The Faces in the Abyss
Lee Seonjae and Lee Hoon returned from the bottom in roughly three minutes. They were trembling, covered head to toe in sweat, blood, and some unidentifiable filth. What on earth had they seen down there? I gave them water to calm them down, as they were pale with terror and on the verge of vomiting.
“Hey, drink some water and pull yourselves together.”
“Th-thank you.”
“Gulp... gulp...”
Lee Seonjae’s hands shook violently as he took the water, while Lee Hoon wept silently, pouring the liquid down his throat as if he were trying to wash away a foul, lingering taste, or perhaps like a man who hadn’t touched water in days.
That was when I noticed something strange about the right side of Lee Seonjae’s face. It was covered in bumpy, acne-like protrusions. But the color was off—a sickly, yellowish hue. It didn’t look like a typical skin condition; it almost looked like bruising.
‘What on earth caused that...’
I decided to hold off on asking about the skin trouble for now; I needed to keep the conversation moving. What they had seen down there was far more important. It could be a critical issue for my exploration of the Narak.
“So, what kind of faces did you see? Were they all the same? Or did they have distinct features? Since you called them faces, I assume they had eyes, noses, and mouths.”
Lee Seonjae and Lee Hoon hesitated at my question. They seemed desperate to forget the experience, but my prodding forced them to drag those memories back to the surface. Finally, Lee Hoon opened his mouth.
“They... they weren’t really human faces. They were just... so unpleasant. Looking at them made me feel physically sick.”
Lee Hoon couldn’t properly describe them. He just grimaced, repeating that they were repulsive and unsettling. Then, Lee Seonjae began to offer a more coherent description.
“Um... Boss Jojun. Do you know about the ‘Uncanny Valley’?”
“I do.”
“That’s the feeling we got. They were definitely human faces, but something was... off. They were embedded in the walls, staring right at us. Smiling.”
“Smiling faces embedded in the walls?”
“Yes. They looked incredibly happy... no, it was more like a drug-induced, manic grin.”
Lee Seonjae went on to explain their three-minute experience in the Narak in more detail.
“To start from the beginning... where we woke up was so dark we couldn’t see an inch in front of us. It was so pitch black that at first, we couldn’t see a thing.”
Squish... squelch... squelch.
Squelch.
Kieeeeeee...
The sound of damp flesh being compressed and crushed. A floor reeking of humid rot. A strangely warm space. Screams echoing from somewhere.
‘Where is this...’
Lee Seonjae opened his eyes. His face was covered in some unknown slime. It was a sticky, acidic-smelling substance. For some reason, his skin felt itchy and stung where the slime touched it. He hurriedly wiped it off onto his clothes. It still itched, but the stinging subsided.
“Hey, Lee Hoon. Are you there? Hey... answer me...”
A pitch-black space where nothing could be seen. It was as if he were trapped in a perfectly sealed box without a single light source; Lee Seonjae couldn’t see an inch ahead. Overcome with extreme fear, he searched for his companion who had fallen with him. He groped the floor, which was soaked in some unknown liquid, praying to find Lee Hoon.
“I, I’m here. But here... it’s so dark...”
“Wait a second.”
Lee Seonjae found Lee Hoon huddled on the floor, grabbed him, and drew his sword to activate a skill. Soon, blue ghost-fire flared on his blade, providing just enough light to pierce the absolute darkness.
“Shit...”
“What is this place...”
They illuminated the bottom of the Narak with the faint light. It looked like a labyrinth. The walls, ceiling, and floor were tangled with unidentified stems, wriggling blood vessels, and hanging entrails. Everywhere, vessels were bursting, spilling out yellowish-black fluid. The liquid smelled acidic, just like stomach acid. Lee Seonjae realized the slime on his face had come from those very bursts.
“That weird smell... Ugh...!”
Overcome by an unbearable wave of nausea, Lee Hoon vomited everything he had eaten. The stench was incomparable to the rot of zombies. It was a visceral, sickening odor, like a refrigerator that had been sealed for thousands of years after being filled with ground-up human remains.
While Lee Hoon retched, Lee Seonjae swung his flaming magic sword around to get a better look at their surroundings.
‘Those things are...’
A corridor covered in black flesh. Fragments of bone and meat that looked as if they had melted. Piles of corpses of unknown creatures beginning to putrefy. And the faces.
Faces with their eyes closed, embedded everywhere in the walls, floor, and ceiling. They looked just enough like humans to be even more inhuman. The pale white faces were like masks—masks made to imitate humanity. And even with their eyes closed, as if they were dreaming, their pupils were darting back and forth. It meant they were alive.
“Hey... hey, stop puking and get up... we have to get out of here...”
Lee Seonjae lowered his voice and called to Lee Hoon, who was still gagging. “This place is dangerous...”
He felt an instinctive sense of danger looking at the faces embedded in the walls. This place felt more dangerous than anywhere he had ever been in his life. Moreover, he felt like he would lose his mind if he stayed in this space any longer. The strange, distracting noise of the blood vessels, the stench that paralyzed his sense of smell, and those unsettling faces—it felt like a recipe for insanity.
At Lee Seonjae’s urging, Lee Hoon finally stopped vomiting, wiped his mouth, and asked,
“Wait... but where do we go to get out?”
“What? Obviously, the way we came in...”
“Where?”
At Lee Hoon’s question, Lee Seonjae scanned the ceiling. Only then did he realize that the hole they had been sucked through had vanished.
“We tried to find a way out...”
“The entrance we came through was already gone...”
“S-so... we spent time looking for an exit...”
Wait, this story is weird. They clearly popped out in three minutes. Maybe even less. But they spent time looking for an exit? They sound like people who wandered around for hours.
“Hold on, how long were you two down there?”
I asked them how much time they had spent below. As the story progressed, it sounded like they had spent far longer than three minutes.
“Th-three hours...?”
“I think we were there for about three to five hours. I’m not sure. We were just frantically wandering around looking for an exit...”
“Three hours?”
“Yes... after wandering that maze-like place for three hours...”
“You guys... you came out in three minutes.”
“Yes? Three minutes?”
“Yeah. I don’t know if it was exactly three minutes, but you popped out in about that much time.”
“N-no, that’s not right. We were down there for a long time. No...”
Lee Seonjae looked flustered at my words. He was certain they had spent hours down there. It seems time flows differently in that place.
“Just keep telling me how you managed to get out.”
“Uh... we opened a red door.”
“A six-armed... strange being told us... to go to the red door...”
“Seonjae... how do we get out of here...?”
“I don’t know. Just... keep your voice down.”
“Okay...”
Lee Seonjae pulled Lee Hoon to his feet and began walking in the direction where there were fewer faces embedded in the walls. Both of them lowered their voices. They instinctively felt that they shouldn’t wake the faces stuck to the walls. They didn’t seem to react to light, but they didn’t know about sound. Lee Hoon’s vomiting had been covered by the sound of stomach acid spraying from the walls, but voices were a different matter.
“But Seonjae... that light goes out when the magic runs out, right...?”
“Yeah. If we don’t find an exit soon, it’ll go out. Even if I don’t use other skills and just keep this one running... it’ll probably die in about two hours.”
“Ah...”
If they didn’t find an exit within two hours, the light would go out. Lee Hoon’s expression darkened instantly at those words. Then, Lee Seonjae, who was walking in front, suddenly stopped. He pointed to a wall riddled with holes and the corpses spilling out of them.
“A pile of corpses...?”
“Not that. Over there... those things...”
Lee Seonjae wasn’t pointing at the pile of corpses stacked in one corner. He was pointing at something else near the pile.
“Wait. What are those things?”
“I don’t know...”
Lee Seonjae’s light wasn’t very bright, perhaps because it was originally an offensive skill. It didn’t reach very far. Because of that, he could only vaguely see the outlines, and he couldn’t clearly see the beings gathered in front of the corpse pile, tearing at the meat. They couldn’t properly identify the pale white humans who were naked and feasting on the corpses. They just realized something was there and were terrified.
“Sh-should we get closer...?”
“Are you crazy? Let’s just... go back...”
The two tried to back away from the corpse pile. They realized that getting closer wouldn’t solve anything. Then, Lee Hoon felt like he had stepped on something squishy and strange. Lee Hoon, who had stopped dead in his tracks, looked down. He made eye contact with a face embedded in the floor.
“Huh?”
“Why. What...”
The face Lee Hoon had stepped on was starting to open its mouth. He had to stop it. If he left it as it was, something irreversible would happen. Lee Seonjae hurriedly plunged his sword into the face. He stabbed it over and over, as if to crush it. In the process, the fire on his sword went out, and they were left in pitch darkness once again.
Stab. Stab. Stab.
“Hey... st-stop it...”
“Hoo...”
In the darkness, Lee Hoon stopped Lee Seonjae. Lee Seonjae finally ceased his repetitive action. Clutching his racing heart, he reignited his sword.
Whoosh.
“Shit.”
And then they realized. They had awakened all the sleeping faces. They realized the faces were watching them, smiling. And they were frantically pulling themselves out of the spots where they had been embedded.
“From then on, we just ran like crazy.”
“And... we found that strange being.”
“Strange being?”
“Yes... a strange being sitting in place like a Buddha, forming a hand seal... It had six arms... but it was wearing a mask, so we couldn’t see its face.”
“Th-that... it pointed in the direction of the door with one of its arms...”
That was all they had seen. I sent the two of them back up. This might be even higher difficulty than the black market’s underground floor.
‘Faces embedded in the walls. They seem to share senses or consciousness, sleeping in the walls and crawling out when stimulated by external shocks. They don’t seem to have much hearing, smell, or sight. They’re spread out like traps, and if one is stimulated, they all crawl out to attack...’
The things feasting on the corpse pile seemed to be those faces, too...
‘Could it be... are those things in the Narak parasites?’
For some reason, I felt that the space made of flesh-walls was like the inside of an unimaginably large creature, and the faces embedded there might be parasites.
‘Humans who fell into the Narak long ago... were eaten by the giant monster of the Narak... and they continued to breed there, evolving into parasites...’
A bizarre Japanese manga I saw a long time ago came to mind. In that story, too, humans evolved into parasites...
‘And the six-armed, masked being sitting like a Buddha... could that be... the helper Indikron mentioned...’
The strange being that showed Lee Seonjae and Lee Hoon the way out might be the helper Indikron said I absolutely had to meet. Or perhaps a guide to lead me to the helper. Regardless, it’s a miracle that Lee Seonjae and Lee Hoon made it out alive.
‘I’ll have to ask Henry first... and Aila, too...’
If it’s Henry, whose body is currently in the Narak, or Aila, who sold me the cracked Ankh, they might have more detailed information. If I go in without proper information, I’ll likely lose several of my subordinates. I went to find Henry’s head first.