Escaping the Mystery Hotel

User: Han Kain (Wisdom)

Date: Day 94

Current Location: Frozen Hell – Room of Resurrection

Sage’s Advice: 0

- Han Kain

After listening to the drone’s suggestion, we returned to the second floor.

But first, we briefly checked on the prayer team that had returned to the first floor.

They had gone through an ordeal even harsher than ours.

Everyone except for Jinchul-hyung was resting in Room 105.

Fortunately, according to the Status Window, everyone was alive, so there was no need for major concern.

After all, Room 105 was known for bringing people back from even the worst injuries.

As long as they were inside, they’d recover.

So, we decided to focus on exploring the second floor.

Time passed without end.

Kim Ahri: Found anything?Kim Mooksung: It’s cold.

We found nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

This wasn’t our first time searching the second floor, either.

Eunsol-noona, with her powerful vision from the One-Eyed Bird, had already helped scour the area, barely managing to find the Frozen Hell.

We couldn’t expect to stumble upon something new just by randomly searching again.

Most sections that might become special rooms after completion were just empty ice fields for now, and even the vicinity of Room 201, the only completed area, held no secrets.

The Frozen Hell was the only significant discovery.

Even after searching outside the Frozen Hell, all we found was snow and ice.

At some point, Grandpa was so desperate he started digging through the snow, muttering about finding some ten-thousand-year-old mythical ginseng, but it was all in vain.

Our search was only sustainable thanks to the occasional breaks we took inside the Frozen Hell, which blocked the freezing winds.

Without the proper protection I had from the Protective Suit, no one else could’ve lasted this long outside.

As evening approached, and with nothing to show for our efforts, we returned to the Frozen Hell to rest.

Ahri, who had gone back by herself earlier, sighed deeply and offered us all hot coffee.

“Here, everyone. Have a cup. No one found anything, did they?”

“Nope… But was there ever a chance we’d find something?”

“I was thinking the same thing. If there was something for us to find, Eunsol, with her transcendent vision, would’ve discovered it already. It’s like we’re trying to find something with our bare eyes that even a superpowered telescope couldn’t detect.”

“What about you, Grandpa? Did you find that ginseng you were looking for?”

“…”

“Mooksung, you didn’t secretly eat it all, did you?”

Grandpa’s response to Ahri’s bad joke was a deep sigh, “Why is this place still freezing? Isn’t the ‘setting’ of his damn Hotel completely arbitrary? The cold was supposed to be from the resentment of the souls trapped in hell, right?”

“Right.”

“But here we are, standing in a warm room connected to that very hell, while snow continues falling from the sky. And this second floor doesn’t even have a ceiling! Will that appear after the repairs?”

“Yeah… Now that you mention it, it seems like the logic’s pretty broken. The snow keeps falling regardless of the hell, and the area near the source of the cold is the warmest spot.”

While Ahri and Grandpa were griping about the Hotel’s inconsistent “setting”, I started to get a strange feeling.

The Hotel had always been unpredictable, so it wasn’t worth getting hung up on that.

After all, in a normal hotel, the idea of calling guests into an unfinished area would never happen.

We were in the middle of a quest-like game tied to the Hotel’s internal structure.

The inconsistencies in the setting weren’t as important as the actual situation.

Is this chaos intentional?

Could it be a trap to hide something?

The Hotel’s setting was clearly fabricated, but what if the real reason for the cold on the second floor had nothing to do with the Frozen Hell?

What if the truth was simply that the snowstorm was coming from outside?

“…!”

- Thud!

“Kain? What is it?”

“The snowstorm.”

“Huh?”

“How is there a snowstorm?”

“What are you talking about—“

“Outside the first floor’s main entrance was nothing but sky. The clouds were far below us! It’s hard to say where we are exactly, but considering we’re far above the clouds, the Hotel is clearly in the upper atmosphere, right?”

“Uh… probably?”

“The Hotel is above the clouds, but snow forms in the clouds. How can there be a snowstorm above the clouds, even if the second floor doesn’t have a ceiling?”

Both Ahri and Grandpa gaped, and all eyes turned toward the sky.

I recalled the “mountain-like” object Eunsol-noona had spotted beyond the ceiling during our first exploration.

I also remembered that Grandpa and I couldn’t communicate via the Chat Window when he was on the first floor and I was on the second.

Why was that?

We had already confirmed the range of the Chat Window in previous events, and it was surprisingly large. A simple change in floors shouldn’t have disrupted it.

“Noona said she saw something that looked like a mountain beyond the ceiling, right? The second floor isn’t located directly above the first. Maybe—just maybe—“

The second floor is actually on the ground.

***At around 5:30 PM, we went down to the first floor and called for Jinchul-hyung again. Surprisingly, Grandpa, who usually wasn’t one for apologies, said sorry to Junchul-hyung.

“Sorry to disturb your rest. But things are a bit urgent right now…”

Jinchul-hyung chuckled at Grandpa’s uncharacteristic attitude.

“What’s this? Since when do you apologize? Just tell me what’s going on.”

I explained the hints we’d gotten from the Owl and the drone, how the snowstorm couldn’t logically exist on the second floor if it was above the clouds, and that we wanted to break through the walls to get outside and investigate.

“Wow! We’ve been to the second floor so many times, and we knew it had no ceiling, but it never crossed our minds to break through the walls and go outside. I guess we assumed we’d just fall to our deaths since the Hotel is in the sky.”

“We thought the same. Since the first floor is in the sky, we just assumed the whole Hotel was. But now, it looks like the second floor might be in a different place altogether.”

“So, how are we going to get outside? Are we really going to break the walls? Come to think of it, Kain, haven’t you already broken parts of the Hotel?”

“Yeah. The Hotel’s durability is about what you’d expect from a regular building. Breaking through the walls should be doable.”

Of course, it wasn’t as if I could break the walls with my bare hands.

But there was one person among us who could.

***Once we got back to the second floor, things moved quickly. Even though Jinchul-hyung had been weakened by his time spent praying, he was still more than strong enough for the task.

He initially considered using the power of the Star Fragment of Another World to break through the walls, but after considering our safety and his own limitations, he decided to rely on the method he had used during The Cube.

- Boom! Boom! Crash!

Ahri let out a small laugh of amazement.n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

“Even after seeing it again, I’m still impressed. I wonder if the Hotel staff ever expected someone to use the Protective Suits as indestructible hammers!”

Her comment piqued my curiosity.

“Did anything like this happen in your first Hotel experience?”

“No. Now that I think about it, the second floor might have been in a different place back then too, but no one realized it. Everyone just assumed it was underwater, and no one thought to break through the walls.”

It hit me then how hard it was to realize that the first and second floors could exist in separate physical spaces.

It was something that would never happen in a normal building.

The first floor’s transparent glass doors allowed us to see that we were high above the clouds, leading us to assume the entire Hotel shared that location.

Ahri’s first team likely thought the whole Hotel was underwater, just like we thought it was in the sky.

In hindsight, there had been plenty of clues all along.

Firstly, Eunsol-noona spotted something resembling a mountain beyond the ceiling, but it was rare for a mountain to be so high up that it was above the clouds. Even then, finding a mountain that we could look up to from a Hotel that was located above the cloud was practically impossible.

Secondly, the first floor was above the clouds, but snow, which formed in clouds, was falling on the second floor.

Thirdly, the usual distance between floors in a building was no more than 10 meters. Such a small distance wouldn’t block the Chat Window.

And lastly, the second floor was much wider than the first.

All these clues pointed to the fact that the second floor wasn’t physically connected to the first but rather was a separate space altogether.

“We were fooled by the fact that we moved between the floors using an elevator.”

“We just assumed it went up, like in a normal building.”

“Maybe that’s why the Owl forced us to notice the different repair times?”

Ahri nodded.

“If the repairs had finished and the ceiling had appeared, we’d never have figured it out. We wouldn’t have been able to see the ‘mountain’ or the falling snow anymore.”

“What do you think is outside the second floor?”

“I don’t know… but I hope it’s not more monsters. Also…”

“Also?”

“I don’t want to be a buzzkill, but I doubt this is how we’ll escape the Hotel. It’s just a hunch, though.”

- Boom! Crash!

A thunderous sound echoed as the wall came crashing down.

Jinchul-hyung had finally broken through the Hotel’s outer walls, creating an opening to the outside.

The world outside looked much like the second floor itself—snowy and freezing, with fierce winds that made it hard to see.

But there was ground.

We all stood there, jaws dropped, feeling a strange sense of awe as we cautiously stepped onto the solid ground beyond the Hotel walls.

On Day 94 of our journey into the Pioneer Hotel, we had finally reached the world outside.