Grab the Regressor by the Collar and Debut - Chapter 427

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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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427. A Haunted Experience
Let’s Go on a
Trip! (4)
We managed to uncover quite a lot in that short span of time.
-Kyaaaaaahhhhh!!!!
-Ahhhhhhh!!!!!!
-…!!!!
-Ugh, if you can’t handle it, just back out already, will you!
It was all thanks to Seo Tae-hyun—the courage champion of this era, the authority on horror experiences, the sole voice of reason among the spirited members of Kairos, and the cherry-flavored gangster who had reclaimed Yellow Teams.
“Just kill me instead….”
“You’re not dying.”
“No, seriously, I think I’ve seen everything, I really have, we’ve checked everywhere?”
“You haven’t checked the right room yet. Don’t lie.”
….
“…Fine, just stay alive for now, hyung.”
Seo Tae-hyun delivered blunt facts to us, scattered across the third-floor hallway looking worn and exhausted. While he was being unusually lenient with Lee Do-ha, who stood speechless, he coolly ignored my and Lee Yu-gun’s theatrics, spreading out clues covered in bloodstains and dust without hesitation across the floor—he was practically the grim reaper himself.
I gripped Lee Yu-gun’s hand tightly beside me and pulled my body back defensively, raising my guard.
“Who are you? Get out of our Tae-hyun’s body. Our INFP Tae-hyun isn’t this cold and ruthless!”
“You all made me this way.”
“This T demon! Begone from here!”
“Hyung, you said you go to church.”
“Christianity is a religion that acknowledges spiritual entities, and the New Testament actually records Jesus casting out demons….”
“That’s enough.”
“Yes, sir.”
I shut my mouth immediately at Seo Tae-hyun’s chilling words—his energy nearly depleted after nearly an hour of exploring this building while dragging three doors with us. Perhaps because my survival instincts were at their peak, I could miraculously distinguish between when to push and when to hold back.
Seo Tae-hyun reviewed the clues and spoke.
“Alright, let’s piece this together. Now I roughly understand what happened here.”
True to his words, we had gathered clues from the first to third floors and combined them to understand the overall story. From newspaper articles and photographs to recording devices and even messenger contents from someone’s phone—we had painstakingly obtained and assembled various types of clues, and our conclusion was this:
-The deceased was Shim Yak-hae, a member of the Touch University Urban Legend Club. (Lee Yu-gun had spent quite a while wondering what kind of name that was.)
-Four years ago, Shim went to the dormitory where we stayed with fellow club members for a club bonding retreat.
Up to this point, it was what we’d expected from the start.
The problem was how someone who came here to have fun ended up tumbling down a nearby mountain path and dying from a fall….
I had already shed my theatrics and returned to serious mode, beginning to piece together the clues that explained this.
“Look at this messenger conversation here—Park Mo, who was in the same club, didn’t think much of Shim, who usually didn’t react much and had a blunt attitude. He thought Shim was unnecessarily trying to act tough.”
“There was also a romantic issue. Park liked Jung, another club member, but Jung always liked Shim, who was calm and quiet.”
Seo Tae-hyun added his opinion while pointing to a letter he’d just found in the corner of the third-floor hallway. Lee Yu-gun, who had only just calmed his racing heart, was now crouching beside Lee Do-ha with his chin resting on his hands, his eyebrows furrowing as he spoke.
“Then Park Mo is the culprit, right? He must have pushed him secretly and then washed his hands of it.”
“That doesn’t seem to be the case. According to the police investigation, Shim definitely fell while running alone on the mountain path. There are testimonies from other club members too.”
“What would make someone who was always calm and quiet suddenly panic and run out onto a mountain path in the middle of the night…?”
Did he actually see a ghost?
A storyline like this naturally flows however it’s written, making it difficult to narrow down the possibilities. I sat with my legs crossed, glaring at the clues as if I could kill them with my stare.
Then suddenly, my gaze shifted to Lee Do-ha, who was massaging his stiff shoulders with his hands, displaying an uncharacteristic tension.
‘A composed person… quiet… barely reactive and taciturn… someone who would only panic and sprint down a mountain path in the dead of night if something truly terrifying happened…’
As I recalled that this was exactly what Lee Do-ha had been like just moments ago, the most plausible scenario crystallized in my mind.
“That’s it.”
“What?”
“This is what we’re experiencing. What’s being done to us right now.”
The youngest member, the writer disguised as Shim Yak-hae, had said exactly that. All the hints to the questions and answers were contained within this building.
As we moved from the first floor to the third floor, we were subjected to all manner of devices designed to test our nerve.
Suddenly someone in ghost makeup would jump out or chase us, or someone would pound on the door of the room we were investigating to startle us.
We had it easier because there were four of us and we knew this was being filmed, but if someone had experienced this alone without any preparation, they could easily have been scared out of their wits depending on their temperament.
“This isn’t just a simple fear experience. The things that happened to Shim Yak-hae are still lingering in this building.”
“So, what, the club members deliberately tormented Shim Yak-hae? That’s trash.”
“Well, I don’t know the exact details, but what’s certain is that all the club members participated in this game. It would be impossible for Park alone to set up a building this large like this.”
“A game… that could be it. Looking at Park’s testimony here and the other chats, they seemed to just want to mess with Shim Yak-hae a bit—there wasn’t hatred enough to kill. They literally just wanted to prank him.”
Seo Tae-hyun and Lee Yu-gun nodded in agreement with my hypothesis. I turned my gaze toward Lee Do-ha, who was still listening silently to our conversation, and continued.
“The club members probably convinced themselves the same way. Since Shin was normally so unresponsive, they thought they’d just scare him a little to see his surprised expression. What Park didn’t anticipate was just one thing.”
“That Shim Yak-hae was more of a scaredy-cat than expected? But he was originally from the Horror Story Club…”
“Reading stories is different from experiencing them firsthand. Look at these guys. Before they came in here, they never dreamed they’d be scared of something like this, right?”
As I gestured with my chin, Seo Tae-hyun glanced at the Lee Brothers—the legendary heavyweight duo huddled tightly beside me—and quietly nodded in agreement. Lee Yu-gun seemed a bit wounded by Seo Tae-hyun’s reaction but didn’t particularly argue back.
I checked my wristwatch. The hands had just passed 11 o’clock.
Less than an hour remained until the deadline of exactly 12 o’clock.
I brushed off my rear end, which had been sitting heavily, and stood up.
“Let’s move. We’re running out of time now. We still haven’t found the youngest members or Si-woo.”
“But it’s surprising. I don’t know about others, but I thought Si-woo would have escaped by now and be taking a walk.”
“Who knows? Maybe that bandaged guy who was chasing us just now is Si-woo?”
“Haha, come on, no way~”
“Haha….”
…It couldn’t be, right?
Even as I thought it couldn’t be, all four of our heads simultaneously turned toward the end of the hallway where the bandaged figure had disappeared, as if the same thought had occurred to everyone at once.
We only resumed climbing to the fourth floor after hearing Lee Do-ha’s vivid testimony that the bandaged man was shorter and heavier than Jeong Si-u.
“So what do we need to find now?”
“We still haven’t found the third question. And we need more concrete evidence about exactly how Shin ended up here and came to his death.”
“Ugh… Can’t you and Tae-hyun just go and come back? Do-ha and I will wait quietly on the first floor.”
“Lee Yu-gun, you always switch to formal speech whenever it’s inconvenient for you. It’s really annoying.”
“Then you do it too.”
“Why should I? My birthday comes before yours anyway.”
“So what, you want me to treat you like an older brother? You want to hear me call you ‘hyung’? Oh my, Tae-hyun hyung~”
“I’m seriously about to just leave you here…”
Still, after spending about an hour here, the other members besides Lee Do-ha were beginning to loosen up. It meant Lee Yu-gun and Seo Tae-hyun had started bickering.
I had no idea what had started it all, but knowing how those twenty-year-olds would bicker endlessly once they got going, Lee Do-ha and I quickened our pace in silence without a word.
Watching Lee Do-ha’s stride gradually lengthen as he walked slowly behind us the entire time, it was clear that our house’s younger members’ fights terrified him just as much as the bandaged man or the virgin ghost.
“Bear, let’s not fight like that.”
“Okay.”
Making such a trivial vow, we’d barely climbed halfway up the stairs toward the fourth floor when suddenly another loud crash echoed through the building. Having been startled all day, we’d grown somewhat accustomed to this level of noise, so Lee Do-ha and I paused mid-step with appropriate alarm (though we were definitely alarmed) as we climbed.
‘What is that?’
I glanced back, wondering if the younger ones who’d been fighting nonstop had finally grabbed each other by the collar, and saw that Lee Yu-gun and Seo Tae-hyun had also stopped moving, apparently hearing the same sound. But they had grabbed each other by the collar, which made it even more baffling.
So what was happening near us? When I checked our surroundings, I found no abnormal phenomena.
‘Then what is it? Where is it coming from?’
Crash, bang, bang!
As I heightened all my senses, another loud crash sounded—this time, with my focus sharp, I could pinpoint the source of the noise precisely.
It was coming from above.
Crash, bang, bang,
Thud, crack! Clang,
Screech, screech, screech…!
And it was getting closer!
“Hey, hey, what is it, what is—what is it!?”
“Should we run? Should we? Should we run?”
“No, no. Wait. It could be the group members.”
“….”
The moment I confirmed the sound was getting closer, I turned to flee, but Seo Tae-hyun, that cherry-colored delinquent, tanked for all of us with his small frame, leaving my ankles firmly bound in place.
We gripped the stair railing tightly and looked up. Lee Do-ha, who’d gone silent since earlier—his audio seemingly lost—was crouched low, ready to scoop up Seo Tae-hyun and bolt at a moment’s notice.
A shadow illuminated by distant moonlight drew steadily closer toward us. The identity of the loud noise soon revealed itself before our eyes.
“Hyung, slowly, slowly…!”
“Ha-ru! Hurry! Come quick! Hurry…!!”
“Don’t do this, let’s just find the hyungs first and talk to them—! …Huh?”
“Huh! Tae-hyun hyung…! Hyungs!”
“Hey, you guys….”
The source of the noise was Ju Eun-chan and Dan Ha-ru.
But now…
“What did you two break this time!?”
Their hands were bound together with handcuffs, and between those hands was a section of iron bars (!) wedged in….
Confirming the state of these two youngest members, Seo Tae-hyun let out the loudest scream yet. Dan Ha-ru opened his mouth to explain something to us in our shock, but Ju Eun-chan blocked him first.
“Wait, hyungs! Don’t move from there!”
“What, why, why? But first of all, what exactly did you two break and—”
“Don’t come up! Prove to us that you’re really hyungs first.”
“What are you talking about?”
Ju Eun-chan spread his right hand—the one not bound by handcuffs and iron bars—toward us in a defensive stance.
Everyone was bewildered, blinking in confusion at being suddenly suspected of identity by the younger members we’d reunited with just an hour after parting. Then Dan Ha-ru, who’d quietly sighed from behind, stepped forward and spoke.
“We found the third question while escaping from where we were trapped. That’s why we’re like this.”
“What was the question?”
Dan Ha-ru fished through his pants pocket with his free hand and pulled out a card identical to the other two question cards. Since Ju Eun-chan still wouldn’t let anyone get close, Dan Ha-ru carefully tossed the card toward me at the front.
I examined the third question, my mind swirling with confusion.
【Question Three.】
【Who is the spy?】
“There’s a spy among us. An entity that locked us in this place and orchestrated all of this.”
It was the moment when a genuine mystery element finally emerged in this Gwigok Mountain Lodge special, breaking through the suffocating dread that had consumed us until now.

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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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