The Door (10)
When I opened my eyes, a bone-deep exhaustion had settled over my entire body.
I pushed myself up off the floor.
Wait. Off the floor?
I had hands.
And my body wasn't a fox anymore — it had taken the shape of a human.
"What on earth happened here..."
Let me think. I fled from the cylinder robot, the black fox welcomed me, and then... and then...
"I can't remember."
"That wicked creature drained your vital energy and completed its ninth tail, you see. Not only did its form change, but its very being ascended a stage higher — and with that, the bindings that confined it to the room were undone. It seems it slipped outside."
A wicked creature? What is that supposed to mean. Is it saying that black fox was some kind of monster all along?
Huh. A monster. Mon... a monstrous anomaly?
So it was an anomaly all along? Not just an ordinary fox?
Is there nothing normal in the Backrooms?
So it made its ninth tail — meaning it went from an eight-tailed fox to a nine-tailed one, became a different being entirely, and left?
No, that wasn't all. The sense that had let me turn my limbs into fox parts was gone too.
It felt like the switch I'd mapped out in my head had lost power and simply stopped working.
Was my vital energy the fuel source that ran it?
And if the black fox's departure meant the fox-transformation inside 3I2 vanished too, then...
"So the transformation in here was actually the black fox's ability all along."
"To my eyes it appeared as your original form, which is why I took it for an illusion."
But then that raises a question.
"What about my limbs turning into fox parts, then?"
Did I genuinely transform just from being influenced by what was merely an illusion?
Well, this is the Backrooms, so it's not impossible.
"It seems the medium within you allowed you to take the form of the forest's beasts. However, that creature took a portion of your medium just now. I'm afraid mimicking the forest's beasts will be beyond you for some time."
"My medium...?"
So there was a fox-shifting power inside me all along?
"I shall tell you this now: your body is hardly that of a typical, fragile Earth human. In the bloodline I see within you, the blood of that vanished creature seems to be flowing."
"You're saying I have a nine-tailed fox somewhere in my ancestry...?"
No, I should probably say someone like a nine-tailed fox...
"Perhaps that is why the woman coveted you. Had you not been what you are, completing the ninth tail would have been beyond her — even the eighth might have only grown dim."
Huh... wait a second?
"The woman?"
"My eyes see its original form as well, not merely the fox. A woman with long black hair. Her beautiful face and graceful figure were visible to me together — so much so that it looked almost as if you had been bewitched by it."
"That's impossible..."
"I take it you saw nothing but a fox, then? But..."
It looked down at my clothing.
Every button on my shirt was undone, and my pants had been pulled down nearly to my ankles, hanging off one foot.
Damp fluids were scattered across the floor.
An inexplicable sense of injustice made me bite my lip.
"This doesn't count. It's void."
"Hm? Void, you say?"
"Anything done without a properly conscious mind is void!!"
"...Rope?"
"I didn't even get to see her face!! I want to enjoy it too, you know!!"
"...Whew. This is largely my fault for misspeaking."
I clutched my head in my hands.
"Should we wait for her here?"
"She will hardly come back. Especially not when you carry the same nine-tailed lineage she does."
"She can't have gone far, though."
I rose, straightened my clothes, and peered out the door.
No fox, no cylinder machine in sight.
"Do you see anything in the corridor?"
"Nothing moving out there, as far as I can tell. However, I did see where it went."
At Selapis's firm answer, I stepped over the threshold of 3I2 and out into the corridor.
When I looked back, the number 3I2 that had marked the room had changed to 3I5.
"Haah... so at the very least, the black fox is a danger level 5..."
My head was starting to clear a little.
Right. That thing was an anomaly too, wasn't it.
And a 5 would probably be about as dangerous as that factory from before.
"So where did it go?"
Still, if something that dangerous had passed through ahead of me, wouldn't the dangers of the rooms be at least partly neutralized or cleared out?
"It went through the door straight ahead."
Straight ahead. The door facing 3I2 — no, 3I5 now...
"Huh? What is this."
"What's the matter?"
The round marble door that had originally stood here bore the number 0M9. But now, beside the round stone door, in place of that number...
"That's an emergency exit sign."
A green sign had been affixed there, showing a figure running out through a door.
"Other letters overlap with it, but this picture existed here from the beginning."
So this is...
A door deliberately concealed behind an illusion — or behind a number that exists simultaneously?
"This one feels real."
I searched for a handle to try opening the round stone door, but there was nothing to be seen anywhere.
"Seriously? How am I supposed to get in like this..."
"Haah..."
Selapis let out a sigh of mild exasperation.
"Would it not be obvious that you open it by rolling it?"
"Oh."
Was I looking at it too much through a modern person's lens?
For an angel who watched civilization advance from the very beginning and even performed the reset, this might have been the simpler door.
No, wait. Selapis watched me open doors too.
Cheating on the exam and acting all smug about it...
When I rolled it sideways, the stone slab rumbled smoothly along.
Opening it and then closing it again behind her — what a thorough woman.
Unlike me, who left every place I'd visited wide open.
Or maybe she'd realized that closing the door severed the connection, and that Selapis couldn't see through it.
Come to think of it, even in fox form, if Selapis's voice reached the woman as well, she might well have been wary of it.
The interior was pitch black.
"Going in?"
I swallowed hard and took a few steps forward.
The smell of water flooded my nose.
Ahead, darkness deep as night.
The garment that formed my arms — Selapis's flesh clone — became a flashlight for me.
When I swept the light around, I saw that I was standing on a marble stone platform barely a meter across.
Beyond it — everything, absolutely everything, was water.
Beneath the surface, countless white hands were flailing in the water.
They clawed furiously at the platform I stood on.
Stone dust trickled bit by bit into the water.
High in the sky, a brilliantly glowing moon cast its light on a single spot on the water's surface.
Behind me, the door I'd entered through had lost its shape and vanished.
"Haah... this is really..."
The door's gone. The water below is a nightmare. And I have no idea where to go.
"I envy Deungpyeongdosu."
He'd at least stride across the water's surface, true to his username.
As I swept the flashlight around, I caught movement on one patch of the dark water.
A small round marble platform.
Someone was crouched on it.
A bare white back, and behind it, nine lush tails of black fur.
At the touch of the light, she turned her head slightly.
Just as Selapis had said, she was an extraordinarily beautiful woman.
When our eyes met, her gaze wavered.
She wrapped her nine tails around herself, hiding her body here and there.
"H-how did you come to be in a place like this..."
A flushed face was visible through the gaps in her concealing tails.
"Because I followed you, that's why. You did steal something, didn't you?"
My precious...
"You took my vital energy, didn't you?"
Partial fox transformation was incredibly useful, you know.
It felt like my limb strength and leaping power were at least two or three times greater.
"I-I know nothing about that..."
"You heard the voice too, didn't you? Selapis saw everything, so don't try to weasel out of it."
Her face grew even redder.
"P-please understand. I am one who has trained unwavering through countless ages..."
"And?"
"Even so, after producing eight tails, the ninth required many times longer still. When I learned that borrowing your energy would spare me that ordeal, I simply lost my reason for a moment..."
"So you stole it in the end."
"N-not theft! I borrowed it! I intended to repay the debt someday..."
Repay it, my foot. She's not coming back once she leaves the Backrooms.
The woman lowered one of her tails slightly.
Apparently even she realized how unconvincing that sounded.
The moment the lowered tail touched the water, the white hands below swarmed onto it.
Splash!
The tail snapped away, and the white hands — along with a patch of the water itself — instantly froze solid.
"Ugh. Anyway, just getting out of here is going to be an ordeal."
Would anything show itself if I walked endlessly across this water?
No — she said 0M9 was visible here simultaneously.
If I think of this place as functioning as both the emergency exit picture and 0M9 at once...
0 — a place that's purely for escape, with nothing to gain, which is why it's represented that way?
9 — higher than a lethal 5, meaning if those white hands catch you, you'd surely, absolutely experience something worse than mere death.
And then M.
Marine?
Moisture?
Marsh?
...
As I pondered, I lifted my head, and the glowing moon caught my eye.
Why...
Why is that moon casting its light on only a single spot of the water?
Is some cloud adjusting its angle?
Did vapor happen to rise in such a way that it only fell toward the moon's reflection?
Ordinarily, moonlight should fall on every place the moon is visible, shouldn't it?
"Selapis. That moon. Does the beam of light falling toward that patch of water look like it's shining for my eyes alone?"
"It looks that way to me as well."
If Selapis sees it too, then that's genuinely the state of things.
Moon.
Or perhaps Moonlight.
Could the moon be the exit?