Our Hotel Is Open for Business as Usual - Chapter 135

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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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Chapter 135.

If there was one uncontrollable, out-of-specification guest in this Hotel at present, it was undoubtedly the Tasteless Guest. And he had a tendency to view Lee Yeon-woo’s protection of the Human Guest with disdain.

‘In that case, it would be better to drag out time and solidify the situation.’
“Eek.”
“So there’s another person here who looks down on me.”
“Coco. Human. No.”
“If communication works this well, I could almost call you human.”
“No?”

Lee Yeon-woo placed Coco on the table in the Central Control Room. Then, in preparation for any unforeseen circumstances, he gently woke Room 14, who had been sleeping soundly, and set her atop Coco’s head.

“I dislike this.”
“Having clear preferences is a good thing.”
“Coco. Room 14. Refuse.”
“Why must you frighten her like that?”

Room 14 hadn’t fully opened her eyes yet, caught between sleep and wakefulness.

“If you look after her, I shall treat you to a fine dinner.”
“Coco. Sincere.”
“Indeed, communication works well.”

A masterful shift in attitude.

“….”

Lee Yeon-woo’s gaze, which had been scanning the CCTV feeds monitoring various corners of the Hotel, soon came to rest on the Rooftop.

“…It seems so many people simply ignore the words of the Hotel’s manager….”

The Rooftop Garden was in disarray.

“A disrespectful guest.”
“That is correct.”

A vast and grotesque painting that transcended human perception.

A dense, heavy navy sky pressed down as if moments before a tempest—oil paint applied with nervous, violent strokes. Murky clouds twisted into malformed spirals, churning endlessly in their vortex.

“Who dares lay hands upon this Hotel’s interior design?”

Beneath her feet stretched a wheat field that knew no end.

A pallid, sickly blue luminescence—closer to disease than vitality. Each time a desolate gust swept across, the wheat stalks, rendered in rough, crude brushstrokes, bent their backs in unison like savage waves, undulating with terrible fury.

The rustling friction of colliding stalks echoed like tens of thousands of dry bones striking one another, or like the death screams of the dying wailing within flames.

And between those cool blue undulations.

“….”

Like arterial blood gushing from a torn wound in the earth, brilliant red poppies bloomed in profusion, searing the eyes.

The vivid, intense crimson petals trembled as if torn by the violent wind, yet they flaunted a terrible vitality. With each gust, blood-drop-like red petals scattered into the void, and a sweet, acrid fragrance mingled with the stench of blood, as if to paralyze human reason itself.

Coco then asked, as if to verify Lee Yeon-woo’s sanity.

“Are you alright?”
“Not as bad as before. It seems I’ve developed immunity to the contamination.”
“I see. Yes.”
“It appears I have become one with this Hotel.”

I can sense the Lover of Dawn within me, after all.

‘A skeletal dead tree, a massive cross… and black ashes.’

At the far end of the blue wheat field, the silhouette of a leafless tree and a cross blazed with crimson flames.

‘A pyre.’

As the black ashes mixed with falling rain, I understood that this place was an execution ground repeating eternally—the fevered delusion of someone’s madness.

And in the very center of it all, a woman.

“…Woman of Dawn….”

No—the White Raven.

That was what humans called her.

The hem of her pristine, gossamer nightgown whipped violently in the wind and rain. Silver-white hair cascaded like a curtain across her corpse-pale skin. Her lips moved soundlessly, singing a dirge.

Within this burning canvas where everything twisted and spiraled into madness….

“―Lieb mich.”
Love me.

The Witch, now the subject of a masterpiece, smiled quietly.

* * *

The beginning stretched far back into the past.

The White Raven—an uninvited guest who had wandered these halls for nearly five years, disregarding the rules. Lee Yeon-woo had once made a verbal agreement with her to obtain clues about the Tasteless Guest, and in exchange, he had surrendered his own memories.

“Since no one else would suffer harm from it, I allowed her to act as she pleased. I acknowledge my own arrogance.”

But she, yearning for eternal love, had marked Lee Yeon-woo as her “Caretaker” and was cultivating a blind obsession. Perhaps the Lee Yeon-woo of the past would have accepted even that.

“The situation shifted dramatically after I retrieved the lost Mias from the Outside—Seme and Rawi—from Basement Level 7 and brought them up to the Hotel.”

It just so happened that Seme had caught the White Raven’s fancy. The White Raven had intended to maintain a passive stance in accordance with the Hotel’s rules, but Seme’s existence shook the very patience she had cultivated.

“You might say she became a catalyst.”

One day, Lee Yeon-woo realized that despite having his ankle torn by Su-gwi with blood streaming down, a massive chunk of memory—the dozens of minutes he had walked to the front of Seme and Rawi’s guest room—had been excised entirely.

With his emotional data corrupted and even fear rendered ambiguous, he could only reverse-engineer his past self using the objective information that remained: the scars on his body and the severed span of time.

“At that moment, I could determine that only one being in this Hotel possessed the ability to edit memories so surgically—the Lover of Dawn.”

The White Raven had finally submitted to the Hotel’s rules to bind Lee Yeon-woo, officially beginning a guest stay. And he had deduced that the sorcerer Seme—burdened by affection and guilt over her dead sibling—had become his prey.

“Trying to catch two rabbits at once seems to have left even her scattered.”

Every night between 9 PM and midnight, Lee Yeon-woo forced upon himself a systematic routine: checking the Central Control Room’s CCTV to gain intervention rights over the secret meetings. Thus he blocked the Lover of Dawn’s rendezvous.

Each time he interfered with the meetings, he lost the memory of those hours as a penalty, yet Lee Yeon-woo’s obstruction repeated without a single deviation. In response, the White Raven, as the Lover of Dawn, demanded proof of love.

“Blood, hands, eyes, heart….”

Lee Yeon-woo willingly allowed himself to be consumed.

“There was no better opportunity than that.”

Belmarés’s blood and flesh were not mere protein.

“My fragments flowing into that person’s internal organs will transmit information in real-time and operate as a biological security tool—malware—to seize control.”

Therefore, allowing my entire body to be consumed was the most certain hardware-level infiltration method: physically accessing the opponent’s main server to seize administrative privileges.

And Lee Yeon-woo’s gambit had worked.

“I confirmed that she sees me as the Caretaker. Since I was born from her very lack of him, I was able to set the course of this line to a certain extent.”

Of course, there were minor complications. Perhaps because the secret meeting had been clumsily severed, the overloaded Seme, tormented by visions of her sibling, eventually spiraled into madness and held a blade to Lee Yeon-woo’s throat.

“But that wasn’t really a major problem….”
“No.”
“Coco, you’re not recording, are you.”

The real problem lay elsewhere.

“In this Hotel, a ‘sorcerer’ is not counted as a ‘Human Guest.'”

A sorcerer—an existence that is spiritual energy itself. Seme, trapped in such a body, could not check out normally simply by accumulating Nightmares like any ordinary human guest.

Sensing that it was only a matter of time before Seme was consumed by the Lover of Dawn, Lee Yeon-woo devised a lesser-evil stratagem based on his previous interpretation of the White Raven’s nature.

“I gave her the authority to hire staff.”

Ten recruitment vouchers in total, received as tutorial rewards. They were gambling-type tickets that allowed me to recruit Staff Members of 1 to 3 stars, but in this reality, they functioned as a kind of ’employment contract.’

“If Seme becomes subordinate to me as my Staff Member, then even if he’s absorbed by the White Raven later and becomes his tool, I calculated that I could at least prevent his soul and self from being completely annihilated and erased. It’s a sort of protective barrier.”

In this Hotel, the rules of the Game take absolute priority over everything else.

“At the same time, I systematized the plan further, and by concluding transactions with others accordingly, I secured safety in proceeding with the work. Even if the Tasteless Guest doesn’t cooperate, the Wet Person will at least provide me an escape route as my Staff Member.”

However,

“A problem arose here. Until Seme mentioned the Devil card, I had completely forgotten the fact that I had handed over that recruitment voucher.”

Lee Yeon-woo continued speaking dryly while staring at the camera lens in the Central Control Room. The red indicator light reflecting off his glasses, signaling that recording was in progress, blinked faintly.

“While rummaging through the box, I realized that one ‘Staff Recruitment Voucher’ had disappeared, and since Coco couldn’t have touched it, the culprit must be me—meaning I had devised a plan to hire Seme, and the White Raven had discovered that plan.”

After all, the Lover of Dawn would have seen the stolen memory.

“Therefore, the White Raven no longer had the luxury of waiting obediently within this Hotel’s rules, merely pressing the doorbell as the Lover of Dawn’s secret visitor. I became certain that today, by any means necessary and even breaking the rules, he would completely absorb Seme and shake me to my core.”

After all, the Lover of Dawn’s ultimate objective was Lee Yeon-woo himself. The Lee Yeon-woo on the screen, having said this, rested his chin on his interlaced hands.

“So, before he causes an incident, I must strike first.”
“Yes!”
“There’s one method I attempted on the Wet Person during the previous tutorial that failed due to a bug.”
“Expulsion! Expulsion!”
“It’s to define him as ‘not my guest.'”

Because he did not respect me as the Hotel General Manager, and he did not abide by our rules.

“In that case, I can forcibly strip away the Hotel’s systemic protection of him.”

The fact that he took a memory unrelated to the Lover of Dawn’s secret visit was already a rule violation, but since I had remained silent about it before, Lee Yeon-woo wanted a more solid justification.

“It’s not merely a disturbance or memory theft—denying the very space of this Hotel itself and dragging his own stage into the Hotel’s interior is clearly an act of encroachment. It is, in every sense, fulfilling the expulsion condition that I, as the Manager of this Hotel, cannot tolerate.”
“Tasteless Guest.”
“Yes, so I waited, pretending not to know. I already understood that the White Raven’s actions were clumsy and inept somewhere. He cannot be as meticulous a guest as the Tasteless Guest.”

That was precisely why Lee Yeon-woo had sat across from the Tasteless Guest in the Dining Area and exchanged trivial conversation.

“I prolonged the conversation with him to buy time. If I rushed straight to Seme to stop her, the Lover of Dawn would still be nothing more than a Problematic Guest who hasn’t crossed the line yet.”
“Problematic. Expulsion. Problematic. Expulsion.”
“It seems you also dislike guests who don’t respect the rules.”

I continued speaking while gently stroking Coco’s cheek.

“That said, I never expected she’d wreck my Hotel quite like the Wet Person did, though I suppose I should be grateful that the conditions for expulsion are now met….”

My gaze turned toward the monitor panel.

The Rooftop Garden on the screen was no longer part of the Hotel I knew.

A thick, heavy navy sky just before a tempest breaks. Pale blue wheat fields undulating like savage waves. And poppies blooming in arterial red so vivid they burned the eyes. Beyond the horizon, a cross burned with crimson flames.

The complete “imagery” and “stage” of a sixteenth-century tragedy had been entirely overlaid upon the Hotel’s rooftop.

“She has crossed the line of her own volition, perfectly and completely.”

The corners of my mouth twisted into a cold arc.

“I did provoke her toward this, but I never imagined she’d react so violently to mere neglect. It seems the mistreatment she received from the Caretaker left quite a profound wound.”
“Weakness.”
“There’s no need for that.”

There was no reason to resort to personal attacks when both of us were already behaving so despicably.

Removing my glasses, I rose from my seat. There was not a trace of hesitation in my movements as I adjusted the collar of my coat with gloved hands.

“Now it’s my turn to ascend to the rooftop and make her understand.”
“….”
“I’ll become the Caretaker she so desperately longed for, and I’ll excavate her trauma in the very way she fears most. That’s how I’ll seize control.”

Coco spoke.

“Dangerous.”
“I’m aware.”

I replied calmly to Coco’s concern.

“In that process, I will inevitably face death. Just as the Lover of Dawn has wandered this Hotel for over four years, this time too, I’ll be dealt with in the same manner.”

Ultimately, the White Raven desires to devour Lee Yeon-woo. However, Lee Yeon-woo, already bound to the Hotel, could never become subordinate to another existence through mere death and consumption.

Perhaps this was the very beginning of all this chaos.

“And when that happens, according to this arbitrarily set coding, the ‘Hotel General Manager Mode’ will activate.”

It may be difficult to regain consciousness.

Lee Yeon-woo stared directly at the camera. More precisely, it was a firm command left for the ‘future self who has lost memories’ or the ‘Hotel General Manager’ who would watch this footage.

“So I say this to you who are watching the recording. This is not some sentimental will, but a clear process of duty handover.”
“….”
“All of this is thorough resource management of the Hotel, equivalent to controlling a malicious virus. I have already fed my blood abundantly into the White Raven’s belly. The conditions are set for me to control her from within.”
“….”
“So you must use this advantage I have created, and instead of completely crushing and destroying her, proceed with the contract with the Lover of Dawn.”

Lee Yeon-woo’s gaze grew cold.

“Do not be swayed by vague emotions like a fool. Handle everything precisely according to the manual on the board I have laid out before you. In doing so, inject the fear befitting Hotel One into Rawi, who will be left alone.”

You understand what the identity of this place is, do you not.

“A game must be played like a game.”
“….”
“…Remember that you too are part of that game.”

[Recording has ended.]

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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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