Welcome to Happy Lostco [6]
"Master Kim!?"
"Yi-yeon!"
Seeing Choi Eun-ha and Yoon Soo-ah safe and sound, my heart dropped back into place for a moment—but there was no time to feel relieved.
"Run!"
The instant the word left my mouth, I triggered the Vairocana Mantra Barrier and the Ksitigarbha Ten-Wheel Sutra Ward in the same breath. Transparent flame racing along the consecrated sand swallowed the Manager whole, while the flower-petal-drawn Ten-Wheel Ward wrapped around it in turn—and as the ward caged the barrier's fire, the transparent blaze gathered into a single roaring hearth that burned the Manager alive.
"Kraaaaaaaaagh!"
"Ah... it's warm..."
"Tha... thank... thank you..."
"Mom...!"
Leaving the Manager's screams and the voices of the victims passing on to the beyond behind us, we ran. A Manager backed by narrative coercion wasn't going to die from something like this—this was, at most, a stalling tactic. Running was the only sensible play.
I caught up with Eun-ha and Soo-ah in the blink of an eye.
"Hold on tight!"
"Eep!"
"Wang Lingguan!"
Grrrrrruuurk!
I scooped Yoon Soo-ah into my arms and had Wang Lingguan take Choi Eun-ha. With the two slowest runners accounted for, we bolted at full speed.
"Why am I the one who..." Eun-ha muttered something under her breath, but it was too quiet to make out.
"Master Kim! You came for us!" Yoon Soo-ah's eyes were brimming with tears.
"It just sort of happened. Also—please keep that text I sent you earlier a secret from the Bureau."
"...Understood. In exchange, there's one thing I'd like to ask. How did you know the Manager would take anyone who declared they wanted to die to the food court or the butcher shop?"
"Most of Lostco's products turn into hunks of meat the moment you carry them outside, right? What do you suppose that meat was made from?"
"Ah..."
"And the two areas that warn customers made of flesh and blood to be careful entering are the food court and the butcher shop. At this point it practically spells itself out, doesn't it?"
"...Astonishing. From that little a hint..."
Truth be told, I had a way to gather hints beyond just those two.
A special plan for anyone annoyed by the hidden rules of anomalies.
Automatically applied when all of the following conditions are met:
· Be mutual blog neighbors with Dongbin's Dao Study Room.
· Register 10 or more entries in the Anomaly Encyclopedia of Salomon's Anomaly Encyclopedia.
· Spend over 500 million won through Nikola's Hyper-Radio Communication.
Amazingly, this was a plan that money-crazed Nikola had handed out for free. That was why the usage rules Eun-ha had read and the ones I'd read were different.
The plan worked like this. For example...
5. Lostco's interior is very spacious, and customers frequently become lost and disoriented. In such emergencies, we provide prompt suicide.
<If you wish to die, please contact the nearest staff member.>
<The Manager's deviant behavior continues to be reported, and headquarters is monitoring the situation closely. Please deliver all customers wishing to die to the designated locations.>
Annotations were appended to each rule, or entirely new items appeared that had never existed in the original—like that. My confidence that suicide-seekers would be hauled off to the butcher shop or the food court came from that "designated locations" hint in the annotation.
And through the annotations, I was also able to find out where the Philosopher's Stone that Jeong-myung-gyo and Cosmos were hunting was located.
1. Welcome to Lostco. Lostco is an emporium that has everything except what it doesn't have. We humbly pray that all our customers find the things they need.
<Shock-discount items were stocked today at 19:45. Distribution of the product flyer has begun.>
Just as Lostco's ordinary merchandise was manufactured by processing ordinary people who wandered in, the shock-discount item—the Philosopher's Stone—had also been "stocked" from outside. And by sheer coincidence...
That was the exact timestamp of her message. Nineteen forty-five—the precise moment Choi Eun-ha fell into Lostco's Inner Space.
Which meant...
"Wh-why are you staring at me like that?"
"Just glad you're safe."
"Wh-what's with the sappy nonsense all of a sudden..."
In other words: the Philosopher's Stone that Cosmos and Jeong-myung-gyo had thrown themselves at like lunatics was sitting inside Choi Eun-ha. How, why, or where exactly she carried it didn't matter. What mattered was...
'Those bastards must never, ever find out.'
Cosmos and Jeong-myung-gyo could never be allowed to learn the truth.
Then—
"Violence against staff is strictly prohibited."
From behind us came a soul-chilling voice, and a figure in a black suit came tearing after us—its face hazy and rippling like smoke. It was security, dispatched to disassemble the troublemaker customer who had dared lay hands on an employee.
4. Rude language and physical violence toward staff members are strictly prohibited. Should this rule be violated, security personnel may be dispatched to disassemble the offending customer.
Unlike the ordinary troublemakers, this thing—like the Manager—was backed by narrative coercion, which made it nearly impossible to take down by ordinary means. But...
Hyup!
I hurled the whiskey bottle I'd brought along in advance.
"Take this and look the other way—just this once!"
Thwup.
The guard caught the bottle on reflex.
4. Rude language and physical violence toward staff members are strictly prohibited. Should this rule be violated, security personnel may be dispatched to disassemble the offending customer.
<Notice to all security personnel: numerous recent incidents of guards accepting bribes from customers and looking the other way have been reported. Any security staff caught engaging in such conduct will be terminated on the spot. Exercise caution.>
"It caught it!?"
—!?
"You're fired, you bastard!"
CRACK!
I swept its knee out from under it, snapped the joint, and drove my heel straight into its face. The instant it accepted the bribe, the guard had lost its job—and the narrative coercion binding it dissolved. And a thing without narrative coercion was nothing more than a middling Class A anomaly.
"And that's why job insecurity is terrifying!"
Leaving the demolished guard behind, I kept running—and checked the time.
1 hour 35 minutes until closing
To save both of them, I'd had to sprint to the food court on my own—but the rendezvous point had been decided in advance: the children's clothing corner. According to the Bureau's records, it was the safest zone in the entire store, with the lowest appearance rate for the Manager and troublemaker customers.
But before we could head there, two things needed taking care of.
"Eun-ha! What did you come to the mart to buy?"
"Huh? What I came to buy?"
"That's right! To get out of here, you have to find whatever it was you came here to buy!"
The ideal case was having already picked up the item before falling into the Inner Space—but if not, she had to find it now.
"Uh... milk?"
"Good! Follow me, Wang Lingguan!"
Off we tore for the dairy corner, guardian deity in tow. Lostco would make you wander forever if you failed to meet its conditions, but that didn't mean the place was entirely without patterns. The endless, infinite layout existed because the real spaces within the floor plan were grotesquely twisted—and even that twisting had rules.
We were currently in the household goods corner. We ran dead straight down the aisle, and the next section was... the exact same household goods corner. But once you repeated it a certain number of times—
"Fifth time through this one!"
CODE:00911 — "Lostco"
EXPLORATION:21st | RECORDER:Cha In-seok
By traversing the same section five or more times, one may pass through to the next corner shown on the floor plan.
* Internal review: this record is certified as genuine.
* Employee Cha In-seok died upon his return.
* Cause of death: massive hemorrhage
The Paranormal Administration Bureau's records—purchased in blood—bore out the truth. And among those records was a rough map of Lostco's interior. According to that map, going from the clothing corner to the dairy corner meant passing through five more corners in total. Factoring in the movement rule, that meant twenty-five more corner transitions. We decided to use the time to settle the second matter on my list.
"Ms. Yoon Soo-ah. Why exactly did the Bureau come into Lostco?"
"I'm sorry?"
At my question, her expression froze for an instant.
"If Eun-ha's problem gets resolved, we're walking out of this place. Until you tell me your real reason for being here, I can't offer you any help at all."
She agonized over it, then finally opened her mouth.
"We're looking for a person."
"A person?"
"It's a directive from the Masquerade Alliance. They ordered us to find one specific individual at the Lostco that appeared in Korea and hand them over."
"A person? Who, exactly?"
"...The Count of St. Germain."
"...And why, pray tell, is France's last alchemist being hunted down in Korea?"
The Count of St. Germain. A French count, and an enigma who had surfaced across the pages of history for hundreds of years, from the eighteenth century onward. The man who cannot die.The man who knows every truth. Those two epithets were the classic signatures of the Count of St. Germain. Despite recorded funeral records placing him in the ground, he would show up the very next year at a private gentlemen's club—or exist in several places at the same hour, among other bizarre anecdotes. He introduced himself as the one being who had achieved both the elixir of immortality and the Philosopher's Stone—the flower and hidden treasure of alchemy. Beyond that, the stories ran endless: that he held assets rivaling a modern Bill Gates, that he had fought the Crusades alongside Richard the Lionheart. In 2005, France even formally conferred upon him the title of Alchemist of Time—which should give you some sense of his standing. And that very Count of St. Germain had, out of nowhere, appeared in a Korean Lostco?
"Hold on—before any of that. The Count of St. Germain actually exists?"
"Yes. He is considered a real, living individual—believed to be one of the very few, alongside Paracelsus, to have ever succeeded in creating the Philosopher's Stone, right up to the present day."
"Wow."
An Alchemist of Time who'd lived centuries, actually real, huh... Then again, wasn't I currently being pushed around by Lü Dongbin, not to mention Solomon and Nikola? At this point, a Count of St. Germain barely merited a raised eyebrow.
By then we'd reached the dairy corner.
"Eun-ha!"
"I know, I know!"
Choi Eun-ha grabbed a carton of Milk Ground from Bones.
"Wh—why is it named that? Our house only drinks Pasteur..."
"Your family drinks the expensive stuff!?"
I always drink the cheapest store-brand milk there is! I'm jealous!
"Our house drinks Pasteur too, you know."
"Look at these gold-spoon brats...!"
"Since when does drinking Pasteur make someone a gold spoon!?"
"P-Pasteur is the tastiest, isn't it?"
Anyone who picks their milk by taste is a gold spoon. Period.
"Eun-ha, check your wallet. Anything different about it?"
"My wallet?"
She fished it out and looked inside.
"Doesn't seem any different?"
"What? Then milk isn't it..."
When you found the item you'd come to Lostco to buy, the money in your wallet changed into a denomination no living person had ever seen.
"Eun-ha, think again. What else were you planning to buy at the mart?"
"Nothing besides the milk... oh!"
Suddenly her face flushed red and she started stammering.
"What, you remembered? Then spit it out! I don't have time for tsundere theatrics!"
"Ugh...! I was trying to buy you a thank-you gift, okay!?"
"A gift?"
"This is the thanks!"
Choi Eun-ha held up the Taecheong Ring on her left ring finger.
"You really didn't have to go so far as—"
"Enough! You said it was needed to get out of here, didn't you!? What do you want!?"
"Well... I just want the idiot friend who got dragged off by an anomaly to come home safe. That's more than enough for me."
"Huh? What kind of idiotic—... oh!"
"What is it?"
"The money changed..."
Choi Eun-ha held up her wallet, displaying bills stamped DAM.
"4,000 DAM. What unit even is that?"
"Figure that out later!"
I confirmed my own wallet's money had switched to DAM as well, then texted Min-seo and Momo—who were standing by with the Bureau: Eun-ha's ready to leave. All that remained now was to regroup and get out of this place.
"Let's go! Out of this godawful mart!"
Rendezvous point: the children's clothing corner. The time was 22:30—one hour left until closing. There was no room for hesitation.
And just as we were sprinting toward it—
"Damn it...!"
Turning the next corner, we walked smack into the private forces of Jeong-myung-gyo and Cosmos. A clean, uneventful trip to the children's clothing corner was officially off the table.