Chapter 214

Eleanor. Ellie, for short.

"In truth I am no longer certain that is even her real name."

"Saying a thing like that, it seems you have picked up a fair amount of Gaps common sense?"

She brewed buckwheat tea and set it down in front of Yeon-woo.

"……."

The scent was good.

"You said you have no memory of me."

Yeon-woo swallowed a mouthful of tea.

"Yet you seem to know my tastes."

"Regrettably it is not information I got out of Chairman Baek. He shielded you so thoroughly that he would scarcely tell me anything private. Said I should hear it from your own mouth."

"I shall have to thank Mr. Baek Mu-jin. If you did not hear it directly, then either you guessed roughly on the grounds that I am a Dokkaebi and happened to be right, or you did a background check."

"Both."

Pale mauve eyes, the color of violets, curved vividly.

"Starting five years ago, you see, an interesting thing happened."

"I am the client here, yet it appears I am to play the counselor. Well, fine. What was so interesting?"

"I came to feel a wrongness in my own memory!"

Eyes glittering in that needlessly handsome face, she flung both arms wide.

"When I traced back to find from exactly what point the actual cause of the wrongness lay, it came out to roughly thirty-one years ago, in Seoul, Korea. Have you any notion how many trials there were, starting from my own vicinity and going all the way to finally finding you?"

Setting down the cup of buckwheat tea, Yeon-woo curved a smile.

"I would rather not have any notion."

"You do seem a little different from the young Yeon-woo 'I' knew. What is the cause? Simply that time has passed? That you grew? That you changed? Was there a change in nature as well? Specifically how?"

"It seems even that fine brain of yours finds calculating that far difficult, Teacher."

"I do know, at least, that the Foundation is tangled up in it."

"The Foundation."

Yeon-woo rolled his eyes.

"So that is how you have understood it."

"From the look of it, you did not know?"

"Rather, I had thought surely not."

No wonder it kept tangling with me to such a strange degree.

'It seems Hoone really was not just a game.'

Whatever else, the performance of Eleanor's brain could be trusted. He had guessed that the 'hotel' as it now stood had come to be connected to the Foundation, but he had not known it was a game connected to the Foundation from the very beginning.

'How far does this person know….'

From the way she spoke, the point at which the 'wrongness' broke off was clear.

"What do you think I am?"

"Oh dear, is this a probing match? This sort of thing is not bad either."

"I am not stupid enough to be swayed just because you mixed a truth serum into the tea I like."

"A blood mage indeed. You neutralize it at once…. My thanks for the good information."

Eleanor folded her arms and leaned back against the sofa.

"For one, the fact that you are Velmareth?"

"Has that become a story every person in the world knows?"

"When the Vampires went out on an outing in a body like that, not knowing would be the stranger thing. Anyone worth calling informed will have grasped at least that Velmareth is somewhere in Asia. And the fact that you are likely a Korean Dokkaebi?"

"Are you certain of that part as well?"

"In the end, is the divine spirit this country calls a 'Dokkaebi' not born through gazes and attention? Of course I think about half of you is an Anomaly. Though I am terribly curious about the specific method."

She rose from her seat and came around behind Yeon-woo's sofa, swinging her long legs. Eleanor reached out, ran a hand over Yeon-woo's neck, and felt the results beneath the skin.

"From what I see, there are certainly results of experimentation in here as well."

"Experimentation…."

He had done a little.

'I did dig around a great deal during the body-improvement work.'

This person was probably an Artist of the 'medical' line. To know the situation beneath the skin merely by touching it with a hand. A walking hospital, no less.

Eleanor, who had been peering quietly into Yeon-woo, asked,

"Is it the Foundation's handiwork?"

"I shall exercise my right to remain silent."

I did it.

'If what she is looking at is simply the body, the highest probability is that these are traces of the body-improvement work. Even if I do not know by exactly what method I became General Manager and was erased from the world….'

Yeon-woo knows Eleanor.

'For the experimentation this person speaks of lies plainly in the domain of medicine and science.'

He decided to organize his thoughts that way for now.

"……."

Therefore he reflected on himself.

"I did not expect much, but you have more of a counselor's qualities than I thought."

"I do not think I did anything, so why are you fixing the problem all by yourself? May we not do it together?"

"I will solve my problems myself, so you need only keep supplying inspiration."

"I told you I did nothing? Am I supplying inspiration by mere existence?"

"There is a concept in this world called the cautionary example."

If this person's mind went to the Foundation, it meant Yeon-woo's body-improvement work had been that insane a thing to do. At the time he had thought it a matter of course.

'Thinking it over again now, digging into my own body to that extent was not a thing done in one's right mind.'

Yeon-woo resolved to treat his body a little more preciously.

"Kindly stop touching me now. It is unpleasant."

"Ah, that was a discourtesy."

"I am relieved you know it was a discourtesy."

"Astonishingly, I do possess that much sociability."

Eleanor obediently returned to her original seat.

"If I am to give my view, something has been mixed together. Probably you, who were likely human, and that hotel?"

"Aha."

It was not a wrong statement.

'Hotel One and I did get mixed.'

If Hoone really had been one of the Foundation's products from the start, the plausibility was higher still. Whether or not she knew he was thinking so, Eleanor crossed her legs and went on.

"It seems the incident occurred about thirty-one years ago, which is to say around the age of nineteen."

'So that is the interpretation she has settled on.'

He did not know the reason, but the point Eleanor had pinned as the actual origin of the wrongness was thirty-one years ago. It was when Yeon-woo had started Hoone. As it happened, his present flesh was likewise close to what it had been at nineteen.

'In the process of my being dragged here, did the history up to age nineteen leave traces behind for some reason? For her to pin that point so clearly means there really was some basis for it.'

'Traces of actual existence,' enough that a close acquaintance could tell.

"……."

No, he corrects that.

'It would take a person with the Teacher's level of competence and tenacity.'

Ordinary people do not live inspecting the world, their surroundings, and their own brain every day. But Eleanor does. When he played hide-and-seek with the other students in elementary school, she used to find him in one second.

'Even thinking of it now, a cruel person.'

But in this case, quite apart from that.

"If traces remained…."

It seemed Yeon-woo had not fallen into an entirely separate world after all.

'It was so different from the world I knew that I had thought it might be a wholly new dimension merely wearing the shape of my own world. At least they are not strangers wearing the same faces, then.'

Deciding it was some small comfort, and organizing his thoughts so, Yeon-woo opened his mouth.

"That would be just when I had become an adult."

"Oh dear, no memory of it?"

"Who can say."

Normally, once past forty, it was only natural not to remember much of having just become an adult.

"There would be things I remember and things I do not."

"What about human relationships?"

"That too, who can say."

It was not a subject to blab about rashly. Yeon-woo still did not know a great deal, and Eleanor was a person dangerous without malice. There was no reason to lay out what was most precious to him as her toy.

'Better to make suitable use of the misunderstanding.'

Yeon-woo went on.

"At the least, I do certainly remember you, Teacher."

"Does it truly feel as though only the 'memory' is there? If you are a Chimera born of the Foundation's experiments it is not beyond understanding, but from your reactions I thought the intimacy was high."

"If the rudeness of thinking one would rather not run into someone counts as part of intimacy, then it could be interpreted so."

"I can gather roughly what image I had in your memory."

"As you seem to have noticed, you are rather on the harmful side."

Her sociability being on the high side made her all the more dangerous.

"You are not a good adult, are you."

"Nor am I a good person, at that."

Eleanor folded her eyes and laughed in good humor.

"I like you, young Yeon-woo. I surely would have taken you on as a pupil."

"Do you not think your certainty about yourself is excessive?"

"When I traced it, it seems you stopped at an airport after graduating high school. If you were a being whose influence reached me and my surroundings in England, then you were surely on your way to me."

It was true. The very reason Yeon-woo had gone abroad to study was Eleanor.

"But seeing that you are not in my keeping, that you were erased like this, and that you were made an Offering inside a Labyrinth the Foundation built… a problem must have arisen along the way. Am I wrong?"

She is wrong.

'Because I arrived perfectly well and even enrolled.'

Tracing the rim of the teacup in a circle, Yeon-woo opened his mouth.

"It seems I vanished only from memory and from computerized records."

"Quite a wide-ranging operation. Very like the Foundation's final death throes. The scale is grand, is it not."

"So those are your tastes. Noted."

So the history before nineteen had only its records erased, while the history after it had vanished wholesale.

'What is the reason.'

Something to do once he returned to the hotel had arisen.

"Then I should like to receive a proper 'counseling' session before long."

"What first impression did you get of Cha Do-hyeon the actor and Prosecutor Lee Yeon-ho?"

"Is this counseling?"

"Astonishingly it is, so answer."

"Hm."

Yeon-woo rolled his eyes dryly.

"I am not sure."

It was not mere evasion, but something he meant sincerely.

"I am a being erased from the world, and they do not know a person called Lee Yeon-woo, so I have some difficulty over whether they can practically be called people I knew."

"So you do have the memories after all. Though it seems they feel like someone else's entirely. In any case."

It was not quite to that degree, but he did not bother correcting her. Eleanor went on.

"Prosecutor Lee Yeon-ho became an Artist in his early thirties, but the point at which Cha Do-hyeon the actor became one is estimated at around twenty."

"Aha."

"As did another friend of yours."

"……."

"The one who likes sweet desserts. She happens to be my pupil now."

Yeon-woo had two schoolmates. One was a boy who liked musicals and kendo. The other was a girl who liked desserts and was working to become a doctor.

"Probably, in my regret at losing you, I took your friend on as a pupil instead."

"I see."

Yeon-woo curved his eyes round and smiled.

"I dislike you after all."

That purity is sickening.

"But I understand what you intended. You judged that my obtaining information comes first. Only by knowing the present society and world can I stand upon it and control myself."

"Well, is Velmareth not the incarnation of control?"

Eleanor shrugged.

"I do not know how you succeeded, or why, having succeeded, you go to the trouble of wearing a human mask. But it must be because you have that degree of controlling disposition that you could become Velmareth at all. A person like you needs information."

"Is that how you saw it?"

"I do not know your specific circumstances. Nor will young Yeon-woo have any mind to tell me in detail. In that case, what I can put in order for you is information about your surroundings."

"Are they people I know?"

"As I see it, you already know the answer."

"In truth, yes."

Yeon-woo nodded.

"They are indeed people I know."

"In the end the human is a defining creature, is it not?"

"A human's world changes as they themselves decide. And I have decided to live as a person and as the master of Hotel One."

Relationships were no different.

"This is indeed different from an ordinary psychiatrist or counseling center."

"Chairman Baek will already have told you, but I am going to teach you a way of living. The only way to survive in the ceaselessly chaotic Gaps is to define oneself within that chaos."

Eleanor grinned. It was a damnably handsome face.

"Do you want to live as a person? But you already know. You cannot become a complete person. Nor will you ever be ordinary again. Which is why you cannot avoid going mad altogether."

"That is unfortunate."

"Do not regard yourself as too dangerous a substance."

Eleanor leaned far forward and said,

"Of course you are dangerous. But fundamentally, humans are dangerous. With a single fountain pen one can rupture a person's eyeball, or stab the throat and cut off the breath."

"So then…."

Yeon-woo stared at Eleanor.

"Take this state as the default value?"

"Have you ever killed a person?"

"I have stood by and watched."

"That would have been a matter connected to the hotel."

Eleanor added,

"The memory of that time has stayed too strongly. You were merely caught up helplessly in your own 'specialness' and stood blank for a moment, and it produced a situation you could not possibly forgive yourself for."

Yeon-woo at the hotel, having become General Manager, had left Human Guests to die time and time again.

"But do you know this? Right now you are no more than a newly born being."

"I seem to have been hearing that a great deal lately."

He understood what was meant.

"It seems I need to shed a little of my existing common sense."

"Every living thing in the world lives knowing nothing about itself or its surroundings."

Eleanor met Yeon-woo's gaze straight on and said,

"That is how one learns, one thing at a time. How easily I can break a flower and crush an insect. What words wound people when spoken. And what deeds bring down a great scolding."

"Will it take long?"

"It will not take so very long."

"But the more I hurry, the more I feel I will hurt people unintentionally."

"If you know that, then all the more must you set down your compulsion about yourself. I know how dangerous a thing it is to tell young Yeon-woo, who is Velmareth, to loosen his control. But you say you want to live as a person."

She smiled, those characteristic curiosity-filled eyes shining. The folded line of her eyes is thin.

"In that case I shall have to teach you how to grow healthy as a person as well."

"I am relieved Mr. Baek Mu-jin does not seem to have spent his money for nothing."

"He is always a good client, though I did not come having received all that much, so the badgering is severe."

"I wanted to be a good person."

Yeon-woo smiled as well.

"If I could not be a kind person, I wanted at least to be a good one."

It was a grimacing smile.

"I know that as for fixed laws in this world, science is about all there is. Life is nothing but variables. If one's life is peaceful at the moment, it is only because one's luck is good now, and there is always the risk that the peace will break."

"Knowing is not everything."

"That is right."

Knowing made it harder.

"It seems that even knowing it all, I held a vain expectation."

There had been many twists and turns, and since he had worked harder than others, he too would live a stable life from now on. The expectation that, in proportion to how hard it had been, he would live all the more triumphantly well.

"I did not want to hurt."

"Keep speaking."

"I wanted to see people who knew me. I wanted to talk with them, to be comforted by them. I also thought of running away without taking responsibility for anything and forgetting everything forever."

"I am listening."

"I needed someone to tell me I wasn't doing well."

However he thought about it, this hotel was too dangerous and the people composing this space were horrifying. And inside it Yeon-woo had in the end to adapt, to endure, to grow.

But what could being an accomplished man in hell make of you in the end, other than a devil?

"Someone to tell me there was a better way than what you did…."

"There is no such way, young Yeon-woo."

"……."

"It is regrettable, but that is the fact."

Eleanor said it flatly.

"Had it not been you, no one would have adapted to that place. They would have gone truly mad and become an irredeemable villain, or a wreck. And in the end a great many people would have died in there."

"Ha…."

"But you held your center in there, remembered yourself, and worked to grow without being corrupted. And so you turned the hearts of countless calamities and sent your 'Human Guests' out alive."

"Haha."

"That is a miracle, and you made a miracle. No better best than that exists."

"You must be mad."

Yeon-woo drew a hand down his face. Smiling, he stared at Eleanor.

"That it was the best."

My deception, my Neglect, and every one of those sins.

"You are saying it was, in the end, something that had to be done?"

"That it was a process you had to pass through is certain."

"And from here on as well I must live committing that many sins."

"Which is why I am telling you to set it down."

Eleanor set a table mirror down in front of Yeon-woo.

"You are too fastidious. Your self-censorship is severe, and your standards are very high."

"……."

"Which is why even trivial things become sins. And regarding that position as your own responsibility cannot change young Yeon-woo's situation in any case."

In the end Yeon-woo would not step away from the position of General Manager. Perhaps he could not to begin with. So if he inevitably had to pass through such a 'process,' then in the end his perception had to change.

"In the end the human is a defining creature, is it not?"

"A human's world changes as they themselves decide."

And Yeon-woo had decided to live as a person and as the master of Hotel One.

"You are right."

In the end what could be changed in here was not the world, but Yeon-woo himself.

"It will be a more painful process than for a newborn child."

"Because you will have to think of sin as something ordinary?"

"In that case."

Yeon-woo.

"I will not change."

It was the point at which Seome's curse that was not a curse became reality.

"However mad the world may be, someone has to know that it is a sin. I will always be fastidious, will censor myself, and will live in this world by very high standards."

"You could become a wreck."

"Then I shall go mad instead."

That much was not difficult.

"It will be a sorry thing for the one who recommended a psychiatrist to me, but I will not harm people for the sake of not going mad. I will not harm someone and then rationalize that it could not be helped."

It is better simply to go mad.

"That is what I want."

"Do you believe you can control yourself that way forever?"

"No."

Yeon-woo looked at himself in the table mirror.

"Surely I will not be able to."

Beneath eye rims festered red, dried tears could be seen.

"So the conclusion ends up the same."

"I am curious what conclusion."

"I must learn more, and know more."

If you know a dragonfly's ecology, you can gauge the weight of that life. If you touch a dragonfly's wing, you can tell how fragile it is. Then you can respect life and not break it easily.

That is how a person learns the world one thing at a time and comes to control himself unconsciously.

"So could you teach me as well? As a person, how fragile a person is. How cruel the Gaps are. What on earth is going on with the situation of the person that is me…."

"……."

"Teach me. As you did earlier."

Yeon-woo stared at Eleanor again.

"The rest I can solve myself."

To that, Eleanor,

"……."

was silent for a while.

"…Did the me that young Yeon-woo remembers know this side of you?"

"I am not sure."

"Is that so?"

It was a face whose thoughts could not be read.

"That is a pity."

Eleanor promised she would help Yeon-woo. And Yeon-woo said,

"Ah, excuse me, but I do not need it to that extent."

"Hm? No, why? I am extremely competent."

"Do not scatter ashes on rice that is cooking perfectly well. Take your hands off."

This person, out to ruin somebody's life again.

***

That evening.

"Mr. Yeon-woo."

Director Lee Seon-hae came by the hotel room where Yeon-woo was staying.

"Do you have a moment?"

"If it is time to give to Director Lee Seon-hae, I have as much as you like."

"I brought a present too, in my own way."

"A present. Let us have a look."

"I got a recommendation from the Uncle."

She smiled awkwardly and held something up in one hand.

"Mm."

"……."

"Something like this."

It was a brand-name wine.

"How would this do?"

"Aha, indeed…."

Yeon-woo smiled faintly.

"Then there is all the less way for me not to welcome it."

Look. Are we not all getting better?