DNLYHS Chapter 11 (Part 2)

So did he ever get that tattoo? Or not? Yeonseo walked onward blankly, wondering. Maybe someone had once advised him to get the scar removed instead. The voice had sounded irritated and nagging, yet oddly affectionate.

The more he followed the marks, the more something stirred inside him. He knew this wasn’t leading him toward an exit but deeper inward. Even so, he kept retracing his steps.

And the closer he got to the end…

― Hey, can I ask you something?

― You ask all the time, why act like it’s new… What?

― Are you… being threatened by bad people?

― …Stay out of it.

― Don’t say that.

― I said stay out of it. Who I hang out with is none of your business.

A bad feeling suddenly washed over him. Yeonseo began walking faster.

* * *

Beating the “Master Key” in the hallway and obtaining a usable key-shaped form was nowhere near as easy as it sounded.

“…Good thing I came with you.”

“Yeah.”

Without the cook’s help, the janitor would’ve struggled. He climbed the stairs, breathing hard.

In his hand was a massive “key.” The thing wriggled with leftover muscle and skin even though it had long since been separated from its main body, and the sleepy-looking eye attached at the top stared at the two of them.

The third floor was surprisingly quiet. Maybe most students had swarmed toward the cafeteria downstairs, or maybe the Master Key had crushed countless students on its way down. Judging by the wrecked hallways, it was probably the latter.

“So once we use that key on the broadcasting room, that’s it?”

“Yeah. If we open it with this, a different space should appear.”

“Then we meet the broadcasting adviser inside and try to convince him… The only problem is if he’s lost his mind so thoroughly that we can’t even hold a conversation.”

Right, that could happen. The janitor finally realized that and frowned. What if the adviser simply dismissed everything as lies, or was too far gone to hear them at all?

“Hmm?”

“What is it?”

“Look there. Where the flowerpot fell.”

Something caught the janitor’s eye. Amid the wreckage, a flowerpot that originally sat in a strange spot had tipped over, revealing the wall behind it.

On the wall, written in thick strokes like permanent marker, was a noticeable message.

Why does the history of repetitions stored in the broadcasting room even exist? If they were just going to make us forget, why did they bother showing it to us?

After reading the message, the cook and the janitor exchanged glances. When the cook muttered, “Could it be…,” the janitor nodded. The handwriting was familiar. They still vaguely remembered exchanging written notes in the basement.

“He wrote this.”

“I figured.”

Maybe the entire school’s wall writings were like that. At first, they thought the handwriting looked different, but maybe that was just because the writing tools varied. Thinking back carefully, the handwriting might have been far more similar than they realized. As he pondered this, the janitor went over the message again.

“So this means the broadcasting room is storing the memories we forgot, right?”

“Seems like it.”

“Good. Then let’s take a look at that accumulated history.”

“Hm? How did you get to that conclusion?”

“What do you mean how? Isn’t it obvious? If we’ve been repeating a ridiculous number of times, then the broadcasting adviser must have snapped countless times too. If we recover his memories, he’ll realize he’s been making the same mistakes over and over. That might snap him out of it.”

“…You really think things will go that smoothly?”

The cook looked confused, but the janitor nodded confidently. Of course, things might get unpredictable once they actually got inside, but if everything went well, maybe it would work.

“You sure it’ll help? The message said we’d forget anyway.”

“Things might be different now. The Code of Conduct said something about the rules of maintaining consciousness breaking down.”

“Hm.”

“And besides… even if we forget, I think something still piles up somewhere deep inside. Even if we can’t consciously recall it.”

After saying that, the janitor lifted the “key” toward the broadcasting room door. The key, shaped like the ripped-off head of a beast, turned mushy and clung to the doorknob. It writhed and squirmed like it was vomiting something out, making wet, nauseating sounds.

“…Maybe you’re right. Maybe things do pile up.”

The cook muttered this with a conflicted look while waiting for the key to finish its work. Had the janitor already realized something?

How much time passed, they couldn’t tell. But between the squelching sounds of flesh and liquid, a metallic click finally rang out.

“There.”

The janitor tossed the key aside without hesitation and kicked the door open.

But the moment they saw what was inside, both of them were speechless.

“Go away. I’ll forget. I don’t know. I don’t want to see anything.”

The first thing they saw was a mountain of corpses. The broadcasting room wasn’t even that large, but there wasn’t a single patch of floor left uncovered. The bodies were stacked so high it was hard to even step inside.

And the worst part was that every corpse looked exactly the same. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of young men, barely old enough to be considered adults, lay scattered across the floor. Every single one had been strangled.

Did they fight each other in here? No, that can’t be it. If they fought, those wounds would’ve transferred to the school nurse. That never happened.

Maybe they were corpses from the beginning, dead people appearing one by one inside the room. Perhaps they weren’t the dead of the last ten days, but people who had died in previous “loops”…

Whatever the case, the broadcasting room was pure chaos. Even aside from the bodies, blood and bits of flesh were plastered across the walls and floor. It made one wonder how anyone could survive in a place like this for two weeks. The plastic bags and lunchbox remnants near the entrance were the only things faintly resembling the human world.

“Don’t go insane. Don’t go insane. Don’t go insane…”

“…First get the bodies out!”

The moment they heard a voice buried under the corpses, both men dove forward, frantically dragging bodies out and hurling them into the hallway. They needed space to do anything.

As they cleared the pile, they found a living person among the dead. When the wide-eyed young man saw them, he curled up and shrieked with a warped, terrified scream.

“No… I don’t want to think! Stop it, please, I’m sorry, everything’s my fault!”

“Get a grip! We’re here to save you!”

The cook shook his shoulder over and over, but the young man only sobbed harder, muttering incoherently.

Meanwhile, the janitor rushed deeper into the broadcasting room toward the equipment. If anything here could change their situation, it would be that.

He knew almost nothing about machines, but he scanned the control panel anyway. There were dozens of switches, but thankfully each switch had a small sticker explaining what it did.

Only two switches were currently on. One was labeled [Sin], and the other [Finale].

“No wonder he went insane with crap like this turned on!”

Without hesitation, the janitor shut both switches off. He didn’t care whether he was “allowed” to touch the equipment. That idiot from the broadcasting club had messed everything up even though he was the authorized user, deceived by the janitor’s lies. Nothing he did now could possibly make it worse.

“Homeroom, dismissal, cafeteria, basement, annex… No, these are important too, but!”

Restarting the daily announcements wasn’t going to fix anything. They needed something specific.

After scanning the labels, the janitor finally found something that might matter.

‘Huh?’

Earlier, the switch had been labeled [Repeat]. But as he reached for it, the letters shifted, like living things rearranging themselves, and reformed into the word [Face].

This was it. The switch they needed.

He shouted toward the cook, who was still at the doorway wrestling with the terrified young man.

“Get inside!”

“Why?”

“It might snap him out of it! I’m turning it on now!”

“How do you even know what it…”

Despite his words, the cook came in without resisting, so the janitor flipped the switch without hesitation.

He had no idea what would happen, but he was certain of one thing: what the broadcasting adviser needed right now was to face reality. Not suffocate under a mountain of his own corpses, born from guilt and despair, unable to confront the truth…

And the moment he pressed the switch.

The janitor realized that the one affected by “facing” wasn’t just the broadcasting adviser.

― Hey, why’s your door locked? What are you doing?

― …Nuna, what brings you to our place?

― I came to tell Dad something. And while I was out, I bought you some food… Anyway, aren’t you going to open this? You picked up the habit of locking doors since I last saw you?

― I’m in the middle of something… But, Nuna.

― What?

― If you had someone precious to you… and you thought that if you stayed close to them, you’d end up hurting them… would you distance yourself?

― Huh? If it were me, I think I’d keep my distance.

― ……

― That’s why I moved out, right? Mom and I don’t get along. Mom’s uncomfortable around me too. If you’re only hurting each other, it’s better to break things off early.

― …But that person doesn’t hurt me.

― The fact you’re even thinking that way means you’re already hurting them, doesn’t it? Anyway, I don’t know what’s going on with you, but cut off relationships that need cutting. It’ll feel lighter.

― ……

― Also, fix that habit of locking yourself in your room. If you trip one day and smash your head on your desk and die, no one will know. I won’t help you either.

― ……

― Tch, do whatever you want. Lock your door and rot in there for all I care. Anyway, I’m going. Whatever it is, don’t obsess over some trivial problem too much.

Right after that, the janitor remembered a moment he had completely forgotten.

A pitiful scene of himself standing before that same locked door, crying until his eyes were swollen, kicking the door and screaming until his voice broke.

* * *

The old screen hanging on the wall glowed with the projector’s bright light.

The moment Yeongwon stepped into the audiovisual room, everything happening outside seemed to fade into a distant murmur. The school swallowed by darkness, the janitor who seemed more intent on using him than protecting him, everything slipped out of his mind.

Instead, he focused on the images on the screen. Memories he didn’t consciously remember, but traces of them remained deep in his heart, stories that felt so distant they might as well belong to another lifetime.

― I liked someone.

― They were the one who came to me first, but at some point… it became my heart that ached for them more.

He didn’t think it was the right time to like anyone. Honestly, maybe his whole life had been like that. Too exhausted to look at anything beyond himself, burdened by the idea that if someone treated him kindly, he would someday have to repay it.

Even if someone told him that all tunnels eventually have an end, no one was there to tell him when the end would come.

― How many times did I think something twisted like “That kid must have it easy”?

― They shower me with kindness because their life is overflowing with room to breathe. I thought that way, not knowing anything.

But the boy who approached him was the opposite.

Even someone as clueless about rumors as Yeongwon had heard of him. Supposedly the third or fourth son of a wealthy family, always ranked first in his class, the type of kid everyone admired.

So why a boy like that lingered around Yeongwon, someone not even in his class, with no real connection, was impossible to understand. It was like he had an uncontrollable urge to care about someone, and no matter how much Yeongwon snapped at him or pushed him away, he didn’t care at all.

― Maybe he just wanted to like someone, and it didn’t matter who…

Trying to justify those awkward, embarrassing feelings took half a year. And another half-year of vaguely assuming that if he left the boy alone, he would eventually give up on his own.

But by the time he understood the boy wasn’t the type to give up or lose interest easily, it was already too late.

― But even so… I don’t think I could have handled him.

First, Yeongwon heard ugly rumors about himself. He ignored them, he’d been dealing with nonsense rumors since middle school.

Then, the rumors switched to target the boy.

That was when he tried creating distance. Partly because he knew he was the cause of the rumors. And also because…

― You know he’s fragile too, right? He wasn’t some endlessly bright, invincible person like I assumed…

He never said anything aloud, but he had shadows too. Scars on his body he claimed he would someday cover with a cool tattoo, scars Yeongwon still didn’t know the origin of.

Maybe the boy stayed near him because of those shadows. But that only made it feel even more wrong to add to them.

― Above all… I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know if he approached me with real feelings…

Maybe that was the scariest part. Maybe Yeongwon was misunderstanding everything, maybe the boy never had those feelings, and hearing all the surrounding rumors, he might realize Yeongwon’s one-sided feelings and become disgusted.

So there were days when Yeongwon thought it would be best to suffer alone at a distance.

But…

“I’m not as strong as I thought I was.”

“……!”

“You’re thinking that right now, aren’t you?”

Yeongwon’s body swayed violently as he stared at the screen. By the time he regained his senses, the notebook in his hand had already been ripped away and thrown aside.

He lunged for it, but the janitor pounced on top of him, trying to strangle him before he could recover the book.

“Ghh!”

“You stupid kid. So you think you died because you couldn’t hold on? That if you’d endured, you wouldn’t have died? Do you know how many people in this world died because they ‘couldn’t hold on’? You going to say that to their faces? Huh?”

“You know damn well that’s not what it meant!”

From the video alone, he already understood the outline.

He couldn’t endure a pain he thought he could handle, and to protect someone precious, he pushed them away, but that person…

“Have you really never thought about it? Why that kid approached you in the first place, when you two weren’t even close?”

“Stop pulling weird tricks…!”

“Don’t you have any guesses about who spread those rumors about you? Do you really think those rumors spread because of something you did?”

He was sick of this man’s method. Exploiting just the right gaps in someone’s memory, planting suspicion, feeding fear into the cracks. He wasn’t going to fall for such a cheap tactic anymore.

But… damn it, his memories…

Because he’d lost his notebook, holes were forming in his thoughts and his memories were fading. He couldn’t recall who he had loved, how gentle and careless that person had been, or how upright and strong they were beneath it all. All of it evaporated.

And whenever a memory disappeared, anxiety took over its place. Without the safeguard called memory, thoughts naturally rolled toward the worst possible conclusion. Maybe there had been another reason he died. Maybe the cause had been someone he believed he loved. Maybe that person wasn’t worth loving at all…

“Ha… ha, scared, aren’t you?”

The janitor grinned, propped Yeongwon up, and dragged him out of the audiovisual room while mumbling sweet nonsense like, “I never meant to kill you from the start.”

“You don’t have to force yourself to remember right now. Once we get out, you’ll remember everything again, Yeongwon.”

“……”

“So come with me, Yeongwon. I’ll turn back the time for you. To before you made all those wrong choices.”

“……”

“You don’t know anything right now. So just do what I say…”

To an outsider, it looked like Yeongwon was being dragged along helplessly. But in truth, he was thinking carefully while listening.

No matter how he looked at it, most of what this man said was a lie. But right now, he had no way to prove it. The man targeted only the empty spaces in his memory…

Unless, was that really true?

At that moment, Yeongwon noticed a small notebook tucked inside the janitor’s shirt pocket. It was almost identical to the one the monitor carried around his neck.

Could that be…

Maybe he had forgotten whom he loved. But he could still find out what kind of creature this man standing before him truly was. Maybe that was the truth the janitor desperately wanted to cover up by weaponizing fear.

“Fine. I’m starting to get interested in you too.”

“Really? That’s great, Yeongwon. Then we can…”

“…So hand over your Code of Conduct, you filthy bastard.”

The moment he said that, Yeongwon yanked the notebook from the man’s pocket and kicked him in the stomach with all the strength he had. The man tumbled down the hallway with a groan. While he was still rolling, Yeongwon flipped the notebook open and turned on the small flashlight he’d taken from the pocket.

At first glance, it looked normal. But it wasn’t.

Just flipping a few pages made it obvious. The first page was suspiciously thick, and there was a hollowed-out space beneath it. The pages had been glued together to hide the real contents.

“You…!”

Right before the man managed to rush him again, Yeongwon ripped open the glued seam and looked inside.

The writing inside was nothing like the codes of the others. Crude handwriting, stained a dark red as if someone had forced blood into the pen.

[I am a liar. An illusion built on lies is what placed me here.]

[Universal rule: I am the “seventh participant” who was never meant to exist. I gain the status of a temporary staff member only while the ritual is underway, and my true identity must never be revealed to the participants. When the ritual ends, I return to where I belong.]

[Escape chance: After obtaining Yeongwon, feed all remaining participants into the wish machine. If you break the ten numbers that turn back time, we will release me.]

Yeongwon finished reading and stared at the janitor, eyes wide.

“…So you found out?”

The thing standing there was no longer a janitor, nor even anything that could be called human.

* * *

“…Hah!”

The monitor snapped back to his senses at the feeling of the cook shaking his shoulder.

Or maybe it wasn’t just that. From somewhere far beyond this place, a tremor strong enough to collapse the entire school and a horrendous scream had echoed through the air.

“You alright? Are you back in your right mind?”

“I… I’m fine. Where’s the broadcasting kid?”

“Over there. Still half out of his mind… but it looks like he remembered something.”

Sorry, I’m sorry. I was wrong.
The broadcasting adviser kept muttering those words. But unlike earlier, when he’d babbled nonsense without even knowing what he was apologizing for, now his eyes were clear. His expression looked strangely sorrowful, as if he were chewing on something long past and irreversible.

The monitor immediately grabbed the broadcasting adviser’s shoulder and helped him sit upright. This person needed to look someone in the eye and speak to them, something he hadn’t been able to do until now.

“I’m sorry, I’m sor…”

“Sorry for what? To who?”

“Uh…? To who?”

“It’s me, the monitor. Took me a while to get the door to where you were open.”

“……!”

“So, who are you sorry to?”

“…The rumors. I… I spread the rumors.”

What came next was a broken, rambling explanation, barely coherent. But the rough outline went like this:

“When you were in school, you saw a classmate and some thug-looking kid together and thought they were dating, so you spread a rumor?”

“I… didn’t know they were dating back then.”

“If you didn’t know, then what rumor were you spreading?”

“I thought… that kid was being blackmailed or something. The guy had all these nasty rumors about him…”

“What rumors.”

“That his parents were divorced, or his dad was some kind of gangster, or that he was gay… Honestly, none of it matched if you thought about it. So I tried… later on… to clear up the misunderstanding. But things just got weirder.”

Trying to guess how he attempted to “clear up” that misunderstanding was impossible. But the important part was clear: he had recklessly created a situation he couldn’t handle and then flailed uselessly when it spun out of control.

A quiet anger stirred deep within the monitor. Saying whatever he wanted despite knowing nothing, then failing to take responsibility and ruining everything…

“I wanted to tell them… that I was sorry.”

“……”

“That was my wish. But when I first remembered it, I felt so ashamed… I just wanted to look away.”

“……”

“I’m sorry. For dragging all of you into this.”

The monitor let go of him without a word. Anything more said here would mean nothing. Better to talk after leaving the school, after he regained everything and could face the painful reality head-on.

Besides, there was a more urgent problem at hand.

“Hold on, something just printed out from the fax here. What’s this?”

“That, that’s an emergency broadcast script! It comes out automatically!”

When the cook waved the paper in alarm, the broadcasting adviser panicked and rushed over. All three of them leaned in to read the fresh white sheet.

[The identity of the foreign entity has been revealed. The ‘janitor’ does not originally exist in this school.]

[The lies that maintained the core of the ritual have been stripped away. The darkness and hiding places that protected you until now can no longer function. This is not a place meant for you. This school lies beyond the boundary of the living. You do not belong here.]

[Once more, this is not a space that exists for your sake anymore. To leave the land beyond the living, you may choose one of two options. Endure until the 14th day and complete the ritual, or move to the auditorium immediately to terminate the ritual in the proper manner.]