Chapter 2. The Room Guest Who Doesn’t Answer the Phone
Chapter 2. The Room Guest Who Doesn’t Answer the Phone
I sat in the counter chair and closed my eyes.
To other people, it would look like I was dozing off, but I was actually doing high-intensity training.
First, I applied strong pressure to my heart with telekinesis.
My heart contracted harder than usual, and my blood began circulating rapidly through my whole body.
Cardio.
At the same time, I applied pressure to the muscles in my arms, legs, and back.
I could feel each muscle fiber trembling.
My muscles quivered as if they might tear at any moment.
Sweet, thick breaths spilled from my mouth.
I endured until I couldn’t anymore, then reduced the pressure.
The muscles below my neck, freed from the pressure, shook as if they had come back to life.
After resting for a few seconds, I applied pressure again.
After repeating thirteen sets, I trained other muscle groups simultaneously.
For a normal person, it would be painful enough to knock them out, but I was fine.
I was used to pain.
Telekinesis—one of the two secrets I’d had since birth.
It was extremely practical, but I had no intention of letting anyone discover it.
I was always careful. Always.
Training like this using telekinesis was higher-intensity and more efficient than a normal gym workout.
At the same time, it also strengthened my telekinesis.
Feeling and adjusting each individual muscle fiber enabled finer control of telekinesis.
Compared to this, changing sheets and wiping moisture in the bathroom during room cleaning was beginner-level training.
Because I trained like this every day, my muscles could produce several times the strength of an ordinary person.
On the outside I looked lean, but if I took off my shirt, I had sharper definition than a professional bodybuilder.
The last time I measured my body fat, it was 4%.
This type of cardio—directly compressing the heart and accelerating blood flow—was effective for burning fat.
I probably wouldn’t ever have belly fat in my life.
I caught my breath and looked outside. The downpour showed no sign of letting up. It was coming down so hard that calls asking about rooms had stopped completely.
The parking lot monitor was black now—I couldn’t see anything. I expanded my telekinetic field to cover the parking lot. If an accident happened there, the business would be liable, and the owner usually tried to dump it on the employee on duty. Over five years working here, three employees had quit because of that issue alone. I kept watching the parking lot with telekinesis and resumed training.
9 a.m.
The rain that had poured all night had stopped, and the air was fresh.
“We’re going to go eat.”
The cleaning team came down from the rooftop dorms and said that as they headed out for a meal.
At our motel, all employees ate at nearby restaurants.
Three meals a day, plus lodging provided.
It was fourteen hours of hard labor a day, but the cleaning team members who came to Korea to earn money wanted motel work. With food and housing covered, they could save their entire monthly paycheck and send it home. I’d heard that in places like Mongolia, many people worked themselves to the bone in Korea for a few years, saved up, then returned home rich. Some even opened motels with systems similar to Korea’s.
“Enjoy your meal!”
I smiled as I said it.
“Enjoy it? It’s the same food every day. I’m sick of it.”
Auntie Sookhee scowled as she went out the lobby doors. The Mongolian auntie and the Koryoin auntie followed after her.
10:10 a.m.
Chanhyeok came running in, out of breath.
“Sorry, sorry. I overslept.”
In a job like ours, with 24-hour alternating shifts, people were extremely sensitive about the other person being late.
Even if you took breaks here and there, working for 24 hours straight was exhausting.
So if the person who was supposed to relieve you was late even by a minute, many people got irritable.
I’d never been late even once, but Chanhyeok was late like this every day. If my shift partners in the past had been like him, they would’ve been red-faced and fighting by now.
His reason proved to be the same every time.
He pretended he’d been running from the subway station, but his breathing wasn’t truly ragged—he was acting. He probably only started running within ten meters of the motel.
“No, it’s fine. Don’t apologize.”
I smiled.
Normal people always showed expressions.
If I acted according to my nature, the other person would realize something was off about me, so I always kept a smile on my face.
Chanhyeok, who had been panting like he was about to die, steadied his breathing in an instant and checked the room status on the counter monitor.
After overnight guests checked out and cleaning was finished, there were five rooms available for sale.
Before the cleaning team came in, the worker on duty needed to ensure there were five sellable rooms by the time they clocked out, in case short-stay guests came early.
But after staying up all night, cleaning five rooms in the early morning was hard. Around 7 a.m., most people were half-asleep and nodding off. That was why Chanhyeok cleaned no more than two rooms, no matter how much the owner nagged.
I worried he’d get fired soon.
“Good work. Anything I need to know?”
“Nothing special. Then have a good rest.”
After seeing that Chanhyeok had checked the room status, I went up to the rooftop dorm.
On the roof were three container rooms.
One was used by the cleaning team, one by me, and the last one was empty.
Back in my room, I lifted my body slightly into the air.
I undid the buttons of my shirt all at once with telekinesis, loosened my belt, and took off my pants.
My pants floated in midair, had the wrinkles smoothed out, and hung on a hanger. My shirt and underwear were quickly hand-washed with detergent in the bathroom sink and hung on the drying rack. I left telekinetic tension in the white dress shirt so that once it dried, it would be stiff and crisp, like it had been ironed.
I floated into the bathroom. Flying with telekinesis was fun, but it was hard to hide from people, so I could only practice inside my room.
Still floating, I took a cold shower.
When the cold water pounded my body, I felt the muscles I’d compressed all night contract.
While showering, I cooked ramen, took kimchi out of the fridge, and set the table.
Until my teens, it had been hard to multitask beyond two actions, but after practicing like this continuously, I could now perform dozens of actions at the same time. My ability grew stronger the more I trained it.
After eating ramen, I lay down on the bed.
The moment I lay down, fatigue hit me. It felt less like physical exhaustion and more like my mental strength had been drained.
Motel work itself wasn’t that difficult. What was tiring was the telekinesis training and conditioning I did in the gaps during my shift.
If I only worked without personal training, I was sure I could do consecutive on-site shifts without getting tired at all.
I woke up in the evening, turned on the TV, watched shorts and dramas, went to the restaurant for dinner, then slept deeply again.
Most of my days off followed this pattern.
Training mattered, but rest was important too. After pushing my whole body to the extreme, my ability strengthened when I rested enough.
“Hello! Good work.”
9:50 a.m. the next day.
I greeted the exhausted Chanhyeok with a bright smile.
His double eyelids looked deeper from sleepiness as he lit up at the sight of me and started getting ready to leave.
Out of forty rooms, only thirty-seven had sold yesterday.
It was Friday, and it still wasn’t full?
I slightly suspected he might not have accepted guests because he didn’t want to clean. But that was something the owner or the manager should worry about.
I cut off my interest.
“Ugh… I’m dead. I must be getting old. Why is staying up all night so hard?”
He was only two years older than me, yet every morning he acted like he was on the verge of death.
It was probably because he didn’t rest properly on his off day and went out to have fun instead.
In this line of work, rest was everything.
He probably wouldn’t last much longer and would quit soon too.
“Nothing happened, right?”
“Did you take in one male guest in Room 310 the day before yesterday?”
“Yes. He stayed alone. Why?”
“He extended for one more day yesterday. But he paid the room fee at noon and hasn’t come out even once since then. He didn’t even order food.”
“He looked tired… maybe he’s sleeping.”
“That’s over thirty-six hours without a single meal.”
“Yeah. That is a bit strange. But what could happen? At worst, he kills himself.”
I smiled as I said the most predictable scenario.
But Chanhyeok’s expression at my answer was odd.
Reviewing my own behavior, I realized I’d smiled too brightly while saying something that wasn’t something you smiled about. I’d smiled out of habit, but next time I needed to match my expression to what I was saying.
“Yeah… anyway, keep an eye on it. I’m heading out.”
“Yes… see you tomorrow.”
After checking the room keys from the checked-out rooms, I picked up the tablet and headed for the elevator to inspect the rooms.
I opened the doors and windows of the checkout rooms wide to ventilate them. Then I checked for anything broken or needing repairs and made notes.
I also quickly checked for any left-behind items.
A notification sound rang out. When I looked at the tablet, the manager had arrived and entered the counter area.
The manager watched the surveillance feed, checking the cleaning team’s movement and tracking my route.
After finishing inspections of the checkout rooms, I restocked supplies on each floor.
This meant organizing drinks, bedding, and other items and stacking them in the floor storerooms. Linen sheets were heavy if you carried dozens.
I pretended to carry them with my hands, but I was actually lifting them with telekinesis, so it wasn’t difficult at all.
My telekinesis was extremely powerful.
The muscle fibers I’d forged were far denser than an ordinary person’s, but my telekinesis could exert tens of times more force than my body.
No… maybe hundreds of times…
I didn’t know precisely how strong it was because I’d never tested it.
If I ever had the chance, I wanted to see how much I could lift with my telekinesis, but opportunities to test it away from people’s eyes were rare.
After restocking from the 5th floor down to the 1st-floor storerooms, fixing minor repairs in rooms, and returning to the counter, it was almost noon.
“Hello, sir.”
“Yes, Chan. You’re working hard. Nothing happened, right?”
“No, nothing special.”
I smiled as I answered the manager, then started calling rooms that still hadn’t checked out.
But Room 310 didn’t pick up.
I finished calling the other rooms, then called 310 again, but still no answer. Sometimes guests were sleeping deeply, or they unplugged the phone line.
“Sir, I’ll be in front of Room 310, so please call it from there.”
The manager immediately understood and nodded.
In cases like this, you go to the door and confirm whether the phone is ringing, and if there’s still no response, you knock and wake the guest directly.
In front of 310, I could faintly hear the phone ringing. But inside, there was no movement at all.
“Sir! Sir, are you there? It’s checkout time.”
I knocked several times, but there was no response.
I took out the master key and cracked the door open.
The inner door past the entry was wide open, and I could see into the large VIP room.
A man in only his underwear—dead, with a short cord around his neck tied to the window handle.
From the doorway, I extended telekinesis and checked inside his body. His heart had stopped, and his temperature was cold.
I didn’t step inside. I went straight down to the counter.
“Sir, we need to call the police. The guest is dead—he’s hanging from the window handle.”
I said it with my usual smile, then realized too late.
I’d made that mistake yesterday, and I’d done it again.
The manager stared at me, mouth hanging open in shock.