Episode 118
Translator: RaidenTL
Episode 118
The library, arriving in the dead of night, exuded a bizarre atmosphere. With a banquet of food and drink underway, no model student would be cooped up in the library studying.
Huu. Elysia took a light, deep breath and looked around. The dark library, which used living trees as bookshelves, felt just like a pitch-black forest.
But a forest should have been filled with the chirping of insects, and here there was none. As Elysia walked slowly toward the interior, she felt that something was off.
‘Did the library have a basement?’
The library was structured with trees so thick it would take five people to wrap their arms around them, serving as bookshelves with branches stretching high toward the sky.
There was a second and third floor with desks and chairs for studying, but she’d never heard of a basement. Her silver-gray eyes, staring between the dark shelves, flashed with a blue light.
“There’s no way I wrote it down wrong…”
She first walked along a familiar path. The only sound in the quiet library was the rustle of her dress. In that moment, a memory flashed through her mind.
Unlike the polished floors elsewhere, there was a place people rarely entered, a place where foot traffic was scarce. The place where Cain Ror had casually thrown open a door that had been locked due to the <You'll Fall in Love> event. Where was that again?
Elysia recalled a time not long after she had first arrived here.
I was looking for a chemistry book, and the librarian told me…
“Go straight, and at the fourth bookshelf, turn right.”
As she muttered this, she whipped her head around, and as if it had been waiting, a shabby door revealed itself. Slowly, Elysia ran her hand along the bookshelf and opened the door. She then discovered another red door, one she hadn't noticed before, and her expression turned to one of puzzlement.
Was this here last time? Why didn't I see it then? Amidst her confusion, her intuition spoke to her. This door was the way to the library's basement.
Taking a deep breath, Elysia grasped the doorknob. At that moment, she froze as something she could never have imagined appeared before her eyes.
DECP CORP SECURITY LOGIN
password:[ ]###
“What the hell… is this?”
Has it been three years since I last saw this?
This window… it was the login screen for her company's security server, the one she had typed her password into every morning before she got trapped in the game.
For a while, Elysia stared blankly at the blinking login screen, unable to collect her thoughts. Then, she snapped back to her senses. She realized things were taking a strange turn, but she had no intention of backing down. Of course, I have to go in, right?
No matter how much time had passed, there was no way she would have forgotten the password she typed in every single day. Slowly, she placed her hand on the login screen and entered the password.
DECP CORP SECURITY LOGIN
Password:[decp12345!]###
With a click, the door opened. Elysia stared blankly at the open gap with an expression that anyone would have called foolish.
Her mind raced. A security login had to be related to the game's data… Slowly, she stepped onto the pitch-black stone steps and descended.
As she went down the spiraling staircase, Elysia discovered something and let out an involuntary gasp.
“Wow…”
The thick roots of the trees that served as the library's bookshelves were tangled together without a single gap, creating a massive labyrinth.
Reaching the entrance of the maze, Elysia frowned at the sight of the walls, which were filled with an overwhelming number of books.
But her gaze stopped at one spot.
Unlike the other neatly organized shelves, there was one section that was a complete mess, as if someone had intentionally overturned and vandalized it.
Elysia swept her hand across the shelf, which had noticeably more empty space than the others, and stared at the amount of dust that came away on her fingertips.
‘A year… no, it’s been empty for at least two years.’
She could see books strewn miserably inside the shelf, which bore marks of being scorched by fire and spattered with black ink. Something crunched under her foot.
Looking down, Elysia saw a large pile of ash in front of the bookshelf and furrowed her brow.
Did they pull out the books and burn them? Staring at the ashes, she suddenly felt she had seen this color somewhere before. A thought struck her. It was the same color that had appeared when she ran the drug test on Hertz’s blood.
Thump. Her heart pounded. She had to be sure. Blowing the dust from her fingertips, she randomly pulled out one of the remaining books and opened it to a random page. She almost threw the book down when she saw something roll out from within.
“Aargh!!!”
Thump, thump, thump… The thing that bounced a few times on the floor like a rubber ball before rolling away was, horrifyingly, an eyeball. Elysia struggled to steady her mind, which was on the verge of spinning into chaos.
Placing the open book on the floor, Elysia swallowed hard at the sight of the multi-colored eyes that filled the page instead of text.
“Fucking hell, what is this…”
Cold sweat beaded on her forehead. Just as she was about to fall into a full-blown panic, she noticed that the eyes embedded in the book were far too clean to have been surgically removed.
Slowly, she reached out, picked up the eyeball she had dropped, and placed it back into an empty space. In that instant, she saw the text written beneath the countless eyes.
“Rose quartz, aquamarine, emerald… And this, written next to them…”
「RGB code: 20. 255. 255」
An RGB code? Oh, don't tell me… Elysia closed the book and checked the cover.
What… is this?
Placing the book back in its original spot, Elysia took a deep breath and looked around at the bookshelves forming the giant maze. Perhaps because her eyes had adjusted to the darkness, the titles of the books, which had been invisible before, began to come into view.
“Ha, haha… This is… ridiculous…”
This place was a repository of sorts, where every element that made up the game was stored.
Why did he invite me here? To find out, she had to accept the invitation.
Clenching her fists, Elysia began to walk slowly. Deeper, toward the darkness, she traced the maze’s bookshelf walls, heading for its center.
She saw a light in the distance. It was so brilliant it felt like a piercing pain, and she squinted, raising a hand to shield her eyes. When she closed them tightly, the light invaded through her eyelids, washing her vision in white. She counted slowly to three.
One, two, three.
When she opened her eyes, she was in a space so vast it was breathtaking. Strange lights twinkled from the walls, which were formed from masses of gnarled roots.
After confirming that several sections of the book-filled walls were broken, Elysia turned her head toward the source of a gaze so intense it was impossible to ignore.
“Hello.”
A man with a bright smile was waving at her as if in welcome. Elysia’s expression hardened when she spotted the familiar vial in his hand.
A vial filled with blue pills.
Cain was dressed in the same clothes he had worn at the banquet. Light, spilling from various directions, colored his white eyelashes in a mystical hue as it fell.
His sharp eyes were curved into a gentle expression, which was unusual for him. Narrowing her own, she assessed his attitude.
‘I don’t know what’s going on, but he seems friendly for now.’
Elysia slowly walked toward him. As she stood there, simply watching him, Cain spoke first.
“Shall we sit and talk?”
Without waiting for an answer, he gently pushed her shoulder. With a soft thud, she fell onto a plush sofa and took in the strange space around her.
Turning her head again, Elysia looked at Cain, who was observing her with a leisurely expression, and demanded an answer.
“…How did you get in here?”
“Because the password was too easy.”
Cain sat up, closing the distance between them. Elysia immediately pulled a gun from her inventory and aimed it at his face, her own expression blank.
“Answer me properly.”
With a grin that seemed to say calm down, Cain playfully raised both hands.
“You ask how I got in, Detective? If you ask a strange question and then yell at me for giving a strange answer…”
“What…?”
“That’s a problem, isn’t it?”
Startled by the title he used for her, Elysia readjusted her grip on the gun. As if it were a nuisance, the man casually wrapped his hand around hers and brought the muzzle to the spot where his heart would be.
A mocking whisper fell upon Elysia’s frozen ears.
“Besides, you can’t kill me.”
“…”
“Could you really kill me without satisfying this curiosity of yours? You, who lives driven by it.”
Was it pride? She gritted her teeth.
He was right. She had no intention of killing him until she had her answers. To be more honest, she had no intention of killing him even after she had them. Shooting him in the shoulder or leg to incapacitate him was one thing, but anything more wasn't part of the plan.
Cain watched her wavering eyes as if searching them, then smiled, his eyes curving. Like a demon sculpted by an angel himself, he was both beautiful and bizarre.
Slowly, the hand holding the gun dropped. He gently cupped the chin of her confused face, looked down at her trembling eyelashes, and said,
“You should ask the question that gets straight to the point. Isn’t that your talent?”
The woman, whose eyes had been on the floor, shot them up to glare at him. Biting her red-painted lip, Elysia growled.
“What… the hell are you?”
As if it were the question he had been waiting for, the corners of the man’s mouth lifted. He cleanly pulled away from her, leaned back against the opposite sofa, and casually crossed his long legs.
Cain murmured a single sentence, laced with a languid sigh.
“What am I…”
His red eyes clouded over as if reminiscing about the past. As those unfocused eyes sharpened and met hers again, Elysia instinctively drew back. Propping his chin on one hand, Cain smiled.
“I’m a piece that has left the chessboard.”