Chapter 233: Ch 233: Serve him together
The one waiting for me in front of the elevator.
The new hire, Kim Heowoon.
"Mr. Employee?"
I cannot distinguish human faces.
They look like melted mosaics, and their voices are as indistinct as an old
radio recording.
Therefore, I cannot tell how much this ’new hire Kim Heowoon’, standing
before the elevator now, resembles the Jang Heowoon I once knew... but
one thing I can be certain of.
’...A strange situation.’
This is strange.
And the one who knows this better than I do is standing beside me.
One of the directors of this company.
"Hello. You must be the new hire with the Field Exploration Team."
"Ah. Yes, sir...! My name is Kim Heowoon."
"I see. ...But how did you come in here?"
"...Pardon?"
"You’re with the Field Exploration Team, aren’t you? Then you wouldn’t
have been able to enter this Security Team sector on your own... so how are
you here?"
Silence.
"And how did you find this elevator? And to that this Mr. Employee would
be here,"
Ho Yoowon pointed at me.
"How did you know that?"
"..."
The mouth opened.
"I imitated."
...What?
"I imitated a Security Team member to get in, and I imitated the Research
Team to learn the employee’s location."
’Imitated...?’
The moment a sense of foreboding rose.
A smile spread across Kim Heowoon’s indistinguishable face.
"But with this, my purpose for joining has already been fulfilled, so I don’t
mind being fired over it."
And he looked at me.
"Mr. Employee."
The purpose of joining the company.
—It’s because there was something I had to find.
It was me.
"You don’t need to worry. Nothing troublesome has happened. I only came
here to seize the opportunity to introduce myself properly... and to express
my gratitude."
Then Kim Heowoon bowed deeply before me.
"Thank you for saving us. Thanks to you, all the people at the facility
survived."
...
Wait.
"Because of you, Mr. Employee, Jang Heowoon’s wish was fulfilled."
That means...
"Aha. How unfortunate. Looks like my guess was wrong, Roe Deer-nim."
I realized.
The two Wish Tickets delivered to Go Yeongeun-ssi being used did not
mean...
’They weren’t used to save Jang Heowoon himself...!’
From the start, the chance that such a smart and composed person would
suddenly make a sloppy wish on a Wish Ticket was low. If anything...
’She would have felt more unsettled to keep both Wish Tickets in her
possession.’
Because someone might find out and steal them.
And she may also have heard that, while the Disaster Management Bureau
was doing its best to improve Jang Heowoon’s condition, there was no
telling when he would recover fully.
In that case, before some mishap happened while holding onto the Wish
Tickets indefinitely... it would have been far more reasonable for her to use
one on Jang Heowoon’s behalf.
Recovery from contamination had precedents, like with Security Team
members, so she could entrust that much to the Disaster Management
Bureau.
Instead, she would have made the true wish.
Like this.
Please grant Jang Heowoon-ssi’s wish.
And Jang Heowoon’s wish was...
...
Before my eyes, I saw the result of Jang Heowoon’s wish being granted.
A family member, bearing the name Kim Heowoon.
One of the people from a countryside religious welfare facility where the
orphan Jang Heowoon had grown up. A place that had burned down in a
fire.
[What an interesting situation, Friend.]
[But moreover. How exactly does this person know that it was you, Friend,
who was the one who handed over the Wish Ticket?]
[And doesn’t the explanation of ’I imitated’ strike you as rather vague?]
...That.
’I have a... suspicion.’
The chill crawling up my spine told me. A single hypothesis that struck me
like a shock in my mind.
...I’ll narrow it down through Q&A.
Question : Relationship with Jang Heowoon
– I wanted to save my precious family.
"Ah. We are family who grew up in the same facility. Out of eight, seven
died in the fire."
Question : Reason for sharing the same name
"In the facility, those who lived together were given the same name. The
surnames differed, but we shared the given name. Because we’re family."
Question : Rules shared by the family
"There weren’t really rules, but... we received the same education, ate the
same food, and slept in the same place in order to have a lifestyle fitting the
name ’Heowoon’. So that we could each have the same experiences, fairly."
Question : Example of a ’lifestyle fitting the name Heowoon’
"Ah. It wasn’t difficult. For example... going to bed late and waking up
late."
...
"Reading poetry collections more than twice a week, becoming afraid of
blood, starting middle school one year early, and dropping out of high
school."
And.
"When meeting shamans or other religious figures, not introducing one’s
own name."
...
The final question.
Question : Name of the facility
"Ah, that place is..."
And I already knew the answer.
In this world, there are countless bizarre groups, but only one insane group
that operates a childcare facility in this way...
"...It is a facility called Paradise of Love shelter."
...
Paradise of Love
"Do you know it?"
I know it.
A fairly well-known cult within this setting’s Korea.
I had even seen its name once before at the Disaster Management Bureau.
Back when the White-Tiger Unit, at my suggestion, dealt with the ghost
story of ’Red Clothes at Exit 4’, the agents had pretended to be missionaries
of this very cult while writing their recruitment lines.
But to me, there is something beyond even that.
This group was registered on the <Dark Exploration Records> wiki as
having its own page.
Paradise of Love
One of the emerging religions that spread in Korea in the
early 2000s within the setting.
Promoting slogans like ’You can meet your ideal partner’
or ’We will make you into the ideal type you imagine’,
they proselytized in ways appealing to the younger
generation, becoming popular on the early internet.
But in truth, it was an unethical, ritualistic cult that
forcibly reshaped the lives of its followers to become
suitable for a specific being called the ’Lover of
Paradise’, through bizarre ceremonies.
– Human life is filled with fear. The lover of paradise, who will protect and
love you so that you no longer have to be afraid, is waiting for you. Come
to the Paradise of Love.
And.
This process gained interest for the hypothesis that it
was influenced by the Mimicry Sect of the Church of the
Luminous Unknown, and eventually it was established as
one of the church’s affiliated organizations.
That facility belonged to the Church of the Luminous Unknown.
Jang Heowoon grew up in a facility of the Church of the Luminous
Unknown.
And he joined Daydream Inc. in order to save the fellow sect members he
grew up with... the orphans of the facility whom he called ’family’, who
had become subjects of those same rituals.
’...’
By this point, it became clear how Lee Heowoon of the Cheerful Research
Institute was connected.
’Heowoon was the target of the ritual.’
Under the circumstance that the ’Lover of Paradise’ is a
real, existing person, an attempt may be made to usurp
the narrative of that individual through the ritual process
of imitating that person.
Thus, it is an act of following the doctrine of the Church
of the Luminous Unknown, which seeks to become a
meaningful existence in this world.
’Is it that they raised someone in order to imitate Lee Heowoon of the
Cheerful Research Institute, to steal that researcher’s role?’
Stories not written in the <Dark Exploration Records>, details I did not
know, reached me through the words of those around me.
The sensation of cold sweat running down my back felt like a
hallucination...
[Ah, to imitate every twist of someone’s life, to fashion a role that would
produce a story resembling theirs...]
[As if inheriting the spirit of industrial capitalism, they treat stories like
machine parts, carving and processing them.]
[As though running them through the same process could yield identical
products!]
And one of those products now stood before us.
A replica fashioned after ’Lee Heowoon’.
Kim Heowoon lowered his head.
"Pardon, um. Actually, it was a lie when I said I only came here to
introduce myself, sir."
...
"I came to make an earnest plea of you, Mr. Employee."
He spoke with extreme politeness.
An absurd request.
"Just as you took in Jang Heowoon, could you take all of us in as well?"
...!!
"We can tell. Because we are the same ’Heowoon’. ...Isn’t Jang Heowoon
happy now under your care, Mr. Employee?"
My head began to ache.
Reason for the request
"...There is nowhere else we can return to."
His voice lowered.
"The facility we were in burned down, and as for the other Paradise of Love
shelters... we cannot go there. ...We cannot live as we did before."
There was no need to ask why.
’The fire.’
That fire had also been part of the ritual imitating the narrative of the
Cheerful Research Institute researcher....
And from that fire, surviving with the story of ’having lived through a great
fire at one’s facility’, Jang Heowoon was the finished product.
But this one... was among those culled and used as material in the process.
"Please, I implore you, grant us the same name[1] that Jang Heowoon
received."
...
"Then, we too can exist as the same person. Because that is how we were
raised!"
His voice grew desperate.
"...Even the fact that Jang Heowoon entered first feels meaningful, doesn’t
it? As if, being the eldest, the firstborn, he received the surname ’Jang’.
Then we could continue..."
I raised my hand.
Kim Heowoon hastily bowed his head, adopting a posture as if expecting
my hand to reach him... but.
From my hand, smoke rose.
Rejected
"...Pardon?"
Alternative choices
► Depart from Lee Heowoon’s life
► Live your own life
"Pardon? But... I..."
A faint chuckle slipped from Ho Yoowon beside the elevator, as though
he’d just heard the most absurd of proposals.
And then.
"I’ve already received the Mimicry Sect’s authority, that’s why, well, what I
did to enter this place... If it continues like this, I won’t be able to escape
—"
"You became unhappy, didn’t you?"
Slash.
Kim Heowoon was cut in two.
Before my eyes, his bisected body tilted, the upper half toppling to the floor
with a wet splatter.
Blood spread.
Blood soaked the tips of my feet.
And thus, for the first time, I was able to see Kim Heowoon’s face.
Because in dying, he was no longer human.
The dead face of a man in his twenties, bearing a somewhat dark and gentle
impression, one quite resembling Jang Heowoon-ssi, was frozen, stained
with expectation and despair....
"Now you’ll be happy forever. Congratulations."
And then I realized.
Wish Tickets are personally omnipotent.
That is why, in the process of Jang Heowoon-ssi’s wish being fulfilled,
instead of Go Yeongeun-ssi or Jang Heowoon-ssi themselves being
transferred to another world, the fact that as many as seven people had
simply come back alive made it clear.
This wish had been judged as one incapable of greatly affecting the world
in the first place.
Because.
—They would soon die again.
"Hello?"
I lifted my head.
Drenched in Kim Heowoon’s blood, the one smiling so serenely was a
delicate-looking adolescent girl.
This kid was even wearing a ragged, old-fashioned school uniform.
But with the emergency broadcast of the company beginning to blare, her
true identity began to dawn on me...
[Evacuation alert. High-risk intruder containment failed. Evacuation alert.
High-risk intruder containment failed. Evacuation alert. High-risk intruder
containment failed...]
...So I thought.
’Kim Heowoon said he entered by imitation.’
That he had received the Mimicry Sect’s authority.
But that wasn’t something one could obtain unless raised in the ritual
facilities of the Church of the Luminous Unknown’s outer cults disguised as
new religions....
Which meant only one thing.
He’d had help from someone.
"Uwaah, you look kind of cool."
One who had likely swallowed dozens of fragments of the Sacred Law
scriptures, someone who had fanatically and willingly become closer to a
ghost story than a human.
A follower of Ireum-nim.
"Do you, by any chance, know Ireum-nim?"
A high-ranking member of the Church of the Luminous Unknown stood
before me.
And from her words and actions, I could infer... a denomination of the
church.
Not the Mimicry Sect. This was...
Happy Ending Sect
A sect within the Church of the Luminous Unknown that
pursues the most altruistic values. To those whom Ireum-
nim does not look upon, to those who have no chance of
surviving the end, to those considered without meaning
in this world, the sect strives to bring the gift of a true
happy ending.
And the path is simple. Death.
For the dead can never again fall into unhappiness.
"Even if you don’t know, that’s alright. Hm, fox and dragon, both so cool...
let’s go together."
The elevator we rode in...
...twisted.
"Let us all serve Ireum-nim together."
Note/s:
[1] Don’t forget, Name = Ireum ↵