It Is Still Pulsing
This time, by some stroke of luck, no one had died in the basement parking lot.
However, Lee Jinsu of NeoSoft was dead.
Honestly, it was nearly impossible to catch that man looking even remotely alive.
It will hurt. A petty curse shall bring you misery: Ear
"Agh—ghk……!"
I ran my hand roughly over the right side of my head. Everything visible seemed to be gone—the outer ear, in its entirety.
As long as the middle and inner ear hadn't vanished with it, I'd be fine.
"Seon Yuhan, sir!"
"Ugh…… gauze. Get me……"
"J-just hold on! Here, this——!"
"Give it here. I'll do it."
Before the first aid kit could even reach my hand, Yu Hyeonjae snatched it away.
"We'll apply light pressure to stop the bleeding first, then disinfect. Please bear with it just a moment."
The CEO of Yuwi Guild held my head steady as he explained. His low voice reached my right ear as a muffled drone, as if I'd fallen underwater.
'In situations like this, stop the bleeding first. Disinfecting comes after. Understand?'
I gritted my teeth, trying to scrub a certain vividly clear voice out of my skull, and forced my focus onto the man in front of me.
Now was not the time to be thinking about that person.
Someday, an opportunity to meet again would come.
As long as I remained in the labyrinth.
"You have remarkable grit. It wouldn't have been strange at all if you'd passed out from the very start."
Having finished disinfecting, Yu Hyeonjae wrapped a bandage over the ear and secured it with tape, bringing the job to a close.
"……Thank you."
I let his remark slide past me with an appropriate word of thanks.
Or what else was I supposed to say?
That I'd healed up better than when he disinfected my severed finger?
That the mannequin that dismantled my body onto a set of scales treated me better?
No words came.
Nothing, at least, beyond jokes that only I would ever laugh at.
"Then, shall we head down."
To signal that I was all right now, he tugged the corner of his mouth into a faint smile.
Inside me, there are some very funny jokes. A hideous number of them.
Perhaps because the emergency treatment of my right ear had eaten up time, Lee Nahyeon was already dead and gone.
"Ah, here."
"That would be our alma mater, I believe."
That bastard Yu Hyeonjae, at it again.
"CEO. Even so, please select an article with a somewhat smaller scale."
So I nailed it down from the very start.
"Hm."
Yu Hyeonjae blinked his eyes slowly, as if deliberating, then gave a nod.
"You're right. Our school grounds were quite spacious, after all."
I very nearly agreed with him on reflex.
I stared at the Shingwang Middle School alumnus for a moment, then turned my gaze away.
"I believe this article is our best option."
The very article we had succeeded in editing last time.
To be precise, the one Yu Hyeonjae had succeeded in editing by leaning close and whispering some sort of magic incantation to those middle-schooler-shaped monsters.
"I'm in favor. CEO, this one's the smallest in scale of the bunch, so I think it should be safe."
"Agreed. This one and the construction site fall accident looked like the most manageable."
"Ah. Certainly. I see."
I hoped the same thing would happen again this time.
Though I had no idea what content lay inside that utterly incomprehensible whisper of his.
At the very least, one thing was certain: having Yu Hyeonjae edit this particular article was, for now, the safest and easiest path available.
"Then I will press the edit button."
The most important thing in a labyrinth is simply th▓
『▓▓▓. Let's go. I'll tell you on the way.』
『Okay. Goodbye, everyone. Have a good day.』
The moment Yu Hyeonjae's brief whisper ended, the boy shook him off and departed together with the girl.
"What? They actually walked out……? CEO, what exactly did you do?"
"What did you just say to them?"
He wouldn't give me an answer anyway. I didn't bother pressing.
"The 'worst' that children their age can imagine has its natural limits. But reality always exceeds imagination, and I merely informed them of what lies beyond it."
Just because you're curious about something doesn't mean you're obligated to know it.
There are things in this world better left unkn▓
"Please enjoy the other games I have prepared while you wait for your friends to arrive."
Hosu, the host of the 5th floor, smiled graciously and repeated the words he'd spoken before.
"Mm…… well, that's true, but……"
"But your ear right now…… is it okay……?"
Thankfully, the excuse went down easy.
"I can hear a little on the right as well. The inner workings weren't destroyed. The left ear is completely fine."
Everyone's faces showed their unease over my severed right ear. Whether or not that was my business to tend to, though, was another matter.
"Then I will proceed."
Click.
My world splits down two separate paths.
I opened my eyes.
"Isn't that a well over there?"
"It's empty."
We set about clearing what resembled a ruin of a front yard—a marble path cracked through, stone fragments shattered and scattered everywhere.
On the screen, a pixel character with its right ear covered, wrapped in cloth of purest white, moved about diligently.
It was never an easy task.
The character's movement speed was gradually slowing down.
Meanwhile, my actual body remained perfectly sound.
Far from feeling any dissonance, it felt, if anything, natural.
And that, precisely, was the point where something felt deeply wrong.
Ha.
Finally. All of it, cleared.
The shattered marble path that had run from the front gate straight across the front yard. And the fragmented stone statuary half-buried beneath it.
It had taken quite a long time.
……No. It hadn't.
I realized I was perceiving even the flow of time in two separate streams.
Time in reality moved slowly.
I had sweated and toiled for what felt like hours.
But in the real world, only a few minutes had passed.
"So what are we supposed to do now? Doesn't this place give out quests or anything……"
"Shouldn't we level the ground first? If we're going to plant something……"
If we'd worked this efficiently from the start, it should have been finished long ago—yet we hadn't even truly begun.
I was grateful enough just to find a rake lying in the corner of the yard.
Another long stretch of dragging and heaving the soil over.
Clank.
I felt something catch on the rake.
Something like a dark, grimy rod lay buried there.
I pressed the interact button and hauled the thing up out of the earth.
Fwoop.
The character on the screen toppled over.
Naturally, I toppled over too.
The end of the rod seemed to be connected to something.
"What is that? What'd you dig up?"
Thinnest at the middle, thickening toward both ends—paired with that sinuous, curving contour, I could make a guess at what it was.
This was something far too massive to belong to a human being……
"……It's a bone."
It was the remains of something.
Decomposition hadn't even finished—in places the joints remained intact, the bones not yet fallen apart.
To extract the whole of it, we would have no choice but to till up the entire plot of ground.
Click.
A rake found its way back into my hand.
At last.
An unplowed plowing—or an excavation, whichever it was—came to an end.
Across the broad stretch of earth we had turned over for hours—no, for minutes—pale remains now lay exposed.
"A bird? This is a bird, right……?"
"Looks like it…… but why is it so big?"
A skull crowned with a sharp beak. Wing bones fanned out above the spine. A long neck of vertebrae curving in a gentle arc. Toe bones split three ways……
It was, without question, the remains of a bird.
Half-rotted flesh and muscle still clinging to the bones here and there.
And between the ribcage, organs that had mummified and shriveled to half their size.
Shff, thud-thud……
A tiny noise snagged on my left ear—the only one still doing its job.
A dry rasping, like grains of soil grinding against each other.
I drew close in the direction the sound was coming from.
And I stared down intently at the half-decayed detritus.
"……"
Skff, tap.
I stumbled backward before I even knew I was doing it.
It was not an illusion.
It is not an illusion.
My two eyes take it all in, vivid and unblinking.
A heart pulsing with faint, feeble beats. Lungs rising and falling in shallow, dim breaths. Organs twitching with what little strength they had left.
"Cor——"
The earth beneath my feet was trembling, very faintly.
"——pse. This is no corpse."