DEB 27

When Huiyun opened his eyes, an empty hospital room greeted him.

“…What’s going on?”

Immediately alert to the situation resembling a set-up dinner table, Huiyun delved into his perception. He tried to search even for the faintest dispersed energy, feeling a lightness in his stomach as if warning him that pushing further might make him vomit blood. 

Expanding his detection range only to the extent of scouring the entire ward, Huiyun became suspicious when he couldn’t sense any trace of the three people anywhere in the hospital where he was admitted, not even a trace of the guards they left behind.

What’s going on here?

Why did the three sticks to him like glue, and suddenly, not one but all three of them vanished?

Something fishy was going on here.

It was clear that they had set a trap. Frowning at the realization, Huiyun took a deep breath and expanded his detection range.

The target was within a radius of 1 km. 

“…Cough.”

He immediately coughed up blood, but since he was waiting with a towel in advance, he was able to catch the blood without staining his clothes. 

Huiyun worked very hard to detect Jiwook, Juan, and Nameless.

After meticulously checking for 10 minutes, the white towel was soaked in blood.

“…None of them?”

Huiyun expressed disbelief at the results he obtained.

It’s a trap. That much was obvious, but judging from the situation, it seemed to lean towards one of two traps.

One was the direction he had just considered, where they deliberately avoided him and were waiting for him to act. The other was predicting that he would think this way and comfortably went to attend to his postponed errand.

The former was blatantly predictable, but the latter was annoying as it seemed to treat him like a complete fool. Thinking about who might have come up with such a fox-like suggestion, Huiyun realized it could be any of them, which was the problem. 

Kwon Jiwook was the most likely to come up with it, as he was good at thinking on his feet, while Hong Juan was simply good at pulling off shallow tricks. Nameless also seemed to have the potential for such scheming. As Huiyun sequentially pondered, he once again recalled that they were his disciples and felt despair.

It would have been better not to know at all.

He wondered who taught those crazy bastards, but it turned out to be himself. 

Though Jiwook and Nameless were still questionable, he was confident that Hong Juan was Ash.

It’s been a while since I’ve been out.

It’s the eighth day today. He might not have felt it if he had been unconscious, but to endure eight days in a confined space while sober, he felt a bit stifled.

 Huiyun pondered while opening the window and feeling the wind on his face. 

Despite the suspicion that it was a trap, this was also an opportunity. 

If not today, when would he had time to progress the quest?

What should I do?

It’s a trap that they set up for him. Should he push through it or avoid it? 

Huiyun, biting his lip as he pondered, hesitated before exerting force on his body.

I shouldn’t rush.

One mistake could collapse the tower he had painstakingly built so far. He picked up the blood-stained towel and put it in a black bag, then picked up a book. Instead of wasting time on futile endeavor, he flipped through the pages as if he were going to read. 

When the three returned, he had read about half of a volume of a novel set in a fantasy world, nearly five hundred pages long.

“You said you were on guard duty. Where did you go?”

It was early evening by the time the three entered the hospital room, so Huiyun closed the book he was reading and asked. 

Juan was the first to come and sit on Huiyun’s bed.

“You’re saying it as if you’re disappointed. Were you lonely?” 

“It was comfortable.”

“Lies.”

Juan smirked and denied it. Huiyun glanced at the remaining two, Jiwook and Nameless looked around the room as if checking if anything had changed.

“I had something to take care of, so I went out. I’ll be like this for another three days, so please understand. I’d like to stay here and ask for your blood, too, but I have a lot of overdue work.”

It was Nameless who answered, the one who had first caught Huiyun’s gaze. Huiyun, who found it absurd that he said that as if Huiyun would surely give him the blood, suddenly realized that Nameless’s skin was cleaner than usual. He immediately checked Jiwook and Juan again. Now that he thought about it, all three of them had a fair amount of color on their faces.

Did they bring some medicine or something? 

Huiyun speculated, then realized.

There were no extra spaces for other people to lie down in the single-person room. If you didn’t sleep on the floor, the makeshift bed for caregivers was all there was. Even that was only for one person, so it wasn’t very helpful in this room where four adult men were using it. 

Huiyun recalled the past seven days.

Focused on avoiding surveillance, he hadn’t noticed, but none of the three showed any signs of sleeping. Of course, since they were human, they might have dozed off briefly while he was asleep, but they wouldn’t sleep on the floor, so it was highly unlikely that they had slept deeply.

So, did they come back after catching up on their sleep?

Everyone seemed fairly tidy, and their complexions had improved, so it wasn’t entirely implausible. Huiyun pondered whether to ask but decided to save his words and continued reading his book. 

There wasn’t much conversation that day. 

He quietly waited until Huigang returned from work, exchanged greetings with him, and then fell asleep again as the night deepened.

On the ninth day of surveillance, Huiyun woke up again in an empty room, except for himself.

“…It’s already been two days.”

According to Nameless, it was supposed to be three days. 

“I have to be patient.”

Just in case, Huiyun used his detection ability to check, and since yesterday, he had been keeping a towel nearby, only to confirm that there were no traces of the three hunters nearby.

It was really strange. 

It was like they dangle a piece of cake in front of him, and they knew he couldn’t hastily bite into it. But he couldn’t just sit still either. Huiyun put the blood-stained towel in a plastic bag and got up.

He also thought he might as well go out for a bit while emptying the bag.

Taking a deep breath, he slowly walked out of the room. As it was dawn, he passed through the quiet corridor, past the bright desk where the night shift nurses were working, and left the ward. 

The wind gently tousled Huiyun’s hair as he walked out.

“Being out here… It truly makes me feels alive.”

Breathing in the fresh air through the window was different from stepping out and inhaling the cool air directly.

 Feeling liberated, Huiyun stood there for a while, enjoying the breeze, rinsed the blood-stained towel in the bag in the bathroom, and when the color faded, he put it in the old clothes collection box and returned.

The three hunters didn’t return until around 5 p.m. that day, filling Huiyun’s room once again.

And on the tenth day of surveillance, at dawn.

Huiyun once again judged that today was the time for them to be absent. He needed to complete the quest with limited time left.

It was dangerous for him to leave when the sun was up, so he needed to find a gate and finish it quickly after the sun sets.

Boldly stepping onto the window ledge and jumping out silently, Huiyun landed on the ground and summoned the system window. Today, the administrator who had been guarding the place immediately sent a golden system window.

[Are you bothered by the gate issue? Just for you! Who are currently concerned…]

“Enough, just find out if there’s a gate higher than low-grade that’s open or not. Look for undiscovered gates.”

[…Please move along the golden line ^^ Fuc-]

[Oops, typo!]

It’s so obvious, you rascal.

Huiyun chuckled at the ridiculous excuse and looked at the golden line that unfolded before him. There was a sense of assurance that it would guide him properly this time the automated system. 

Then, it happened…

Rustle

Then, he heard a rustling sound from the side and turned his gaze, where he saw a young child, about six years old, standing on the flower bed, trampling the grass. 

Surprised because it was a dangerous time for a child to go around, Huiyun used his small size to approach the boy who seemed to have sneaked out.

However, Huiyun’s steps had to stop before reaching the child. It was because the ground beneath him trembled faintly.

“This…?”

At first, he thought the vibration was too weak to be real, but it wasn’t. When he looked down, he saw the stones on the ground bouncing lightly. Huiyun’s expression hardened as he realized the nature of the eerie energy rising slowly from the ground.

Distortion.

Huiyun suddenly looked up. An ominous current was gathering towards the child, and it was a moment of impact when the ground beneath the child rose with a grinding noise.

Crack!

The ground on which the child stood collided with another surface and shot upward.

“Whoa!”

The dazed child finally regained his senses and staggered. 

“Be careful!”

“H-Help!”

The boy who had lost his balance and fallen noticed Huiyun running towards him and called out to him. It was simultaneous with Huiyun’s instinctive reaction to the danger, as he reached out his hand towards the boy, Huiyun leaped swiftly and embraced him.

Bzzzz!

A black hole, only the size of a fist, appeared right next to them. Huiyun, easily surmising it was a gate, swiftly attempted to get off the ground, but the black whirlpool instantly grew in size and sucked Huiyun’s body in.

“Oh no…”

He tried to stand firmly on both feet, but the black hole, which had already swallowed Huiyun’s back and one of the child’s arms, showed no intention of letting them go.

“Ugh… Sob!”

The child, with tears welling up, couldn’t hold back his fear and burst into tears. Realizing there was nothing to gain from resisting the pull, Huiyun tightly embraced the small child.

“It’s okay.”

The scale of distortion wasn’t too large. 

Huiyun, calming the child, realized that the grade of the gate might not be too high either. He closed his eyes. This was a gate that had to be cleared. 

Let’s clear it quickly and get out.

With that thought in mind, he relaxed his legs, and the gate instantly engulfed Huiyun and the child.