Chapter 104

Our Hotel Is Open for Business as Usual

"The hand-kiss originates from proskynesis."

"Yes?"

"An act of reverence toward gods and men. It was a ritual expressing submission by kissing the ground, which then spread from the gesture of kissing a monarch's or clergyman's ring as a sign of loyalty and obedience...."

Lee Yeon-woo lightly waved his gloved hand.

"Eventually it was modified into the form of kissing the back of the hand."

"Oh."

"You could say it's primarily a European custom."

"Oh."

"Still not in the mood for learning, I see."

He didn't seem to notice that the reactions were amusing enough to make him keep talking.

"......? Betrayal. Betrayal."

"A misunderstanding."

He gave the squishy body on his shoulder a gentle pat.

Staff in the corridor passed by with silent nods, and the context of their behavior felt similar to the Monster Guests' earlier conduct.

Watching them, Lee Yeon-woo continued.

"In the 17th century, it was an act expressing loyalty, submission, and hierarchical order. Afterward, it became a symbol of respect, chivalry, and manners. In the modern era, it's a gesture scarcely used...."

This impromptu history lesson wasn't merely to tease Coco.

"Which is why it makes me uncomfortable."

"Yes?"

"You'll need to know as much background as I do to empathize with me, won't you?"

"Yesn't?"

"I was asking for empathy."

"Coco. Empathy."

A satisfactory response.

"I'm a modern person, am I not?"

"Yes? Yes."

"To receive from a Monster Guest a gesture I've never even received from a human. And the fact that it wasn't just one of them makes my feelings all the more peculiar. What made them act that way?"

"Eee?"

"I'm not pleased at all. I do enjoy being treated well or receiving goodwill, but even so—this is a bit... beyond my sensibilities."

It wasn't as though he'd lived in that cultural sphere.

"The scene was also quite suspect."

"No?"

"Only from your perspective, Coco."

When Lee Yeon-woo had just stepped out of the elevator and received that inexplicable welcome, he could barely bring himself to look at the students for long. The thought of how flustered they must have been was too vivid.

'I was worried their guard would shoot up even higher because of that.'

Lee Yeon-woo traced his lip.

"...That it actually dropped further was truly unexpected. Their suspicion toward me seems to have grown, but separately, I sensed a faint trust that wasn't there before."

Suspicion and trust. He wasn't sure those two words could increase in proportion simultaneously. But from what Lee Yeon-woo could see, the students regarded him with more suspicion yet had also loosened up, just a little.

'As if deliberating whether to rely on me....'

The injuries?

'Could it really be the effect of getting hurt?'

"Ye...sn't?"

"If the effect is truly that pronounced, I may have to get hurt a few more times."

"Eee?"

"What a hypothesis needs at this stage is, of course, experimentation. Repeated experimentation."

"No?"

"Don't reject the universal process of research simply because you dislike the conclusion."

At any rate, setting everything else aside.

"......"

Behind glasses he hadn't worn in a while, Lee Yeon-woo rolled his eyes.

"If I had to guess, there are two possibilities. The first is...."

"External Observation Level."

"Got it in one."

He suspected the Meta-Cognition Guest—whose face they probably hadn't even seen this cycle—had played a significant role. As confirmed in the Hunting Grounds, the External Observation Level had risen from 4 to 5.

And in this game, Hoone, 'External Observation Level' meant 'Hotel Reputation.'

"The hotel's reputation has risen, so perhaps as its co-owner, I've gained value worth respecting."

But.

"This one's still uncertain."

"Yes? Yes."

"It's likely to have influenced their attitude toward me, but I find it hard to believe it's the decisive factor."

"Yes."

"There were no system-level elements related to it either, and realistically, the timing is too abrupt. It's possible the impact changes at intervals of five, but there's no evidence."

"Yes."

"Then only one thing remains."

He looked at the staff.

As always, their attire was immaculate. Not a single wrinkle, footsteps nearly silent. Restraint in action, movements flowing smooth as a river.

And then, their eyes met.

"......"

Awe and fervor.

Absolute conviction and relief.

Obsession and dependence.

Distorted love and intoxication.

"...Hmm...."

Lee Yeon-woo's eyes narrowed slowly.

"There is, indeed, some resemblance."

"Yes."

"So it wasn't my imagination."

The second possibility he'd considered.

"It was this hotel all along."

The Monster Guests' sudden 'reverence' seemed attributable to Lee Yeon-woo's assimilation with the central control authority.

"That was certainly an effect that didn't exist in the game."

"Yes."

"Thanks to that, the Monster Guests' behavior has become even harder to predict."

"Yes."

Solve one problem, and another springs up.

"Nothing's ever easy."

***

Rewinding time a little... quite a lot, actually.

"......"

The 14th Floor Central Control Room, just before he turned off the Maintenance Function and descended to Sub-Level 7.

"...Must've lost my mind."

Lee Yeon-woo sprawled out like three-year-old laundry and muttered.

"I can't believe it took this long."

"Yes."

"Would you kindly get off my face?"

"No."

"A shame."

It weighed almost nothing, so it wasn't terribly uncomfortable. Kindly, it left his airways clear. But the sensation of a slime draped across his forehead and eyelids was profoundly strange.

Lee Yeon-woo wedged his hand under Coco's flank and lifted.

"......"

"......"

Their eyes met.

Unable to push it far, Lee Yeon-woo set Coco down on his chest. Because of Lee Yeon-woo's awkwardly slouched posture, Coco slid right down and landed on his thigh.

Coco looked up at Lee Yeon-woo. Lee Yeon-woo declined roundaboutly.

"I do have something called human rights."

"Yes?"

"When you express doubt at that, how exactly am I supposed to react?"

Then again, he was someone erased from the world. His resident registration number might well have been deleted too, so legally guaranteeing his rights could be somewhat difficult.

'The project I spent eight months on wasn't exactly one that took human rights into heavy consideration to begin with.'

Not figuratively—quite literally, his entire body had been in tatters.

"But the results are clear."

"Yes."

"I'm free of that wretched emotional disorder."

"Yes."

Given how surreal the problem was, it had taken some time to identify its form and origin. He had improved The Guest Without Taste's penalty—the emotional accumulation disorder.

For the time being.

"It's a shame the improvement isn't complete."

"Yes...."

Coco answered glumly. As its reaction suggested, Lee Yeon-woo's emotional accumulation disorder hadn't been fully resolved.

'And....'

He frowned.

"No matter how I think about it, the big data being damaged this severely must have a cause beyond The Guest Without Taste."

"Yes? Yes."

He had his suspicions.

"There were conspicuously many memory inconsistencies during the pursuit with that person."

"Yes. Yes. Yes."

"So it was her after all."

Name: 『Lover of Dawn.』

White from head to toe save for the eyes. A phantom of love eternal that could never exist, and lastly... a Monster Guest who obsessed over the memories of the living.

It was unmistakably her. Lee Yeon-woo flicked through the control room screens.

"CCTV records show this guest appearing as far back as the tutorial, but the records indicate she only formally applied for hotel lodging quite recently."

"GWT."

"You still use that abbreviation.... Yes, around that time."

Lee Yeon-woo scrolled through the interface and reviewed the Memory Cards he'd collected regarding The Guest Without Taste.

"No wonder there were cards I couldn't remember."

"Yes...!"

Coco's reaction was intense.

At the time, opportunities to serve The Guest Without Taste a 'meal' had been few. So the past Lee Yeon-woo must have reasoned that the most 'essential human sensation' related to him needed to be stimulated.

But the existing Hoone Memory Cards alone couldn't read that, and so....

"In the end, I must have approached the Lover of Dawn to win him over. Needing a card containing his core memories, I sought to borrow this Monster Guest's systemic rules."

"Correct!"

"And I probably gave the Lover of Dawn the memories she wanted in exchange for a temporary... yes, a verbal agreement at most. No matter how I look, there's no trace of a contract beyond the one with The Drenched One."

Of course, had it worked, The Drenched One wouldn't have sat still.

"She's been here since the tutorial and I never noticed any wrongness—just how much of my memory did she rummage through? She wouldn't have approached me at all before The Guest Without Taste."

Having periodically reviewed the hotel's records, the past Lee Yeon-woo would have at least known 'there are anomalies in my memory—likely the Lover of Dawn's doing.'

And yet he'd ignored it all this time.

"Hello."

"I have no excuse."

Lee Yeon-woo reflected on behalf of his past selves as well.

"It seems I judged there was no significant harm."

Checking now, she'd even been present when Director Lee Seon-hae and writer Hong Gyeong-yeon visited. There was even footage of her sitting in the same lobby—a blunder born of Lee Yeon-woo's arrogance.

"She'd been an uninvited guest who never formally registered but merely wandered the interior... so she'd been fairly docile until now."

"Docile?"

"Wasn't she?"

After all, the in-game Lover of Dawn hadn't been a difficult guest to handle. If the hotel's rules still fully applied now that it was reality, she would have been comparatively easy to manage.

Coco, who had been quietly listening, sprang to all fours.

"No?"

"Then it means no one has been harmed besides me."

"Yes."

"Yes."

Communication with this cat professor was growing smoother by the day. At this point, understanding what it was trying to say wasn't difficult.

Lee Yeon-woo continued.

"Whether the Lover of Dawn broke hotel rules as an unauthorized intruder or ate away at my memories wouldn't have mattered much. Compared to what she could provide, that seemed like a cheap price."

"Yes."

"But now that this has become reality, beyond the game's rules she went off on her own doing who-knows-what, and this problem arose. Am I correct?"

"Yes."

"A shame."

Presumably, the many 'past Lee Yeon-woos' who'd noticed the wrongness had all judged 'whatever she's doing, leave her be and use her as needed.'

"Come to think of it, Coco, you showed puzzlement several times during the pursuit on the 14th Floor. At the time I took it as protest against my foolish actions."

"No."

"By that logic, this is a disaster I brought upon myself."

"Eee."

"Don't be too sad, Coco."

Lee Yeon-woo patted Coco.

"Things did get a bit tangled, but...."

As if to remind him that his body was still dominated by the system, it was 'impossible' to fully eliminate a Monster Guest's penalty through non-in-game methods.

Even if it had originated from a verbal agreement.

'I must be insane.'

He couldn't understand why something he was trying to fix wouldn't be fixed.

'Is it saying it doesn't want to shed its identity as a game?'

"Yesn'o?"

"I've already accepted that you don't know either, Coco."

Coco's stance on The Guest Without Taste's penalty was negative. If it had known a solution, it would have shared it within those eight months. That it hadn't meant it was indeed the hotel's—or the system's—problem.

So Lee Yeon-woo had to compromise. He'd installed an on-off function.

"I suppose this is what 'a blessing in disguise' means."

Thanks to Velmareth's properties, every drop of Lee Yeon-woo's blood carried its own selfhood. That had been instrumental in his ability to split his 'identity' in two.

'I've tentatively separated General Manager and Lee Yeon-woo, but....'

Lee Yeon-woo looked at the interface, which was oddly crackling with static.

"...Can nothing be done about this?"

"Yesn'o?"

"I think I'll need to research further."

"No."

"You must have been terribly bored."

"Yes."

"I see."

Having focused solely on 'Physical Improvement,' the work conducted through non-game methods had affected the interface as well. It felt like looking at a prototype with wires jutting out at odd angles.

As a result, the once-clean interface had taken on a slightly eerie appearance. But looks aside, functionality was intact. Lee Yeon-woo stared at the [Version: Lee Yeon-woo] floating there.

"......"

...The 'Lee Yeon-woo' referenced here was a kind of update file.

'A patch, perhaps.'

He'd overlaid a file called 'Lee Yeon-woo' on top of the base file, 'General Manager.' But during this process, something had caught Lee Yeon-woo's attention.

"It was always a buggy game."

"Yes."

"Did you know? In quite a few games, a technique called 'map clipping' is used. Also known as wallclip or clipping—in short, finding gaps in insufficiently polished terrain to make progression easier."

"Yes? Yes."

"As I understand it, the character's collision detection fails to function properly, allowing them to phase into walls or object interiors. Hoone had no shortage of such bugs...."

Lee Yeon-woo continued, looking tired.

"Whether it's a side effect of synchronizing with the Central Control Room authority, or a defect born from modifying it—those bugs have appeared throughout our hotel."

Coco then said.

"GWT."

"So he's partly to blame?"

"Yes. Rude guest."

"Absolutely right."

After all, during the final pursuit, The Guest Without Taste had bulldozed his way through to the 14th Floor. The damage to the system from that incident seemed to have manifested.

"But it might be usable...."

"Yes? Impossible."

"Of course, the recoil from data collisions is expected to be severe. Attempting it recklessly without calculation, or using it multiple times simultaneously, could be... somewhat problematic."

"Hello."

"Yes, but in an urgent, split-second situation, it could prove invaluable."

A kind of cheat.

"But it's not the only bug that's appeared this time, so who knows. This place truly has a talent for wearing people down."

"Who?"

"That's what I'd like to know."

Right—who was it that trapped him here? Lee Yeon-woo was dying to know.

"Bugs are appearing left and right, and it's not as though I've been able to fully resolve the penalties either. It would've been nice to smooth out the water-affinity contract with The Drenched One."

"Yesn't."

"What mindset is behind that, I wonder?"

Lee Yeon-woo stroked his chin.

"Still, it would've been better if it could've been fixed."

"Eee."

"The hotel system's coercive power is clearly quite substantial."

The emotional disorder was something he could trace from 'is there a problem with the brain?' and work upward. But the lungs suddenly filling with water, or the body being conditionally dominated without any trauma—that had no answer.

They said you could make answers, but only when you had a proper foundation and materials. In the end, what Lee Yeon-woo had gained from this update was the 'on-off function' and....

"...Hah...."

...an ambiguously improved body.

"I'll need to make appropriate choices depending on the situation."

"Hello?"

"Exactly—in the 'Lee Yeon-woo' version, not only the penalties but even the invincibility state becomes conditional...."

And it hadn't even fully settled in yet. Prototypes were always like that. A bit inconvenient, but for now, he had no choice but to work with this function.

"But what's certain is that I've grown closer to the hotel than before."

"No!"

"I see. I can phrase it more precisely."

Lee Yeon-woo rubbed his tired eyelids. With the 'Physical Improvement' at least partially successful, there shouldn't be any physical abnormalities. But perhaps from old human habit, his eyes felt dry.

"Perhaps I should say we've become one."

It was a truly strange feeling.

"Beyond the functions the game provides."

"Yes!"

"It's gratifying that at least one being is happy about my achievement. I feel one step further from human rights, but if this is the best option right now, I suppose I should be happy too."

"Yes!"

"How resolute."

"Hehe."

Apparently quite bored, Lee Yeon-woo looked at No. 14, sprawled out haphazardly.

"Come here."

"......?"

"As I mentioned, the interior renovation has been successfully completed."

"......!"

No. 14, seemingly delighted, immediately climbed onto Lee Yeon-woo's hand.

Watching No. 14, Lee Yeon-woo carefully closed his hand. So the small life on his palm wouldn't be startled. As though cradling a newly hatched fledgling.

And then....

"......"

He absorbed it.

Though he hadn't 'swallowed' it by mouth, a taste of blood lingered on his tongue. Out of habit, Lee Yeon-woo licked his lips, assessed the state of himself and No. 14, and said.

"No abnormalities."

"Yes."

"Excellent."

He had finally succeeded in 'blood absorption' through contact, beyond oral ingestion.

"In some respects, it's a shame."

Had this made him even less human?

'I suppose I haven't been for quite some time.'

But whatever one said, this was something Lee Yeon-woo had to do. Simultaneously, something he could do. And so he'd simply done it.

It was a very simple principle. So he was allowed to set down this weight, just a little.

"Haah...."

Lee Yeon-woo rose from his seat.

"Shall we step out of this frozen time, Coco?"

"Yes!"

And so Lee Yeon-woo left the Central Control Room.

...And at the staff's reaction, he'd hastened down to Sub-Level 7.

***

"......"

The Drenched One, having just stepped out of the elevator, tilted her head.

"......"

A noticeably calmer atmosphere.

'...He must have tidied things up the moment he arrived.'

She met the gazes of various ghosts. Among them were looks of fear, mere indifference, and even competitive curiosity.

But they were all cold. Sharp and pointed, nothing more. No matter how vast or deep any of them seemed, could they compare to The Drenched One? They were of no use to her.

Absolutely none.

"......"

Her eyes tracked a very, very faint and dim warmth.

"...—."

Friend.

My friend.

My warm, gentle friend.

"...Hmmm...."

He'd promised her sweet snacks.

Her heart fluttered at the thought of tormenting that modest friendship, and The Drenched One couldn't help but smile. The ghosts' gazes grew heavier at her laughter, but that wasn't her concern.

Her soaking-wet footsteps headed toward the Aqua Park.

'I like it.'

Her new home—just as pleasing as the sweetest of snacks.