Visiting the Tiger's Den
Visiting the Tiger's Den
The next day.
Perhaps because I had fallen asleep without realizing it.
It was hard to gauge the time.
'He said it was noon when I fell into that pit.'
The room had no windows.
The candle the man had left burning had exhausted its life, reduced to a lump of beeswax.
Still, the fact that I could see my surroundings meant there was light penetrating through somewhere, but I couldn't pinpoint the light source.
Objects revealed their outlines uniformly, like a moonlit field.
After observing carefully for a while, I finally realized.
'Is everything... a luminescent body?'
Strictly speaking, any matter above absolute zero emits electromagnetic waves through thermal radiation, so technically everything in the world is a luminescent body.
But that's beside the point.
Human photoreceptors shouldn't be able to detect the faint wavelengths emitted by the thermal radiation of room-temperature objects.
So the phenomenon I was experiencing could be explained by one of two things:
Every material in this room is a high-risk radioactive substance emitting massive amounts of energy.
I am not human.
Both could be true, but only number two had any evidence.
The eye that was stabbed yesterday.
I rubbed it to clear the sleep from it, and it was fully healed.
Lizard-like recovery and night vision like a scope.
I'm getting more and more curious.
About the true nature of this new body I've acquired.
Calming my pounding heart, I picked up a book just as the door opened.
The person entering was the black-haired man from yesterday.
'It was Zenon, wasn't it?'
I'd heard that when he was speaking through the crystal ball, but I don't know if that's his name.
For now, I called him as I had before.
"Hey."
The man didn't even acknowledge me.
He didn't respond or even look my way as he walked deeper inside and operated a machine covered in copper-colored levers.
Immediately after, the room brightened.
I hadn't had time to think about it yesterday and let it slide, but this too was important information.
'A civilization comfortable enough to use electric lights without burden.'
At least it didn't seem to be a world similar to the medieval period commonly associated with "fantasy."
So what kind of world was it?
As I stroked my chin in contemplation, the man spoke.
"You seem to be under some kind of misconception."
He sat down at his desk, pushed aside a flask filled with black liquid, and continued.
"Abandon any useless hope. No matter what you do, the outcome won't change."
It was an obvious statement.
Whether a guinea pig lives or dies isn't up to the guinea pig.
I knew that better than anyone, so I shot back confidently.
"Then give it to me quickly. That juice."
Only then did the man turn to look at me.
Still an indifferent face.
But his eyes, which had been empty, now held a faint trace of bewilderment.
Thinking he finally looked human, I pointed to the flask he had pushed aside.
"That's the elixir, isn't it? Yesterday, when you stabbed my eye, that was to draw blood to make that, right?"
The man rose from his seat with a serious expression.
"How did you know?"
His already low voice dropped even further, feeling like the low-frequency growl of a tiger.
To overcome my fear, I deliberately took an even more confident posture.
Arms crossed, chin raised, I answered.
"It was in the book. To awaken Heta's pupil, you need a creature called 'Dampir,' and Dampir can be made from humans."
That's not exactly what was written.
I was just guessing based on the direction of the research, and since there were many undecipherable symbols and magic circles, my guess could be wrong.
The man walked over slowly and asked.
"Do you know what Dampir is?"
"No."
"Yet you're willing to become a Dampir?"
"It's not like I'm volunteering..."
Even if I didn't ask for it, they'd give it to me eventually, wouldn't they?
I looked up at him with a sulky face, and he snorted.
"Ridiculous."
Then he pulled out something like a collapsible baton from his pocket.
Chwaleuk
The rod extended, transforming into a cane with an antique design.
The man pointed the tip of his cane at the cover of the book lying on the floor.
"Read what this is."
This was the moment I'd been waiting for.
'Intelligence test.'
I didn't know it would start so suddenly, but thankfully, the question asked was the most basic of basics.
"The Third Basic Circle of Astrology. You invented this, right?"
"What's the difference from the Second Circle?"
"A lot. Like the First Circle, it can use all types of mana, and the range of variations is wide."
The man moved his cane.
He tapped the book open and pointed the tip at my forehead. He stared at me for a while before asking the next question.
"Do you think you can become a Dampir?"
I lowered my gaze to check the open page.
'Variations of Circles According to Mana Traits.'
Unfortunately, I couldn't find a connection to his question.
'Since becoming a Dampir could be considered a variation, there might be a connection...'
After a moment of thought, I answered honestly.
"I don't know."
The man returned to his seat without a word.
Then he just sat in his chair, reading a book, which made me anxious.
'Was my answer that bad?'
Fortunately, my worry was unfounded.
Not long after, the man rose from his seat, picked up the flask, and approached me.
Up close, the liquid inside the flask was far more unsettling than it had been from a distance.
Like ink that hadn't fully mixed, a murky layer and a pitch-black layer were separated, making the fluid's flow visible to the naked eye. Faint smoke was rising from it, making me think it would stink if I brought it to my nose.
The man held it out to me.
"Drink."
Forcing my hesitant body to move, I accepted the flask.
I had prepared myself, but using my own body for a clinical trial was more repulsive than I had imagined.
Moreover, the only information I had about the elixir was that it was an 'expensive material needed to make a Dampir.'
An experiment with an unknown success rate and unknown side effects.
This was the first time my intelligence as a primate felt like an obstacle.
'If I were as mindless as a rat, I wouldn't be scared...'
I shut my eyes tight and downed the liquid.
A metallic, fishy taste started on the tip of my tongue, traveled down my throat, and transmitted a sensation of heat.
Like downing a shot of strong liquor, a hot sensation spread through my entire body. When the heat reached my skin, steam began to rise from my whole body.
All those sensations were foreign, close to pain, but not unbearable.
Slowly, I opened my palm, looking down at the rising steam, and stretched my arm out to the side to observe any more detailed changes.
The only visible change was the steam.
But I could clearly feel things changing inside.
Heartbeat.
Blood flow.
A strange, writhing something below my solar plexus.
All of it was abnormal.
It was strange that I could detect my heartbeat and blood flow so clearly, and the foreign writhing sensation I was feeling for the first time in my life also sparked my curiosity.
I wanted to find out immediately, but there was a process I had to go through first.
I looked up at the man.
He was staring down at me with wide eyes, then flinched and asked.
"How do you feel?"
His reaction was irritating.
'Has the result already come out?'
If it had, why was he reacting like that?
I didn't think I'd find the answer by pondering it.
For now, I answered his question.
"My body feels warm, I guess?"
I decided it was better not to mention the foreign sensation in my solar plexus.
Because I didn't want to be dissected.
"Anything else?"
"No."
Frowning as if deep in thought, the man moved.
A display cabinet at the very back of the room.
I had to struggle to hide the rising anticipation as I saw what the man took out from there.
It was a splendid key that shone with a golden light.
Holding it, the man approached me and warned,
"Don't get the wrong idea. I'm letting you out now only to observe your activity levels."
Sure, whatever.
Of course you should.
Bowing my head only in my mind, I greeted him with a confident posture.
The glorious moment when the cage trapping me disappeared.
For the next two days, I stayed only in the room.
It wasn't that I was trapped—there was just too much to do in the room.
There were seven desks in the room, and on five of them, at least three pieces of strangely shaped equipment were installed each.
When I opened a drawer, there were two or three books inside. The display cabinet at the back showed ores and medicines I had never seen in my life—what else could I do?
I was so busy exploring that I lost track of time.
Today was the same.
I was busy observing the equipment installed on the desk near the entrance.
The equipment was a bizarre mechanical device expected to be made of Ni-Cu series alloy.
I could figure out that gears with numbers on their teeth were connected in parallel to be used like a gauge panel, and that a lever-like hydraulic device adjusted internal pressure, but I had no idea what it was for, so I stood in front of it for a long time.
Thanks to that, I didn't even notice Zenon entering.
"Are you staying inside again today?"
Startled, I turned around and something flew at my face.
Peolleok—a fabric covered my head.
It was soft and fluffy, seeming to be quite high-quality cloth.
I grabbed it with my hand and brought it in front of my eyes—my guess was correct.
It was a robe similar to what Zenon was wearing.
"Put it on when you go out."
Then Zenon walked over and, as always, sat down and quietly read a book.
I tilted my head.
'What does this mean?'
In my life, I'd never seen a crazy researcher who dressed their lab rats.
Professor Choi's team supposedly kills another pig every so often to create an additional sacrifice for a memorial service or ritual to honor the dead experimental animals—but our lab didn't even hold such ceremonies.
'Maybe he's telling me to go out and move around since I've been holed up in here so much.'
If that's the case, it makes sense.
If I think of it as replacing raising the cage temperature to increase the guinea pig's activity level with providing outdoor clothes, it adds up.
If so, what I should do...
"Can I go out now?"
I asked while putting on the robe, and the expected answer came back.
"Do as you please."
A guinea pig doesn't need orders or persuasion.
You change the environment, and if you don't get the desired result, you just change the environment more harshly.
If I gave them clothes and they still didn't go out?
I'd just use other means.
So I had to get outside right now.
'Because I'd be in trouble if he decided to feed me an aphrodisiac or something.'
I trudged toward the entrance.
Just as Zenon had done, I pulled the candlestick attached next to the door. With a thud, the wall began to rotate.
Beyond the door, a dark corridor stretched out.
The ceiling was made of uneven rock like a tunnel, but the walls were ornately carved in Gothic style—a bizarre corridor.
The lights installed at sparse intervals looked like the kerosene lamps used for 19th-century streetlights.
I wanted to look at them up close since they were fascinating, but I was too short.
After hopping a few times and giving up, I proceeded down the corridor.
A moment later.
As I turned a corner, a metallic fishy smell stung my nose.
My face scrunched up.
When I found the source of the smell beyond the passage ahead, I couldn't help but curse.
"Crazy..."
The dog food I had witnessed when I first opened my eyes in this world.
And the burly man I'd expected to be the one making it was standing in a butchery-like space, brandishing a slaughtering knife.
