Chapter 290. Eun Yuri (1) (1/2)
Bzzzz
A vibration filled the air as everyone stood in awe.
[A message from the Guide has arrived.][Sender: The Guide]1. Gather at the next island within the time limit.2. Time left 00: 40: 00
Seol Jihu clenched the phone in his fist. Although he had no idea what was going on, his instincts told him to head to the island.
‘The Guide should know something,’ he thought.
Seol Jihu departed as soon as he received the Guide's message. After finding a car, he found a person among the rescued who knew how to drive and left the injured to his care.
The rest headed to the bridge. The four bridges that linked the islands hung precariously over a steep cliff.
There was an odd clause highlighting that only one person was allowed to cross each bridge at a time. Seol Jihu quickly crossed the bridge, not paying much attention to this condition.
A group of about ten people was gathered at the place. They must have either escaped by luck or had just arrived after receiving the Guide’s message.
Seol Jihu waited patiently as a few other survivors arrived one after the other. The timer had gone down to less than 10 minutes when Phi Sora finally appeared.
“Only 28….”
Phi Sora counted heads and scoffed, but Seol Jihu could sense a faint air of concern from the look on her face.
“What happened?”
As soon as he asked, Phi Sora gently bit her lower lip.
“…First things first.”
She began but tapped on her phone in the next moment without finishing her sentence.
[Sender: The Guide][1. Rules for the Scavenger Hunt]Avoiding the eyes of the Homunculus, which will soon arrive at the second island, search for the coins hidden across the island, and find a way to escape!
[2. Conditions for Escaping]The entrance fee will be 100 coins.Offer the ‘sacrifice’, which can be acquired from the gacha machine with 666 coins, to the altar at the center of the island to activate a portal linked to the Neutral Zone.
[3. Precautions]The Homunculus will be in a rampaging state and can exert 16 times its original strength.Guided by the grudge of ‘Absolute Evil’ looming over the island, the Homunculus’ target will 'first' be the survivor who annihilated the Sixth Mother.Its regenerative abilities will also soar, enabling the Homunculus to recover from mortal wounds.There is a limit to the resurrection, however. The Homunculus will no longer be able to heal itself after 5 mortal wounds have been inflicted to it.
[‘Rampaging Homunculus’ will soon arrive on the second island.]
Seol Jihu looked up from his phone and stared at Phi Sora. His eyes were demanding an explanation. The job of a Guide was to offer necessary guidance when needed, nothing more. However, seeing the confused look on Seol Jihu’s face, Phi Sora could no longer keep her mouth shut.
“Dear, aren’t you forgetting one thing?”
“?”
‘Forgetting, forgetting….’
Seol Jihu began to think. Suddenly, he remembered the ‘Diary of an Unknown Survivor.’
“How to eliminate the killers.”
“That’s right.”
“Wait, but I didn’t forget about it. I just decided it wasn’t important. You’ve been watching, so you should know that the Sixth Mother—”
“I know, just hear me out first.”
Phi Sora interrupted Seol Jihu.
“I don’t know where to begin.”
She started with a sigh.
“So you know that the Sixth Mother was a black mage. You also know that a failed experiment designed to combine conflicting energies destroyed her body and trapped her soul inside the body of an anti-evil energy user.”
“Yes, yes, I know that. But—”
“The black mage failed her experiment, but she didn’t give up on it entirely. Just before she perished, she transferred the energy of black magic to her five devotees, promising to meet again in the future. She planned on improving her experiment using what she learned from her failure.”
Phi Sora spoke quickly, perhaps because they did not have much time on their hands.
“In short, the ultimate goal of the Sixth Mother was her own resurrection. Her ambition went beyond freeing her soul. She planned to create a body that could carry both types of energies, and then transfer her soul into that body.”
Seol Jihu felt dazed. Now he could understand the role of the Homunculus that, up until now, seemed to have appeared out of the blue.
“Then, the Homunculus is….”
“A new body that the black mage has prepared for her resurrection.”
Seol Jihu’s face warped into a distinct frown.
This meant that the cave from before was nothing but a decoy. He had assumed that the black mage’s wish was to set her soul free. However, as it turned out, the real objective had been elsewhere.
“Of course, the conditions for the resurrection are not easy to meet. First, you’d need an Essence of Soma and the Absolute Evil, each representing one end of the conflicting energies. Then, the soul of the black mage, who will serve as a mediator controlling both energies inside the new body, would have to be freed.”
“Absolute Evil?”
“The killers. Though, they are really fanatics who served the black mage.”
Phi Sora continued.
“Sacrificing survivors in order to liberate the Sixth Mother— that was nothing but an ostensible objective.”
“…”
“There are a total of five devotees of the Sixth Mother, but you might as well as treat them as one. They became linked to each other when they received the black mage’s energy. What this means is that they, too, are nothing more than sacrifices that would eventually be used to resurrect the Sixth Mother.”
So, the reason the remaining killers became stronger each time one of their own died was because the energy that had been divided into five pieces became closer to the whole.
After hearing the explanation, Seol Jihu finally realized why the Sixth Mother had thanked him.
“You’re saying that killing the killers is part of the process of completing the offering.”
“Yes. When the five pieces come together, Absolute Evil is born.”
Seol Jihu could only chuckle at the absurdity of the situation.
“So, whatever I chose to do wouldn’t have mattered.”
“No. That isn’t true.”
Phi Sora shook her head.
“Not everything was set in favor of the Sixth Mother.”
“?”
“As she said, it’s pointless for the survivors to kill the killers. But things could have been different had you fed the killers to the Homunculus locked away in the dungeon.”
The Homunculus was a vessel created to embody both the Essence of Soma and the Absolute Evil.
That is to say, if he had let the Homunculus devour the killers, that would have been seen as an act of offering sacrifices, and the energy of the black mage would have remained inside the vessel without being delivered to the rest of the killers.
“If you had taken the time to find the Homunculus and let it slowly devour three killers, things could have been different.”
“What do you mean?”
“Did you not read the third message? The one about the Homunculus gaining intelligence and a sense of self.”
Seol Jihu blinked his eyes.
“The Homunculus was born without a soul. But if it takes in the sacrifices not all at once but slowly, one at a time, it can absorb the energy of the Sixth Mother as its own and gain the ability to think independently. Then, even if the soul of the Sixth Mother was freed and the resurrection ritual was completed, the outcome wouldn’t have been the same as the one you’re facing.”
“….”
“The Homunculus, now fully intelligent, will fight to protect its body according to its survival instincts. It will fight over the ownership of the body and soul with the black mage who entered the vessel to take control of the energy within. Even the black mage would not have expected this. It’s a miscalculation on her part.”
“But the Diary of an Unknown Survival hinted that we shouldn’t feed the killers to the Homunculus.”
“That’s also correct. If the Homunculus gained more than three pieces of energy, it would have broken out of the dungeon. Then, it would have tried to devour everything in its path, be it the killers, the survivors, or the Sixth Mother.”
Having finished her explanation, Phi Sora looked down at her phone nervously. Clearly there wasn’t much time left. It was then that Seol Jihu realized the mistake he had made.
‘So this is what Attention Required meant….’
The special tutorial contained a huge secret that was simply beyond his imagination.
Seol Jihu thought he was being reasonable, but it turned out he had been making decisions based on only small parts of the tutorial.
“I have one more question.”
Seol Jihu said.
“Why did the Homunculus enter a rampaging state?”
“Because it failed to meet the conditions.”
Phi Sora answered quickly.
“Its body was made to contain opposite energies. But in this case, only half of those energies came in, and all at once too. So the Homunculus couldn’t properly digest the sudden surge of energy. And because the Sixth Mother’s soul isn’t there to control the energy, it’s natural for the Homunculus to go wild.”
Then Phi Sora continued in a somewhat feeble voice.
“Though… in this case, it did so on purpose to get back at you.”
Seol Jihu closed his eyes.
A mess. Everything was a huge mess. He felt wronged, of course. The Tutorial was simply too complicated.
Seol Jihu was no Sherlock Holmes. It was virtually impossible for him to figure out the entire plot with such limited information. But he also knew this was an excuse. Looking back now, he could see that, though scarce, the hints were definitely there.
[What is the Sixth Mother’s goal?]
There was at least one hint in the Diary of an Unknown Survivor. He did think it was strange there were so many pages in the diary. Had he taken the time to collect all the pages and proceeded with caution, he might have seen through the Sixth Mother’s plans.
Instead, he rushed and consequently failed. The noise inside his head was getting louder, but Seol Jihu defeated it with a shake of his head.
In any case, what was done was done. He knew his priority should be solving the problem at hand.
“To think that… of all the options, you’d choose the worst….”
Phi Sora sighed. Their conversation came to a halt. As the silence prolonged, the survivors’ faces began to fall. They could see that both the Guide and the Invited were upset.
“W-Wait.”
Giving in to the pressure, one of the survivors finally raised his hand and asked.
“So we have to find the coins or whatever to open the portal? Here, right now?”
“Yes. For the record, there are 6000 hidden coins. Though, that covers the entire island.”
“No, that’s not what I meant. I meant that… well, from what I heard, it seems there’s a scary monster on the way….”
He mumbled and looked at Seol Jihu. Phi Sora raised her eyebrows slightly.
“You’re blaming this man?”
A look of disdain quickly crossed Phi Sora’s face. She knew he was one of the survivors Seol Jihu rescued. She couldn’t believe he was still looking for someone to blame, so much that she started to question his motives.
“Now that’s too much!”
Park Woori raised his voice.
“What the hell do you want?”
“Excuse me?”
“You’d be dead anyway if it wasn’t for Hyung-nim! ‘Let’s do this together. Is there anything I can do to help?’ That’s what you should be saying! Where’s your conscience!?”
“I-I haven’t said anything yet! I just—”
“Not me.”
As the man shrugged nervously, a sharp voice interrupted their conversation. It was from the same woman who argued with the young man at the empty lot. She looked at Seol Jihu and Park Woori with eyes full of discontent.
“I haven’t received any help from the Invited over there. I made it here on my own.”
She didn’t say much, but it was clear from the tone of her voice that she was pinning the blame on Seol Jihu and demanding him to take care of the mess that he had created.
“All of you, shut up.”
It was then that Phi Sora raised her voice.
“I did warn you not to point fingers at others.”