Escaping the Mystery Hotel - Chapter 192
Only Krnovel
Episode 192 – Party Time – Secret of the 2nd Floor (1)
[User: Han Ga-in (Jihye)
Date: Day 94
Current location: Hanbing Hell – Room of Resurrection
Sage Advice: 0]
– Han Ga-in
After listening to the drone’s advice and returning to the second floor, we took a moment to check on the situation of our colleagues who had returned to the first floor. The ‘prayer team’, who in some ways had a much harder time than us, all went into room 105 and did not come out. The grandfather called out through the chat window, but Jincheol was the only one who responded. The rest of the members seemed to be deeply asleep.
I don’t know if I should say it was fortunate, but according to the information on my colleagues in the status window, everyone was alive, so I wasn’t too worried. Even if your limbs are blown off, isn’t room 105 the place where you can be saved if you go in with just your breath? I’m sure I’ll somehow come out unharmed. We decided to focus on exploring the second floor.
And time passed in vain.
Ari Kim: Has anyone found something?
Kim Muk-seong: It’s cold.
I found nothing, really nothing. To begin with, today wasn’t my first time exploring. It wasn’t long ago that we went on a search with Eunsol, who had already acquired the eyes of a monocular bird. Even people with transcendental vision search to their hearts’ content, barely able to find one cold ice hell and nothing else, but it’s even weirder when we search by ourselves and something special suddenly appears.
The sections that were expected to become special rooms after completion are just ice at this point, and there is nothing around room 201, which is the only one that has already been formed. I opened the door to room 201, but the inside was no different from the outside.
I searched outside the only cold ice hell I found, but as expected, there was just ice and a snowstorm. At one point, her grandfather even searched her floor, hoping to find some type of ice cream, but his efforts were in vain. Fortunately, I was able to explore for a long time because I took regular breaks in the cold ice hell room that blocked the outside cold. If it weren’t for that, no one but me wearing a protective suit would have been able to properly explore.
Around 5 p.m., as dinner time slowly approached, we eventually returned to the Hanbing Hell room and began to rest. Ari, who arrived a little earlier, sighed and took out some hot coffee.
“Everyone, have a drink. “Has anyone found anything?”
“doesn’t exist… . Can we find something on our own in the first place?”
“I thought that too. If there was something we could find among ourselves, Eunsol, who has acquired the eyes of a superhuman, would have found it a long time ago. In other words, we are looking with the naked eye for something that even a person with a powerful telescope and a magnifying glass could not find.”
“What did you find, grandfather? “I heard you were looking for wild ginseng.”
“…”
“You didn’t find it and eat it alone, right?”
Grandfather’s response to Ari’s dull joke was a deep sigh.
“Why is there still a blizzard in the first place? . If you look closely, isn’t the ‘setting’ of this damn hotel arbitrary? “Are you saying that the resentment of the dead leaking out of hell is the cause of the cold?”
“Yes.”
“But actually, this room where the door to hell is located is quite warm, and isn’t the snow falling from the sky regardless of hell? This damn second floor has no ceiling! Will it come back when the repairs are finished?”
“I know… . If you look closely, the settings are wrong. “Snow is falling from the sky regardless of hell, and it is actually warm near hell, which is the source of cold.”
While Ari and Grandpa were complaining about the hotel’s ‘crappy setting’, I began to have a strange thought. There is no need to worry about the hotel being out of control because it doesn’t just happen in a day or two. If it were a normal hotel, there would be no reason to call customers to a place where construction was not completed.
Prayers of rest and resurrection related to the Cold Ice Hell need to be understood as a kind of game quest that is connected to the progress inside the hotel, so there is no need to obsess about the setting itself.
Rather, wasn’t this absurd setup itself a trap to hide something?
Let’s ignore the setting, which is obviously something the hotel made up haphazardly anyway, and look at the reality. What is the ‘real reason’ that the second floor is frozen? Maybe it’s because there’s a snowstorm outside?
…
— Jump up!
“Gain? What are you doing?”
“snowstorm.”
“huh?”
“How on earth does a blizzard happen?”
“What do you mean -”
“Outside the main entrance on the first floor was the sky. That’s an incredibly high sky! The clouds were far below. Where was the location? “It’s hard to know exactly, but judging by the fact that the clouds are far below, it’s probably at the top of the troposphere, right?”
“to… . maybe?”
“The hotel is above the clouds. Snow forms in clouds. “How can there be a blizzard in a hotel above the clouds, even if it has no ceiling?”
Ari and Grandpa opened their mouths at the same time and everyone’s eyes turned to the sky. When I first explored the second floor, I remembered the ‘mountain’ my sister had discovered with her monocular eyes. I also recalled the fact that she couldn’t use the chat window when her grandfather was on the first floor and we were on the second floor.
Why? The limits of the distance of the chat window have already been confirmed in ‘Media that Changes Common Sense’ and ‘Mansion of Fear’. It is much wider than expected, and it is not blocked just by changing the number of floors in the building.
“Your sister said she found something that looked like a ‘mountain’ beyond the second floor ceiling, right? The location of the second floor is different from the first floor. perhaps!”
Maybe the second floor is on the ground level.
*
At around 5:30 PM, I went down to the first floor and called Jincheol again. His grandfather had an unusual reaction.
“I’m sorry for calling you while you were resting. Since the situation is a bit urgent right now… .”
My older brother chuckled, as if he was surprised by my grandfather’s trailing off attitude.
“What kind of apology is this that doesn’t suit you? “Please tell me the reason.”
I confirmed that the location of the second floor was different from the first floor through the hints we received from the owl and the drone, and the snowstorm falling through the ceiling, and suggested the idea of going outside to the second floor.
“wow! I’ve been to the second floor several times and knew there was no ceiling, but it never occurred to me to break down the wall and go outside. “From the beginning, I thought that breaking it and going out would only result in falling to my death since the location was in the sky.”
“We know now. Of course, since the first floor was in the sky, I thought the entire hotel would be in the sky. “I never thought the second floor would be somewhere else!”
“How do you plan to get out? By breaking down the wall? Come to think of it, Ga-in has already destroyed your hotel, right?”
“yes. The durability of this hotel is no different from an ordinary building. “It’s worth breaking down the wall and going out.”
However, if I were to use Kangrim, I wouldn’t mind breaking it with my bare fists. Even if you wear a protective suit and gain superhuman strength, you cannot destroy a building made of concrete with that much strength.
Among us, there is only one person who can knock down a building with force.
*
After arriving at the second floor, work began to proceed smoothly. Although he was much more emaciated than usual because he was praying in front of the incense candle of rest, his strength was not lacking. At first, my brother thought about trying to destroy it with the power of ‘Star Pieces of Another World’, but soon after considering our safety issues and the limits of what he could endure, he decided to use the method used in ‘The Cube’.
— Boom! thud!
…Ari reacted with admiration.
“It’s amazing even when I see it a second time. Did you expect it when the hotel gave you protective clothing? “I never thought there would be someone who uses a protective suit as a ‘blunt weapon that never breaks!’”
As I listened, I became curious and asked.
“Did something like this happen in your first hotel experience?”
“huh. When I think about it now, the location of the second floor may have been different back then, but back then, no one had achieved the same enlightenment as we have now. “Everyone thought that the second floor was in deep water, so we didn’t even think about destroying the wall.”
I felt it again. The fact that the first and second floors can physically exist in ‘different spaces’ is a very difficult idea to think about. This is because, according to common sense, this cannot happen in buildings in the real world.
In the case of the first floor, the external space can be seen through the transparent glass front door, so based on that information, it is easy to think that the ‘entire hotel’ is in the same place as the first floor. Just as we naturally assumed that the entire hotel was in the sky, Ari’s first party would naturally assume that the entire hotel was in the deep sea.
If you think about it, there were quite a few hints.
1. Beyond the second floor ceiling is an object that looks like a mountain. There are very few mountains that can be higher than the clouds, and even those mountains have only a portion of their tops above the clouds, and it is not easy to be in a position to ‘look up’ from a hotel that is much higher than the clouds.
2. The location of the first floor is the sky above the clouds, but on the second floor, snow formed from the clouds is falling.
3. In a normal building, the physical distance between the first and second floors is less than 10m at most. At that distance, there is no way the chat window would be blocked.
4. The horizontal area of the second floor is much larger than that of the first floor.
All of these hints pointed to the fact that the first and second floors were not physically connected as one building, but separate places formed in separate spaces.
“The fact that we moved between the first and second floors by ‘elevator’ contributed to our illusion.”
“Because I was moving in an elevator, I thought I was going ‘up’ normally.”
“Is this what the owl meant by writing advice and forcing us to pay attention to the reasons for different repair times?”
Ari nodded.
“Once the repairs were completed and the ceiling was built, you wouldn’t have noticed it at all. “Because the ‘mountain’ is no longer visible and the ‘eyes’ no longer enter, many of the hints disappear.”
“What on earth is outside the second floor?”
“well… . I hope no monsters come out. and.”
“and?”
“It feels like cold water is being poured on me in advance, but I don’t think I can escape this way. “It’s just my feeling.”
— Boom! Grumble!
There was a sound like thunder and the sound of something collapsing. Finally, Jincheol destroyed the entire wall with his invincible pickaxe and created a hole leading to the outside of the second floor.
The exterior wasn’t much different from the second floor. The snowstorm that turned the second floor into hell in the first place must have occurred outside the hotel. The enormous snow and the sharp wind that felt like it was torturing a person made it difficult to open the eyes.
However, there was ‘land’ outside the second floor.
With our mouths wide open and feeling some kind of emotion, we carefully stepped onto the ‘ground’ outside the hotel.
On the 94th day after entering Hotel Pioneer, we arrived outside the hotel for the first time.
See next episode