The Boy’s Abyss (6)

“A favor? You, Youngwon, asking me for a favor?”

Yang Juhui made a scornful expression.
Even in this situation, is she planning to act arrogant and prickly?

This fucking insane bitch.
If only I knew where the multipurpose room was, I’d ditch her right away!

“What favor? What favor could our Youngwon possibly ask of me? Huh?”

Yang Juhui asked me with her arms crossed.
It felt like she was daring me to speak up.

“It’s not a favor I need right now. There’s something I want to ask later. I can’t tell you what it is now, but can you promise you’ll do it?”

“What are you saying? You want me to promise without even telling me what it is?”

“Promise me! It’s a bit hard to say right now. But just in case it’s needed for our escape, I might really need your help…? Like a secret weapon.”

“Haha….”

Yang Juhui laughed.

But her expression soon turned serious.

“Ha Youngwon, spending time with you here, do I seem that easy? If this was normal, you’d barely be able to make eye contact and now a favor?”

*Ring-ring. Ring-ring.*

Just then, a strange alarm went off.
Turning my head, I saw all the electronic clocks in the faculty office indicating 1 PM sharp.

1 PM…
Really?
Is it this dark at 1 PM?
As if startled by the clock sound, Yang Juhui trembled and ran her hand from her forehead to the back of her head.

“Okay. I don’t know what the favor is, but I’ll do it. I hate being in a place like this any longer.”

“Great. Then let’s get out of here.”

“Jeong Sojin said she saw a total of three ghosts. Is that true? There’s another ghost besides the Bell Woman and Head Ghost? Do you know what kind it is?”

I asked Yang Juhui about the remaining type of ghost.
But Yang Juhui shook her head as if nothing came to mind.

“No, I only saw that shaman bitch and the head. Did Jeong Sojin lie?”

Yang Juhui said she was with Jeong Sojin until the Head Ghost incident.
If Jeong Sojin had seen it, Yang Juhui should have seen it, too.

Did Jeong Sojin lie as Yang Juhui said?
Or did Jeong Sojin separately see the third ghost after they parted ways?

There was something else I was curious about.

“What about Kim Geonho? Where did Kim Geonho go?”

“Don’t even mention that bastard. He always acts like a tough guy, but as soon as he saw a ghost, he pissed his pants. Maybe he even shat himself. Ugh-.”

Yang Juhui cursed out Kim Geonho, who had grabbed Jeong Sojin’s hand and ran away.

As far as I know, Kim Geonho liked Yang Juhui.
No, rather than liking her… he lusted after her.
Lust and affection are two different things, after all.

But Yang Juhui never really liked Kim Geonho in the first place, and it seemed she was completely disgusted by him now.

Anyway, Kim Geonho’s location couldn’t be determined.
It seemed he was somewhere in this corridor, but where or how he was hiding was unclear.
As we walked for a while, I was able to solve two mysteries at once.
First was the location of the multipurpose room.

“It’s the multipurpose room! Youngwon, it’s the multipurpose room!”

Yang Juhui was overjoyed.
The words “Multipurpose Room” must have seemed like an oasis in the desert.

However, I couldn’t be completely happy because there was a large bloodstain splattered in front of the multipurpose room.
Shoes were also scattered around. The Balenciaga shoes Kim Geonho always wore.

No, looking closely, there were other things besides the shoes.
If you put those together well, wouldn’t it complete a puzzle of one person?

“This….”

Yang Juhui tried to say something to me but stopped.
As if trying to ignore the rancid smell of blood, she turned her gaze and examined the lock sealing the multipurpose room entrance.
Looking closely, there were marks of something striking down on the lock.

“When he tried to break the lock, it must have made a loud noise. Maybe something heard that sound and came. That’s probably how this happened.”

“That bell bitch? That shaman bitch!”

Did the Bell Woman do this?
Do people end up like this if they’re caught by the Bell Woman?

No.
I didn’t think that was the case.

“The Bell Woman’s bell rings loudly from far away, so there’s no way Kim Geonho wouldn’t have noticed. It rings as if deliberately telling you to hear it and run away.”

“That’s true. But there’s something bothering me.”

“What?”

“Youngwon, you seem strangely calm in a weird way, unlike in the classroom? Your head is working well, too. This isn’t your usual character, right? …Could you be a ghost?”

…Did I seem too calm?
I was trying to focus on surviving this somehow while suppressing my fear.
Thinking it would be annoying to arouse unnecessary suspicion, Yang Juhui said,

“Should this unnie touch your willy to check if it’s really you?”

“Eek, don’t!”

“What, it really is you, Youngwon. Well, let’s say Kim Geonho died here. Honestly, I just think he got what he deserved. If not the bell woman, maybe the head ghost did it?”

No, I didn’t think it was the head ghost, either.
I saw right in front of me how a person dies when caught by the head ghost.
The head ghost doesn’t have the physical strength to hack a person to pieces.

After considering various circumstances, there was only one conclusion.
There is “something” in this nightmare corridor that is different from the Bell Woman or Head Ghost-.
Something so terrifying that even Kim Geonho’s physique couldn’t run away from—

“The third ghost Jeong Sojin mentioned…?”

When I reached that thought, I got uncanny goosebumps.
Yang Juhui frantically tapped my arm.

“Hey, open it quickly. Quick. Open the multipurpose room quickly! Quick! Quick! Quick! Quiiick!”

*Click.*

As I inserted the key, the lock opened, and the door creaked open.
Just as someone’s breathing, I couldn’t tell whose, quickened from tension and anticipation.

“Huh…?”

Someone made a dumbfounded sound.
It was from Yang Juhui’s side.

“Where’s the multipurpose room…? Multipurpose room… where is the multipurpose room….”

Yang Juhui seemed to be dizzy, as if the corridor that appeared when we opened the door confused her.
As I just explained, what appeared when we opened the multipurpose room door wasn’t the multipurpose room but another “corridor.”
Shining the lantern we got from the faculty office, I saw 1-4 written on a nearby classroom.

“Aaaargh! Aaaah! It’s the same damn corridor!”

Yang Juhui sat on the floor as if she’d lost her mind and spewed curses.
When the “hope” you believed in shatters, people break down like this.

In a way, it may have been a foregone conclusion.
There was actually no confirmation anywhere that the “multipurpose room” was the exit.

“Fuck!”

The problem was that Yang Juhui was cursing like crazy and making a lot of noise in despair. It was easy to imagine what kind of end we’d meet if we stayed like this.

“Hey! Yang Juhui! Get it together! The exit might be beyond here! Even if it looks the same, it could actually be a different corridor!”

“Is it because of me…? Because I… didn’t listen to Mom….”

Yang Juhui seemed beyond recovery.
Of course, she’d be in despair, unable to escape this terrible corridor.
Maybe it was just my mood, but I thought I heard a *jingle-jingle* bell sound from far away.

I pondered whether I should leave Yang Juhui here.
But I absolutely needed Yang Juhui to escape.
The moment I grasped the true nature of this corridor, I was certain of that, so I couldn’t give up on Yang Juhui.

“Hey. Yang Juhui. Pull yourself together, I said!”

*Slap!*

I squatted down and slapped Yang Juhui’s cheek hard.

“Ah─”

Yang Juhui seemed surprised by the unexpected shock.
She had a dumbfounded look as if she never imagined I would hit her cheek.
That dumbfounded expression soon changed to anger as she lunged at me as if to attack.

“Yaaah!!!”

She was like a tiger.
It was as if she knew I was the one who threw her into this nightmare corridor as a player and pounced on me. But that can’t be.
She’s just in despair.

But I was different.
I hadn’t given up yet.
Rather, grasping the multipurpose room situation gave me a clue to escape and made me feel courageous. But Yang Juhui fought surprisingly well, and I got beat up almost one-sidedly.

Ah, fuck that hurts!
You just hit my solar plexus and bones!
At this rate, I’ll get beaten to death!

“Hey! Wait! Hold on! Ack! We can escape this corridor! I thought about it, and it’s actually a simple trick! We can get out of here! But first, let’s get out of here!”

I picked up the struggling Yang Juhui and went into classroom 1-4.
And I said,

“Listen carefully. This is all fake.”

“…What? What do you mean?”

“This whole place is a dream! First of all, time itself is all jumbled up here!”

Time flows differently in dreams and reality.
In reality, it may be brief, but in dreams, you can spend years.
The vague hint was that Yang Juhui, who had gone missing the previous day, had spent two days here.
There was even more evidence.

“Status Window.”

Taking advantage of Yang Juhui’s dumbfounded state, I called up the status window.

My funds were 0 points.
For reference, I received 1 point every 12 o’clock and used 100 points yesterday afternoon to open the shop, then gained 1 point at midnight that day.
I used the 1 point I got at midnight to call for advice about this “Nightmare Corridor.”
So my funds were 0.

But on the clocks I saw in the faculty office, the time had already well passed 12 PM.
If it was really past 12 PM, it would be normal for points to have been added to my status window.

“The corridor endlessly repeating is the same. When a person dreams, their spatial awareness ability decreases. That’s natural since some brain functions stop. It feels like the same space is repeating. Haven’t you seen the movie Inception?”

Above all, I had a decisive clue.

This place is the “Nightmare Corridor”.
What is a nightmare?
A bad dream.
In other words, this place itself was blatantly telling us from the beginning that it was a dream.

In other words…
There’s a high probability that I’m sprawled asleep in my room, and it’s not even morning yet!

“This is all a dream!”

“What? Da…mn… Yeah. A dream… If it’s really a dream like you said, what should we do? Should we just die…?”

“No, I think it’s best to put that on hold for now since we don’t know.”

Generally, many people wake up from a nightmare when they die in the dream.
But I didn’t know how death in this nightmare corridor would reflect in reality.

Honestly, I don’t want to die.
It’s really fucking scary.

“But I know for sure how to wake up from a dream. I have a talent for desperately coming to my senses and waking up when I feel like I’m about to have a wet dream.”

“What…!?”

“Wet dreams. Sometimes, men unknowingly have wet dreams when they have erotic dreams. I have a talent for waking up before ejaculating to stop it. It might sound like bullshit, but I seriously bet my life on it. If this is a lie, I’ll lick your feet.”

“…What…”

Yang Juhui’s expression changed erratically.

*Jingle, jingle*.

“Whereareyouwherewhereareyouwherecan’tseeyoucan’tseewithmyeyeswhereareyoucan’tbeheregottogetoutwhereareyouwhere.”

The sound of the Bell Woman wandering around could be heard from outside.
But I couldn’t care less about the Bell Woman.

“I actually tried having a wet dream alone. But given the situation, it wasn’t really working. I think I need some stimulation. When it comes to stimulation, it could be visual, tactile, or auditory….”

“So what do you want me to do…!”

Yang Juhui shouted as if pushing away her impatience.

I was serious.

“…Hmm, perhaps you could start by removing your shirt?”

“Wow……”