## Chapter 174 – (5)
—
[태양 Hotel – Important Notices]
1. This hotel is no longer in operation.
1-1. If you have entered this hotel by any means, you must escape before the day is over.
2. The only way to escape this hotel is to head to the rooftop.
3. You must complete the mission in one hotel room on each floor before moving to the next floor.
3-1. Failure to comply will result in two additional floors being added, making escape impossible.
4. (Missing)
5. Once again, the 태양 Hotel is no longer in operation. There are no employed staff.
—
“What is this…?”
“Have you heard of ‘Napolitan 괴담’?”
“Ah, I know it. It was on the exam.”
“…I see.”
In a world where exorcist certifications exist, it seems the types of urban legends are also on the exam.
Still, it seems that even if it’s on the exam, you can’t immediately recognize it.
Until I told her, Sophia seemed to know nothing about this strange urban legend.
I only knew that urban legends with this kind of rule structure belonged to the ‘Napolitan 괴담’ category.
I remembered it because I often saw these kinds of urban legends pop up in my social media feeds.
Sophia, living in the world of urban legends, probably doesn’t spend time on social media.
“Isn’t the content too strange? Why do we have to go to the rooftop to escape… and where is rule number 4…?”
“That’s Napolitan.”
“This is…?”
Actually, I didn’t know much about it either.
But I vaguely remembered that most Napolitan 괴담 were like this.
Something unsettling, terrifying, but not telling you exactly what is terrifying.
In a way, it was a very unkind horror genre.
“Haa…”
I sighed.
Since the opponent was a hotel, I had no idea where to start the exorcism.
I couldn’t just destroy the entire hotel, and I didn’t know what would happen if I forcibly destroyed it.
All I could do was follow the rules provided by the urban legend.
“So this is Napolitan…”
“…I’ll take a look around for a moment.”
Since I seemed to understand it better than Sophia, I should take the lead.
While Sophia carefully examined the rules, I immediately began to inspect the doors on the first floor.
There were words written in front of the doors.
“The Blood Room?”
The name and conditions were written in front of the door.
The Blood Room required you to enter and offer a certain amount of blood.
It wanted about half a paper cup of blood.
The subtly ambiguous amount of blood it wanted felt unpleasant.
The other rooms were the same.
“The Tiger Room, the Hunger Room, the Hallucination Room…”
All the rooms had eerie conditions written on them.
I slowly read the conditions, stroking my chin.
I saw rooms with better conditions than the Blood Room.
“What’s written in the rooms?”
“Read it.”
“N, no way! This is—”
Sophia panicked, approached the entrance, and shook the door.
But the door didn’t budge.
I also put a little force into shaking it, but it didn’t move, as if blocked by something huge.
I looked at several doors and stopped blankly in front of one.
“Uhm, let’s just go up! Everything on this floor is impossible!”
“What if the next floor is the same?”
“Th, that’s…”
Sophia couldn’t answer.
That’s right.
No one could know what the next floor would be like.
So, even more, we had to prevent the floor from increasing by skipping this floor.
And from what I saw, there were many rooms worth trying.
For example, this room in front of me, even if it was someone else, for me—
“Wait here for a moment.”
Leaving Sophia behind, I went inside the door.
***
Leaving those short words, the man, Seonghan, went into the room.
“W, wait a minute!”
Without even consulting her, he went in alone.
She hurriedly ran to grab the closing doorknob, but—
Thud!
The door closed with only one step difference.
Click, click.
No matter how hard she tried to force the closed doorknob, it wouldn’t budge.
Wondering what kind of room he had entered, she looked up and saw a chilling message written there.
“Th, the Tiger Room…”
Personally, it was one of the most absurd rooms.
The mission of this room was to enter the room and spend an hour with a hungry tiger.
If you were lucky, the time might pass without anything happening, but being trapped in this small hotel room with a hungry tiger was unlikely to be easy.
She might even think that.
“Maybe… he gave up on everything…”
Could he have given up on life because he couldn’t bear the fear of the urban legend?
That wasn’t an unfamiliar thing.
A large proportion of the victims of urban legends were people who took their own lives.
Thinking that way made her body tremble.
She hadn’t thought that being left alone in this hotel would be so terrifying.
Her legs gave way, and she collapsed onto the floor of the hallway.
“Hwan-ie…”
She didn’t know why she was thinking of Hwan-ie now.
She had never even spoken informally to him in reality, but she had always thought of him comfortably in her heart.
Now, she muttered his name out loud.
Creak—.
And the door opened.
“…Huh?”
“What are you doing?”
“Yes? No, how…?”
Seonghan’s voice was heard through the wide-open door.
When she looked up, she saw the man’s face.
“Kyaa!”
And she screamed at the sight.
She didn’t scream because of his face.
She wouldn’t do such a rude thing.
It was just that the man’s face and arms were covered in blood, so the scream came out naturally.
“Bl, blood…”
“It’s not mine.”
Seonghan pointed inside the room with his hand.
While sitting, she stretched her neck to the side and looked into the room.
“Heok…”
The tiger was dead.
With its chest pierced.
In that moment, the image of that urban legend came to mind.
The urban legend lying on the floor with its chest pierced.
“If you count that, it’s an urban legend, so why is there blood…”
Seonghan grumbled and went into the public restroom in the hallway.
Continuing to look at the tiger’s corpse made her feel scared for some reason, so she followed Seonghan’s footsteps.
“…This is the men’s restroom…”
“Ah, I know. We’re just wiping off blood anyway…”
“Haha. The tiger’s corpse was a bit scary, right?”
“N, no…”
The man teased her and laughed, then started washing his face.
She felt a little upset that she was being teased, so she crossed her arms and looked at Seonghan.
He was a strange man.
No matter how developed an exorcist’s body was, even if they could defeat urban legends, there were no exorcists who could fight tigers.
It wasn’t for nothing that there were fewer urban legends or scary stories spread in the old Joseon Dynasty.
When urban legends or scary stories arose, most of the culprits were identified as tigers.
An exorcist whose body was strengthened enough to face real beasts that neither spiritual powers nor exorcism could affect.
She had never heard of such a thing before.
And—
‘He must have done that for me, right?’
Without any consultation, he risked his life and went into the room to fight the tiger.
Of course, it seemed like he had unilaterally won the tiger rather than fought a fierce battle.
But anyway, it wouldn’t have been an easy decision.
It would have been the first time for the man to fight a tiger, too.
Thinking that way, she suddenly felt grateful to the man.
“Huu.”
“…Did you wash up? …From now on, let’s definitely talk and decide— Why, why are you coming closer?”
“No, I was wondering if I still smell like blood, so smell it.”
“N, no thanks. Smell it yourself…”
“No, really, my nose is numb because of the blood smell.”
The man asked as he approached.
Normally, she would have refused, but in a way, this was the man who had braved the danger for her and gone into the room.
She couldn’t keep refusing strongly.
Besides, he said his nose was numb because he smelled blood…
She was the only one who could help…
“A, alright! Stand there.”
The man stopped abruptly at her words.
She took a deep breath and calmed her breathing a little.
She carefully took a few steps and carefully brought her nose to the man’s clothes.
There was no choice but to smell the places where blood had splattered a little, but it wasn’t too bad, thanks to washing it off right away.
“What about your hands?”
“…”
Seonghan held out his hand, so she smelled his hand too, but she only smelled a slightly strong flesh smell, not a blood smell.
It definitely smelled different from her.
Just smelling it made her feel like she was doing something bad, quietly smelling in the men’s restroom.
“Ah, it doesn’t smell…”
There was no smell of blood.
She spoke in a small voice as if crawling on the floor.
Seonghan nodded and stepped out of the restroom.
“What are you doing? We have to get out within a day, so let’s go up quickly.”
“…Yes.”
Was she the only one conscious of it?
She felt a little strangely annoyed by the man’s nonchalant appearance.
But his words were right, so she followed Seonghan’s back to the next floor.
It was the same after that.
Whenever a door appeared that he could fight something, the man calmly went inside.
Bears, murderers, even hotel staff that shouldn’t exist.
No matter how she looked at it, he went into rooms that weren’t made to be cleared, cleared the mission in 1-2 minutes, and walked out.
