I would treat that as my hypothesis.
“...There it is after all.”
When I turned the clock over, a spiral logo was engraved on the bottom as well. Now that I had a hypothesis, it was time to prove it.
I quickly began scanning for ghost stories related to the updated Helical Cult entry in the Depth Gauge. There was still not much internal data, and only ghost stories with religious themes came up.
Among them, I could hardly find any ghost story dealing with both religion and time. I grew more anxious by the second. Maybe my mind was becoming muddled because my eyelids kept being scorched and restored without end.
I could simply leave, but I stupidly endured the heat because I was afraid that, if I did, I would never be able to enter again and would lose the clue.
Let’s widen the range. I expanded it to spirals, Spiral, and even time travel, then searched through the page where I had first found the Helical Cult, focusing on the Twilight Market's cipher code.
The cult's candidates and discarded mechanisms, One Who Goes First and baptism. How to find it...
Information I already knew was listed again. There had to be something among it that I had pushed aside because I did not need it at the time. There had to be.
“...!”
「A spiral is two that make one. Where there is one, there is another, and together they become whole and rise to the heavens.」
One passage caught my eye. What did it mean? Did two making one mean that a spiral rose with two lines twisting together?
Two. Two times. Two train cars. Two ghost stories. Could it be?
“...I need one more. A key.”
I shone the light on the overturned clock. Inside it, a control panel for resetting the time and a keyhole gleamed clearly.
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