Escaping the Mystery Hotel - Chapter 431
Only Krnovel
EP.431 Episode 431 – A Family with a Backbone (7)
Episode 431 – A Family with a Backbone (7)
– Han Ga-in
“Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!”
Han Min-sang, who had taken the child’s body, twisted his entire body and ran wild even while his neck was being strangled.
I thought about pulling the string with all my might several times, but then the child’s body itself died, which would be a big problem.
Although it was a tiring situation, it was better to deal with the being possessing the child’s body than with a formless ghost.
Finally, after about 10 minutes, Han Min-sang started drooling and slumped down, and Elena and I hurriedly approached him.
“Name tags, name tags! Here they are!”
The owner of the body, Minseok, had a name tag that naturally appeared on his chest that read ‘Han Minsang’.
“Where is Han Min-seok’s name tag?”
“Here! It’s on the floor!”
After taking off Han Min-sang’s name tag, I put Min-seok’s name tag back on.
“Now let’s go to the jar!”
To end the name tag game, you must put the name tag that will be sacrificed back into the jar and close the lid.
I held Han Min-sang’s name tag and ran to where the jar was.
As expected from a Hanok where a great-grandfather, a man with assets worth over 100 billion won, lived, it had more than one or two rooms.
“There’s a jar!”
“There’s a jar in Grandpa’s room again!”
“When I dreamed of Ga-in outside, he was always in that room. Was that your grandfather’s room?”
The jar always appeared in the largest room in the Hanok, my great-grandfather’s room.
As I entered my grandfather’s room, I saw an open jar in the middle and the body of an old man who had collapsed as if he had died.
“Mr. Gain, Mr. Han Jinseong…”
“…”
Let’s recall the nightmare that ended with Han Min-sang’s victory.
At that time, Han Min-sang took my younger brother’s body and dragged me to the jar like a dog.
Then he mocked the old man who was standing next to the jar and put his soul into the jar.
That is, if Han Min-sang is left alone, he will trap the soul of his great-grandfather, the person he hates the most, in a jar.
In this episode, Grandfather’s soul was already trapped in a jar.
“Should I take Grandpa’s soul out of the jar?”
“…”
“Cow, if you put your hand in and take out the name tag -”
“That’s too dangerous.”
Elena lowered her head with a gloomy expression.
Take out the grandfather’s soul that’s already in the jar? Put your hand in the jar and search it?
It’s too dangerous.
Since our bodies also contain souls, how can we be sure that the jar won’t swallow up another soul?
In the first place, there is no guarantee that only one person’s soul can enter that jar.
— Bam!
So I threw in Han Min-sang’s name tag and closed the jar lid.
The jar did not even hesitate to swallow two souls.
…
…
…
*
[User: Han Ga-in (Jihye)
Date: Day 378
Current location: Underground, Art Gallery
Wise Man’s Advice: 3]
– Han Ga-in
I suddenly came to my senses.
When I checked the status window as soon as I woke up, two days had passed.
Was that why?
I felt quite hungry and thirsty.
“Gainaaaaaa!”
“Eww!”
When I woke up and shook my head, Miro was laughing and hugging my neck.
Elena, who had woken up next to him, made a bewildered expression, and Ari, who had been nibbling on a potato chip, hardened her expression slightly and lifted the back of her neck.
“Miro, take it easy. Gain, how are you feeling?”
“I’m hungry and thirsty.”
As soon as he finished speaking, Jincheol handed me a bottle of water.
“Here’s water.”
“Thank you.”
“Thank you for your hard work. It’s a bit shaky, but the artist said that this would be a good solution.”
“…”
After quenching my thirst, I looked around belatedly.
The location was in the middle of an art gallery, and Elena and I were sleeping on a blanket spread on the floor.
My colleagues brought chairs and even sofas from wherever they came from, and sat or lay down on them.
It seems like you’ve been watching my dreams like a movie for several days.
The painter was yawning next to the huge canvas that served as the screen.
“Is it solved?”
“roughly.”
“… Isn’t there something more after closing the jar lid? It feels like it was cut off in the middle -”
“What’s the point of looking any further? The name tag stealing game is over, and Han Min-sang and Han Jin-seong are locked in a jar together.”
“…”
“All that’s left are the terrified children and Han Jin-seong’s soulless body?”
That’s how it feels.
“The kids will go home on their own, right? Han Jin-seong is an old man who could die suddenly in his sleep, so we’ll deal with it like that. The secret of the jar will be buried in the darkness of the warehouse, and your family will receive the inheritance and live well. What else is there?”
There is nothing more.
I think that’s the ending.
“Thank you for looking for me. If you had come to the art gallery even once, you would have found me by now. Now, are you curious about the reward?”
The moment my colleagues showed expressions of interest, I shouted firmly.
“for a moment!”
“What? Do you still have something to say?”
“I heard from Elena. She said I have two more chances left. I used it once with Elena, so I still have one left, right?”
“That’s true, but I thought this was enough? I said I’d give you compensation.”
Emotions revealed in the painter’s facial expression.
Boredom, regret, fatigue and disappointment.
It doesn’t end like this.
I don’t know the exact reason, but at least it’s not this.
My intuition is warning me.
[Advice: 3 -> 2]
‘The artist seems disappointed, why?’
[Because you didn’t see what you needed to see.]
The hotel wanted to show me something, but the dream ended without me seeing it.
This is definitely valuable information.
It’s something I experienced in the past but forgot due to some intervention.
Why didn’t I see it?
Because the actual events and developments were so different!
“Wait a minute, wait a minute!”
The painter chuckled.
“Okay. Try hard to give me advice. That’s your strength, so I’ll give you a chance.”
The way Elena and I solved it was so different from the real experience of Han Ga-in, a middle school student in the past.
The development was so different that the ‘special things’ that happened then didn’t happen this time.
I understand up to this point, but… .
“…”
From the middle, I also felt that the direction was strange.
To be exact, I thought something was strange from the moment I started wrapping the string around my cousins’ necks.
Even if you’re a middle school student with no sense of propriety, you’re going to put a thread around your cousin’s neck out of nowhere?
This is not the natural behavior that my past self would have done.
Learn the rules of the game by playing rounds and play your hand before your opponent does.
It’s the regressor’s way.
This is typical hotel attendee behavior.
This is not the mindset of a human boy who lives only one life.
Although I vaguely felt this fact, I didn’t know what to do.
Why?
Because I just couldn’t find the right answer.
I couldn’t figure out how a ‘normal middle school student’ could survive in this situation.
Let’s take a step back and think about it.
Since you are not a regressor, you only have one chance.
Not only do they not know the rules of the name tag game, they also do not know that such a thing even happens.
Of course, I don’t know information like there’s a Han Min-sang in the jar or that you can transfer souls with a name tag.
A situation where an evil spirit that jumped out of a jar suddenly attacked you while you were sleeping in bed without knowing anything.
Does it make sense for a middle school student to win in such an absurd situation?
With no superpowers, no information, and only one chance, the conditions are actually much harsher than the Room of Curses.
It was a game I couldn’t win, so I had no choice but to use unusual methods to try to win.
“…”
[Advice: 2 -> 1]
‘How on earth can I survive in that situation naturally, like a middle school student?’
[Think backwards. You are a future being who has already survived, look back on your experiences and think about what the outcome was.]
Think backwards.
Rather than analyzing the ordeal from the beginning to the end, let’s think about the outcome that has already been decided in the future.
First, our family has never inherited more than a few billion dollars.
Second, I don’t remember anything about that time.
“…”
As I focused on this information, I vaguely got a sense of ‘what kind of ending’ had been created.
A fortune worth 100 billion won disappeared without a trace.
Something supernatural happened involving a haunted jar, but I, my cousins, and my younger siblings all forgot about it.
The only organization that can do this is the Administration.
But knowing the ending didn’t change anything.
Because the path to that conclusion was still unknown.
It feels like the flow of thoughts is somehow blocked.
A huge rock is blocking the river, and I don’t know how to remove it.
[Advice: 1 -> 0]
‘I know the ending, but I don’t know how to proceed. No matter what I do, I can’t think of a way for my past self to overcome it without any information.’
It’s not that I don’t know how to solve it.
I’ve already worked this out with Elena, and several other approaches come to mind.
The problem is that the methods that come to mind are all possible for hotel attendees who have seen the future.
I couldn’t figure out a way that would work for a middle school student with no information.
[If a veteran working on the second floor of a hotel can’t recall it, how could a middle school student?]
“…What are you talking about?”
You’re asking for an answer, but what kind of answer is this?
How can a middle school student come up with something that I, a hotel veteran, can’t?
No, I thought about it, so my past self survived –
…
“ah.”
no way.
No way.
No, I don’t think that’s right, but I can’t believe it.
“no….”
When a truly absurd possibility occurred to me and I opened my mouth without realizing it, the artist smiled.
“Participant Han Ga-in.”
“…”
“Do you want to try one last time?”
“… yes.”
Last attempt.
He gave a strong message to his colleagues who were looking at him with worried eyes.
“This time, I’m going in alone again.”
“Huh? Mr. Gain, without our help, it wouldn’t be easy for you to create variables on your own, right? Just like a middle school student, you’re being pushed by the situation -”
“That’s why I’m going in alone.”
Ari tilted her head next to Elena, who was flustered.
“You’ve already failed more than twice by going in alone.”
“Where did I stop when I did it alone?”
“what?”
A hazy memory came to mind, the words my colleagues had shared.
‘Here we go again. Are we stopping here this time too?’
‘At this point, it’s already a loss.’
‘It’s not easy to just sit back and watch. So…’
The rounds I went through alone, my colleagues stopped dreaming and started again every time my defeat was confirmed.
“Just leave it alone this time.”
Songi muttered with an anxious expression.
“That, Gain oppa doesn’t seem to know, but if we leave it alone, Gain oppa will try to commit suicide with the body of a 90-year-old man -”
“Then just leave me alone until I kill myself and suffocate.”
“…”
*
— Shhhhh!
As a soft breeze caressed my cheek, I could hear the leaves rustling in the nearby bamboo forest.
For a moment, I smelled the tickling smell of the earth, and the little boy in front of me grabbed a wriggling bug with his hand –
“Eight!”
“Letting the memories of the past flow by, I think. What mistakes did my colleagues and I make in this incident?”
…
Around lunchtime, when I returned to the country house with my younger siblings, the adults were fighting loudly.
“Jeong-ho, you! You never set foot in your grandfather’s house -”
“The victory conditions are ridiculously harsh. There is only one chance, and unlike me, an ordinary middle school student, my opponent is a supernatural evil spirit. What’s even more serious is the information imbalance.”
…
The next day was chaos from morning.
“Ha, Grandpa! What on earth are you talking about!? A, a donation all of a sudden!”
“Junsuk… When you make so much noise, my ears start to sting.”
“Grandpa!”
“At night, a jar appears and an evil spirit emerges from it to take over the body of a living person through a name tag game. Only the evil spirit knows all this information, and I am attacked while sleeping without knowing anything.”
…
“I can’t stand seeing those lazy bastards! Bring me some tea right now!”
“Oh, Father! Why are you suddenly teasing me… All of the kids are city people. Even if you say that -”
“It’s unfair. I, a middle school student, can never win. It’s a situation where I can’t win, but I try to win by any means possible, so naturally, things turn out unnaturally. This is the trap that my colleagues and I fell into.”
…
Great-grandfather’s country house shed.
My father told me before that this warehouse is filled with all kinds of expensive art pieces that my great-grandfather had collected since he was young.
Maybe that’s why I was afraid of touching anything carelessly, so I just stayed quiet.
“What are you doing?”
“…”
“Come here. Do you know what this is?”
“The direction was wrong from the beginning. Everyone was just digging in the wrong direction. That’s why the artist was disappointed, and he couldn’t see what the hotel was trying to show. So this time, we’re going to turn that twisted dream back to the right direction.”
…
When I returned to the Hanok, the phone was ringing loudly.
“Yes? You’re coming tomorrow?”
Because of my great-grandfather’s whim, all the adults went out to pick tea leaves together, but they said they would come back after one more day.
“I accepted one absurd truth. This truth is ‘obvious’ to common sense. But to me and my colleagues, it was ‘unthinkable.’”
…
— Got it!
I woke up in excruciating pain as if something was choking me!
“The past me was defeated. I was defeated in a situation where I couldn’t win, so I lost normally. This is the truth that my colleagues and I have excluded from the beginning.”
…
I am Han Ga-in, a first year middle school student… .
Trapped in the body of a nearly ninety year old man.
This is the most painful prison in the world.
“Wow~! As expected, guys have nice bodies.”
“My colleagues always stopped dreaming at this point and started over again because they thought there was no chance of a comeback.”
…
The being, now a ‘boy’, giggled and approached the open jar.
— Daughter!
The lid of the jar was closed.
The name tag disappeared into the darkness.
“It’s over now~! Ahahaha! Look at the eyes, eyes! Why, did you think you’d have a chance too?”
Despair, fear, pain, dread.
I fell into an abyss of negative emotions that was too deep to express in words, and screamed and screamed so that no one could hear.
I would rather beg to be killed now than live the rest of my life as a ninety-year-old man.
“The remaining scenes were of me being trapped in the body of a ninety-year-old man, feeling hopeless. My colleagues who were watching this in real time had a hard time bearing it. I understand. This is proof that my colleagues loved me that much.”
…
…
…
“…”
Up to this point, it is an unavoidable development.
Didn’t the owl say anything?
How could I, an ordinary middle school student, come up with an answer that a veteran working on the second half of the hotel couldn’t come up with?
My past self couldn’t come up with an answer.
I couldn’t even realize that the question had been asked, let alone the answer.
That’s why I was defeated and had my body taken over by Han Min-sang.
My past self turned around right here.