Chapter 141: Revisit (5)

[17. This item has been officially deleted. Item 17 does not exist.]

"...."

Su-myeon carefully descended the stairs.

The slightly dimmer lighting reminded him of the wine bar he'd seen before.

Come to think of it, even compared to all the ghost stories they'd experienced so far, this place was somewhat unusual.

How was it possible to erase an existing rule and overwrite it with something else?

'For now, whatever.'

Su-myeon flung open the door to the wine bar ahead.

They had already discussed the plan thoroughly upstairs, so Chang-sik immediately moved in front of Su-myeon, blocking him from view.

"...!"

And before the Red Queen could recognize them and respond.

Su-myeon immediately sprayed the perfume they'd received at the spa toward the Red Queen's torso.

It was possible because the staircase connecting the wine bar and the spa came out directly behind the bar counter where she worked.

"You...!"

Then Su-myeon immediately sprayed the perfume toward the Red Queen's head as well before she could say anything.

Once.... might not be enough, so he pressed down on the perfume nozzle several times in rapid succession.

As before, he covered his face with his sukajan to minimize exposure and held his breath.

On top of that, as an extra precaution, he'd pulled his sleeve down long enough to grip the perfume bottle through the fabric.

His dulled hand movements nearly made him drop the bottle, though.

"......."

The Red Queen blinked hazily and fell silent.

Was it working?

Su-myeon backed toward the stairs again so he could flee at a moment's notice if anything went wrong.

The mysterious perfume, trailing violet smoke, smelled somewhat like lavender.

'...Damn it.'

Su-myeon tried hard not to accidentally inhale after holding his breath for so long.

Maybe some of the perfume had touched his skin, because even without breathing, he could somehow ‘feel’ the scent.

It was beautiful, incredibly soft, soothing enough to calm even his mind.

The kind of scent he'd never smelled once in his life was so intoxicating that it made him want to smell it again.

If he'd already been exposed anyway, wouldn't it be fine to take just one more whiff?

As Su-myeon briefly stared at the perfume bottle he was clumsily holding through his pulled-down sleeve.

"Stop."

Han-su reached out and took the bottle from him.

Su-myeon instinctively glared at him, then frowned for an entirely different reason.

"I think I got a little of it."

"Oh.... Wooow......."

At the same time, Chang-sik, who had been right behind Su-myeon, seemed to have been exposed to the scent as well.

With a languid exhale, he stretched his enormous mass-like body out across the floor.

"This place is really nice...."

Hehehe.

At the sight of Chang-sik even letting out an innocent little laugh, Su-myeon's entire face twisted into a grimace.

'You're telling me I almost ended up like that too?'

Good thing Han-su had stopped him in time.

The Red Queen, who had just been thoroughly drenched in perfume from head to toe, was spinning around and around on her rotating barstool.

The sight of a headless torso doing that was quite grotesque.

But judging by the broad grin on her face, at least they didn't seem to have to worry about her becoming hostile.

"Looks like she fixed her eyes in the meantime."

Su-myeon nodded at Han-su's words.

The last time they'd seen the Red Queen, her eye had been destroyed by Ju-hee's crowbar.

But now she had an ordinary pair of dark brown eyes sitting perfectly intact in their sockets.

"......."

It was obvious whose eyes they were.

They were probably Lee Min-su's eyes, the ones Gi San-hyeok had torn out and handed over however he pleased.

Su-myeon still didn't feel even slightly sorry for the man who'd been left unable to die, trapped in continuous suffering.

"I have something I'd like to ask, Manager."

At Su-myeon's words, the Red Queen let out a meaningless laugh and gestured with her eyes.

"Sure. Go ahead. What are you curious about?"

At the compliant response, even Mu-yeon, who had been standing with his fur bristling, seemed to relax somewhat and let out a low groaning sigh.

The clown, which had been cautiously reading the room, gave a very soft pwoo... on its horn.

It was chaotic, but at least it was a decent start.

"Do you remember when you compared the situation we're in to a sandwich before?"

At Su-myeon's question, the Red Queen laughed again.

"What a stupid question."

Her languid, seductive voice was unchanged, but there wasn't anyone here likely to feel attracted to a woman whose head had been cut off.

Grinning like someone deeply drunk, she spoke.

"Looks like you found the answer in the end, though? Rumors about you are already everywhere."

Before Su-myeon could ask what she meant, she continued.

"Because in the end, what's easier than breaking your way out through a sandwich is simply getting rid of the entire thing."

Su-myeon's gaze shifted toward her body as she made an exaggerated gesture, then he nodded.

Fair enough.

Rather than trying to break their way out of something.

It had already been quite a while since they'd changed their approach to ghost stories toward eliminating them altogether.

They'd already gotten rid of more than one or two ghost stories by now.

'...Rumors, huh.'

It wasn't completely impossible to understand that something like that might spread.

He decided not to think too deeply about how these entities communicated with one another.

"Then there's something else I want to ask."

Just as Su-myeon continued his questioning, the Red Queen finally became unable to contain her happiness and started dancing by herself.

The sight of a headless body swaying on its own was something he still couldn't get used to no matter how long he watched it.

"If we take this man back to reality, will he die?"

At Su-myeon's question, she burst out laughing.

Not the small laugh she'd given before, but genuine, full-blown laughter.

Cackling as though she'd just heard something hilarious, she answered through her laughter.

"That thing isn't human anymore."

"A specimen preserved by causality. The remnants of a self that failed to evaporate. That's all that garbage is."

Still cackling, the Red Queen gracefully extended one hand like a ballet dancer.

She bent slightly at the waist, exposing the cleanly severed surface of her neck.

When Su-myeon saw the movement of the large blood vessels still pulsing inside, he turned his head away.

"Ahhh, yes. This hotel was actually one enormous garbage dump! A graveyard for remnants, you might say!"

The words didn't match her voice, which sounded as though she could barely contain her delight.

Looking at Han-su's grave expression, Su-myeon asked again.

"But Cheshire looked like that too, and he came back."

At Su-myeon's question, the Red Queen suddenly thrust herself forward.

Her head, resting on its tray, was abruptly pushed right up in front of Su-myeon's face.

A severed head speaking on its own was horrifying enough.

With the tip of his nose nearly touching hers, Su-myeon almost punched the head on reflex.

"Really? Don't you already think otherwise?"

......What?

"...No. Cheshire definitely...."

He'd returned to being human and was still perfectly fine at the Governance even now.

But there certainly had been strange things about him.

His vaguely unreliable senses and his oddly unrealistic way of thinking.

And on top of that, his complete inability to remember anything from his past.

Su-myeon had assumed they were simply side effects of having spent too long inside a ghost story....

"Hohohoho, questions you already know the answers to. Honestly. They're so boring it's enough to make me laugh."

The Red Queen burst into laughter and began swaying her body again.

"Recycling is nothing more than recycling. Even if you melt down iron and pour it into the same mold again, can it truly become the same thing? Or is it something new?"

Watching her mutter that it was a meaningless dilemma, Su-myeon clenched and unclenched his fist.

Director Jang Bok-eum suddenly came to mind.

Could it be that the man who had never once considered rescuing missing people had already known something like this?

"Hehehe...."

Looking at Chang-sik sprawled across the floor with a foolishly happy grin, Su-myeon and Han-su fell silent for a moment.

Su-myeon gestured briefly to Han-su, then took the perfume out again and sprayed the Red Queen one more time.

This time, he pressed the nozzle exactly once and quickly retreated about five steps away from her.

Still wearing an utterly unwary expression, the Red Queen spoke cheerfully.

"The essence of a human isn't the body, but the mind. Then what exactly do we mean by that mind?"

The self? Memory? Knowledge?

Su-myeon couldn't answer as the Red Queen listed examples.

In Cheshire's and Chang-sik's cases, all three had been lost.

As for Cheshire, who had only belatedly acquired something like a human conscience, if he really thought about it.

'...Maybe he didn't remember it again. Maybe he learned it anew.'

Was that why?

Why, after returning to reality, did he prefer being called Cheshire rather than by the name from his past that they'd discovered?

The more Su-myeon listened to her, the more everything seemed to fall into place.

Compared to him, Mu-yeon had at least only lost a part of himself. He still retained his past identity, memories, and knowledge.

"......."

Perhaps Mu-yeon was thinking the same thing, because he stared only at the floor with his ears and tail drooping.

If that was the case, they would need to think much more carefully about what it meant to save Chang-sik.

"......Think about it."

At Su-myeon's words, Han-su pressed a hand to his forehead.

It was obvious what he was being told to think about.

Whether to take Chang-sik with them anyway, or give up and grant him rest.

Su-myeon took a deep breath and asked.

"By any chance... are my parents here too?"

Please.

Su-myeon himself couldn't even tell what answer he wanted, but the thought surfaced in his mind on its own.

Yet the Red Queen, her eyes still half-unfocused, spoke casually through a blissful smile.

"No. They're not. Why do you keep asking about things you already know?"

I'm asking because I don't know. Why would I ask if I knew?

It was irritating, but at least that answer was more hopeful than ‘I don't know.’

Sometimes, the beings inside this ghost story seemed to have some major misunderstanding about him, along with the belief that there was something special about him.

Su-myeon forced himself to think of it that way, sighed, and continued questioning her.

"What happened with the vouchers in this hotel? I understand that they're also a form of currency made from causality. I don't understand why I was given such an enormous voucher."

"Do you know what kind of method rigged gamblers use when they're looking for a victim?"

What followed sounded like something Su-myeon had seen in a gambling movie.

"They let you win at first. One becomes two, and two becomes four. You'll lose sometimes too, of course, but the important part is this. Every once in a while, they have to let you win. Then the people who can't forget how that felt eventually bet the whole hundred."

Because that's what humans are like.

In that sense, Alice handed out vouchers as bait.

Little by little, bit by bit.

People used them to profit, adapted themselves to the rules of the hotel.

They came to believe that if they only had a little more money, they would gain a little more freedom.

And eventually, at some point, humans might stake everything they had.

Even after receiving an enormous sum, Su-myeon had used it as sparingly as possible, but that was only because he knew a definite way out of this place.

Gi San-hyeok, for example, had understood the direction the hotel's currency system worked in and immediately begun treating other people's bodies as tradable goods.

'And that's how he ended up like that himself.'

And in a way, the voucher had also served as bait for Su-myeon.

Because he'd had that voucher, hadn't he ended up dragging not only himself but Han-su and Mu-yeon into this hotel as well?

"So it was all a setup to reel in a sucker?"

The Red Queen's head on the tray burst into laughter at Su-myeon's phrasing.

By now, even the sound of her laughter was starting to frighten him.

Still humming as though she were going mad with delight, the Red Queen suddenly pulled something out from beneath the counter.

Su-myeon hesitated to take anything from her, and when he didn't immediately accept it, her body thrust a pen at him again.

"...Why this?"

What the hell was this?

As far as Su-myeon could tell, it was just a ballpoint pen.

A vintage-looking red ballpoint pen that matched the clothes she wore.

"I should get off work now."

"What does that mean?"

Unable to shake his ominous feeling, Su-myeon asked again, but she forcibly placed the pen in his hand.

"It means exactly that. I'm getting off work now."

Just as Su-myeon was about to object and ask if she was joking.

Splat-

"......."

The Red Queen's body collapsed to the floor in an instant.