Chapter 91
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Conqueror V
Shin Noah
8
Afterward, the school ghost story subjugation operation proceeded smoothly.
Cheon Yohwa and I continued patrolling the school. And the moment we discovered survivors, we immediately transported them to the "safe zone."
The survivors shed tears of emotion.
"The ghosts... aren't coming out?"
"I can use the bathroom freely!"
"Thank you, security guard oppa!"
"Argh, but the bodies...... Hmm, well. I've seen plenty of corpses anyway, so it doesn't matter."
"Fuck, cup noodles are so fucking delicious......"
Since floors 1 through 3 had already been largely declared "safe zones," there was plenty of space for the students to stay.
The key issues were food and hygiene to feed and sustain hundreds of survivors...... Hygiene was OK since I had packed plenty of medicine in my trunk bag.
Ultimately, food was the problem.
The trunk bag I obtained in the 115th iteration boasted capacity rivaling a dimensional space, but that dimensional space was merely equivalent to an ordinary study. Naturally, it didn't boast the romantic size of 'somehow larger than a mansion's study' that often appears in fantasy novels.
Fortunately, the Korean Peninsula had once been the world's poorest nation before escaping hunger (though of course, this was limited to only 50% of the region), so it had expertise in quickly resolving food shortages.
"Let's use the cafeteria."
"Huh?"
Cheon Yohwa was taken aback. She was a child with a natural talent for expressing the words 'dislike' and 'contempt' using only her facial muscles.
"Surely not the 1st floor cafeteria? That place is a bit...... I've only been there once, but there are seriously a huge number of ghosts."
"Of course there would be many. Student, didn't you know? Originally, ghosts tend to gather most in bathrooms, bedrooms, and kitchens."
"No, I didn't know that......"
The entrenched anomaly in Baekhwa Girls' High School cafeteria was the 'Human Flesh Restaurant.'
(1) Every day, school lunch is served in the cafeteria.
(2) However, the meat used in the side dishes actually contained human flesh mixed in.
(3) People who eat human flesh become rapidly addicted and increasingly seek only human flesh. Eventually, they transform into cannibals who can eat nothing but human flesh, and if they don't eat human flesh for even a few days, they go mad.
Anomalies related to human flesh could often be found in Voids.
In particular, they appeared with high probability in Voids where people had suffered 'mass slaughter,' and they appeared without fail in the school ghost story where hundreds had already been massacred.
The Void was an extreme environment more vicious than Antarctica. When faced with the ultimatum 'Will you starve to death tomorrow? Or go mad and die in 1 or 3 months?', even the most skilled Awakened had no choice but to swallow tears and commit cannibalism.
But... in the school ghost story, the situation was a bit different.
"Student. This school's student meals weren't exactly great, were they?"
"Huh? Ah, yes. Dinner is passable, but breakfast and lunch are really bad. That's why living in the dorms was hard."
"Then what's there to worry? The school lunch is served divided into stainless steel trays for each side dish, right? The serving containers are all separate too."
"Huh?"
"You're safe if you only eat the side dishes that look like nothing but grass to anyone. From now on, breakfast and lunch will become the students' staple foods."
If eating human flesh makes you go crazy, then just eat everything except the human flesh, right?
Normally, 'Human Flesh Restaurants' that appeared in Voids were difficult to overcome with such clever tricks.
The Korean Peninsula was a harsh region for vegans. Void restaurants that appeared on the Korean Peninsula also actively targeted animal protein lovers, such as pork stir-fry specialty restaurants, gukbap specialty restaurants, tonkatsu specialty restaurants, and so on.
Unless there were dishes with no meat at all like aglio e olio, or dishes where the patty could be easily filtered out like hamburgers, it was quite difficult to separate meat from most Void restaurant dishes one by one.
But 'schools' and 'the military' were different.
Unlike other regions, these two groups respected life so much that they were sincere about veganism.
The human flesh restaurant, no, the human flesh cafeteria that appeared at Baekhwa Girls' High was, from my perspective, nothing more or less than an excellent source of nutrients.
"So you can use ghosts like this......"
Cheon Yohwa exclaimed in dismay as she received her meal from the shadowy, undulating serving staff ghosts.
"If you just free yourself from prejudice, there are quite a few anomalies that can be used surprisingly usefully."
"Hmm, is that so...... Ack. The stir-fried anchovies are delicious. They're so delicious it makes me more anxious! Ugh, security guard ajusshi. It's really okay, right?"
I glanced at Cheon Yohwa's profile. The student council president was looking down at her own meal tray with complicated feelings.
Suddenly, the moment I first met her came to mind. That is, in the 5th iteration, when I went to recruit Cheon Yohwa and had a conversation at the school gate.
- Cheon Yohwa's ability is very powerful. I don't know if you're turning already dead corpses into zombies, or if you're even turning living people into zombies.
- ...Corpses?
At that time, Cheon Yohwa hadn't properly recognized the word 'corpse.' 'Human flesh' would likely be the same.
Brainwashing for survival.
It was a simple problem if one thought about what 17 survivors ate to live for as long as 4 years.
In reality, all the Baekhwa Girls' High guild members were addicted to human flesh, and if they didn't consume human flesh at least once every 4 days, they would go mad.
"...My idea isn't particularly remarkable either. If a little more time had passed, the students would have reached the same conclusion."
"Huh? Us?"
"Of course. And this solution isn't permanent either. Eat as much as you can while you can. I'll also keep foods with long expiration dates separately."
"......?"
My prediction was correct.
A week later, the school lunch menus served in the school cafeteria began to change little by little.
"Hmm? Ajusshi. It feels like... there are more meat side dishes, right?"
"Yeah."
The anomalies were alive and moving.
In terms of the speed of life, anomalies were much more impatient and urgent than humans.
While humans slowly evolve over thousands, tens of thousands of years, filtering out mutations through the mesh of time, anomalies could have their very species change in as little as a single day.
As a result.
"Argh. M-meat dishes are two-thirds......"
The side dishes on Cheon Yohwa's stainless steel tray were incredibly lavish.
Chicken drumsticks, beef soup, round meat patties, boiled pork. The only dishes without meat were vegetable curry, white rice, and salad.
In the past, she could have taken a photo and posted it online with the title [Is this real about high school lunches these days?] to garner praise and jealousy from the older generations.
"Throw away everything except the vegetable curry, rice, and salad."
Okay...... Heh, what a waste!"
Cheon Yohwa made a crying face as she threw the side dishes into the food waste bin.
"Yesterday, a student who couldn't resist and took one bite of cheese tonkatsu appeared. I scolded her severely, but I could understand her feelings......"
"One bite should be fine. But if you keep eating two bites, three bites, thinking it's nothing, it's the end. Isn't it fortunate that at least curry is coming out now? Soon you won't be able to eat anything but white rice."
"Ugh. The nutrition is the worst. If only we had protein supplements......"
It was obvious as day that the food situation would rapidly deteriorate.
But we hadn't been idle during that time.
We increased patrol teams and explored the entire Void, and as a result, we secured over 150 survivors.
We had also subjugated almost all the school ghost stories. The school building that had strangely expanded to 13 floors returned to its original 4-story building. The playground and dormitory were also restored.
...That many, we also discovered over 500 bodies.
Compared to previous iterations where only 17 survived, the 117th iteration's route was significantly better.
Thanks to accurately identifying the locations of victims at this time, future iterations would be even better.
But for now, let's focus on the story of the 117th iteration.
"Ajusshi- Is the funeral over?"
The playground.
Wooden desks and chairs were piled up and burning like a campfire. Since they weren't good firewood, black smoke was thick. But since the fire was well-contained, it didn't spread to the surroundings and rose straight up into the sky.
At the very least, it was a decent rope to guide souls to heaven.
"Yeah, it just ended."
"Hehe. Our kids cried a lot again this time, right?"
"Crying is a good thing. Just as laughter has no borders, tears have no nationality either."
Cheon Yohwa stood beside me with her hands behind her back. The sky of Baekhwa Girls' High, stained by the Void, was always blood-red.
The spider lilies surrounding the school building were equally red. Only the white birch trees, free from redness, had become white prison bars imprisoning the school.
No matter how many anomalies we subjugated, those spider lilies and white birch trees never disappeared.
"You're right. Holding funerals like this seems to have eased the kids' minds a bit. You even collected all the bone ash, right? Lately I've noticed them making pouches out of their close friends' bone ash and wearing them around their necks."
"To give to their families when they meet them?"
"Yep. Well, even if they can't deliver them, there's meaning as a talisman."
"It must be hard for kids your age to even care about the hearts of the dead."
"Ahaha...... Oh, have this!"
What Cheon Yohwa handed me was a rice ball. White rice with stir-fried anchovies inside, wrapped in seaweed.
Now, side dishes 'without meat' had become extremely scarce. So some students formed a cooking team and recreated dishes using the school lunch.
"Thank you."
Of course, even this was an enormous feast for me.
Tomorrow, the stir-fried anchovies would probably disappear. And the day after, even the white rice would change to bolognese pasta.
I had stored foods with relatively long expiration dates separately, but even this had clear limits. Four days at best.
The hourglass of the school ghost story was rapidly building a pyramid in the desert.
Cheon Yohwa looked up at the blood-red sky.
"Ajusshi. When on earth can we escape from this hell......?"
"Tomorrow."
Cheon Yohwa's eyes turned toward me.
"Tell the other students to wait near the school gate so they can escape at any time. Yohwa, you come with me."
"......"
"By tomorrow, I'll carve out the heart of this Void."
9
We had searched the school's upper levels—the dormitory, main building, old building, playground, and auditorium—all of them.
Naturally, the anomalies there had been annihilated as well.
The total number of anomalies subjugated by me and some current students so far was exactly 99. Of all numbers, 99.
It was a result close to miraculous, but the 'school ghost story's' blood-red sky still remained. It meant there was still an anomaly somewhere hiding secretly that needed to be subjugated.
And I thought I knew the address of that secret hideout.
"It's underground."
Cheon Yohwa blinked.
"Underground? My school doesn't have an underground, hmm...... There are semi-basements used as small storage rooms here and there, but."
Indeed, in any building, stairs leading from the 1st floor underground couldn't be found.
Right. Stairs were.
As you all know by now, the premier means of transportation in Voids wasn't stairs.
"Yohwa. We're going down by elevator."
"Elevator? Where is there an elevator...... Huh. Don't tell me?"
That 'don't tell me' was it.
Cheon Yohwa and I gathered supplies and moved to the old building. Though called the old building, it had been well-used as a club building, so it wasn't particularly dilapidated.
The old building had a food service elevator installed.
Dumbwaiter, lift. There were many ways to call it, but students just called it the food elevator and everyone understood.
It wasn't a facility made for people to enter, but wasn't this also a fine 'elevator'?
"Now, you go in first."
"No way. I've thought about wanting to go inside whenever I saw it while walking around, but I never thought I'd actually go in...... Argh! Ajusshi, no! It's narrow! It's completely narrow here! Really narr...... Hmm? I-it's surprisingly spacious......?"
"Physical space has little meaning in Voids."
Crash, thud.
After squeezing and wedging ourselves into the elevator, I turned on the flashlight. Then, surprisingly, elevator buttons came into view.
[B001] [B005] [B009] [B013]
[B002] [B006] [B010] [B014]
[B003] [B007] [B011] [B015]
[B004] [B008] [B012] [B016]
Shudder-
One side of the elevator wall was covered with buttons.
When the flashlight illuminated that spot, Cheon Yohwa fidgeted behind me.
"B-basement 16 floors? You're saying there are 16 underground floors we haven't explored yet? Oh my! That's ridiculous. Ajusshi. This isn't something that will end in a day or two......?"
"Ah. Don't worry. In cases like this, you need to grasp the form, not the numbers."
"Huh?"
"Look at the buttons. Four vertical spaces, four horizontal spaces. This is merely a method to realize the number 4."
"Ah......"
"You try pressing one. Anywhere is fine."
"Um, well. Okay, I'll do it."
Cheon Yohwa reached out her finger and pressed the 12th floor firmly.
Thud! The elevator shook. Cheon Yohwa let out a small scream "Heek!" and grabbed my shoulder. Thud, rattle......
That was the moment. Blink, blink. The elevator buttons lit up red.
[死444] [死444] [死444] [死444]
[死444] [死444] [死444] [死444]
[死444] [死444] [死444] [死444]
[死444] [死444] [死444] [死444]
The red light seeping from the buttons stained the entire inside of the elevator blood-red.
"......"
Cheon Yohwa swallowed her breath.
Though no different from ordinary LED lights, the blood color was viscous as if it had viscosity. Red hues flowed down from the buttons and clung all over our bodies.
Rattle!
Like an old boat docked at a pier, the elevator shook greatly.
Then the door slowly descended, revealing not the surface's false 4 floors but 'underground 4 floors,' the 'underworld' of the school ghost story in its true sense.
"Come out slowly. And when I take one step, you must take one step to follow. Never take more, never take less."
"Ah, yes. This place is......"
Cheon Yohwa carefully exited the elevator and looked around.
There was no need to observe for long.
"A hospital......?"
Because every scene was identical, endlessly repeating.
White hospital corridors and ceilings. Not a single patient or doctor was present, and bizarrely clean hospital beds lined the corridor. From each bed, transparent IV lines hung like suspension bridges. The corridor was infinite.
――I had witnessed this exact same scene, though only for a fleeting moment, in the 89th iteration.
'Mugan.'
Yes.
The 89th iteration was when I witnessed Mugan.
A scene where prison, school, hospital, swimming pool, movie theater, and movie screen scenes endlessly chaotically swirled and intercoursed. No, not a scene, a mad scene.
'...So this was the main base after all.'
The main body of the Ostracized God Mugan.
It had made its nest in the Mugan Hell on the 4th underground floor of Baekhwa Girls' High School.
Infinite Regressor Tells a Story