Labyrinth Exploration 101 - Chapter 201

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

Labyrinth Exploration 101 Episode 201

Empty Car (1)

The sky is dark, and the atmospheric pressure is low. It must be because the rainy season is approaching.

I really hate this kind of weather. My knee aches much more than usual.

“…At this rate, I might have to use a wheelchair later.”

Inspector Lee Young-ho gave a bitter smile at my half-joking remark.

I made contact with Inspector Lee Young-ho today. I hid my hair inside my clothes to avoid being noticed and wore a mask. I also used my sequence to search for any possible tailing in a wide range.

“Here it is.”

The place Inspector Lee Young-ho guided me to was the underground of an abandoned building called ‘Storage Facility’.

Click.

He opened the door with a key. Inside the spacious interior were corpse freezers and various items.

“Ah, don’t mind the other stuff besides that freezer. I’ve been using this place as a storage room. I keep all my investigation materials here.”

It felt a bit unsafe to leave them outside. Lee Young-ho muttered as he opened the freezer.

Whirr.

Mentor Kim Yoon-jun came out from inside the freezer. He was preserved like a living person.

“Whew…”

I took a deep breath. Lee Young-ho asked casually.

“Is it finally possible now?”

“Yes. It’s a demonic sect formula.”

Thud. I set down a large magic stone as preparation.

“Huh. What’s this?”

“It’s a magic stone. It’ll be disgusting because there’s some flesh attached to it.”

Thump. Thump. It actually beats.

It’s essentially an artificial body organ with blood vessels created to circulate blood through the magic stone.

“This is what the demonic sect is like.”

This is why they receive condemnation from ordinary people and restraint from the world.

I opened Mentor Kim Yoon-jun’s eyelids with my fingers. I extracted the eyeball that he supposedly received as a transplant from a friend. The soft texture wasn’t particularly pleasant.

The eyeball hadn’t decayed at all.

Now, I will track the magic power contained within this eye. More precisely, I will extract the visual information that Kim Yoon-jun’s magic power ‘saw’ before his death.

I connected the eyeball to the magic stone.

Hissss…

Magic power rose like a heat haze. The optic nerve and magic stone stuck together and swelled like flesh.

Thump thump thump thump thump.

The magic stone beat rapidly and created eyelids on its outer skin. The eyeball settled inside it.

Blink. Blink.

The eyelids close and open by themselves.

Lee Young-ho asked in surprise.

“Wh-what’s the principle? I’m also a ranker but I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

“If I had to explain it, I transplanted the eyeball into the magic stone.”

A perfect demonic sect formula that uses the human body as a tool.

This combination of eyeball and magic stone is a ‘projector’. It will reconstruct Kim Yoon-jun’s last memories before his murder and project Kim Yoon-jun’s vision exactly as it was.

It’s not entirely unrelated to my mental visualization. Thanks to seeing too many villains who turn people into tools.

“Let’s see.”

The magic stone opened its eye. Magic power was projected from the iris.

Kim Yoon-jun’s vision before death appeared in the air.

Lee Young-ho stretched out his finger in great surprise.

“I can see it. There, that’s the crime scene.”

Kim Yoon-jun standing at the location of his own death.

He was looking up at the sky when suddenly.

‘Mentor.’

Someone’s call made him lower his gaze.

There was…

‘You came.’

Kang Hyeon was there.

* * *

Meanwhile, Kang Hyeon returned to the dormitory after finishing his training as usual.

The only remaining schedule was showering and sleeping, but.

“You came.”

Today there were uninvited guests in the dormitory. This time it was a man and woman.

“Hello. I’m Hao Xian.”

“I’m Mei Lan.”

He slowly examined the two faces introducing themselves as they stood up from the sofa.

“We came all the way here following the murder case of Mount Hua Sect inspector Kim Yoon-jun.”

Mei Lan placed her hand on her chest.

Kang Hyeon assessed their condition. There was no sign that they wanted to fight.

“…It’s fine. We came to talk. Look. No weapons, right?”

Hao Xian showed his waist area. He even spun around once.

Kang Hyeon nodded. Hao Xian and Mei Lan sat back down on the sofa.

“Please sit.”

Kang Hyeon also sat across from them.

Hao Xian held out a squid leg.

“Would you like some?”

“No. I don’t particularly like chewing things.”

“…Oh~ So that’s how you maintain your jawline.”

Mei Lan poked Hao Xian.

“Ah. Ahem. Anyway, Kang Hyeon.”

Hao Xian leaned his body forward. Then he smiled confidently.

“You killed him, didn’t you?”

Hao Xian had found the answer.

No, there was no correct answer except for Kang Hyeon.

Kang Hyeon quietly looked at Hao Xian. Hao Xian chewed the squid leg and asked.

“What was the reason?”

The culprit was already confirmed. Only the ‘motive’ remained.

“…”

Kang Hyeon closed his eyes. However, from the moment he killed Kim Yoon-jun, that fact could no longer be a secret.

“…Mentor Kim Yoon-jun asked me.”

Kang Hyeon recited sadly.

“To kill him.”

Hao Xian and Mei Lan’s brows furrowed intensely.

* * *

‘Is that true?’

On a mound where cold wind ripples.

Kim Yoon-jun looks at Kang Hyeon and asks. Kang Hyeon quietly faces him.

‘Yes. Fakes exist in this world. They’re Labyrinth People.’

“Labyrinth People…”

Lee Young-ho flinched and trembled.

‘Some source we don’t know about is maintaining them.’

Then Kim Yoon-jun grits his teeth and lowers his gaze. He shakes his head as if he cannot accept it. The vision shakes horizontally.

‘That’s false. My eyes still see you as-‘

‘Mentor Kim Yoon-jun.’

Kang Hyeon’s eyes widened as he stared at Kim Yoon-jun.

‘Look at me closely.’

Kim Yoon-jun stares into Kang Hyeon’s pupils. Kim Yoon-jun’s face reflected in the iris becomes visible.

‘What are your eyes calling fake?’

I recalled something Kim Yoon-jun had said once.

-My friend’s eyes were tainted by aberrant magic power, and from then on he suffered, saying he could see things that couldn’t be seen. He couldn’t endure it and committed suicide.

Eyes that see the invisible.

However, humans cannot look at themselves. What they see of themselves is merely an image formed in a mirror, even that with left and right reversed.

Humans always live looking at others.

Kim Yoon-jun’s friend saw the invisible in Kim Yoon-jun.

‘Mentor Kim Yoon-jun. The fake is you.’

“Hah…”

Lee Young-ho let out a hollow laugh with a dazed expression.

“Is this… correct?”

“Nothing is impossible in a world where magic exists.”

After all, my very existence is a product of regression—a miracle beyond magic.

I gritted my teeth.

* * *

Hao Xian’s jaw stopped chewing the squid.

“You want me to believe that?”

Kang Hyeon gazed intently at Hao Xian. If he couldn’t believe it, it was a story impossible to convince from the start.

Chew chew.

Hao Xian’s jaw moved again.

“Normally I would have said something like this. It’s an absurd story, but.”

Hao Xian buried his body in the sofa.

“Something seems strange.”

Creak. He rubbed his upper body against the backrest as he continued speaking.

“We’ve felt like we were being watched since we came to Korea. As you know, Kang Hyeon, for people like us, feelings are intuition. They’re no different from certainty.”

His question was this.

“Why would they monitor us who came to investigate Kim Yoon-jun’s death? It’s not like they killed Kim Yoon-jun themselves.”

Hao Xian raised his finger.

“But if Kim Yoon-jun was fake, it makes sense. If we investigate the fake and discover that Kim Yoon-jun was fake, it would be trouble.”

Mei Lan nodded.

“And above all, no matter how I think about it, Kim Yoon-jun seemed to have committed suicide. If someone like Kim Yoon-jun had decided to resist, it wouldn’t have ended comfortably…”

Hao Xian shrugged his shoulders.

“So it was suicide after all.”

Mei Lan stared directly at Kang Hyeon and asked.

“Is the culprit Labyrinth Exploration NaN?”

Kang Hyeon shook his head.

“I don’t know, not yet.”

* * *

“I don’t know.”

I put down Kim Yoon-jun’s ‘eyeball magic stone’. This eye needed to be kept fresh.

“Whether Labyrinth Exploration NaN is the cause, result, or process.”

I must be cautious. If I move rashly, I’ll only be destroyed like my left knee.

“What’s certain is that fakes exist in this world. They’re moving to survive.”

“…Then how do we distinguish them? No, how do we know if we’re fake or real?”

“We can’t distinguish them yet.”

“C-can’t we do something with this eye?”

Lee Young-ho pointed at the magic stone eyeball. It kept repeating the motion of closing and opening its eyelids like a living creature.

“An eye is just an eye. The brain receives information. Unless we transplant this eye, we can’t interpret the information the eye receives.”

Lee Young-ho let out a deep breath. He seemed to have complicated feelings too.

“…Yes. Then. Let’s store that eyeball for now.”

Lee Young-ho opened the freezer. I put the eyeball magic stone inside.

* * *

“Emptiness and gaps.”

Kang Hyeon spoke of the method to distinguish fake from real.

“Fakes are always people after 70,000 hours. It means the first 70,000 hours of life don’t exist. When emotions fluctuate, that gap inevitably shows.”

Humans instinctively remember memories.

We forget our very early childhood as we age, but those 70,000 hours are the ‘most important moments’ that constitute who we are now.

“Just as children who were abused from a young age cannot forget their wounds, fakes have inherent instinctive flaws. I identify those.”

“Then.”

Hao Xian swallowed. He breathed tremblingly toward Kang Hyeon.

“Are we… fake?”

“If you were fake.”

Kang Hyeon responded as if he had been waiting.

“What would you do?”

Both people’s expressions hardened.

Kang Hyeon continued emotionlessly.

“Would you willingly accept the annihilation of your existence, or would you kill me to survive?”

“…”

Hao Xian bit his lips tightly for a moment. He leaned back and ran his fingers through his hair.

“Th-there’s no need to kill each other. Coexistence… coexistence is the motto of these times…”

Kang Hyeon answered.

“You’re both real.”

“…Really?”

“Yes. Now I’ll ask again.”

Kang Hyeon changed his question.

“Will you coexist with fakes, Hao Xian?”

“…”

Hao Xian licked his lips with his tongue. Mei Lan’s eyebrows twitched.

Kang Hyeon smiled faintly.

“Differences in position are infinite. An individual can think rationally. But when that scope widens, if the fact that fakes exist is revealed to this world, society will collapse.”

Everyone fell silent for a moment.

In the stillness of night, Kang Hyeon continued like a sigh.

“Fortunately, the number of fakes isn’t that large yet. That’s probably why they formed a group too.”

If their numbers were already sufficient, at least 0.1% of humanity, there would be no need to form a group. Because even if Kang Hyeon moved infinitely, he couldn’t kill them all.

“…Then.”

Suddenly Mei Lan asked.

“What about Seol Ha-woon?”

“…”

Then, for the first time, Kang Hyeon was flustered. Mei Lan continued questioningly.

“Is Seol Ha-woon fake or real?”

Kang Hyeon’s jaw trembled. He pondered how to answer, but couldn’t find a suitable response.

“I can’t distinguish. Ha-woon hyung is.”

“What? Then that method is incomplete.”

Hao Xian frowned.

If an error occurs even once in a system, one has no choice but to doubt the whole thing.

“But Ha-woon hyung might be okay.”

“…Only Seol Ha-woon? What kind of discrimination is that?”

“It’s not discrimination. It’s a difference. Ha-woon hyung is different.”

Kang Hyeon spoke about Seol Ha-woon with a hollow laugh.

As if even I couldn’t believe I was saying such things.

“Seol Ha-woon is… the kind of person where it wouldn’t matter if he’s fake or real.”

Hao Xian heard Kang Hyeon’s voice. His tone carried a strange faith in Seol Ha-woon.

“In my opinion, that’s the kind of person Seol Ha-woon is.”

Kang Hyeon came to that conclusion.

* * *

“Let’s move under the assumption that we’re real.”

I said to Lee Young-ho.

There’s no choice. We don’t have any particular way to distinguish between real and fake.

“And absolutely don’t get caught.”

“…There must be fakes among my subordinates, superiors, and colleagues too, right?”

Lee Young-ho asked with a sad expression. I brushed through my long hair.

“Either they’re fake, or they’re cooperating with the fakes. One of the two.”

“Damn it all. No wonder something felt suspicious…”

Suddenly Lee Young-ho looked at me.

He had doubts about my authenticity. No, going further, he had doubts about himself.

“Don’t worry.”

I said to him.

“Even if I’m fake, I will definitely stand on the side of the real.”

The beliefs and principles I’ve established must apply equally to me. I have that faith.

Otherwise, I wouldn’t have the face to confront the people I’ve killed so far, the parallel world I burned away with nuclear bombs, Percival and Seo Ji-hyuk who crumbled like ash.

“If I’m fake, I will definitely cut myself off.”

Lee Young-ho looked at me and drew in a breath. Then with a resolute expression, he extended his hand to me.

“Yes. Jemallot, I will definitely believe in you.”

I also took his hand.

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