The Endless Class (5)
I flipped past page after page of solid black squares until I finally reached a stretch I could actually read — only to find the text still half-drowned in indecipherable characters. Still, I pressed on.
Fortunately, a few of the blanks resolved themselves the moment I worked them out.
The line about entering upon acquiring something — thinking back on the escape room I'd already survived — let me deduce fairly easily that it referred to the Rulebook and the Survivor's Record.
And because I'd always been drawn to mysteries, the occult, and ghost stories, recalling the urban legends surrounding rulebooks brought Neapolitan Horror to mind almost at once.
The unknown dangers, the connection to the Rulebook — too many details lined up for it to be coincidence. The moment the thought settled, the text itself began to change.
The formless black that had been shimmering over the words like a veil sank into the paper the way rain soaks into earth, and letters emerged beneath it.
Only the two ■■ remaining after "Neapolitan" refused to dissolve.
No matter how hard I wrung my brain, nothing but "Neapolitan Horror" would come. I scratched other candidates into my notebook with a ballpoint — dimension, space, school, trial — and checked the Rulebook after every single one, hoping for even the slightest shift. The ■ sat there unmoved, as if mocking the effort.
A few empty minutes bled away. I kept wrestling with the next passage, clutching my head, certain I'd only been thinking for a moment — until the bell announcing the end of the period rang out.
I'd heard that sound so many times it almost felt familiar. When break arrived, I was almost glad for it; now I had something to focus on that let me ignore everything around me. I kept the notebook clenched in my hands and tried one approach after another.
I forced myself to tune out the break-time noise — that chorus of hideous acts — and kept turning the problem over. The later sections, still choked with ■, remained opaque, but most of what I could parse, I understood.
Only the two-character word written as '■■' continued to elude me.
I'd been sitting still long enough that fatigue began to press in. I started to stretch — then froze mid-motion.
This was still class time.
Stretching, drawing attention, stopping my notes — any of it would do me no favors at all.
I swallowed the exhaustion and, if only to forget the weight settling into my body, went back over the notes I'd made, re-examining everything I'd pieced together about my situation.
First: the reason I'd ended up in this "classroom" seemed to match the second method of entering a Neapolitan ■■.
If that was the case — roughly a week had passed since the contract — then entering a "Neapolitan Horror" (for convenience, I'd decided to just call it a horror for now) about once a week might be enough to stave off the forced entry. That was my working theory, at least.
And the provision left for me in case of a failed escape… that had to be the mark carved into my shoulder, the one that rewound time every time I died.
But even that wasn't perfect. The first time I'd stepped through the classroom door, only my shoulder had flared with sharp pain. Each subsequent failure — each "death" and restart — had layered on another point of agony. Time wasn't rolling back cleanly.
At this rate, no matter how many loops I survived, there would come a moment when my body simply couldn't endure the imperfect regressions any longer.
I'd have to be careful.
I absently touched the phantom pain still splitting open the flesh of my neck, the dull throb at the back of my skull, and let the thoughts keep turning.
Things felt a little more ordered now. I flipped the Rulebook's pages forward.
Unlike before, the front section — which had been locked into a rigid, solid mass — turned as freely as if the earlier resistance had been a lie.
Inside, I found confirmation of one of the functions I'd discovered when I first obtained it: the recording of my own actions.
Flipping through roughly, I found the moment I'd entered the escape-room building. Yeom Sang-hyeon goofing off on the escalator. Even the thoughts I'd had while watching him — all of it written out in meticulous detail.
And when I'd wondered about the shape of that strangely endless escalator, ink had bloomed across the paper like a photograph developing in real time — a black-and-white image of the thing itself.
…Yeah. Still gave me chills looking at it.
I was still turning pages when a thought cut across my mind like a blade.
I flipped back toward the front.
There — in the stretch of memory that had been riddled with holes like a worm-eaten apple, the part after I'd read that "strange book" in the Central Mansion — every detail was written out with clinical precision.
I read my own story the way you might read someone else's.
I'd sensed it dimly before, but the version of me that had started changing after the strange book had become considerably more proactive.
The escape through the forest — almost every memory of that had been gone — so reading it felt genuinely like reading a novel.
When the white-knuckle flight finally ended, I reached the part I'd been waiting for.
What kind of contract had I made.
What exactly had happened.
Who, precisely, had I contracted with.
The questions that had been tightening around my chest like a vise drove me to flip the pages with near-frantic impatience, devouring every line.
I was tearing through the text when I reached the scene of the conversation with the Guide and the Indescribable Being — and a pain like needles driven into my eyes and skull slammed into me.
Even through the sensation of my brain being wrung out, I clung to a fierce desire to understand the grotesque language on the page. Whether that wish was answered, or whether forbidden knowledge long buried behind a veil of forgetting simply rose to the surface, I found I could comprehend it.
I forced myself through every word of the exchange between my past self and the Indescribable Being, enduring the hideous agony to the end — and then the world began to spin.
Ah, my head…
I couldn't hold it upright. It pitched forward, and with a soft, sickening patter, drops of blood bloomed across the notebook in dark points.
I managed to lift a hand that was trembling of its own accord and wipe my face. A bright-red, blood-smeared back of a hand filled my vision.
The dizziness swelled past anything I could fight. The last of the strength I'd been holding in my body simply let go.
In the tilting world —
the teacher, a shape of terrible black —
and every student in the class, smiling at me with something cold and wrong in their faces.
.
.
Huh… wait…
Before I could fully process the wrongness of what I was seeing, my vision went black.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
…You've got to be kidding me.
I'd realized the regression was unstable, sworn to be careful — and died within minutes.
Not that anyone could have predicted dying like this.
Killed by reading a book…
The pains that were already starting to feel familiar settled back into place. I sat at my desk through the black teacher's salute, then pulled out the Rulebook and began examining it again.
This time I didn't force myself through the forbidden knowledge or the images that still made no sense. The moment anything started to hurt, I skipped past it. That way I managed to review everything up to the instant I'd arrived in this "classroom."
The part about dying, though, refused to resolve into anything useful. It simply stated, in heavy bold type, that I had died.
Probably killed by content that would have driven me mad if I'd actually read it.
Hmm…
I turned the thought over for a while, then deliberately, intensely, wished to know about the death. The bold-faced Y o u . D i e d . stretched in an instant into a long, dense sentence — and I slammed the Rulebook shut at once.
Right. I could check that later. Someday.
I spent the remaining time testing the Rulebook's various functions, rereading my own story, calling up images of the scenes I was curious about. Before long, the end of fourth period — the point where I'd first died — came around again.