Escaping the Mystery Hotel - Chapter 656
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EP.656 Episode 656 – Room 301, The Cursed Room – ‘The Origin of Species’ (3)
Episode 656 – Room 301, The Cursed Room – ‘The Origin of the Species’ (3)
– Yoo Song-i
When I returned home with the gray cat, fortunately there was no one home.
“Gray – this is your name from now on. Do you understand? Rest next to me for a moment.”
After giving clean food to the cat that was not in good health, I checked Eunsol’s reply.
“Teletalk?”
It contained a message asking to be contacted via some sort of secure messenger.
I thought, “Is this enough?” but I couldn’t think of a better way.
As soon as I installed the app, messages started coming in.
Eunsol: I’m glad you contacted me now! Did you find out anything?
Songi: I even found a talking cat.
Eunsol: Already? Good work! Did you find out something?
Songi: I just got back. What about you, Sister?
Eunsol: I’m gathering suspicious information related to my father.
Songi: Did you find something?
There was quite a delay from here until the next answer, and it seems that even as an older sister, your thoughts are complicated.
Eunsol: I didn’t know before, but I saw it when I looked at it with a suspicious eye. You spend a considerable amount of money every year in unknown areas.
Songi: To what extent?
Eunsol: At least 2 billion won a year. There were years when it exceeded 8 billion won.
At least 2 billion a year, and in severe cases 8 billion!
It was such an unrealistic amount that I couldn’t really grasp it.
Eunsol: The accounting process is so complicated that most people wouldn’t know about it. Even those who did find out thought it was just ordinary slush funds.
Songi: You still don’t know where it was written?
Eunsol: I don’t know. Also, there are a lot of strangely empty spots in my father’s schedule.
After that, Eun-sol continued to list all the strange things she felt about the chairman of Daeyang Group.
There were some parts that sounded strange, like billions of dollars whose whereabouts were unknown or schedules that were unclear, and there were also stories that were difficult for people like me who didn’t know much about companies to understand.
Songi: It feels like my sister and I are going through completely different scenarios.
Eunsol: There’s nothing we can do since both the talking animals and the suspicious chairman are suspicious.
Songi: Will it continue like this for a while?
Eunsol: Yes. In the way that each of us does our best in our respective fields.
There are only two people, and even those two people feel split. Is this the best way to proceed?
Oh, there was something I was worried about on my own, right? I should say it now.
There is also a management office in room 301.
How about actively seeking their help?
Songi: Should I ask the management for help? I think they’d be interested in talking animals.
Eunsol: I thought about that too, but I don’t know how the administration will react to us.
The question is how the administration will react.
It’s a shame that it’s just me and Eunsol alone.
Even if Ariman was here, wouldn’t the management office have done something about the problem?
Eunsol: Our situation is different from reality.
In reality, Ari was openly a top official of the Management Bureau, and Ga-in and her brother were absolute powerhouses that even the Management Bureau had to be wary of.
There was no way I could bow down to the management office… .
The odds are much worse for us now.
Songi: But, the two of us solving Room 301… No matter how I look at it, I wonder if that’s possible.
We are very underpowered, and above all, we have no one who is good at physical combat.
It’s a sad story, but even if Eunsol and I combined, our fighting power might be less than Pero’s.
Eunsol: Let’s do this. You solve the animal-related problem on your own. I’ll approach the management office.
Songi: Sister?
Eunsol: As you know, I have a background in ‘Daeyang Group’.
Of course, as Jincheol Oppa experienced, the Management Bureau is a group that can wipe out even a chaebol family in broad daylight if it has to.
But at least she seemed to be more careful with Eunsol than with me.
Songi: The roles are divided.
Eunsol: You’re in charge of talking animals, and I’m in charge of contacting the management office and the suspicious chairman.
At this point, when I was about to cut off contact, something unexpected came out.
Eunsol: There are a few people who have taken care of various difficult tasks for you in the past, right?
People who have handled the major and minor affairs of the Daeyang Group chairman’s family for at least several decades.
Songi: Are you like a butler?
Eunsol: Similar. Should I send one person?
I was taken aback by the unexpected story.
Eunsol: He’s a tight-lipped person. He won’t ask you anything, and he’s not the type of person to go around talking nonsense. It seems like we need at least one person who can do the work.
Eunsol unnie didn’t seem to notice it, but I found it really amazing!
People who silently handle all the ‘complicated and delicate work’ of the chaebol family?
This in itself seems like something out of a comic book, doesn’t it?
Songi: Send it to me!
Eunsol: What are you going to tell your parents?
Songi: Don’t worry about that.
This concludes our first meeting.
The general outline is caught.
All I have to do now is study the phenomenon of human souls being trapped in animal bodies.
Finally, we quickly secured an entity that could serve as evidence for the ‘Gray’.
Sister Eunsol must investigate the suspicious chairman and contact the management office.
“…”
Even aside from the management office, how do the separate stories that Eunsol and I are working on connect?
Talking animals and a suspicious conglomerate chairman! There must be a connection between the two.
First of all, let me focus on my work.
“Gray, come here. Can you read Korean?”
*
Communicating with an intelligent cat was not as easy as I thought.
First, the power – ‘telepathy’ is not a telepathic ability that can be used on any Chaos entity.
Rather than conveying a clear intention, it is the power to convey the mind, that is, the heart.
Thanks to this, I could clearly feel how much pain and sorrow Gray was suffering, but exchanging specific information was difficult.
Second, Gray’s mental state was not sound.
Being trapped in the body of a beast must be torture every moment, so it’s basically like talking to someone who’s been tortured for over a year.
“Think about it slowly. Can you understand what I wrote?”
Also, I could understand the language to some extent, but I couldn’t write.
Even if I sat him down in front of the keyboard, he didn’t know which button to press, so he was practically illiterate.
Could it be that cats have a reduced intelligence because their brains cannot handle human intelligence?
I’m not sure about this part.
“If you have a headache, eat first.”
Only after considerable care, including neat food and warm baths, did something resembling information begin to emerge.
“So… you’re saying you woke up in a cat’s body about two years ago?”
– Meow!
I don’t remember the exact dates, but I remember surviving two harsh winters.
“Were you human before?”
As soon as those words came out, I felt a surge of intense emotion.
It was difficult to understand everything even with telepathy, but as I listened, I was able to get a general idea of ??the person’s identity.
“What’s your name, Park Jin-ho? Park Ji-ho? Park Ji-hoo? Sorry for the confusion. Before you became a cat… . Late teens? Twenties? It’s ambiguous.”
By the time night fell, Gray had sorted out almost all the information he could remember.
“It was about 2 years ago when I woke up in the body of a cat. When I was a human, I was a male between 18 and 21 years old. My name was Park Ji-hoo, right? I lived near the coast of Gangneung-si, Gangwon-do.”
After figuring this out, the next thought that came to mind.
“Shall we go to your house? Have you ever been there?”
– Meow!
He said he wanted to go, but he has never been there.
This may be because a cat’s body cannot use transportation, and it cannot walk from Seoul to Gangneung on cat’s feet.
A natural question.
Two years ago, the mind of a young man named Park Ji-hoo was trapped in the body of a cat.
So what happened to Park Ji-hoo’s original body?
A vegetable?
Already dead?
Or… .
“I have to see it for myself.”
I can’t go today, so I’ll have to go tomorrow.
Surely the world won’t end overnight?
Late at night, Mom and Dad came home.
It seemed like they both had something to say to me, but they didn’t bother me because I said I was going to sleep.
*
The next morning at 6:30, I got ready to go out as soon as the sun rose.
My parents were taken aback by the sight of me washing and getting dressed so early in the morning, but they didn’t feel the need to explain it in detail.
However, an unexpected variable stopped me for a moment.
— Clang!
Suddenly the door wouldn’t open.
“what?”
The door wouldn’t open even though the door lock wasn’t working.
I couldn’t understand so I just held on to the doorknob, and when my dad saw that, he came over.
“Why is this happening? Songi, stay back for a moment.”
“…”
— Bam!
“What’s wrong? Is the door lock broken?”
The door finally opened after three people had been wrestling for over ten minutes.
“Oh! Okay, okay.”
“…I’ll be back.”
“Songiya, um, are you meeting your friend today? Are you bringing Pero with you?”
“yes.”
“You’re leaving so early? When are you coming back – Songiya!”
“good bye.”
After walking for more than 10 minutes from the apartment, I waited at the meeting place I had told Eunsol unnie in the morning.
Soon a black sedan approached.
—Wheeing!
The person who appeared as the window rolled down was a middle-aged man with a sturdy build who appeared to be in his early 50s.
At first glance, he looks like some kind of security team leader.
“Are you Miss Songi?”
“yes.”
“I heard from the young lady. This is Director Kim. Please come in.”
“Yes. From now on, I will call you Director – Huh?”
— Clang!
Strangely, the car door wouldn’t open.
The door doesn’t budge even when you pull it once more, twice more.
Director Kim responded with a puzzled look.
“You were fine this morning, so why are you acting like this all of a sudden? I’m sorry.”
“…”
At this point, I also felt something was strange.
The door lock suddenly malfunctioned without warning.
A car door that won’t open for no reason.
Could this be a coincidence?
If you look at it separately, it’s a common occurrence that happens often in life, but it felt strange when it happened consecutively.
Anyway, this time the door finally opened.
— Boom!
“Oops! It’s open. It’s my fault for not checking the car condition in advance. Sorry -”
“are you okay.”
After apologizing, Director Kim didn’t say anything at all, but just like Eun-sol said, he seemed to be keeping his mouth shut.
I heard the general outline of the story from you last night.
According to Eun-sol, Director Kim thinks I’m some kind of agent from the management bureau.
Do you think it would be easier for me if I said it like that?
It might be absurd for the administration, but it doesn’t matter since this guy won’t contact the administration to verify my identity anyway.
“Here, go to this address.”
“Is this Gangneung Gyeongpo-dong? Can you give me a more detailed address?”
“I have to go and look for it.”
“All right.”
*
Oh no…! I can’t stop Songi!
Locking the door is not enough to hear the warning!
Is more active intervention not possible?
Even locking the door was difficult! It was just a ghost-level intervention!
Huh! I guess that’s what it means when they say you can’t see the whole thing from the inside, and you can’t touch the inside from the outside!
There has to be a way. I’m sure there is!