Chapter 1
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Translator: penny
Chapter: 1
Chapter Title: King of the Backrooms
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My first thought was that the power had gone out.
I'd definitely been in the company restroom, and the moment I pushed open the stall door, everything went pitch black.
Next thing I knew, the tile floor vanished like it was evaporating, just like in some Japanese hidden camera prank show, and I plummeted straight down.
Then, when I opened my eyes...
"......What the hell is this?"
Stretching out before me were yellow walls.
The ceiling and walls were all covered in endless yellow wallpaper. In spots where it had peeled up, a rotten, musty smell wafted out. The floor beneath my feet was a damp, dingy brown carpet. When I pressed down, it squelched, leaving a sticky residue on my fingertips. The stench of an old mop assaulted my nose. Fluorescent lights were embedded in the ceiling at regular intervals, a few of them flickering. Bzzz. Bzzz. That droning hum drilled into my skull like an awl.
"Hello? Is anyone there? Anyone at all?"
No response.
"Seriously, is there really no one?"
I shouted louder, but my voice felt muffled, absorbed into nothing. It was like the sound was being sucked right into the wallpaper.
I rummaged through my pockets. My smartphone was there. It powered on, but no signal. No Wi-Fi, no LTE, nothing. The time was frozen at 2:34 p.m.
I started walking, anyway.
The hallway stretched on forever. No matter how far I went, the scenery never changed. Yellow wallpaper, brown carpet, fluorescent lights. Occasionally, a room appeared. An empty room. A room with a single desk. A room with just a chair. All of them had the same wallpaper, the same carpet.
About thirty minutes in, it hit me.
Am I just walking in circles?
I turned around. The same hallway. No way to tell if it was the path I'd come from or the one ahead. I scratched an X into the wall with my fingernail and kept going.
Ten minutes later, I ran into that same X.
"Shit?!"
Was I looping in a circle? Or was the space itself twisted? I couldn't make sense of it. Didn't want to. I just wanted out.
My throat was parched. My stomach growled. I had no idea how long I'd been walking. My phone still read 2:34 p.m. An hour? Three? Six? The fluorescent lights gave no hint of day or night. They just buzzed.
At some point, I collapsed to the floor.
Am I gonna die here?
That thought crossed my mind.
At twenty-five, in some nameless void. Starved or dehydrated to death.
That's when I heard it.
Thud.
Footsteps.
Not mine. I was sitting still.
Thud-thud. Thud-thud-thud. Thud.
Getting closer.
I held my breath. My heart pounded like mad. The sound came from around the corner at the far end of the hall. One fluorescent light flickered there. In the flashes between blinks, something appeared.
A shadow.
Human-shaped. But the proportions were off. Arms too long, dangling down past its knees. No neck—head fused straight to the shoulders. And that head...
It was smiling.
Just a mouth on its face, no eyes, no nose. Ears torn wide in a rictus grin. It was smiling. Inside the gaping maw, no teeth—just a black void. A faint wheezing breath leaked from it, like the last gasp of life...
Smiler. That's its name, I learned later. Things born from the dark that hunt with laughter.
I ran.
Exhausted as I was, my body somehow moved. I didn't want to die here, not like this.
A sound chased me from behind.
Kee-hee-hee-hee.
Laughter. It echoed down the hallway.
I ran and ran. Around corners, into rooms, slamming doors shut. I held my breath.
The sound faded away.
How long did I crouch there? An hour? Two? My phone still said 2:34 p.m.
For now, I was alive.
And then it dawned on me.
Running away wasn't enough.
That was the beginning.
At first, it was hell. Hunger and thirst ruled me. I wrung water out of the pooled carpet and drank it. Disgusting, but better than dying.
Food...
The "grinning thing" showed me.
More precisely, its corpse did.
I stumbled on it while fleeing. It was impaled on the wall, dead. No idea who killed it. What mattered was the weird fruit-like things nearby. Edible. I survived on those.
That's how I learned to endure.
This place had rules.
Don't go into the dark. Smilers lurk where the fluorescent lights are out.
Steer clear of pooled water. Something lives there.
If you find a door or hole leading down, descend carefully. Never go up. No clue why, but anything that goes up never comes back.
......People?
Oh, right. There were others besides me. Humans. In the first few years, I met a handful. All "fallen" like me. Japanese, American—different nationalities. Sometimes we couldn't even communicate.
Most died.
One went mad and walked into the dark. Another got dragged upward by something from the ceiling right in front of me. Some just vanished. Gone when I woke up.
I survived.
Talent? Luck? No idea. I just did.
And at some point...
I started hunting.
About a hundred years in, I killed my first Smiler.
No weapons, so I did it barehanded. Yanked up a carpet tack strip and made a metal rod out of it... Then bashed and stabbed like a maniac.
It died.
They could be killed.
Something changed in that moment. Fear turned to rage. Rage to obsession. Obsession to purpose.
Kill everything here.
And go even further...
By the thousand-year mark, I'd fully conquered the yellow rooms.
Backrooms. That's what this place was called. I heard it from a "senior" survivor. He'd gone deeper. The lower you go, the vaster, more dangerous, and weirder it gets.
I stuck with him for a while and learned a ton.
Then I watched him die. To a pack of dog-like things.
Hounds. Black beasts that hunt in packs. Kill the leader, and the rest submit.
I wiped them all out.
Took two hundred years to figure out the trick.
By five thousand years, I'd stopped counting how deep I'd gone.
Time meant nothing. Hunger and thirst vanished at some point. No idea if my body changed or if this place changed me. Didn't matter.
What mattered was getting stronger.
What mattered was subjugating everything.
Partygoers. Humanoids with yellow skin. They assimilate humans.
But they bowed to greater power.
Skinstealers. Things wearing flayed human skins. Cunning and cruel.
Took about three hundred years, but they knelt too.
Beast. A monster big enough to demolish a building with one finger.
Twelve legs gripping ceiling and walls at once. Three layers of jaws in its torso, spinning in different directions, pulverizing anything they touched.
Fought it for centuries. Took fifty years to learn I had to destroy the three hearts embedded in those jaws simultaneously, and another fifty to pull it off. Got my arms torn off, lower body crushed—dozens of times. Then I won.
Saw fear in the fallen Beast's eyes. That fear became submission.
That's when I realized.
Nothing here could kill me.
After that, even bigger threats appeared. Void, Chronos, Eraser. Broke them all.
One thousand, two thousand, three thousand years. As time piled up, threats dwindled.
Ten thousand? Something like that?
Not sure exactly, but that's how it felt. Time for a human civilization to rise and fall. I spent it all here.
I'd trod every floor and ceiling of the Backrooms.
Met every entity in the Backrooms.
Every existence here knew me.
Some feared me. Some worshipped me. Some hated me. Same result.
Submission.
I became the king of the labyrinth.
After that, it got boring.
Desperately boring.
No challengers. No threats. Tomorrow like yesterday, yesterday like a thousand years ago.
I owned this place entirely.
Paradoxically, that meant I owned nothing.
I found the door by chance.
The end of the Backrooms. A white void, nothing else. I was wandering there.
That's when I saw it.
A door.
The kind you'd see in an apartment. A plain door with a handle.
But one I hadn't seen in tens of thousands of years.
I grabbed the handle.
The feel of metal—familiar yet alien.
I turned it.
The door swung open, and light poured in.
That warm glow, blindingly bright, wasn't fluorescent. Sunlight, felt for the first time in ten thousand years.
Warm. It seeped into my skin.
"Ah..."
Seoul.
Gangnam Station intersection. People bustling about. Cars passing. Sun shining down. The bus stop display showed the date.
20XX, Month X, Day XX. 3:12 p.m.
I remembered the day I vanished from the company restroom.
20XX, Month X, Day XX. 2:34 p.m.
38 minutes.
I'd returned after just 38 minutes.
While tens of thousands of years had passed in that world...
I'd come back as twenty-five-year-old Ian.
I laughed.
The human world I'd longed for so desperately.
In that moment, my shadow writhed. In the shadow cast on the asphalt, tens of thousands of eyes blinked.
They'd come with me.
My legion.