Chapter 26: Sadang Station Exit 4 (2)

[2. Can you hear it? Can you hear the flute?]

Author: Anonymous

Today, I am born anew.

Freed from the tedium of everyday life,

Leaving without even a final goodbye.

Farewell, wretched existence.

To a place where the sun never sets—

Grant me my freedom.

***

"You said it was Exit 4, right?"

After getting off work, Ju-hee rushed straight to Sadang Station.

Du-pal had already arrived.

They had gathered as quickly as their circumstances allowed, but without Su-myeon, they had no real plan.

They searched every corner of the station and the area around Exit 4, but found no trace of Su-myeon.

Ha-min arrived shortly afterward and spoke urgently.

"But did you see it? The post Su-myeon hyung and Han-su hyung mentioned."

The two of them had gone to Sadang Station after seeing an account posted online.

Ha-min showed them that the person who appeared to have written the post they'd seen had uploaded something new.

At first glance, it looked like a random collection of sentences, but when read together, it resembled a poem that made little sense.

A disjointed piece of writing that sounded as though its author were having a breakdown.

Various theories were already appearing on the forum, but none of them seemed particularly useful.

"It does look suspicious, doesn't it? Can any of you make sense of it?"

Ha-min asked again, but none of the others could find anything noteworthy in the post either.

Young-cheol was the last to arrive, but his presence only increased their headcount.

"How the hell does someone just disappear in a place this crowded...."

Even though rush hour had long since passed, Sadang Station was still packed late into the evening.

Du-pal stood there staring around in bewilderment, completely at a loss.

People streamed past them like a current. Simply standing still made it feel as though they were obstructing the flow.

Those entering and leaving the station formed two endless rivers on either side of them.

Caught in the middle, the group could do nothing but stand there, gripped by helplessness as the crowd flowed around them.

They hadn't found a single clue as to how someone could vanish in a place like this.

***

"Are you alright?"

Han-su looked at Su-myeon with concern.

Su-myeon's left eye, fitted with the unfamiliar contact lens, had turned gray.

The sensation of having something foreign in his eye was uncomfortable, but not enough to cause any real trouble.

"Yeah, I think so?"

Still uneasy, Su-myeon removed the lens and put it back in several times just to make sure.

But contrary to his worries, it came away from his eye without any difficulty.

It didn't seem to improve his ordinary vision, either. Even after putting his glasses on over it, nothing looked any clearer.

"Looks like I'm becoming a regular...."

And once again, the one who had delivered the item was the plush cat with the peculiar way of speaking—Cheshire.

Su-myeon averted his gaze from the button eyes peering curiously at him, apparently fascinated by the lens in his eye.

"Thank you."

"Don't mention it~"

Han-su had been startled when the doll appeared out of nowhere, but he seemed to accept it quickly enough.

A talking, moving plush doll was, strangely enough, easier to understand.

Wasn't it still better than having the path you were walking suddenly transform into another world and loop endlessly?

'......Is that really any different, though?'

Su-myeon dismissed the thought and blinked a few times.

When he covered his right eye, only the gray glow of his left remained visible.

Through the lens, the unnatural distortions woven into this space—and reality itself—became clearly distinguishable.

"Can you see the way out now?"

Before answering Han-su, Su-myeon looked around once more.

Having played the game, he already knew every condition required to escape.

The problem was that fulfilling those conditions was extremely difficult.

"Not yet. The passage back to reality only appears when we find a completely normal corridor—one with nothing suspicious in it."

Like a game of spot-the-difference, they had to pass through a corridor where no anomaly was present in order to return to the real world.

If anything was wrong, they had to stop advancing and turn back.

"Then what's wrong with this one?"

Han-su couldn't see anything unusual.

But through Su-myeon's lens, which revealed the truth, the grotesque abnormalities stood out all the more clearly.

"......One entire wall is connected by blood vessels."

It was as though a living creature were pretending to be a building.

Behind the tiled wall, clusters of blood vessels twisted and writhed.

An illusion concealed them, so to Su-myeon's normal right eye, all he saw was an ordinary expanse of white tile.

But once he knew there was something wrong and looked again, another detail became noticeable.

The grout between the tiles was stained a reddish brown, like clotted blood that had oxidized over time.

At a glance, it was subtle enough to dismiss as nothing more than old dirt.

Su-myeon was about to turn back when he noticed that Cheshire was still floating nearby.

"Hmm~"

"You're not going back this time either?"

At Su-myeon's question, Cheshire nodded in midair.

"Yep."

A single-word answer.

Nothing more.

Han-su looked at the plush doll, which clearly had no intention of elaborating, and asked another question.

"Why?"

"Mm...."

But Cheshire replied in such a listless voice that it seemed capable of draining the motivation from anyone listening.

"Too lazy... to explain."

An uncertain being with an uncertain purpose, simply tagging along.

What a ridiculous situation.

If this wasn't something unique to the Ellis Hotel but a pattern that would continue repeating, they needed to learn more.

The items sold in Belle's shop, in particular, had proven remarkably effective.

If Cheshire was connected to all of that, there was no harm in building some kind of relationship with him.

Su-myeon deliberately reached out, picked Cheshire up, and cradled the doll in his arms as he asked,

"Do you want to help me?"

Trapped in a situation with no obvious escape, Su-myeon wanted to find the smoothest path forward.

Cheshire sat placidly in his hands like a sleepy cat.

At the very least, Su-myeon was certain of one thing.

The shop only he could see, and Cheshire, who acted as its delivery courier—

both seemed to be extending some form of goodwill toward him.

"Mm.... Who knows?"

Cheshire idly tugged the zipper on his belly up and down, then added,

"I want to watch."

A much more neutral word than "help."

But Su-myeon actually preferred curiosity to goodwill he couldn't understand.

As long as he continued giving Cheshire something worth watching, wouldn't the doll keep treating him favorably?

Su-myeon looked at Han-su.

Han-su nodded, apparently seeing no reason to refuse Cheshire's company.

"Alright. Then let's move together."

The blood vessels inside the wall were pulsing more and more violently in Su-myeon's vision.

Not knowing how they might react, Su-myeon and Han-su ended the conversation and hurried back the way they had come.

With Cheshire perched on his shoulder, Su-myeon once again began walking through the endlessly repeating corridor.

The scenery repeated so relentlessly that it was enough to numb the mind.

Handprints appeared across the cold tiled floor, while the figures on sagging posters had their eyes gouged out and wept tears of blood.

Then they came upon a wall dominated by a massive electronic display.

The screen flickered with fragmented footage of an old amusement park, accompanied by a strange wash of static.

They had been walking for so long that even Cheshire eventually yawned sleepily.

"Is the way out... really going to appear?"

By then, Han-su sounded genuinely curious rather than impatient.

He hadn't meant to pressure him, but Su-myeon still felt a stab of urgency.

This wasn't a game designed around a rational world.

The anomalous realm that trapped people unfortunate enough to stumble into an urban legend wasn't going to let them escape easily.

The correct corridor appeared purely by chance.

And when it did, they had to seize the opportunity without hesitation.

"It'll appear eventually."

The only problem was that there was no way to know whether it would be the tenth corridor or the hundredth.

Su-myeon swallowed the rest of what he wanted to say, turned around with Han-su once more, and continued walking.

Trapped in what felt like a Möbius strip, the two abruptly stopped.

Even though they had turned back, the looping corridor had returned them to the same place.

"......!"

By now, the repeating scenery had become sickeningly familiar.

But this time, something was different.

A stranger was walking toward them.

His movements were stiff and unnatural, like a wooden puppet learning how to walk.

Step by step, he approached them from the opposite direction.

"Who...."

Han-su started to speak, but Su-myeon stopped him.

The man approaching them with heavy footsteps was someone neither of them had ever seen before.

He looked to be in his mid-thirties, reasonably handsome, and dressed in a sharp business suit.

But as Su-myeon studied him, one detail caught his attention.

"That employee ID."

At Su-myeon's words, Han-su narrowed his eyes and looked as well.

The employee badge hanging from the man's neck displayed the name Shinseong Group in large letters.

Understanding immediately why Su-myeon had pointed it out, Han-su answered quietly.

"Isn't that Ju-hee's company?"

Su-myeon nodded.

"She said their executive director went missing, right?"

"I heard he was young and tall."

Han-su recalled what Ju-hee had told him.

The two whispered to each other while silently observing the stranger.

The man moved as though he couldn't see either Su-myeon or Han-su.

He continued walking toward them as though they weren't there, then suddenly changed direction without hesitation.

Straight toward a dead-end wall.

They expected him to collide with it.

Instead, he passed through it without resistance.

"......Wait."

A wall.

He had walked straight through a wall.

It was an impossible sight.

But unlike the blood seeping through walls or stains forming across the floor, this felt different from the sort of anomaly they were simply supposed to ignore.

Something had also flickered strangely across Su-myeon's left eye.

He covered his right eye completely and looked only through the lens fitted over his left.

The distortion became even clearer.

"There's a hidden passage there."

What had looked like yet another identical tiled wall was nothing more than an optical illusion.

Beyond the false image revealed by the lens lay a passage hidden behind thin, veil-like strands of blood vessels.

Su-myeon watched the stranger disappear completely into the passage and hesitated.

What if that man really was the person Ju-hee had mentioned?

The one who had vanished?

"Our missing acquaintances might be in there too."

Han-su spoke with uncertainty, apparently having reached the same conclusion.

Should they follow?

It was a difficult decision.

As far as Su-myeon could tell, the passage wasn't closing or shifting.

"As long as we don't lose our way, we should be able to come back...."

While the two of them deliberated, Cheshire spoke in his usual languid voice.

"Paths don't deceive people~ So. Just retrace the way you came."

Considering that they were already trapped in a suspicious place they'd entered without even realizing it, trusting those words wasn't easy.

As though sensing their doubt, Cheshire continued.

"It's not the paths that deceive you—it's other things. But hey, you've got eyes that can see the truth now, don't you~?"

Cheshire lazily waved one round paw.

Then, as though urging the two men who stood there lost in thought, he asked,

"So, are you going~?"

Would they choose to walk down an unknown path solely for the sake of someone else?

Cheshire's question sounded almost like a test posed to people standing at a crossroads.

Naturally, Su-myeon hesitated.

There was no way to know whether Cheshire's claim—that they could simply retrace their steps—was actually true.

Heading down an unfamiliar path in a place where any number of impossible things could happen was nothing short of a gamble.

Either his guess was right, or it wasn't.

An unfair wager with only two possible outcomes.

"Let's go."

But Su-myeon made his decision.

His own family might be trapped somewhere like this too, lost or bewitched beyond his reach.

Even if the possibility was only one percent, he couldn't ignore it.

Now that the thought had occurred to him, turning away without finding out would guarantee that he never slept peacefully again.

And he already knew that much for certain.