Floor 2 - Mansion (4)

**

Lee Sa-hyuk stood before me.
My first reaction was confusion.

‘Why is this guy here?’

I recalled what had happened that morning.
The short conversation between him and Han Gyeong-ah in the restaurant.

-“Nothing happened overnight?”
-“No.”
-“We’re going up to Floor 2 today too, like the others.”
-“Okay.”
-“Would you like to come with us?”
-“No.”

And that had been the end of it. Despite Gyeong-ah’s repeated attempts to persuade him, Lee Sa-hyuk had firmly refused.
Because he couldn’t be bothered.
He’d stayed on Floor 1 while everyone else went upstairs. His individualistic streak stood out more than anything.
I’d assumed he’d stay at the hotel instead of coming up here.

‘So why the hell is he in the Mansion?’

Had he changed his mind for some reason? Questions swirled through my head.
The man himself looked completely unconcerned.

“…”

Lee Sa-hyuk stared at me with dull, exhausted eyes.
Then he casually tossed out a single question.

“Got any cigarettes?”

I was speechless.
Of all the things to ask in a situation like this, that was what he went with.

“…Nope.”
“Okay.”

And just like that, the conversation ended. He turned away without another thought, and a dumbfounded Kang Se-rim cut in.

“Why are you here, old man?”
“That…”

Lee Sa-hyuk trailed off.
Instead of answering, he looked at Gyeong-ah beside him.

“Ask the young lady.”
“What? Me?!”

Was even explaining himself too much effort, so he was dumping it on someone else?
At this point, I almost had to admire him.

“Gyeong-ah, what happened while we were separated?”
“W-Well, actually…”

She hesitated awkwardly, her face turning red.
According to her explanation, the very first thing Gyeong-ah did after coming to was…

“…You hid in a closet?”
“Don’t make fun of me!!”

I wasn’t.
I’d only repeated what she said, but she reacted like someone with a guilty conscience.

“I suddenly found myself in this weird place, and neither you nor Se-rim was around, and I kept hearing strange noises…”

My prediction had been right on the mark.
Left alone, Han Gyeong-ah had hidden in a closet.
Because she was alone and scared.

“And then?”
“Sa-hyuk found me.”

So that was what happened.
She’d happened to run into Lee Sa-hyuk, and the two of them had explored the Mansion together until they found us.
That explained most of it. I still had no idea why Lee Sa-hyuk was on Floor 2, though.

“He ran out of cigarettes.”
“Cigarettes?”
“Yes… Apparently there weren’t any spare cigarettes in the hotel.”

The reason was even more ridiculous than I’d imagined. Was that why he’d just asked me if I had any?
I looked at Lee Sa-hyuk to see if she was serious. He didn’t even glance my way.

“What? Got a problem?”
“…No.”

Apparently she was serious.
Come to think of it, Lee Sa-hyuk was a serious chain-smoker. We’d first met him in the Smoking Room on Floor 1.
I could practically reconstruct what had happened.

‘Did he finish breakfast, try to have a cigarette, realize he’d run out, then keep searching until he wound up on Floor 2?’

It was an absurdly personal reason. Kang Se-rim didn’t hold back.

“Old man, I told you to quit smoking. You trying to get cancer and die?”
“Mind your own business.”
“Tsk, tsk…”

In any case, the four of us who’d been scattered across the Mansion had finally reunited.

“I’m glad everyone’s safe…”

But we couldn’t simply relax. We were still trapped inside an unknown Mansion.

“Do you know where we are?”
“Not at all… I’m still confused! It feels like reality isn’t the reality I know anymore…”

Gyeong-ah was visibly flustered. I told her that this was Floor 2.
She jumped in surprise.

“You’re serious, right?! If you’re joking around even in a place like this, I’m going to be angry…!”
“I’m not joking. It’s true. Why would I lie about this?”

She still looked skeptical, but seemed to accept it to some extent.
It was about time she started getting used to this.
Experience shaped a person, after all.
After so many impossible things kept happening, even she was beginning to accept them as reality.

“Oh my God… Then what are we supposed to do now?!”
“We probably need to escape the Mansion. If we get outside, we should be able to return to Floor 1.”

There was one problem.

“I found the entrance, but the front door was locked.”
“Oh no…”

Her shoulders trembled as she reacted with genuine dismay.
She was so innocently expressive that it made me want to tease her.

“Gyeong-ah, speaking of which, have you seen anything like a key?”
“No… I haven’t found any keys.”

Han Gyeong-ah shook her head regretfully. Then her expression suddenly brightened as if she’d remembered something, and she rummaged through her pocket.

“I didn’t find a key, but I found this! Do you think it might be an important clue…?”

She handed me a scrap of paper.

‘A diary?’

It was part of a torn page, crumpled and badly damaged.
There wasn’t much left to read.

The passages before and after had been torn away. Only this fragment remained.

“Hmm…”
“Do you know what it means?”
“Not really.”
“I see…”

Gyeong-ah seemed deflated that the clue she’d worked so hard to find hadn’t been much help.
Seeing that, I tried to cheer her up.

“Don’t get too discouraged. Let’s finish what we were doing first.”
“What we were doing…?”
“Investigating. The investigation.”

There were still places in the Mansion we hadn’t checked. Starting from the Main Hall, I looked around.
Then one area caught my eye, at the far end beneath the chandelier’s light.
A lavish silver door stood there, decorated far more extravagantly than any other room we’d seen.
Even at a glance, the door looked sophisticated and luxurious.

“It’s right next to the Main Hall. There might be an important clue inside.”
“That’s true…”

Han Gyeong-ah nodded. Kang Se-rim agreed as well.

“Sounds reasonable. But you, stay away from unni.”

She planted herself between Gyeong-ah and me and practically growled, so I took a step back before she could bite me.
Either way, both of them agreed with me. Lee Sa-hyuk was the only one who looked completely uninterested.

“…”

That was just how he was, so I ignored him. We were about to enter the final room when…

“…You probably shouldn’t go in there.”

Lee Sa-hyuk spoke up as if offering advice.
It was so unexpected I thought I’d misheard him. He’d actually spoken first. Han Gyeong-ah looked the most surprised of all.

“Why? Is there a reason?”
“Don’t know. Don’t ask.”

He answered as though even that much conversation was exhausting.
Kang Se-rim immediately bristled at his uniquely antisocial way of communicating.

“Old man, what the hell does that mean? You’ve got a mouth, so use it!”
“Never mind. If you’re investigating, I suppose seeing it isn’t a bad idea.”

He muttered something difficult to make sense of. Han Gyeong-ah asked him another question.

“Sa-hyuk, have you been in this room before?”
“…Yeah. When I came to Floor 2, that’s where I started.”

Lee Sa-hyuk nodded.

“What kind of room was it?”
“Bedroom.”
“What was inside?”
“Something.”
“What?”
“Don’t know. Go see for yourself.”

Their back-and-forth had exceeded three exchanges. Lee Sa-hyuk had apparently reached his response limit and refused to answer any more.
That was the end of today’s conversation.
Was this some kind of system trying to upsell me after the free trial?
Unfortunately, he was a person rather than an AI, so there was no way to pay for more.
And with that, the conversation ended.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

Our problem customer Kang Se-rim angrily complained, but the attendant ignored the customer’s grievance.
Han Gyeong-ah, acting as the dedicated handler for abusive complaints, barely managed to calm her down.

“Se-rim, calm down…!”
“Unni, say something too! What kind of old man acts like that…?”
“You’re noisy, kid.”
“Who are you calling a kid?!”
“Kyaa!”

I quietly watched the whole mess from the sidelines.

‘What a shitshow.’

Watching the scene play out in real time felt strangely surreal.
It was like playing Chapter 2 of 「Tower Death Game」.
If I hadn’t ended up inside the game, I would’ve been watching a scene like this through a monitor.
How much better would that have been? After indulging in a little self-pity, I refocused on the situation.

“All right, calm down.”

I clapped my hands to get their attention. The three people bickering with each other all turned toward me.

“We don’t know what’s in there, but why don’t we at least check?”
“Do you really think that’s okay…? Sa-hyuk warned us.”
“But it’s the last room, and we’re out of other places to search.”

We were stuck otherwise. Investigating wherever we could was our best option.
Han Gyeong-ah reluctantly agreed after some persuasion, but with one condition.

“All right… Se-rim, this could be dangerous, so wait here for a moment. We’ll go in ourselves.”
“What?! Unni…! I can go too!”
“No. It’s too dangerous.”

Kang Se-rim protested, but Han’s decision was firm. She was trying to protect her from whatever danger might be inside.

“We’ll be right back. Sa-hyuk, could you keep an eye on her?”
“Do whatever you want.”
“Thank you.”

With that, Gyeong-ah and I headed for the Bedroom. Surprisingly, Kang Se-rim didn’t resist.
Since the request came from Gyeong-ah, she respected her wishes and obediently stayed behind.
She did, however, glare at me with enough murderous intent to make her feelings perfectly clear.

“…We’re going in.”
“Okay.”

I slowly opened the Bedroom door. The scene inside immediately came into view.
And I instantly understood why Lee Sa-hyuk had warned us.
Why a man so indifferent to everyone else had actually gone out of his way to tell us not to enter.
A corpse hung from a rope in the middle of the Bedroom.

“Gasp…”

My mind went blank the instant I saw it.
I sucked in a sharp breath.

A corpse.
There was a corpse.

I wasn’t seeing things.
It wasn’t a mannequin or some elaborate prop. It was a human body.
My vision spun, and my mind went faint.
How many times did an ordinary person ever see a dead body in their life?
I’d only ever seen this kind of thing in games.
Seeing one in real life for the first time made nausea rise in my throat.

“Oh my God…”

Gyeong-ah was equally horrified.
Apparently being a police officer didn’t make her accustomed to corpses. Her body went rigid, and her face drained white.
It was a gruesome sight, almost impossible to look at directly: the corpse of someone who had hanged themself with a rope.

Like a dried fish,
dangling there.

Was this what Jarin-gobi would look like if he were a cannibal?¹
It was almost impressive that Lee Sa-hyuk could see something like this and calmly leave us nothing more than a warning.
Desperate to get out immediately, I grabbed Han Gyeong-ah’s arm.

“Gyeong-ah, let’s go. Now.”
“Y-Yes!”

For once, we were in complete agreement.
We hurried out of the Bedroom. It felt like we’d spent less than ten seconds inside.
The moment we returned to the Main Hall,

“Unni!”

Kang Se-rim came running toward us. At first, I thought she was worried because we’d come back so quickly.
But that wasn’t it.
She looked stunned and was clutching something tightly.

“Look at this! Right after you went into the Bedroom, unni, this suddenly fell from the ceiling…!”

She held out a crisp, neatly folded piece of paper. Elegant sentences had been written across it in an old-fashioned hand.
The moment I read it, I flinched in disbelief.

【Honored guests of the Mansion, you are invited to the Drawing Room.

Kang Se-rim

Kim Yohan

Lee Sa-hyuk

Han Gyeong-ah

The four of you are requested to come to the Drawing Room immediately.】

“This is…”

An invitation from an unknown sender.
And written inside were none other than our names.