User: Han Kain (Wisdom)
Date: Day 131
Current Location: Floor 1, Room of Rest
Sage’s Advice: 3
- Han Kain
- Crunch!
The mystical sound echoing in my mouth filled me with happiness.
It was the sound of the perfectly seared crust of a well-cooked steak, formed by just the right Maillard reaction, breaking apart as I bit into it.
As my tongue and teeth broke through the crust’s barrier, I was greeted by an ocean of rich juices.
After savoring a single bite, I took a big sip of the cola in my glass.
If I had to rate this meal…
“I don’t know.”
That seemed like the best answer. I’d have to eat it all day to fully appreciate its taste!
With my face practically buried in the table, I alternated between cutting steak, swallowing pork cutlet, and slurping spaghetti, steadily clearing this delectable feast in front of me.
During this slightly earlier-than-usual lunch hour, we had left Room 203 and moved straight to Room 105, where we sat in silence, eating for nearly twenty minutes.
Only then did my comrades begin to regain their senses one by one.
“Whoa, this is amazing! Has the Hotel food always been this good?”
“I think this is the best food I’ve ever had in my life. Ah! I feel like crying…”
Songee wasn’t joking… she actually started sniffling.
“Here, eat this and stop crying!”
Ahri, sitting beside her, handed her a spoonful of white rice topped with Spam and stir-fried kimchi.
Sniffling, Songee took it without hesitation.
Are we… refugees who had just escaped starvation or something?
Of course, I wasn’t one to judge—I was also desperately shoving as much meat into my mouth as possible.
Grandpa scolded me, saying that my food wasn’t going to run away, so I should slow down.
Eunsol-noona, who had been devouring bulgogi without a care, finally regained enough composure to comment.
“We were saying we should talk about everything that happened on the way here, but as soon as the food was in front of us, everyone lost their minds!”
“Eunsol, swallow your bulgogi before you speak.”
“I can’t. Bulgogi must be eaten continuously, without pause.”
“Seriously… What the hell did you all go through to end up like this?”
Ahri, the only one who couldn’t relate to the madness unfolding around her, waved her hands like a well-fed noble daughter stranded among ravenous savages.
“Ahri, you should have been there! Do you know what the first meal I was served in Room 203 was?”
“What was it?”
“Caterpillars! I swear, I’m not exaggerating! They called it a special delicacy and served them on leaves!”
Grandpa scoffed at her complaint, “At least caterpillars are still protein. You got a good deal. I was given a handful of tree nuts that were even less edible than acorns.”
“I got tree bark boiled with ants… Apparently, it was their traditional ‘nutritious’ soup.”
Sanghyun, who had been silently listening, finally spoke up, barely holding back a groan, “At least you all ate something. The tribe I was with had no food at all. It got to the point where I thought we’d start eating each other if we didn’t find food fast enough.”
“Eating each other?! Don’t say such scary things… I really went through something terrible. I have to tell you all about it.”
“If it was so horrible, why do you have to tell us?”
“Because if I suffered, then everyone needs to know!”
While Ahri gawked at Songee’s absurd reasoning, she went ahead and shared her story, anyway.
“I woke up on this horribly rough straw bed. At first, I had no idea where I was. Then, this old man came up to me, congratulated me on waking up, and suddenly handed me a plate of steaming hot meat.”
“Meat?”
“I didn’t know any better, so I thanked him and ate a few bites. But then—out of nowhere, Perro swooped in and knocked my plate over. That’s when I felt something was wrong.”
…I already knew where this was going.
“Turns out, those bastards had given me the roasted wrist of a fallen warrior they had hunted down! And when I freaked out, they just calmly told me, ‘Don’t worry, it’s still fresh.’ I almost passed out on the spot!”
And so it went.
For a while, we engaged in a ridiculous contest of who had suffered the most, sharing one absurd tale after another.
I didn’t even get a chance to speak—there were too many outlandish stories to keep up with.
Compared to all this, my experience of eating rancid, foul-smelling meat porridge for over ten days seemed almost like a luxury.
We were the ones who had endured that for ten whole days.
And the other tribespeople had been eating even worse things.
There was no one to complain to—we just had to endure, suppressing the urge to vomit at every meal.
And then, suddenly, this feast appeared before us.
Of course, we lost our minds.
Around that time, Seungyub—who had been silently devouring his fifth pork cutlet—finally lifted his head.
The room fell into silence.
The Champion of the Suffering Contest.
Is the undisputed champion about to speak?
“S-Seungyub, so… how have you been? Everyone was really worried about you.”
“I had… an interesting time.”
At that word, silence settled down around the table.
“Now that I think about it, I don’t think they ever truly respected me. At best, they treated me like some kind of shaman. They had a separate warrior leader who ran the tribe. My role was to predict where we could find food and water since winter was coming.”
“Predict?”
“They brought me something like an armadillo, skinned it, smeared my blood on it, and then burned the shell. The direction in which the shell cracked determined where the tribe would move.”
“What the hell… That’s basically ancient oracle bone divination. Why are these primitive lunatics so creative?” Sёarch* The NovelZone.fun website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.
“Well, I got it wrong three times in a row… Maybe I would have gotten it right if my Blessing had been intact? Who knows. Anyway, each time I was wrong, they took more and more of my blood to use for the ritual.”
The story was already turning sickening.
“Of course, it was completely useless. By the time they were drenching armadillo shells in bowls of my blood, I genuinely thought I was going to die. But that wasn’t the worst part.”
“Come to think of it… Elena mentioned that you were hanging from a pole when she found you.”
“That was after the fourth failed divination. To this day, I have no idea how those morons interpreted the cracked shell, but on the fourth attempt, it supposedly told them to travel northwest for an entire day.”
“So… did they?”
“Yep. And after walking for a full day, we arrived at a barren wasteland with no water. By then, some of the weaker tribespeople collapsed and started dying.”
“…No way.”
“That’s when their leader, ‘Wolf Running Across the Plains’, declared that the ancestors were furious with my greed and stupidity. To appease them, they had to spill my blood.”
“…”
“The warriors tied me to a pole and left to gather firewood. Funny thing is, the wasteland was so barren that they had a hard time finding anything to burn, so it took forever to get the fire started.”
Of course, no one was laughing.
Then, Seungyub abruptly stood up.
“And then—BAM! Out of the sky, an angel swooped down, slaughtered the entire tribe, and saved me! Sure, she was a little insane, but still!”
“…Make sure you tell Elena that story later. It’ll help her a lot.”
“Yeah. But… Elena-noona isn’t eating.”
At the mention of Elena, the mood in the room darkened.
We hadn’t expected this.
When we left Room 203, everyone’s blessings were restored—and Elena’s Calmness and Tranquility started healing even the memories she had lost.
She remembered everything.
And she hadn’t spoken since.
I didn’t know how to comfort her.
Maybe it was an unethical thought, but part of me wished she wouldn’t dwell on it too much.
After all, the moment we escaped the Cursed Room, everything she had done inside it essentially ceased to exist.
If we were to go back in, even the people who had died would be alive again.
Strictly speaking, once we solve the room, all the NPCs would disappear, anyway.
Given that, could their lives truly be considered equal to real human lives?
Of course, that was just my own reasoning.
Ultimately, this was something Elena had to come to terms with.
By the time we finished lunch, we still hadn’t even begun discussing the solution to the room.
***
I walked down the hallway alone, lost in thought.
After escaping, I checked the room number we had emerged from—it was none other than Room 203.
If it was a coincidence, it was a damn eerie one.
Our party had essentially been split into two groups.
Jinchul-hyung, the doctor, Grandpa Mooksung, Elena, Seungyub, and I had ended up heading toward the mountains—the Mountain Group.
Meanwhile, Eunsol-noona and Songee had discovered strange traces left by an unknown celestial creature and had decided to follow its shadow.
Let’s call them the Shadow Group.
Out of the two, the ones who successfully escaped were the Shadow Group.
They had followed the shadow for about ten days, and then, out of nowhere, they were suddenly ejected from the room.
Strangely enough, they had no idea what they had escaped from, or why they had escaped at all.
The escape notification had appeared at a completely unexpected moment.
However, the timing of their escape aligned suspiciously well with the Mountain Group being completely wiped out after encountering Ahri and her devastating light beam.
I was convinced it wasn’t a coincidence.
Something about what we had done in the mountains had affected the Shadow Group—even though they had been dozens of kilometers away, moving further and further from the mountains.
Of course, I had no idea how.
And then—
- Thud!
“Deep in thought, I see.”
“Ah, Doctor?”
“I called you from behind, but you didn’t answer. My apologies for startling you.”
“Sorry about that.”
“No need to apologize. But things aren’t looking simple. I think we should have another meeting in the evening. I’ve been gathering information from everyone, and I must say… it’s rare for us to be this clueless about what’s going on.”
“Yeah…”
“Who is the real Adversary? The Ahri we saw in the city? That hardly matters—after all, we still don’t know who was controlling her. And then there’s the matter of the curse. The Convicts in other rooms sometimes remain a mystery until we solve the room, but what exactly is the curse of Room 203?”
“I don’t know.”
“Still, we have learned quite a bit. We now know that beyond the mountains, there are ruins of an ancient civilization. We also know that Ahri’s body was possessed by some malignant entity in that place. And… it seems Seungyub saw something interesting at the very end.”
Something interesting?
“We’ll discuss it later. But I actually came to give you a suggestion.”
“A suggestion?”
The doctor sighed, his face weary.
“Let’s move on to the next room.”
“…”
“Room 203 is absurdly difficult—even compared to the first Hotel I experienced.”
“Difficult…?”
“Is it the most dangerous room? No. In terms of immediate risk, Room 202—where everything went to hell in just a day—or Room 104, where the prisoner actively hunted us, were far worse. In comparison, Room 203 has given us plenty of time. We’ve been inside for over ten days, and we still don’t even know what this ‘Curse’ actually is. What does that tell you?”
“That the ‘Curse’ takes at least ten days to fully manifest.”
“Exactly. Time-wise, this is one of the most generous rooms we’ve encountered. But in terms of difficulty, it’s the complete opposite. Mentally, it’s already hell—just the fact that we were forcibly separated from the people we rely on was torture in itself.”
In Room 203, the entire party had been scattered, forced to fight their own battles in isolation.
“And physically? I don’t even need to elaborate, do I? Forget first-world complaints like ‘there are no cars’ or ‘there’s no air conditioning.’ Room 203 doesn’t even provide edible food. The only available water is basically sewage.”
“The more you say, the worse it sounds.”
“That’s why I’m going to suggest it in tonight’s meeting—we should move on to the next room.”
“…”
“I’m not saying we should abandon Room 203 forever. But let’s tackle rooms that cause less suffering first. That way, we can recover, regain our strength, and come back when we’re in a better position. As a doctor, I can tell you—Seungyub and Elena, in particular, are going to shudder just seeing the number ‘203’ for a while.”
My mind was spinning again.
Would another room really be easier?
But… it was also true that Room 203 had been brutally difficult in ways we hadn’t experienced before.
Even compared to other Cursed Rooms, being thrown into a primitive era, completely alone was something we had never faced before.
We needed to talk about this as a group.
***
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