Escaping the Mystery Hotel

[User: Han Kain (Wisdom)

Date: Day 21

Current Location: Floor 1, Room 105 (Room of Rest)

Sage’s Advice: 3]

The box Ahri carried over was still closed.

“Sorry but I haven’t opened the box yet. He said there could be a ‘violent weapon’, so I thought it would be better to unbox it together with everyone inside a safe room.”

“I like that. And I think it would be safer for me to open it.”

Jinchul-hyung immediately reached forward and took the box in his hands. He must have been feeling uncomfortable throughout the night just like me, and was probably eager to be useful in any way.

The box was quite easy to open, and inside was an item that everyone was very familiar with.

“A gun?”

“Is it a gun?”

“That’s a lot more normal than I thought.”

Jinchul-hyung took out the pistol with a dumbfounded look on his face.

“Like, sure a pistol is a good weapon, but what are we supposed to do with this? We don’t even have bullets! Noonim, are there bullets on the HP Market, by any chance?”

“They don’t sell bullets on Amazon do they? That is quite strange though. Have a look at the magazine – are there bullets inside?”

Hyung shouted after opening it with a click.

“Wow! These guys are damn scammers; there’s not a single bullet inside! How could they do this after taking—”

“Now now~. The two of you, please be quiet for a while. There is an instruction manual here.”

As Ahri said, there was a small manual inside the box which had a very simple instruction.

Load the magazine with blood and bullets will appear.

…

“Everyone in this place is perverted or something. Did they really have to give us a blood-draining gun?”

“Well, at least there’s a way to load the gun with bullets. Let’s test it out.”

Saying that, Ahri was about to take out the syringe from before but it was then.

Jinchul-hyung snatched it away from her.

“Let’s use someone else’s blood at least.”

Ahri didn’t bother stopping him, so Jinchul-hyung took out his own blood before dropping them into the magazine.

“Hmm. By the way, won’t there be an issue with hygiene if we use one syringe for multiple people? We are not trying to transfuse the blood but it’s still not that safe, right?”

“…”

“It’s okay. They probably have syringes on the HP Market.”

“Now that you mention it,” replied Eunsol-noona. “I should probably get one right now. You guys can go on. I’ll buy some syringes.”

After about a minute since we shoved the blood inside the syringe into the magazine, a click suddenly echoed from the gun.

“Looks like it’s done. Let me try shooting it.”

— Bang!

It was definitely about as strong as a real gun, and a faint mark appeared on one of the walls.

It seemed that we finally had a proper weapon in our hands. Of course, we did have the ‘bracelet’ which was incomparably more powerful and of higher status than the gun, but the bracelet wasn’t something that was specialised for brawls. It didn’t have a direct killing potential either.

The rare good news put everyone in a better mood. We enjoyed a good meal, used the gun a few more times and chatted to spend time.

After having breakfast, we all headed to our room and were separated into our personal spaces.

*

Lee Eunsol walked over to her bed.

It was painful. Even though she could move her hands just fine and she had been pretending like it was okay in front of everyone else, the pain was still there.

But even so, it was bearable.

The breakfast was done, and they decided to continue with the next room after having lunch so she decided to rest until then. Something amusing that she realised was that she had more rest time after entering the Hotel.

When she was outside, she had so many things to do that having 5 hours of sleep a day was already a luxury, but nice food and good sleep became passives after coming to the Hotel.

Lying down on the bed, she turned her head and noticed a small piece of paper.

‘Ah, I forgot to toss this away,’ she thought. It would have been a big problem if someone came back to the bedroom during the meal time and saw the note.

That piece of paper was the lower part of the ‘secret letter’ that she carefully removed with a knife.

Making sure the cut wasn’t obvious was a very difficult thing to do. And even when she was showing the note to everyone, she was worried that they might find something strange so she quickly retrieved it after they were done. Fortunately, there was no-one who questioned her actions or the note.

Before throwing the paper away, she looked at it one last time.

3. One of your teammates knows about Escape Route 1.

Ripping the paper into tiny pieces, she threw it down the toilet and flushed the water.

*

– Han Kain

After having lunch, we all went outside to the corridor to look for the next room to explore and noticed that something had changed.

“Huh? What’s that? Is that a new door?”

“Room 107 has a door now? Can we challenge that ‘Gate Room’ straight away?”

“That’s weird. We haven’t even been to Room 106 yet though. Do you have any ideas, Ahri?”

“I don’t know. The Gate Room has a different condition every time. Sometimes, you only need to escape from all the other rooms but sometimes you need to resolve a few of them. It’s random.”

“Should we head to Room 107 first? I think we can go straight to Room 107 without going through Room 106.”

After some contemplation, I decided to take the lead.

“Let me grab on the door knob first. If we’re lucky, the ‘Advice’ might tell us something.”

As soon as I approached the door and held on the knob, an announcement appeared, but this time it wasn’t from the ‘Sage’s Advice’ and was from the Hotel itself that everyone could see.

/Warning!

In the Gate Room, you must pass several trials in an order without any rest, and it is immensely difficult.

Minimum Condition: Escape from all the Cursed Rooms. In possession of at least 1 Inheritance.

Recommended Condition: In possession of 2 or more Inheritances.

…

…

…

You have met the minimum conditions and you may attempt the trial, but it is not recommended.

Would you like to proceed?/

I immediately stepped back from the door as Seungyub opened his mouth in response.

“This really feels like a game. We need to escape from all the Cursed Rooms and obtain 1 Inheritance to gain access into the dungeon, but it’s difficult and you should have more than 2 at least.”

“I don’t think the Hotel is usually nice enough to give us announcements like this, though.”

“The fact that they’re warning us and saying, ‘immensely difficult’ is probably to tell us that we can’t beat it if we go in right now. Let’s put this aside for now. We should probably get at least 2 Inheritances as they say,” said Jinchul-hyung.

“There’s something strange though. The minimum condition is ‘Escaping from all the Cursed Rooms’. Room 103 is fine because resolution is the higher version of escaping but we haven’t even been to Room 106.”

“Instead of being strange,” Eunsol-noona replied. “I think the message is fairly clear. It’s telling us Room 106 is not a Cursed Room.”

“First off, how about we head to the table and take a seat? It’s a bit taxing for my old knees.”

*

“Shouldn’t we first head to Room 106? It’s not a Cursed Room and it’s not the Room of Rest either, so what is it? Is it safe since it’s not a Cursed Room? What do you think, noonim?”

“Who knows. But I wouldn’t say it’s safe just because it’s not a Cursed Room. If you look at the basement, there are a lot of dangerous things there but they’re not necessarily a Cursed Room.”

“Kain, can you have a look at the states of all the rooms with your Location Information thing?”

I checked the Location Information tab on my system window.

Room 101: Cursed Room (A Strange Family) – Escaped

Room 102: Cursed Room (Mansion of Fear) – Escaped

Room 103: Cursed Room (Athanasia’s Human Farm) – Resolved

Room 104: Cursed Room (Preparatory Selective Hotel High School) – Escaped

Room 105: Room of Rest

Room 106: ???

Room 107: Gate Room – Can Enter

“I can see Room 107 as well. It says, ‘Gate Room – Can Enter’, which we all know already.”

“There are two main things we need to do on this floor then.” Eunsol-noona said to organise the situation. “First is to retry one or more rooms out of Room 101, Room 102 and Room 104 to get an Inheritance. Second is to have a look at Room 106.”

“Let’s go with the second option first. The first one sounds way too hard already.”

“Okay. We’ll go to Room 106 first then. As for the ‘resolution attempts’ for rooms other than Room 103, I think we should have a day off to thoroughly double-check what we know, what we can do and come up with a proper and extensive plan. There are a lot of things on my mind already, but let’s start by checking Room 106.”

Currently, our two goals for the 1st Floor were as follows.

First, obtain one or more Inheritances.

Second, find out the identity of Room 106, which was not a Cursed Room.

After deciding to start with the second goal first, we stood up and headed to Room 106.

As expected, I grabbed the knob first but there weren’t any notifications. Even though there were a lot of weaknesses to ‘Sage’s Advice’, this meant that there weren’t any risks immediately after opening the door at the very least. 

Opening the door, we headed inside.

*

/Welcome customers to the Hotel Land of Hope!

The Hotel Land is full of very exciting attractions.

You may now go through 7 types of attractions!

If there are survivors even after experiencing all 7 attractions, there will be a surprising reward waiting for you!

However, attending the Hotel Land is not compulsory. You may still leave. Just like a Cursed Room, if there is a survivor at the end of the attractions, everyone that died in the process will be brought back to life.

# Would you like to start the Mission Room: Hotel Land of Hope?/

…

Silence befell the area as we started processing the information in our heads.

“So, it means there are 7 types of attractions in this amusement park thing, and passing them will give you a reward, right? By the way, how could they even call themselves a ‘Hotel Land of Hope’ and straight-up say, ‘If there is a survivor’ as if it’s obvious that they’ll be killing us? How is that related to hope in any way? Anyway, can you check the room information now, Kain?” Jinchul-hyung asked.

/Room 106: Mission Room – Hotel Land of Hope/

“It says Mission Room, Hotel Land of Hope. Looks like going into this room is not compulsory. That’s why Room 107, the Gate Room, was open even when we didn’t go to Room 106 and it seems that we can still leave.”

“The door to the corridor really is still there, and this time, we are still in a room without suddenly being sent somewhere.”

After Eunsol-noona, it was Grandpa Mooksung. 

“It is time to make a decision. Are we going to proceed?”

What was the right call here?

Even though we had gone through several Cursed Rooms, one with an optional participation like this one was a first. The fact that we can enter the Gate Room even while ignoring Room 106 meant that we could leave the Hotel by fully ignoring it until the end. 

“I think it depends on how we approach this.” Jinchul-hyung added. “You might think, ‘Is there a reason to bear the risk by going into a room that we don’t even need to beat?’ but you can also think of this as a chance to get stronger by obtaining the ‘surprising reward’. I think it’s meaningless to linger on this topic for too long. Let’s just decide by majority.”

In the first place, the reward was very unclear so it was rather difficult to logically compare the risk with the benefit. However, I had a feeling that the reward wouldn’t be an Inheritance. There would probably be a different type of reward to Cursed Rooms, right?

The result of the majority vote was more one-sided than I thought. Everyone wanted to challenge the room except for Elena.

After staying in this Hotel for weeks and after going through several processes of death and resurrection, we had already started considering the risk of death as something of little regard, and we were more expectant of the upcoming reward.

How were we even supposed to let the Hotel know of our challenge though?

That question of mine immediately became useless. As expected of the Hotel that always monitored us, an alarm popped up as soon as everyone stood up and walked forward.

/The Hotel Land of Hope will now begin!

Real Life Bumper Car

3! 2! 1! Start!/

Real Life Bumper Car? What kind of name was this?

*

When the dimensions fluctuated and the scene around us changed,

I noticed what that crazy name was about!

Everyone appeared inside a sedan in a large arena that was about 3 times the size of a football field.

Like, half of us didn’t even know how to drive and yet they threw us into individual vehicles.

—–VUUUUUUUUNNGGG!!!!!

That was when a deafening roar echoed from somewhere.

When I turned to the centre of the arena in a fluster, I found a monster truck that was as big as a house.

Like… how was that even a bumper car? That’s a freaking bumper truck!!