"...Uh, so."
Rawi, having opened the door, stumbled over his words.
"What exactly happened...."
"Seo got entangled with a problem guest."
"No, I think the problem was with you, Yeon-woo."
Rawi was genuinely horrified for the first ti in a while.
"Fuck, what the... from where to where...."
"Could you take him first? As you can see, I'm in a bit of a state."
"This is insane, give him here. Fuck, I'm losing my mind."
He took Seo from Yeon-woo. Eyes open, even walking on two feet, but unresponsive. If he wasn't just spacing out, then he must be unconscious.
"What the hell happened? Why's he like this? And why are you like that?"
"Let's lay Seo down on the living room sofa first. He'll settle himself into position."
"The living room sofa? No, forget that, just get inside. What are you doing standing outside dripping blood?"
"Rawi."
Yeon-woo called his na and stopped dead in his tracks.
"Is it alright for to co inside?"
"......"
Rawi understood what that ant. If you carelessly let 'sothing not human' inside, it becos an Open Room. Yeon-woo was teaching him not to let urgency cloud his judgnt.
After gaping wordlessly, Rawi's face scrunched into a sharp scowl.
"Fuck, if you bleed outside, you'll just attract more freaks. We're not going to keep the door wide open and chat, so just get in here already."
"A wise decision."
"What the...."
He'd been about to say more, but when the light from the guest room spilled out, Rawi was montarily struck speechless.
Beneath a shirt soaked through and plastered with blood, the cavity where his heart should have been was grotesquely hollowed, ribs exposed. On his bare face, one eye socket was empty. It was all far too starkly visible.
"......"
"Nothing good cos from looking."
"Ugh,"
Yeon-woo lightly tousled Rawi's hair with a dry hand where the knuckles jutted prominently.
"Best not to co too close. You'll get blood on you."
"Is that really sothing for the person who just mussed up my hair to say? No, more importantly, the state you're in right now...."
Rawi looked back and forth between Yeon-woo's hollowed-out chest, the empty eye socket, and the hand that had just stroked his head, utterly flabbergasted. No wonder his hair hadn't gotten bloody.
"What's with the wrist? Why is it caked in blood? And why is only the hand clean?"
"I needed both hands right away to bring Seo back."
"So your hand was severed too? And you've regenerated it? Then the rest?"
"Better to leave them eaten."
He had no idea what that was supposed to an.
"I'll take separate asures later."
"What kind of asures?"
"I'll need a transfusion of sorts."
A half-comprehensible answer.
"In any case, be careful not to touch it. I don't know how my blood might affect you."
Rawi hesitated at that, then said,
"Assuming there's a reason for all this... then what about our sunbae-nim?"
"He's fine."
"I have no idea what's going on."
"A problem guest was targeting Seo, so I went and humored them for a bit. The imdiate crisis is resolved, so don't worry and just look after Seo."
"You have no intention of listening to right now, do you?"
"As you noted, I bled a fair bit in the process of resolving the issue. Now, let close the door before any stray guests follow the scent."
With that, Yeon-woo shut the door and stepped into the room.
"I'll be imposing on you."
"...I'm going to lose my mind~...."
Rawi's expression finally crumbled.
'Even looking like that, he still wants to play the adult.'
Yeon-woo, who more than anyone must have wanted to be 'human.' Such a person had effectively admitted he was 'not human.' That bothered Rawi considerably.
It was glaringly obvious what kind of injury this was and how he'd co by it, and pretending not to notice was just as hard.
'Being an Artist isn't all it's cracked up to be.'
The sa went for constantly having to rein in the thought of 'ah, seems safe to get close, maybe I should put myself out there.' Being an Artist didn't seem as remarkable as the mages made it sound.
Rawi seated Seo on the sofa.
"There we go."
"......"
"...He really is out of it...."
Even now, Seo just stared blankly through the floor-to-ceiling window at the rain. Rawi murmured to himself. Then he heard Yeon-woo, who had been quietly following behind them, add,
"He's in the middle of 'reminiscence.'"
"Reminiscence...?"
"Around now, he should be recalling certain events from his past. The most important ones in constituting who Seo is — particularly those related to 'love.'"
"That's a pretty grandiose word to drop out of nowhere."
At Rawi's murmur, Yeon-woo let out a rare chuckle. A gaze like one looking at a younger sibling or a small child. A smiling face he'd seen only a handful of tis.
"Embarrassing, is it?"
"No, it's not that...."
"At your age, it's the kind of word you'd reject as cringeworthy."
"How long have you even lived?"
"I guarantee you — longer than you."
"......"
Well, he was a Dokkaebi, so of course.
'And yet he probably died around my age.'
Rawi had already heard many things from Seo, the veteran rcenary. It didn't seem like Yeon-woo had been a Dokkaebi for hundreds of years or anything. Wasn't that hardly impressive?
'Listening to him talk, you'd think he was a grandfather. Are all Traditional Dokkaebi like this?'
He didn't even think about what he himself looked like, yet treated everyone else like children.
"No, so."
"Yes."
"Why do you look like that? Seriously."
He couldn't understand.
"Before, you used, like, so kind of healing technique, didn't you? There was the sll of blood but no wounds. Or so item or sothing? Do potions exist?"
"They do exist...."
"This labyrinth thing is literally a video ga, isn't it."
"It may be unique to our labyrinth. I'm not sure how other labyrinths operate. I've never been outside this one."
"Wow, that's heartbreakingly stated."
"It wasn't said in hopes of sympathy."
What was he thinking?
"...What I an is...."
After drawing out the pause, Yeon-woo added,
"I felt I should say with my own mouth that I have no will to leave this place."
"Is there a reason?"
"I'm worried."
Drip. Still bleeding from every part of his body, from his face, he spoke.
"That you might ask to leave together."
"......"
Rawi bit his lip hard and said,
"...I won't. It already looks like a stretch just for us to get out alive, so why would I. Soone of your caliber can manage on your own."
"You're already hoping I'll leave this place."
"Fuck, I've been had."
Yeon-woo was right. Rawi had already grown attached. However faint and shallow that 'attachnt' might be, he wanted this person — so annoyingly kind and capable that it grated on the nerves — to live.
"So what is it, really? What happened to you? Are you just going to keep deflecting?"
"I bled a bit while humoring a problem guest."
"Do you think I don't already know that and that's why I'm asking?"
"Lover of Dawn seems to have found sothing deeply compelling about Seo."
At that, Rawi muttered,
"If a pipsqueak like that is her type, isn't that a bit dangerous?"
"So you did think of him as a pipsqueak."
"That stays between us."
"We'll see."
He gestured toward Seo, who was still sitting on the sofa staring beyond the window.
"This is the result of disrupting that rendezvous."
"No, I an, can you be a bit more... You know you're surprisingly stingy with words, right?"
At that, Yeon-woo glanced at Rawi and added,
"There is a Monster Guest that parasitizes the happy mories of Human Guests, seeking to taxidermy them. Seo must have loved the person in those mories deeply, because he ultimately opened the door for that guest."
"Opened the door? When?"
"While you were sleeping, presumably. She visits at dawn, so it would have been difficult for you, an upstanding young man with an early bedti, to notice."
"'Upstanding young man,' that's genuinely the first ti I've ever heard those words. Anyway, so that ans...."
Rawi asked, dumbfounded.
"This whole disaster was brought about by our tiny sunbae-nim?"
"He won't rember it himself."
"He won't rember?"
"That's what this guest feeds on in the first place. If the rendezvous is interrupted midway, the target only forgets the events of that dawn."
"I haven't done any interrupting, so that must've been you."
"For the most part...."
Clunk.
Yeon-woo staggered slightly and sank into a chair.
"......"
"Hah...."
Rawi dragged his hand down his face and continued his questions.
"...You really won't tell ?"
"Tell you what."
"Why you ended up looking like that. I think this is my third ti asking now, or isn't it?"
"I kept disrupting things, so this ti they demanded a toll."
"A toll?"
Rawi narrowed his brow.
"What kind of toll turns a person into this?"
"Proof of love."
"Ah, seriously, what the...."
Face hardening, Rawi pieced together the man's words. Seo's dazed state every dawn for the past several days. Yeon-woo's wrecked appearance. And the words he'd just let slip — 'I kept disrupting things.'
"The reason sunbae-nim's been out of it every dawn — you've been blocking it every night this whole ti?"
"......"
"And that's why he doesn't rember any of it? And then today that Dokkaebi finally snapped and tore out your eyeball and heart under that bullshit pretense of love?"
Yeon-woo, who had neither confird nor denied, coughed up blood with a wet, choking sound.
"—Cough, ack!"
"FUCK,"
Rawi, who'd been about to say more, seized Yeon-woo's shoulder in alarm.
"A person can't even get a word out. This isn't so high-level ploy to shut up, is it? It better not be, you piece of shit. F-fuck, wait. Fuck, what do I do? Uh, potions, do you have potions?"
"I'm fi—"
"WHAT KIND OF BULLSHIT IS THAT!!"
"It's just from the blood loss. There's nothing to make a fuss about."
Yeon-woo pushed Rawi away and clamped a hand over his mouth.
"This is uncomfortable, so would you maintain so distance?"
"Is that a provocation?"
"Rather, as I ntioned, I'm low on blood."
"...Uh...."
"......"
Above the palm cupping his jaw, Yeon-woo's eyes curved into an arc.
"I might bite you."
"Yikes."
"That's the spirit."
A composed face once again. Yeon-woo wiped the remaining blood from his mouth with the sa hand that had been covering it. Rawi recoiled but obediently backed away, yielding to that detachnt.
'He has no heart and yet he's coughing blood, no, how is he even alive in the first place....'
He vaguely recalled hearing that so dical-track Artists could do similar work. Thinking along those lines, Rawi recalled knowledge about The Gaps that Seo had once shared.
"...I'm asking just in case, but were you a blood mage, Yeon-woo?"
Yeon-woo, who had been watching Rawi, answered.
"I'd been wondering when that topic would co up."
"No way, that's actually real."
"You have far less... information than I'd expected, Rawi."
"You might as well just curse at ."
That my head is empty.
"That wasn't my intention."
"The hell it wasn't."
"Your ears aren't as good as your eyes, it seems."
"Is that really the issue right now?"
Blood mage, of all things.
'Uncle definitely said that Count Dracula or whatever also knew Blood Magic....'
Especially that among blood mages of the past thirty years, not a single one was sane, so be careful. Rawi's expression twisted into sothing strange. Could a Traditional Dokkaebi also be a blood mage?
'Because he used to be human?'
It was a question too difficult for Rawi's shallow Gaps knowledge to answer. But even so. He couldn't hold back the question.
"That doesn't add up, though? Your hands were definitely white."
"White, you say. So that's how those eyes see it."
"Blood Magic or whatever, you've never killed anyone."
Rawi asked, bewildered.
"And soone of your ability — you should've fought back instead. Why did you let yourself be torn apart so compliantly? You had the power. Didn't you resist?"
"It wasn't entirely one-sided."
"Not one-sided?"
Yeon-woo replied dryly.
"Why do you think I told you 'don't touch the blood'?"
"...Well...."
They say a blood mage's blood has a self of its own.
'...If that man really is a blood mage, then that blood....'
His uncle had said as much. That's what makes it dangerous. Where that blood touches could rot, could be contaminated, could be outright eroded.
So if you don't want to be devoured by a single drop of blood, be careful.
"I think I'm starting to understand."
Rawi continued.
"Then the heart and the eyeball that Dokkaebi consud... they can still move according to your will? Since a blood mage's blood has a self of its own?"
"I should take back what I said about you lacking information."
"So what you're telling is that you deliberately fed it your own flesh to tear it apart from the inside? And if you do that, you can easily, sohow."
"I'm sorry to hear it looked easy."
"Who said it looked easy?!"
Even as he raised his voice, Rawi's face was pale. Because Yeon-woo hadn't denied his hypothesis. He still added neither confirmation nor denial, rely pressing his thumb against his own temple.
"Starting from the belly rather than circling on the outside is the fastest and most reliable approach. I won't say it's easy from a personal standpoint, but the return on investnt is quite favorable."
A favorable return on investnt. Those words made Rawi feel as though the breath had been knocked from his lungs.
"One thing all the Monster Guests who co to this hotel share is that each carries a profound deficiency."
"And you plan to exploit that? That still doesn't sound like the act of a sane person."
"That too is unfortunate."
He was growing thoroughly sick of that verbal tic.
"What do you even gain by going that far? Satisfaction? Self-gratification?"
"Of course it's self-gratification."
"Seeing you go this far just to save a couple of rcenaries like us, I don't know what face we're supposed to wear while breathing."
If only he'd at least vent or complain, maybe it would be easier. But Yeon-woo was a man of notably few words in that regard. This ti too, he rely gazed at Rawi with an impassive look.
"Rawi."
An unwavering voice.
"Don't mistake this for sothing it isn't."
"Mistake what?"
"I rely wanted to solve a problem that arose in my territory in my own way. I didn't do this to put you in my debt."
"Does saying that make it not a debt?"
"Then how about this."
His appearance was still horrific, blood still dripping, yet there was no trace of self-pity.
"You called sunbae-nim at first."
"That was, back then...."
"Shouldering danger first is a senior's duty."
Even the Yeon-woo saying this had probably died at barely twenty or so. And now he could never age again. Because he'd already been offered.
"With this, Seo is safe without a scratch, and I've gained leverage over that guest. That's all there is to it."
"What do you an 'that's all.'"
"I ant: don't waste energy on needless guilt or a sense of indebtedness."
"But...!"
To that, Yeon-woo asked.
"Do I seem strange to you?"
He looked tired.
"Nothing is more ordinary than one person helping another."
"...That's not actually true...."
"Is that so."
Then, in an offhanded tone,
"How unfortunate, as always."
"Ha."
Rawi let out a hollow laugh.
For the second ti today, he thought: no wonder they'd trapped him.
***
"......"
Stepping out of the room, Yeon-woo heaved a deep sigh.
"Hah, honestly...."
What an exhausting hotel.
"I was about to rest."
"Do you need any help, my friend?"
"Your very existence is harmful to ."
"Anemia makes you more honest."
"Does that bother you?"
"I quite like it."
"You must be insane."
"I enjoy this kind of conversation with you."
"I can't say I share any fond mories of it."
Yeon-woo wiped his blood-slick face and asked.
"Your appearance has changed. What should I call you?"
"A changed appearance doesn't change the essence."
A tall East Asian man with black hair and a pale face bent slightly at the waist and smiled.
"...Please call 'The Guest Without Taste.'"
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