Chapter 186

"Hoot."

"I'm being as careful as I can."

Kwon Do-heon swallowed hard, his gaze fixed on the surreal hellscape spread beneath his feet.

"This really isn't easy…."

"Hoo."

"How the hell does any of this work?"

Not a single space here was in its right mind.

The cabana domes had long since lost their function, transformed into transparent underwater prisons filled with suffocating abyssal water, drifting through the void. Inside the glass walls, bloated drowning corpses bobbed up and sank again like glitter inside a snow globe.

Every last one of them was staring at Do-heon with eyes blanched white.

'I'm going to throw up.'

"Hoot."

"That one I understood. You're telling me not to look too closely."

"Hoo-hoo."

"But this isn't something that gets solved by not looking…."

Through the gaps in the glass walls, smothered in cobwebs, every breath drew in a searing acidic reek and viscous mucus that felt as though it could melt his respiratory system.

Blocking his sight alone was not enough to endure this.

"Honestly, an all-out fight would be better."

The floor he stood on was equally atrocious. The natural marble tiles—once smooth and pristine white—had crumbled apart in splotches like the hide of a decomposing corpse, and the fragments floated in midair, defying gravity, like stepping stones.

On top of that, the seams between tile and tile were packed with the transparently melted faces of drowning victims. Each time he tried to set his foot down, those grotesque faces opened and closed their mouths in unison, unleashing panting echoes in every direction.

"……."

"Ugh."

It sounded exactly like metal scraping.

"Is… is this really the right path? I'm not being bewitched again, am I?"

"Hoot."

"It's so fucking horrible I could lose my mind."

The grotesque screams accompanying every step split his ears and paralyzed his brain. Kwon Do-heon clamped a hand over his own mouth.

"I'm asking in all seriousness—is it okay if I start throwing up soon?"

"That's your choice, but I wouldn't recommend it."

"That suddenly sounded like human speech—this isn't an auditory hallucination, right?"

"I won't leave you behind, but you'd do well to treat me with a bit more care."

"Hiding in the dark and saying the most outrageous things."

That wasn't all. Looking further down, the blue hole—what must have originally been an artificial sinkhole structure—had expanded into a pitch-black pit whose bottom couldn't even be guessed at.

"What do you think would happen if I fell in there?"

"It wouldn't be a pleasant death, probably."

"It looks like there's no bottom, and just looking at it is making me dizzy."

"Might be because your eyes are too good…."

When her Detection System eyes tried to forcibly quantify the depths of that grotesque abyss, a splitting pain hammered through her temples. Unknown emotions kept clutching at his ankles like a water ghost, dragging and clinging.

"It might truly be infinite."

"Oh, down there? The blue hole?"

"The deep sea is a space that exists on Earth, so there must be limits to it. It's not expanding eternally like the universe. But a labyrinth is closer to a 'concept' than a space."

Above his head, unseen, Seome continued from the darkness.

"And to a mere human, even the deep sea is bound to look infinite."

"Is that why it looks like that?"

The lights that had been embedded in the walls and beneath the water's surface had transformed here into eerie, glowing eyes.

"At the very least, I don't think I ever imagined anything this horrible."

Each time the water rippled and light scattered, rotted and crumbling eyeballs from every direction watched Kwon Do-heon's movements, shining with gazes as ancient and twisted as old riddles.

"This kind of thing wouldn't even show up in a dream."

"You're not the only one doing the imagining."

"Then who thinks up something like this?"

"Plenty of people—for instance, people just moments before drowning?"

"I've said it twice now, but this is fucking horrible."

Even within this suffocating space,

"Oh, fuck!!"

"Please lower your voice."

"That fish, right there!!"

"Sigh…."

A single white fish resembling a betta was tracing a sleek trajectory through the blue water spheres suspended in midair.

"Something just occurred to me."

"I'll hear you out, go on."

"At first I thought it was just darting around in a panic."

"And now your opinion has changed?"

"There's a strange regularity to the way it moves."

The fish appeared to swim at random, yet it never headed for the dead zones of the underwater cabanas crammed with crumbled corpses, nor for the hazardous areas where acidic mucus spewed out.

It was subtly skirting around the dark sectors where bloated, cloudy eyeballs blinked obsessively, and the shadow crevices where red fog that looked lethal at a glance lay in wait.

"Not that it makes this any less horrible,"

Kwon Do-heon said, forcing his eyes to stay fixed on the fish and not the ground below.

"But looking at where the fish passes, the footholds I can barely step on or leap to are—"

"It's moving along a safe route?"

"Yes, so I was wondering if it might be showing me the way right now."

"True enough—the 'path' I'm looking for right now is also the quickest way to follow that fish."

Not an exit from this place.

"It looked like a relatively safe route."

"And you just followed it as-is?"

"You couldn't have found so much as a fin on that fish without me, and yet you've got a lot to say."

"My eyes happen to be extremely good, you know?"

"That's not the same as an ability to find hidden fish."

"You don't let a single word slide. Were we always like this?"

"You left me speechless plenty of times too."

Kwon Do-heon narrowed his eyes and focused every nerve on the white trail of the fish.

When the fish surged upward, he kicked off a stepping stone and launched himself into the air; when the fish slowed, he stamped his feet to brake. Just as he thought their breathing had synced perfectly,

the fish vanished beyond a massive wall in an instant.

"No, what the—"

"Hoot."

"Sunbae-nim?"

Seome gripped the collar of Kwon Do-heon's shirt with her talons and gently pulled him toward her.

"……."

At last, Kwon Do-heon understood.

"Ah."

At first he'd thought some architectural structure—a ceiling support beam or a collapsed marble pillar—had blocked his view entirely. He'd assumed it was nothing more than the kind of enormous, heavy wall one might encounter in this grotesque deep sea.

'That's not what it is.'

It was moving.

The vast shadow he'd taken for a structure began to ripple grotesquely, slowly, with a sense of mass so absurd it was as if an entire continent were sinking.

'This isn't architecture—it's a living, moving—'

No—it was a transcendent being that moved as though alive despite not being alive. A mass of immense concept that, within the shallow limits of human common sense, could only be defined as a wall.

That mass extended a hand, gently. It was a colossal hand formed from the tangled faces of tens of thousands of weeping people. It was a succession of water drops, a tenacious bonding of transparent wraiths.

"Uh, uh…."

"……."

"Wait, that—"

The white fish that had looked as though it were sculpted from sunlight.

The liquid hand seized the light Kwon Do-heon had chased so desperately, caging it within its enormous grip. And in the instant before that light was extinguished, a flash seared the thing's true nature into Do-heon's field of vision.

"……."

It was the deep sea and a river and a lake, and all the water in the world. A colossal embodiment of primal resentment—something close to a natural object, in which the narratives of every drowning victim and wraith who had ever perished submerged were grotesquely condensed.

'…Wait….'

Every single water droplet was a screaming face, and the flowing currents were made of tears shed in the agony of asphyxiation. A transcendent order and a cosmic terror that no mortal could withstand reigned over that place, wearing the skin of liquid.

'Wait, this is—'

His Detection System eyes, which laid bare the truth and weaknesses of things, began to thrash wildly in a mad attempt to decode the essence of a transcendent being that a small human brain could never hope to process. The instant that torrent of catastrophic information was forcibly crammed into his mind, Kwon Do-heon's temples swelled as if to burst.

'It's not what I'm thinking—'

"Kwon Do-heon."

"Ah, ugh…."

"Kwon Do-heon!"

"Gkh…!"

Seome's voice brought his reason back for the briefest of moments, but even that was only a flash.

"Cough—uh, ngh…"

Instinct screamed within a helplessness like being pinned to the deep-sea floor and drowned. In Kwon Do-heon's whites, along the corners of his eyes, capillaries burst in a chain reaction, and dark-red blood streamed down his cheeks.

'At this rate, I'm actually going to—'

It was then.

"It is inadvisable for a guest to venture into the restricted deep-level unauthorized zone without a designated guide."

Someone seized Kwon Do-heon's crumbling shoulder with one hand and hauled him upright. Even then his legs wouldn't hold, and he collapsed to the floor, but at least his body suffered no great impact.

"Gakh, cough! Haah, hah…!"

"No matter how proper a registered guest you may be."

It was a voice so polished it was chilling—a flawless hotelier's voice, refined to an almost eerie degree. That voice erased in a single stroke the screams of the drowning dead that had been splitting his eardrums and the pressure that had been strangling his throat.

The water pooled in his lungs surged out through his mouth in a retch, and immediately after, sour, dry air rushed deep into his chest.

"BWUEEGH, cough!"

"Hoot."

Kwon Do-heon, collapsed facedown on the floor, roughly wiped at his face, a mess of tears and blood. Seome, who had swooped down from the air in a frantic descent, circled around him, unable to keep still.

"I'm fine, I'm fi—"

Having barely managed to focus his eyes, Kwon Do-heon lifted his head and looked at the figure standing before him with hands clasped together. A hotel uniform, worn without a single crease, without a single wrinkle—immaculate from head to toe.

"……."

"Hoot."

Staff…?

'The uniform's the same—like those silent staff members that follow the General Manager around.'

Before Kwon Do-heon's thought could go any further, the staff member blocking his path slowly bent at the waist toward "something." It was not merely the posture of a subordinate addressing a guest or a superior. It was an unmistakable prostration.

Presently, archaic language flowed from the staff member's lips.

"I prostrate myself and humbly beseech thee. O divine spirit of the abyss, who presides over the harmonies of this Water Court and holds sovereign governance over the fathomless currents."

A gentle yet eerily trailing, sinister intonation.

"This lowly handmaid, having newly received her commission and become a vassal of this domain, dares to implore thy compassion before thy august presence. This witless traveler, ignorant of the depths of the waterways, acted presumptuously and drew the master's wrath; yet in truth, his trespass was not born of a thieving heart."

The staff member, her uniform skirts gathered demurely in her hands, bowed her head deeper still.

"The master has already accepted into her keeping the offering she long awaited; I humbly entreat thee, by thy generous and boundless magnanimity, to look down with mercy and release this young and pitiable life that wanders thy divine domain."

The woman's plea echoed through the valleys of the deep sea.

And that "something"—no, the Water Wraith—held the fish in her grip and said nothing for a long while. An immeasurably countless multitude of gazes simply looked down, as if appraising Kwon Do-heon and the staff member.

A silence that crushed the entire space.

"……."

"……."

Presently, as if sick to death of it, the vast current heaved once, greatly.

"…Oh."

In an instant, the darkness was forcibly swept away as though lights had flicked on, and his mind snapped to clarity.

"Oh, huh?"

Kwon Do-heon blinked stupidly. The streams of blood that had soaked the corners of both eyes had vanished as if by magic, and the spine-crawling deep sea that had filled his vision was gone without a trace.

When he came to his senses, the place was the Aqua Park. Perfectly normal, peaceful, and quiet.

"……."

"Hoo."

"I, I was just looking. Just to make sure."

The only things in human form there were Kwon Do-heon and the staff member in the hotel uniform—just the two of them.

"In case something else weird showed up…."

"We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused by a temporary water-pressure regulation error within the facility, sir."

"Hurghh."

"The situation has now been safely resolved, so please rest assured."

"Uh-huh, uh."

Kwon Do-heon gulped down a dry swallow.

'Play dumb.'

He realized instinctively that, at the very least in this moment, the only way to keep his neck attached in this insane chain of events was to pretend he knew nothing at all—to act the part of an ordinary, oblivious guest.

Kwon Do-heon forced his trembling lips into a smile and put on a clumsy show of composure.

"Ah, yes, th-thank you. The facility is… truly, uh, incredibly…."

"Hoot?"

"Dynamic!"

"……."

"……."

Seome's beak clamped shut. Kwon Do-heon, too, was struck speechless by his own words. He could feel Seome's gaze from atop his head piercing him like an arrow.

'Was that really the best you could do?'

It felt as though a voice like that was ringing in his ears like a phantom.

* * *

Watching Kwon Do-heon and Seome safely escape the "Aqua Park," the General Manager said.

"All that fuss, when she was going to accept it anyway."

The vampire then added.

"Even so, offering a single candy to the primordial drowning victim was a bit much."

"What would a minor have known?"

"And still you'll claim your favoritism isn't severe, our master?"

The General Manager merely smiled at the vampire's words.

"Where is there a master here?"

"Pardon?"

"I am the General Manager."

"Yes."

Coco agreed as well.

For now.

* * *

And Kwon Do-heon would come to say this.

"That gumiho thing—I thought you said it was in Japan!"

"Huh? What?"

"The gumiho—I thought you said it was in Japan!!"

He was thoroughly outraged.

"This is why adults are the worst!!"

"What did I even do?"

It was chaos from the very morning.