Bailonz Street 13-Chapter 234.1

Serve Ireum-nim.

Serve Ireum-nim.

Serve Ireum-nim.

Serve Ireum-nim.

Serve Ireum-nim…

Even though my ears are buried in flesh, the chant echoes. The words of the zealot of the Happy Ending Sect, a sect of the Church of the Luminous Unknown, reverberate through the space and shake the elevator…

……

Suddenly.

The elevator I was riding in was already in another space.

Plink.

A drop of water fell in the dark, dim place.

A basement.

An unknowable, ominous air. The damp chill and dankness, the moldy smell of timber, and then…

A corpse.

The bisected body of Kim Heowoon.

Somehow, it had already been neatly arranged and displayed in the basement. Placed in a coffin filled with dozens of withered chrysanthemums and sunflowers, and children’s paper crafts.

Be happy now

Blood dripped along the chrysanthemums.

Do you want to be happy too?

The corpse in the coffin draws near. Terror, the screams of those fading into erasure, resignation, the only escape, the final mercy one human can bestow upon another. Death without pain, the termination of narrative…

Do you want to be at peace too?

But…

How terrifying. The end of a story, the instinctive dread of death. Ah, it would have been better not to know. If only it were an ignorant death met without knowing, the heart might have been calm.

But you have learned. Once death is chosen on one’s own, the meaning of happiness fades.

Thus, for you, there is only one salvation…

Ireum-nim!

Flash.

The basement ceiling door opens. From beyond it, a bright and majestic light pours down.

Ireum-nim knows every thread of story and life. Only He is the answer to this world’s truth, and only His will holds meaning in this world. May He see us. May He watch our ■■, let us understand fully and follow His will, and let our stories become meaningful to Him. Then perhaps, within that light, there may be pity for us, perhaps He will hold affection for us. And so, at last, perhaps what we awaited will arrive. Rest, happiness, the chance that even after the end we might survive and be granted…

Happy Ending!

As the basement grew darker and more sinister, beneath the shaft of light streaming from the ceiling, a glimmering fragment of parchment appeared…

It was a form I had seen before.

A sacred scripture of the Church of the Luminous Unknown.

Happy Ending Scripture, Verse ■

■■■■■■■

That ritual parchment, still blank, is calling to you.

As if telling you to swallow it gladly.

As if telling you to perform the rite.

Make your existence into scripture.

Let your strangeness, mystery, unplaceable unease, cruelty and fear become authority.

The intense light pulls at you.

It calls to you.

The basement grew darker, more unsettling. The single shining source of light lured like a lamp to a mayfly. And then…

‘Hmm.’

I simply stood still in place.

‘So that’s how it is.’

[Hooh, they even know how to gaslight their target like a proper cult. Light, scent, auditory stimulation. So typical, yet quite impressive!]

Kind of.

Had I still been in the state of feeling emotions richly, maybe I would have been greatly shaken.

Piercing the primal fear of humans, conjuring compulsive anxiety with hallucinatory effects bordering on delirium… it was close to brainwashing through illusion. But.

Above all, I already knew.

‘Ireum-nim isn’t like that.’

It was no different from when I had faced the centipede in Jisan Village.

In the end, I just stood absent-mindedly in the clear underground space someone had drawn me into, looking at a fragment of scripture.

If I wanted, I could have used my ‘read-out’ ability to escape… but there was no need.

Because the one who pulled me here would surely be here too.

“Oh? Not going to write it down?”

Sure enough, something suddenly popped out from behind the coffin where the corpse lay.

The perpetrator of this scheme, who appeared to be an officer of the Happy Ending Sect, casually turned around and brushed the basement dust from her school uniform skirt.

The light of ‘Ireum-nim’ caught the dust drifting in the air.

With her back to me, she spoke.

“He’s saying this is really good… Why aren’t you writing it down? If you won’t write it, then…”

Upright.

The person standing straight.

Only his head turns to look at me.

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Thud, drrrr…

The head attached to his back falls off and rolls toward me.

Thuk. The moment it reaches my feet.

I am seeing the Daydream Inc. main building’s underground corridor again.

But this time the basement looks bizarre. A corridor of pulsing red flesh.

Veins attached to the head stretch long and reach to the end of the corridor. As if those veins have suction of their own, they try to pull me in…

L

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’ 𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖

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There’s something in the skull.

‘Wriggling?’

I realize it instinctively. This is the sort of ghost-story that, the moment you respond to that phrase, you ‘get pulled in’.

…It seems that the Church of the Luminous Unknown ghost story has properly marked Ho Yoowon and me as new targets for religious conversion. Or for management…

Salt Goblin

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