Editor’s Survival Guide - Chapter 159

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Editor’s Survival Manual – Episode 159

ep21. Shrouded in Mist (9)
“I’m applying pressure to stop the bleeding. Don’t worry and keep moving.”
Cha Si-eon’s voice was calm.
But it carried no conviction whatsoever.
Blood was pouring out like water, and he claimed he was stopping it.
“Wouldn’t it be better to treat it properly and then move?”
“This is bleeding I can’t stop here.”
Cha Si-eon said this and continued forward.
Every step he took left a fresh trail of blood.
But I was hopelessly weak, barely more than a child—I couldn’t even support the injured man at my side.
Then Cha Si-eon, who’d been leading, suddenly stopped.
“We have about eight hundred meters left.”
Click—
The sound of a magazine being changed.
“If we keep going, we should encounter the Monks.”
“What do you—”
I looked up at Cha Si-eon as he turned around.
Why was he saying such a thing all of a sudden?
That was when it happened.
Meow—
A kitten’s cry echoed from behind my back.
The sound of the River Crosser.
“Run. As fast as you can.”
Cha Si-eon gave a terse command and thrust a pistol into my hands.
I stared at him for a moment before taking the gun.
The pistol, caked with blood, felt far heavier than I’d ever known one to be.
I began to run, gun in hand.
Rat-a-tat-tat—!
Gunfire erupted behind me.
I didn’t look back.
When the gunfire suddenly stopped, I almost faltered.
But I steadied myself and kept running.
Then.
Boom—!
An explosion tore through the air.
Heat rushed past me with the deafening blast.
What followed was silence.
A terrible quiet that marked the boundary where death and peace meet.
I finally stopped.
I considered turning back countless times, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
If I turned around now, everything would be over.
That’s what my instinct was telling me.
I took another step forward.
Then I ran, eyes fixed ahead.
Not far now.
Eight hundred meters—a distance I could cover in five minutes.
But already my breath was ragged.
“Huff—gasp—!”
My legs felt heavy despite the short run.
Actually, they hurt.
Cha Si-eon and Baek Sa-ra had carried me most of the way, never letting my feet touch ground, but I was already injured from diving into the river and being caught in the explosion.
Each step sent knives of pain through my knees and ankles.
Damn it, so what was I supposed to do?
There’s only me left now.
To save those people, I have to—
“Huff—sob—”
My labored breathing finally broke into sobs.
Damn it, tears began to fall.
Static mixed into my already irregular gasps for air.
Cha Si-eon seems to be dead.
Baek Sa-ra is dead.
The others are likely dead too.
I have to bring them back.
But why are you still lying in my hands?
The moment I looked at the Crow I was holding, I finally broke.
“Don’t die—”
I couldn’t run any further and collapsed where I stood.
I clung to the Crow and whispered desperately.
“Don’t die and leave me alone—”
Please, take me with you instead.
Mother, I’m begging you.
I didn’t know.
Whether I was a twenty-eight-year-old editor or a nine-year-old child who’d lost her mother.
Whether this pain was grief over someone else’s death or despair at being left alone.
If only I’d died sooner.
If I’d been swept up in falling metal and flames, dead before I could even understand why.
Pain is the burden of the living.
The dead carry only their own death away, but the living remember all of the dead.
So they live alongside death.
Living is dying.
So perhaps.
Death, which might be kind to me.
That was when it happened.
Tap—tap—tap—tap—
Footsteps sounded near my ears as I lay weeping face-down.
I flinched and lifted my head.
From across the bridge, the Monks with lotus-crowned heads were walking toward me.
The very beings I’d been waiting for all this time.
But for some reason, I felt no joy.
Rather than relief, my first thought was: why now?
I sat where I was and watched the Monks approach.
They gazed upon me with the same indifference as always.
Stop—
But the last Monk among them halted before me.
It brought its hands together in prayer and bowed deeply, its lotus-crowned head at full bloom.
It was a gesture I couldn’t interpret.
I didn’t know what of humanity this bizarre creature understood to mime such an act.

Yet my eyes overflowed with tears once more.
It was only imitation.
Meaningless mimicry of a monster.
And yet through that gesture I saw myself reflected.
Myself, who had wished selfishly for death.
I wept, regretting even that brief moment of giving up.
And when those tears finally stopped, I had become an adult again.
“Phew—”
I exhaled long and slow.
Whether because I’d grown up or because I’d cried myself out, my heart was calm.
I steadied my breathing and wiped my drenched face.
Then I straightened my clothes, which had rolled up and twisted everywhere.
“All right. Let’s get to the door.”
Everything’s a mess from start to finish, but it’s too early to give up.
Whether at the door I care for the Crow or do something else—I’ll give it my all.
“Cha Si-eon has been saved several times already.”
At the very least, Cha Si-eon is someone important to the Crow.
So if he wakes, he’ll move to save Cha Si-eon again.
“Same with Baek Sa-ra and Jeong Jin-woo.”
There’s a high chance they’ll all be brought back to life.
Even the Director has been saved countless times.
So get your head straight.
Right now, you’re all I have.
I persuaded myself and stood again.
Then, returned to an adult’s body, I began to run.
A distance that had seemed vast when I was a child shrank in an instant.
I can do this.
In this state, it’s possible.
I ran, building confidence with each step, and soon reached the door.
“Phew—”
I caught my breath and gazed at the doors before me.
Could this even be called a door?
Wouldn’t ‘wall’ be a more accurate description?
Though it wasn’t exactly a complete wall either.
The center had a gaping hole through which the sky was visible, while the remaining intact portions were covered entirely in doors.
It resembled incomprehensible contemporary art.
In any case, the center had been utterly demolished in a rain of bombs, but along the edges, intact doors remained.
And looking closely, I could tell precisely.
All the doors here were from Yongsan Station.
The glass doors at the station entrance, the iron doors to the station office, even the restroom stall doors.
Every door that existed inside had apparently been dragged here and driven into place.
Just how desperate was the Big Cat to hide the Train Station?
I marveled at that obsession and slipped the Crow into my pocket.
Then, holding the pistol, I slowly approached the doors.
Fortunately, the area around the doors was quiet.
Perhaps because it had already used its preparations to annihilate us, it was now abandoned like a defunct factory.
Thanks to that, I reached the door without difficulty.
Moreover, most of the doors at my eye level were intact.
Now I just had to choose one and enter.

But I couldn’t bring myself to open the door.
Because I’d witnessed the bombs falling from the sky here in real time.
No, wait. Stop.
That bombing was the result of frantically opening and closing doors to align the date.
The probability that opening a door now would summon that day again was infinitesimally small.
Of course, only that day isn’t dangerous.
There may be other horrors stored in this space.
But even that would be a special event.
Most days, aside from that one, passed without incident.
There were far more days when ordinary people led ordinary lives.
Yes, unless God truly despises me enough to want me dead.
The moment I open the door, a death sentence shouldn’t appear.
I trusted the odds and opened the door before me.
Click—
Or rather, I tried to.
But before I could even grasp the handle, the door beside it swung open by itself.
Through the gap, something black appeared.
The moment I saw it, it swallowed me whole.
Crunch—!
The impact came before the pain.
And what followed was darkness.
That doesn’t mean God hates me.
He probably neither loves nor hates.
Humans seek God to give meaning to their own worthless existence.
Humanity has always been this way.
And mocking such humans, certain things simply occur.
Defeat.
Failure.
Death.
Ruin.
Or conclusion.
This, too, was merely one of those things that happen.
* * *
Is death white?
It seems so.
Looking at everything surrounding me.
Is death a woman?
That also seems right.
Because I keep hearing a woman’s voice.
—I hope my death is not a great source of sorrow for you all. Should anyone else have been harmed, I offer my condolences and sympathies to them and their families.
Then is death my own suicide note?
That seems right too?
The words I’ve been hearing match exactly what I wrote in my note.
—I was advised to write my suicide note as shamefully as possible. So I considered how I might become ashamed and found a way, but I realized it’s not just my own shame that’s the problem—the living who must know the fetishes of the dead are the real victims. So I decided to refrain from mentioning such things.
God damn it.
I should have burned my note before it got out.
I’d scrawled it carelessly in some pre-dawn melancholy and just left it behind.
—Did you really write this as a suicide note?
Death muttered in exasperation.
Then, in a voice grown lower, it marveled.
—Quite well done, though… This way people will be eternally curious about your fetishes. To hint at it and then die like this—how deliciously wicked.
No. It’s a misunderstanding.
I had no such intention.
Or rather, that’s beside the point.
What is this voice?
Death couldn’t possibly have such a willful consciousness of its own.
The moment I questioned it, my dormant senses reawakened.
“That’s right, remember.”
The voice that had been echoing without direction became clear and drove into my ears.
“This is the third time you’re seeing it.”
I turned my head toward the voice and found a woman standing there.
A face I knew.
The woman with that familiar face whispered to me.
“Dead again? I’m disappointed in you.”

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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