Chapter 61: The Witch’s Forest (4)

[1-1. Confirm direct passageways using Room 404 as the reference point.]

SHAAAA.

Leaves and branches brushed and struck against one another in the wind.

The wind roared from every direction, loud enough to drown out even the sound of trudging footsteps.

At the center of it all was Su-myeon, wandering endlessly through a forest steeped in deep green.

In Korea, when a place was thick with trees, it was only natural to picture a mountain.

But this forest stretched endlessly across flat ground, like the landscape of some distant foreign country he had never once visited.

That did not make traversing it any easier than climbing a mountain.

The unfamiliar scenery alone was disorienting, and the uneven ground constantly impeded his steps, though Zephyrus's Wind at least helped ease his exhaustion.

"Ah...."

Damn it.

The problem wasn't simply that he was lost.

An overwhelming hunger kept surging through him, shaking his mind to its very core.

When Su-myeon had experienced The Witch's Forest in UTG, he had immediately dubbed this place the Forest of Starvation as well.

More than anything else, this was a forest ruled by hunger.

He wasn't actually hungry, so his stomach neither burned nor growled.

"......."

Su-myeon stared at his trembling hand, then clenched it tightly into a fist.

He kept circling around only to end up in the same place, while the thought that he was hungry surfaced in his mind again and again.

He wanted to tear the bark from the tree beside him and eat it.

It was an endless hunger unlike anything he had ever felt in his life—something he had never even imagined he could feel.

'At this rate....'

Forget finding the way out. He was going to die after picking up and eating whatever he came across.

Even though he knew perfectly well that there was nothing physically wrong with him, once his mind was consumed by hunger, he could no longer control himself.

When his knees began to buckle on their own, Su-myeon reached for the tree beside him to steady himself.

Or at least, he thought he had.

"......."

A sticky yet firm texture.

The rich, savory scent of butter.

"......,"

When Su-myeon lifted his head, he found himself staring at a simply constructed candy house, like a gingerbread house enlarged to an enormous scale.

His eyes were drawn helplessly to its walls, baked to a vivid golden brown as though they had just come out of a perfectly heated oven.

Suppressing the urge to taste it immediately, Su-myeon forced himself to ask the obvious question.

Exactly when had this appeared beside him?

"Snack~!"

While Su-myeon struggled with a mind that refused to function properly, Cheshire sprang from his pocket and charged straight toward the candy house.

Watching the doll cling to the wall and gnaw away at the enormous confection, Su-myeon felt anger flare inside him.

He was barely managing to restrain himself, and that thing had just run over and started eating!

"......Fwoo."

But even through the haze, he knew that this anger itself was unnatural.

Su-myeon forcibly suppressed the emotion and managed to draw a deep breath.

There was no point in letting himself be swept away by an artificially induced desire and lashing out with anger that wasn't truly his.

Repeating that thought over and over in his head, Su-myeon finally managed to break a few pieces of chocolate from the wall.

He fought down the urge to shove them straight into his mouth and stuffed the chocolate into his Inventory instead.

[Livestock Feed A]

The name and description that appeared in his Inventory were just enough to shore up his wavering resolve.

[High-calorie feed created to fatten the livestock the Witch raises. A single piece provides enough energy to last a full day. It is sweet enough to sting the tongue, but what it is made from cannot be known.]

The name alone was enough to ruin anyone's appetite.

The description was no better.

A small amount contained an enormous number of calories. If someone became intoxicated by the taste and kept eating—

'They'd quickly reach a size that suits the Witch's palate.'

And since this was food from a ghost story, there was no reason to expect that the resulting weight gain would happen in any natural way.

Su-myeon recalled the pigs he had seen inside Room 404, ravenously devouring cookies mixed with filth.

Countless pigs dressed in human clothing.

"You're not eating?"

Even now, Cheshire remained plastered against the wall of the candy house, greedily devouring the confection.

Calories could hardly matter to a cotton doll, so there was probably no danger to him.

For Su-myeon, however, it would be a different story.

"I'm fine."

His mouth had gone bone dry, but Su-myeon nodded.

Hunger was unfamiliar and agonizing, but it wasn't something he absolutely couldn't endure.

Once he managed to regain control of himself, even the hunger seemed to recede slightly.

What mattered to him was his desire for sleep. If he ever truly felt as though he might die from hunger, he could simply lie down on the bare earth and sleep.

The hunger was psychological, after all. His body itself had not lost its strength.

After turning that thought over in his mind several times, his condition improved considerably.

'The fact that a candy house appeared means....'

The master of this place had finally noticed him.

On top of the hunger already permeating this strange forest, the Witch herself would now begin actively scheming to turn him into food.

The situation was far too dangerous for him to let mere hunger distract him and waste his time.

"Uh...."

Su-myeon grabbed Cheshire, who was tearing into the chocolate and sweets in a trance, and peeled him clean off the wall.

Even as Su-myeon carried him away, Cheshire stretched back to snap off one final piece of biscuit from the wall.

They had only gone a little farther when the scenery changed completely.

This time, a lake of an eerie blue-violet hue appeared before them.

"I wanted to eat more...."

"Cheshire."

Su-myeon addressed the sulking doll.

"Do you know the master of this place too?"

"Maybe... not...?"

The chances of getting a clear answer out of Cheshire appeared to be less than fifty percent.

Thinking that, Su-myeon nodded.

It was time to make use of the information he did have.

First of all, this lake was most likely the central point of the area.

The way out should be north of this lake....

"...?"

Ripples spread across the surface, as though something had knocked against the water.

The disturbance was small, like a tiny fish tapping the surface, but it came twice in succession.

As far as Su-myeon knew, however, there were no living creatures in this lake.

There should have been nothing beneath the surface except the sunken remains of corpses the Witch had devoured and discarded....

With that chilling image in mind, Su-myeon silently stared at the water.

"It rang!"

Cheshire, who had followed Su-myeon's gaze toward the lake, exclaimed brightly.

Just as Cheshire had said, the lake rang out twice again.

"......."

A lake where nothing remained but piles upon piles of stripped, picked-clean skeletons.

That was certainly how Su-myeon had understood it.

But only now did something about that strike him as strange.

The fundamental nature of ghost stories was to draw living humans inside, entice them, and absorb their causality.

By gaining a sense of reality through that process, they became capable of interfering with reality itself.

That was clearly the purpose of ghost stories.

'This ghost story is a little different.'

Keeping people alive was still ultimately part of the process of 'eating' them.

Nothing more than a means to that end.

But if the Witch's desire was simply to raise them, fatten them, and eventually devour them, then something didn't quite fit.

Unlike other ghost stories, did the Witch have no need for reality or causality and simply want to eat humans?

Even that explanation didn't add up properly.

Of course, compared to other ghost stories, The Witch's Forest did possess somewhat more unnatural scenery.

But that also meant there had to be enough humans remaining inside this ghost story to sustain a forest of this scale.

'Then there are still living people here too....'

Even in the game's presentation, the script had only described the lake that way.

It had never actually shown any white bones.

If that was the case, then perhaps inside this lake....

Still deep in thought, Su-myeon slowly approached the shore and lowered his head.

"Su-myeon is peering into the su-myeon."

Cheshire's cackling laughter followed the ridiculous pun.

The water was hazy and murky, making it difficult to see into its depths, but something faintly appeared beneath the surface.

Unlike Cheshire's painfully unfunny joke, it wasn't Su-myeon's own face staring back at him.

"A hand......."

A hand hovered just beneath the surface, as though it were about to touch the water without quite reaching it.

The pale, slender hand looked nothing like that of a drowned corpse.

Its fingers were curled into a fist.

As though it were knocking.

After another moment of hesitation, Su-myeon raised his own fist to the surface and tapped against the water in reply.

At once, as if frightened out of its wits, the faint hand vanished.

"......."

The sight sent a chill crawling over his skin.

But rather than fear, it stirred a memory.

The hand he had just seen.

He knew it.

There was no mistaking it.

His decision made, Su-myeon abruptly plunged his hand into the lake, groped through the water, and seized the hand that had hidden itself below.

***

Thirty minutes earlier.

Gihyang Apartments in reality, Building 404, Unit 304.

The apartment, now standing empty, wasn't even locked.

Ju-hee stiffened when the front door handle turned with a clunk and offered no resistance, but she carefully pushed the door open.

Han-su went in first.

After confirming that nothing seemed immediately wrong, he gestured for Ju-hee to follow.

"What is this...."

The strange state of the interior drew the words from Ju-hee before she could stop herself.

A pale film of dust covered everything, thick enough to make it seem as though no one had lived here for a very long time.

The apartment clearly appeared to have been abandoned for quite some time.

The problem was that every piece of furniture and every household item was still exactly where it belonged.

"......It's not that they emptied the house."

The people had simply disappeared, leaving the entire home behind.

Evidence supporting that disturbing conclusion lay plainly before her.

"...."

Ju-hee carefully surveyed her surroundings.

If Room 404 had possessed the wrongness of a place kept unnaturally spotless, Room 304 felt wrong because it had been utterly neglected.

It was as though only the people who had made up the household had been plucked away, leaving every object exactly where it had been.

Every interior door had been left wide open as well, so a few slow passes through the apartment were enough to grasp the entire layout.

[No anomalies found in the layout of Room 304.]

Out of habit, Ju-hee transmitted the report to Su-myeon in that same formal phrasing, then looked farther inside.

She lightly brushed her hand across the pale surface of a piece of furniture buried beneath a layer of dust.

An empty-looking picture frame, its surface thick with dust, caught her eye.

Inside was a photograph of a lone tree, standing by itself with no discernible significance.

"It certainly seems that everyone who lived in this house was dragged into the ghost story."

Han-su said it while looking around the apartment.

Every photograph arranged throughout the home was similarly empty, framed at angles where it would have been perfectly natural for a person to be standing.

Once they were certain that something was wrong, there was no longer any reason to hesitate.

Room 304 lay directly beneath Room 404, so their layouts were identical.

Among the doors arranged in exactly the same positions, Ju-hee stopped in front of the one corresponding to the door through which Su-myeon had disappeared.

Knock knock—

Ju-hee knocked, then waited.

She remained motionless for dozens of seconds, listening for a response.

Nothing.

In the silence, Ju-hee raised her hand and knocked again.

Knock knock—

Once again, there was no answer.

Han-su and Ju-hee exchanged glances.

"Let's just go ahead and...."

Go straight in.

Ju-hee was just about to finish the sentence when—

Knock knock—

A knock came from the other side of the closed door.

Ju-hee flinched, snatched her hand back, and froze.

Someone had answered from beyond the door.

But she had no way of knowing whether it was Su-myeon.

The instant that thought crossed her mind, a hand suddenly thrust through the door panel, which distorted around it like a hologram.

"...!"

The sight was even more shocking than the answering knock.

But this time, what startled Ju-hee was something else entirely.

The cuff visible behind the outstretched hand.

It belonged to Su-myeon's distinctive sukajan, its embroidery unmistakable at a glance.

The moment Ju-hee realized it was Su-myeon's hand, she grabbed it without hesitation.

The person on the other side—the one who had reached out first—seemed to be the one startled now.

But there was no time to hesitate.

Still gripping his hand tightly, Ju-hee threw her entire body toward the door with all her strength, as though forcing her way straight through it.