Chapter 56

[Entry to the basement is prohibited. If you have any inquiries regarding the basement area, please visit the office on the third floor.]

About ten minutes earlier.

Seo Tae-hyeon, who had come to UTG headquarters to give his report, stood staring at the unsettling warning notice posted near the building's entrance.

Unlike the interior, which had been renovated to look almost brand-new, the door leading down to the basement was terribly worn.

The iron-barred gate looked more than a decade old, and more than a dozen locks hung from it, making it stand out all the more.

"Staring at it won't do you any good."

At the voice coming from the stairs above, Tae-hyeon flinched and looked up.

A young man with fairly ordinary features, dressed just as ordinarily and looking no older than his mid-to-late twenties, was beckoning to him.

"You can come up this way."

He had heard that this place was some kind of investigative agency.

But it wasn't even a police station.

Was it really normal for an organization like that to operate out of a building like this?

Still harboring his doubts, Tae-hyeon climbed half a flight of stairs and found an elevator.

He rode the small elevator, appropriately sized for the modest building, up to the office.

[If the coffee machine dispenses coffee on its own, feel free to drink it. It is harmless.]

The moment he stepped inside, the coffee machine clicked and began brewing a cup all by itself.

The rich aroma of the latte he usually drank mingled with the scent of warm milk, strangely putting him at ease while simultaneously making him feel uneasy.

The whole place had a peculiar atmosphere, almost as though he were being bewitched by something.

Still, for the moment, he picked up the coffee that had been poured for him.

There weren't many people in the office, but the staff seemed to consist of a fairly even mix of young men and women along with one middle-aged man, so nothing about them appeared particularly unusual.

"You're here? Come this way."

Then Hwi-yeon, whom Tae-hyeon already knew, appeared and led the two of them into a small conference room marked Meeting Room.

"This is Section Chief Han Su-myeon."

At Hwi-yeon's introduction, Tae-hyeon looked at Su-myeon in surprise.

A young man who didn't even look thirty was a section chief?

"I'm Team Leader Lee Hwi-yeon."

When Hwi-yeon introduced herself as well, Tae-hyeon became certain of one thing.

Whatever this place was, it was no ordinary institution.

Whether it was some kind of cult or something else entirely, he couldn't tell.

But then again, the problem he had brought to them was itself anything but ordinary.

"So... you're saying you can find a missing person...?"

In the end, the story he told them came down to one thing.

He was the only person who remembered the missing man.

Everyone else—even the man's own family—had forgotten he had ever existed, as though his very existence had been swallowed up somewhere.

"The problem is, the photos... even the chat rooms where we used to message each other, all of it disappeared. His game account too."

Everything that could have contained any trace of him.

Every piece of data.

Every place that should have remembered him.

He had vanished from all of it.

There was no way to file a missing-person report.

No way to search for him.

No way even to prove he had ever existed.

He had disappeared so completely that even Tae-hyeon himself had begun to wonder whether he had simply gone insane.

"Everyone thinks I'm crazy, or that I'm making some stupid joke. But that doesn't make any sense. He was my friend for ten years. We've known each other since we were wearing school uniforms, all the way up until now...."

Surely all those memories couldn't just be delusions.

Encouraged by the fact that Su-myeon and Hwi-yeon were listening to him seriously, Tae-hyeon's voice gradually grew more heated.

They were accepting a phenomenon he himself could barely believe as though it were nothing particularly strange.

Tae-hyeon thought that even if this place really was a cult, he might end up falling for it despite himself.

"There's something important I'd like to ask you."

Su-myeon interrupted him there.

"Have you ever experienced anything strange in the past? Being suddenly trapped in an unfamiliar place you'd never seen before. Seeing a monster or a ghost... something like that?"

Hwi-yeon continued the question after Su-myeon.

It was an even stranger—and far more suspicious—question than anything they had asked so far.

It seemed to have absolutely nothing to do with what Tae-hyeon had been telling them.

And yet he could not immediately object or deny it.

Instead, his eyes widened as though they had struck directly at something he had been trying not to think about, and his mouth snapped shut.

"........"

That silence was as good as an answer.

"Could you tell us about it in detail?"

At Hwi-yeon's second question, Tae-hyeon hesitated for a moment.

Then he took out his phone and searched for something.

After a brief wait, he turned the screen toward them.

It was a blog post.

It's in the water. It was in the water.

A wondrous being.

Where veins filled with gold and jade pulse,

an eternal, undying truth.

You must bow your head.

You must show courtesy to that one.

The sublime thing sunk beneath the seafloor

inthewaterinthewaterinthewateritstherewasthereyouknow

inthewaterinthewaterinthewater....

To anyone reading it, it looked like a nonsensical stream of words written by someone who had completely lost their mind.

As Su-myeon read, Tae-hyeon continued with an expression tinged with embarrassment and awkwardness.

"When I was in high school, I went on a cruise with my parents once."

The post he had just shown them, he explained, had been written immediately afterward.

He remembered almost nothing clearly from the four days he had spent on that cruise.

Only something enormous and blue.

Somethingbeautifulandwondrousbeneaththewater....

"...Don't force yourself to remember. That's enough."

Su-myeon handed Tae-hyeon a tissue.

Only then did Tae-hyeon realize that cold sweat had broken out across his forehead.

He wiped it away with the tissue.

It felt like nothing more than a dream to him now, but he had the vague sense that he had seen something deeply ominous back then.

"But why are you suddenly asking me about that? Does this... have something to do with my friend's disappearance?"

At Tae-hyeon's question, Su-myeon and Hwi-yeon exchanged a brief glance.

Then Su-myeon answered with certainty.

"Yes. Have you ever heard of ghost stories?"

Tae-hyeon's expression became even stranger.

Would it have sounded more convincing if a shaman had said it?

Seeing the naked disbelief on his face—as though he were thinking, What nonsense is this? Why are we suddenly talking about ghost stories?—Su-myeon continued.

"There are cases where stories that have gained recognition among people, one way or another, swallow up living human beings."

Tae-hyeon stared at him, still clearly unable to follow.

Su-myeon scratched his forehead and tried again in simpler terms.

"There are all sorts of bizarre phenomena like the one you experienced. It looks like your friend was caught up in one of them and disappeared."

"Then... how do I find him again?"

At Tae-hyeon's question, Su-myeon answered in as businesslike a tone as he could manage.

"I can't guarantee anything. But if he's still alive, there is a way. We enter the same ghost story and escape with him."

If he's still alive.

Escape from a ghost story.

Tae-hyeon blinked, visibly struggling to keep up with the direction the conversation had taken.

"The...."

"We won't charge you anything separately."

Hwi-yeon cut in before he could continue, eliminating in advance anything that might make the situation sound like a scam.

"All we ask is that you tell us everything you can remember. The more information we have, the easier it will be for our agents to enter."

Tae-hyeon tightened his grip on the cup of coffee he had completely forgotten about.

Truthfully, if they had asked him for a few thousand, he would have paid it.

This was no longer just about saving his friend.

He himself had been driven almost to the breaking point.

If it was true that his friend had been dragged somewhere else, then that would also mean Tae-hyeon wasn't insane.

"Do you remember which building and unit your friend lived in?"

"Yes. Of course."

They had been close enough to casually visit each other's homes all the time.

There was no chance he could have forgotten.

"Building 404, Unit 404. His... family still lives there. No matter how many times I go, they just tell me they don't know who I am...."

What an unfortunate number.

The moment he heard the building and unit number, Su-myeon let out a quiet sigh.

Ghost stories had a tendency to fixate on symbolism.

Numbers, especially, seemed to grow more significant the more often they repeated.

"An apartment.... An apartment........"

Su-myeon drummed his fingers against the table, wearing the expression of someone who almost remembered something but couldn't quite grasp it.

For now, however, there was nothing they could confirm.

"We'll look into it."

To Tae-hyeon, Su-myeon's words were hope itself.

He left the conference room in something of a daze.

The coffee in his paper cup was still strangely warm.

In a world where iced americanos had practically become the default, how had that machine known he only drank warm lattes?

And the rich coffee had somehow been prepared exactly to his taste.

Carrying that belated question with him, Tae-hyeon accepted a business card from a young woman who appeared to be in charge of records and left UTG.

***

Su-myeon took the UTG elevator up to the fifth floor.

The enormous door blocking the entrance was secured by a bewildering array of systems: a fairly complicated passcode, fingerprint recognition, iris recognition, and several others besides.

Hwi-yeon had explained all the technology that had gone into it, but to Su-myeon, it mostly just seemed inconvenient.

He would have preferred to have security like this installed on the basement.

Unfortunately, electronic locks weren't particularly effective down there.

They broke almost every day.

There was little they could do about it.

[Baekya Land]

Su-myeon looked at the label on the cabinet nearest the entrance and at the clusters of keys hanging inside.

They were the basement keys, sealed away behind layer upon layer of locks.

A glass jar beneath them contained candies in a variety of colors.

Among those candies were several whose effects Su-myeon had witnessed firsthand.

They were valuable items, since they had clearly proven useful when exploring ghost stories.

And with Peter Pan's warning having been so severe, they wouldn't be able to enter and obtain more candy for quite some time.

To prevent the candies from being wasted or misused, they had been stored here as soon as the fifth-floor storeroom was completed.

"........"

Beyond the cabinet labeled Baekya Land, dozens of other cabinets lined the entrance.

Each had its own label.

Among them was one marked 'Infinite Campus'.

Inside were the rooftop key they had used to escape, the attendance register containing the student roster, and the Shadow Sewing Kit.

There was no telling when—or where—any of those items might prove useful again.

"Haaah...."

Past those cabinets, deeper inside the room, Su-myeon's personal belongings were stored as well.

His computer, in particular, had been set up on the large desk positioned in the very center of the room.

"I still think... your place is better than this~"

And, as if it were part of the computer itself, the Cheshire doll lay sprawled on top of the desk, yawning as it scratched its side.

Of course, all of Su-myeon's other ghost-story-related items were stored here too.

The Nemean Lion Hide hung from a coat hanger.

Zephyrus's Wind sat inside a display case.

And there was the Cyclops's Contact Lens.

On top of all that, they had even set up an armory packed with every kind of firearm and ammunition Hwi-yeon had requisitioned.

The discovery that physical attacks were effective against monsters inside ghost stories seemed to have been an extremely significant one for her.

"Still, this place is better because people other than me can come and go too."

"Hmm...."

I haven't seen anyone come.

Ignoring Cheshire's grumbling, Su-myeon turned on the computer.

Technically, everyone in UTG had authorization to enter.

In practice, however, the fifth floor had become little more than Su-myeon's private office.

"An apartment........"

Among the games in Su-myeon's possession that had been created from the various versions of the source material known as UTG, quite a few used apartment complexes as their setting.

That wasn't particularly surprising.

Against a South Korean backdrop, apartments and officetels were among the most common forms of housing, so naturally they appeared frequently as settings for ghost stories.

But even among all of them, there was one that bothered him more than the rest.

'Gihyang The Forest.'

Despite having a name that made it sound as though there ought to be a mountain directly behind it, the apartment complex where Su-myeon lived was actually quite far from any mountain.

In fact, the mismatch between its name and location was something of a joke.

If anything, there was a stream much closer by....

'But if it's a place that really does have an atmosphere close to a mountain....'

And if the ghost story was also connected to the number 404.

There was exactly one ghost story that came to mind.