Chapter 106: The Restorer (2)

He did feel as though he were being stalked mentally, but Su-myeon still slept well and woke up refreshed.

No, rather than mentally, should he call it spiritual stalking?

Something at Shinui Hospital seemed to have become entangled with him....

A feeling? Certainty? Delusion? It was the kind of sensation he did not even know how to define.

Anyway, it was a strange situation.

But in the end, nothing bad had happened, and it was undeniable that they had resolved one major incident, so for now, things were good.

It was healthier for his mind to simply think of it that way.

"You’re here......."

As soon as he entered the office, he heard Mi-ae’s listless greeting, making him wonder whether she had even gone home from work.

"...You didn’t go home?"

"Maybe...?"

At Mi-ae’s answer, Ji-hoon, who was beside her, gave an awkward smile with dark circles hanging beneath his eyes.

Everyone looked far too exhausted to celebrate the situation being resolved.

At least Du-pal seemed to have been given priority as the oldest and gone home first.

"Why don’t you call it a day? You look tired."

"Yes. Just this first. I’ll only finish the first draft of the report.... Can’t I just take the entire day off?"

"Go ahead. Get some rest."

There was no way Su-myeon could tell her no.

"Then come over here and take a look. We’re almost done."

Ju-hee, who was sitting beside Mi-ae, beckoned Su-myeon over.

Since Ju-hee and Han-su had arrived before him, it seemed they had already organized what had happened based on the two of their accounts.

This time, the ghost story had been brought to an end, so all they needed to do was document what they had experienced for future reference.

There was no need to uncover its rules anymore, so the report was somewhat simpler.

"We really only have the ending left now, right?"

At Mi-ae’s words, filled with her desire to finish quickly and go home, Su-myeon checked everything that had been recorded so far.

"So what did you do at the very end?"

That happened to be the part where they needed Su-myeon.

It was the scene where the Heart playing card and Su-myeon ultimately agreed that he would return to Alice Hotel.

The others’ explanations might have been enough for the other scenes, but from this point onward, they needed Su-myeon’s account.

After checking what had been written above, Su-myeon began to speak.

***

"Then, for the room I’ll be staying in a month from now, can I choose the room and the options myself?"

"Yes. Tell me what you would like, and I will check."

Looking at the Heart playing card’s long, split mouth curved into a smile, Su-myeon had complicated feelings.

Its excessively accommodating attitude made him more uncomfortable than grateful.

'Is it a trap? Or has my value really changed, and it wants to negotiate something with me?'

He would be able to find out once he went there himself in a month.

"Can I go with you?"

Han-su clearly had no intention of letting Su-myeon handle it alone.

Of course, if it was possible, Su-myeon was also a little afraid of going alone.

If it were a friendly ghost story, that would be one thing, but Alice Hotel was still impossible to read.

If possible, it seemed better to have someone accompany him.

"My apologies to your companion, but free lodging cannot be provided."

The Heart playing card subtly added,

"If he wishes to stay, he will need to sign a contract providing a portion of his body...."

As the Heart playing card naturally began proposing organ trafficking, Su-myeon hurriedly cut in.

Knowing Han-su, he might actually offer up a kidney simply because he could not let Su-myeon go alone.

Su-myeon had to get ahead of him before he said something ridiculous.

"My voucher! Can I pay with the voucher I have left?"

"......That is possible."

The response sounded somewhat reluctant, but it had said yes, and that was enough.

"I’ll go too."

"Then I’ll...!"

Ju-hee and Hwi-yeon spoke at the same time.

But Ju-hee continued first.

"I’ve already been there once. I know the rules better, so I’ll be more useful. Besides, you’ve always moved around in groups of no more than three."

Su-myeon thought about Ju-hee’s words for a moment.

Normally, she would have been right. But.

***

"Right. I wanted to ask you about that again anyway. Why did you say I couldn’t go?"

Ju-hee interrupted as she listened to Su-myeon recount the moment for Mi-ae.

Su-myeon had flatly refused to let Ju-hee go.

The reason was clear.

According to her original fate, Ju-hee was someone who should have died there.

Of all people, he was reluctant to have her accompany him.

But how was he supposed to explain that?

'You were a character who was supposed to die there?'

No matter how much he softened the wording, there seemed to be no reason to go out of his way to tell her something that horrible.

"......There’s a reason. Ju-hee, you can’t go back there."

When Su-myeon gave her only the conclusion, leaving most of the explanation out, Ju-hee could not press him any further.

If he said so, then she had no choice but to accept that he knew something.

But that did not make the dissatisfaction disappear from her eyes.

His firm attitude had merely silenced her. She still looked as though she wanted an explanation.

Pretending not to notice, Su-myeon looked away and resumed his account of what had happened that day.

***

Once Ju-hee had been rejected as a companion, Hwi-yeon spoke.

"......How about taking either me or Mu-yeon?"

"Then...."

After thinking for a moment, Su-myeon said,

"Would you come with us, Mu-yeon?"

At Su-myeon’s question, Mu-yeon barked into the air as though agreeing.

"Woof!"

He was a far more stable choice than taking unnecessary risks.

Among the currently available field-team members, if one judged by efficiency per unit of causality, was he not the best?

And on top of that, perhaps the most reliable member as well.

"I’ll pay for Kang Han-su and Lee Mu-yeon with my vouchers. Please put us together in a suite, ......Room 201."

".........."

When Su-myeon even specified the room number, the Heart playing card did not answer immediately and instead fell silent in thought.

One of the rules for the floor with the suites stated that they must never enter Room 666.

He had proposed this condition specifically to avoid that....

'No, why the hell isn’t this crazy Heart playing card answering right away?'

'If I hadn’t said anything, was it seriously planning to assign us Room 666?'

When Su-myeon stared at it, the Heart playing card finally nodded.

***

"You people really aren’t sane."

Mi-ae stopped typing and looked around at everyone with an appalled expression.

From her perspective, every last one of them was behaving like a moth flying into a flame.

"So in the end, the three of you are going into Alice Hotel a month from now?"

Mi-ae picked up the desk calendar, flipped a page, and marked the date.

The account continued with how the Heart playing card had created a back door and shown them the exit.

Judging by the flow of events, they should simply have escaped that way.

The problem was that the master of the ghost story was still perfectly alive.

That did not match the current result, in which the ghost story had been brought to an end.

"What else did you do?"

Mi-ae asked, clearly assuming Su-myeon must have done something.

And as though to live up to that assumption, Su-myeon continued explaining what happened next.

"Since we’d already risked our lives doing all that."

Wouldn’t it have been a little disappointing to stop there?

Su-myeon did not want to come back here two more times.

Besides, he had a plan that felt so unfinished he knew he would occasionally think about it even while lying in bed if he left things as they were.

A plan that might weaken the ghost story even further.

A very, very good plan.

"If you think about the situation at the end, nearly all the causality belonging to the things inside the ghost story should have been wiped out beneath the Ferris wheel."

Everything that had survived after killing one another had gathered beneath the Ferris wheel.

After wiping them all out at once, the group had avoided the battle between the final two remaining leaders.

In that case, the only beings left inside the ghost story were its masters and Su-myeon’s group.

"So I thought, why not feed it an apple?"

[Apple of Deception (30 Coins)]

Taking a bite places the user into temporary suspended animation.

They can only awaken through another person’s kiss.

The apple Su-myeon had bought at Bell’s castle.

A plan involving that apple had occurred to him.

He wanted to test it.

If it worked according to theory?

Could they not deal with that parasite monster, the one that had even impaled the Pied Piper into the ground, without fighting it at all?

"If it falls into suspended animation and goes to sleep while it’s alone, there’ll be no one here to kiss it awake."

The master of the ghost story would fall asleep in a state from which it could not awaken.

So even if someone were unlucky enough to suddenly wander into this ghost story later, there was a good chance they would still be fine.

They would simply wander around a little, find the exit, and leave.

At that point, the ghost story would effectively be resolved.

***

When Ju-hee heard Su-myeon’s plan at the time, she was horrified.

"Are you insane? The part where you have to feed it the apple is already a problem!"

In theory, they would feed it the apple, put it into suspended animation, and leave.

She understood the conclusion, but the problem was the process.

Would that not be just as dangerous and difficult as fighting it head-on?

"......."

Su-myeon glanced over just in case, but the Heart playing card merely watched their planning without much interest.

After pausing for a moment, Su-myeon explained the plan in more detail.

"......I think I can do it if I go."

Su-myeon was still wearing the Nemean Hide.

The parasite’s main method of attack was powerful physical strikes with its tentacles, so he should be able to endure those somehow and get close.

"Just in case, give me that back for a minute."

Su-myeon even took the knuckles back from Cheshire, who had been standing there watching blankly.

The icy metal, infused with the energy of frost, settled snugly over the back of his hand.

Even if the tentacles wrapped around him, he should be able to grab and break them or disable them with the cold.

And just as Su-myeon was about to stride solemnly out of Dream Arcade.

"I’ll do it."

Han-su held out his hand.

***

"......So. He just tanked his way in. And fed it the apple...? Team Leader Kang did that?"

At Mi-ae’s summary, Su-myeon nodded with a strange expression.

He wanted to deny it, but that was exactly what had happened.

All Su-myeon had done was lend him an item for a little while.

In the end, Han-su had taken on all the danger himself, and though the method looked rather brute-force, it had certainly worked.

"Anyway, that’s how we dealt with the ghost story and got out."

The ghost story itself likely still existed somewhere in a gap between spaces.

But it should no longer possess any influence, so it was effectively dead.

And on top of that, the result had turned out to be even greater than Su-myeon expected.

"All I was hoping for was that there wouldn’t be any more casualties. I didn’t expect the ghost story to actually end like this."

It was different from The Witch’s Forest, where they had directly killed the Witch and the ghost story had ended afterward.

Still, the end result was the same, so there was no point complaining about a good outcome.

"Yes. Got it. That’s all the major stuff, right? Then I’m leaving the cleanup to you and going home."

In any case, that was the end of the story of this incident.

Having finished organizing everything, Mi-ae dusted off her hands and rose from her seat.

Watching her, Su-myeon nodded and said,

"Ji-hoon, you should head home too."

Ji-hoon, who had been organizing the number of victims and the related paperwork beside Mi-ae, looked exhausted enough as well.

As always, the office personnel must have gone through quite a lot this time too.

Mi-ae had already taken care of the main record, so after the two of them went home,

all that remained was for Hwi-yeon and Ju-hee to take over and finish organizing the rest.

Lying on a sofa in one corner of the office, Su-myeon closed his eyes as he listened to the sound of keyboards clacking.

The steady rhythm of the typing was like ASMR, and Su-myeon began to doze off.

There was no one there who could reprimand him for it.

The office was practically Su-myeon’s own domain.

'I slept that much yesterday, and I’m sleepy again.'

As Su-myeon dozed there, a sudden thought occurred to him, and he abruptly sat up.

"...?"

Han-su flinched at Su-myeon suddenly shooting upright.

"Now that I think about it again. Doesn’t something seem a little strange?"