Our Hotel Is Open for Business as Usual - Chapter 81

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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 81.

Coco’s point had merit.

“After enduring such trials, rest might indeed be the wiser choice.”

I concede the argument.

“All work demands adequate rest. You remember well what I said on the 14th Floor. I’ve always maintained it—your capacity for learning deserves commendation.”
“Ying.”
“No, I’m not deflecting… hmm.”

But.

“…Haven’t I rested enough already?”

I’ve already squandered days securing control of the Central Control Room.

“Pardon?”
“I understand your meaning, but please—calm yourself and hear me out.”
“Yes.”
“Regrettably, the world’s duties don’t wait to accommodate individual circumstances.”
“Pardon?”
“And I bear the responsibility of managing this Hotel.”

Honestly, I still don’t understand why it had to be me. This treacherous Hotel chose me, and—

‘Enough.’

I need to stop this.

“Right. I can’t undermine myself from the very start.”
“No?”

Coco seemed to hope I would rest longer. Perhaps she worried for my wellbeing, but that wasn’t all. She appeared to fear the consequences of losing our bond.

“….”

The discomfort and awkwardness settled in easily.

‘It still shocks me how coldly I treated her right after being invited by the Tasteless Guest.’

Even now, the bond between us wasn’t as strong as before. I rarely found her cute anymore.

‘Coco only seemed cute because I was playing the Game, after all.’

All that remained was a sense of indebtedness for the help I’d received on the 14th Floor.

So Coco herself was anxious. It was fine that Lee Yeon-woo was becoming a capable manager by distancing himself from humanity, but she didn’t want to be treated coldly like before.

‘That’s why I’m being careful not to let my condition deteriorate further. If I’m consumed by more negative emotions than now, the probability of me treating Coco poorly increases.’
“Yes….”
“How honest of you.”

This cat knew nothing of modesty.

“….”

I lifted Coco and cradled her in my arms.

“…You don’t need to worry so much.”
“Meow.”
“Listen to me.”
“Yes.”
“The Tasteless Guest only consumes emotions that already exist—she can’t devour the cognitive framework that creates such emotions in the first place. Probably.”

In truth, it was much the same. I’d experienced what it was like to be a human stripped of all positive emotions sustaining them, and the circuits that generate and store emotions simply broke down without resistance.

In simple terms, madness.

“But I’m not at that point.”

It was largely thanks to my firm grip on reason.

“After finishing the urgent matters, some peace of mind has returned as well.”

Any emotion could be rebuilt from scratch, after all.

“So ultimately, it’s something time will resolve. Personally, when I first saw you inside Ho-won, I felt something unfamiliar—and I think that’s not entirely bad in its own way.”
“Pardon?”
“It’s the feeling I had when I first encountered the Game.”

If I thought of it as gaining something new to enjoy, it wasn’t entirely unpleasant.

“….”

No, it was unpleasant.

‘I told you to shut up.’

That was the right thing to say.

“Hmph.”
“But I understand what you’re worried about.”

Lee Yeon-woo straightened his disheveled appearance. It was different from usual.

No formal jacket, no vest, no tie—just a shirt. He still wasn’t wearing glasses, and his hands were bare without gloves. His raw appearance still looked strangely young.

‘How did it come to this.’

Feeling uncomfortable, I swept my hair back. That helped a little. I continued speaking.

“If things continue this way, negative emotions will outweigh the positive.”
“Yes!”
“You surely don’t wish for such a situation. Neither do I. Being swayed by emotion is far more inconvenient than I imagined.”
“Yes….”
“In that sense, I trust you won’t stop me.”
“Pardon?”

Lee Yeon-woo smiled.

“Let’s go clean this up.”

Choice and focus—they matter everywhere, always.

* * *

When the door opens, only a single door is visible along the narrow corridor.

The corridor stands silent and empty, the air suffused with a delicate aroma reminiscent of roses. The floor is covered in ebony, and footsteps sink into the quiet resonance beneath.

And when the door opens once more, a small salon-like Dining Room reveals itself.

“…Ah.”

Lee Yeon-woo saw a single person seated there.

“So you were here.”
“Yes.”
“Is the meal to your taste?”
“You look unfamiliar.”
“Today I’ve come not as the Hotel General Manager.”
“I see.”

Lightly, I tapped the table as I asked.

“Would you invite me to join you?”
“….”
“…I’m curious about your name.”

The Tasteless Guest, who had been silent for quite some time,

“….”
“….”

Only after a long pause did he ask.

“…May I eat?”

Lee Yeon-woo sat across from him.

* * *

The man recalled what had transpired not long ago in the Control Room, stained crimson with blood.

“….”

He was the Tasteless Guest. Wherever blood flowed, he could go. So he could see Lee Yeon-woo, alive yet ensnared like a sacrificial offering among all manner of metal and medical apparatus.

“Ugh….”
“….”
“Kgh, hh….”
“….”
“Aaaahhh…!”

Crimson blood drenched the floor.

The reek of corroded metal assaulted his nostrils.

“Aahhh!! Aaaahhh!!!”

The sound of bones fracturing.

His heart compressed, his entire body crushed and mangled.

Yet something was strange. He did not break. Though his form grew increasingly unrecognizable with each passing moment, his composure remained unshaken. Even his trembling hands, quivering from agony, seemed to reveal that iron resolve.

It was a desperate struggle—clawing at the possibility of survival, grasping at any means to endure.

“….”

…He understood now. This was the perfect moment.

Hunger convulsed through every cell of his being. Blood and despair, the scent of death—the sweetest temptation. One more step forward, one reach to seize that heart, and he could swallow him whole, complete and entire….

‘Now I can do it.’
‘Look how weak he’s become.’
‘Just once….’

His inner demons whispered.

‘Just once, abandon being the Unknown Elder Woman.’

And so.

‘Abandon honor, seize the author without justification.’

Then.

‘Then we win.’

Saliva pooled at the corners of my mouth, my jaw clenched painfully tight. Blood and flesh, torn loose from thrashing against the grotesque apparatus, streamed downward. My fingertips trembled, yet—

‘Ah, this sweet scent of blood…’ ‘My throat burns with thirst.’ ‘Throat? Such things don’t exist. How filthy.’ ‘It doesn’t matter. To extinguish this agony, I must drink that blood now.’ ‘As if my entire body were melting away…’ ‘There is no flesh, only blood remains.’ ‘It’s hot, so hot, burning hot.’ ‘Look, see? It’s perfect.’

And yet.

“…”

My feet did not move.

Why?

“Ugh, ngh…!”
“…”
“…Hah…”

Drowning in blood, yet unbroken. Shattered and torn, yet holding onto myself.

“…”
“…”

I simply watched that figure as if it were the sea itself.

‘Consume him.’
‘Seize him.’

My inner self urged me on.

‘You can win!’

But there was a voice that rang louder still.

“…It’s no different….”
“….”
“No different, it’s….”

…Whose voice was that?

“Ah.”

It was mine.

When the blood smeared across the floor touched his feet, he flinched as though he’d brushed against burning embers, stumbling backward a step. As he retreated, wavering and instinctively covering his mouth, his gaze collided with The Devil’s.

“….”

Those pitch-black eyes—was it called Coco? That creature, a fragment of The Castle itself, merely gazed upon him.

‘…Does it not think I will attack?’

No, that wasn’t it.

‘Why?’

Why does this being not crumble?

‘It said we’re no different.’

If we are the same, then how can it do such things? That question inflicted a pain far deeper than hunger.

“….”

In that moment, I understood.

“….”

If I were to kill this creature now, to consume it, to make it mine once and for all—I would never obtain the answer I truly sought.

What I genuinely craved was not sustenance, but the answer to what fundamental difference separated its existence from my own. I was parched for it.

You understood that, didn’t you? That’s why you revealed yourself so vulnerably.

“…Ah, I see….”

He finally turned away.

“…How petty of someone who claims to be a god.”

Hunger gnawing at him, answers eluding him, he vanished from that place as quietly as he had first appeared. And he consoled himself, insisting that this was not a failed hunt.

There simply existed things in this world more precious than death.

“….”
“….”
“….”

* * *

The young man, lost in a peculiar emptiness, suddenly became aware.

“Ah….”

From sunset to moonrise and back to dawn, he had been standing in this empty Banquet Hall like a phantom. Alone, he contemplated this truth.

“….”

What he found was humiliation and despair.

In his most vulnerable moment, with prey dangling before his eyes, he could not bring himself to strike. He had justified the hunt as his pride and reason for existence, yet he had diminished that very instinct within himself.

‘…I am falling, yet you held yourself together even in that agony.’

He had wanted to destroy Lee Yeon-woo and prove they were the same, but Lee Yeon-woo had proven himself no beast. His overwhelming restraint and nobility became a cruel mirror reflecting the young man’s failure.

Now he could confess: he had been lonely. Wandering alone without a kindred spirit bearing the same sin, perhaps he had secretly hoped for kinship and salvation in Lee Yeon-woo. But in the end, they were different.

‘Where did it all go wrong?’

He already knew the answer. It began the moment he tasted Lee Yeon-woo’s ‘positive emotions.’

For one who had lost taste, it restored sensations from a forgotten time. Even knowing he was becoming less divine and more human with each taste, he obsessed over it. The meal Lee Yeon-woo offered became a deadly poison that ultimately stripped away even his purpose.

Then my inner voice whispered.

‘No, stop making excuses. You’re just shifting responsibility.’
‘You should have become a god.’
‘You didn’t even try to consume his sense of self.’

The instinct in my blood sneered. It mocked me for lacking the courage to attempt it, for fearing failure, for claiming I couldn’t guarantee control and calling it an uncertain gamble—all calculated excuses born from cowardice.

“I know.”

The young man admitted it readily.

I feared that the moment I consumed him, I would lose even this shallow relationship forever. Perhaps what the young man truly desired was not a transcendent god, but an eternal, stable, and noble ‘human’—one who would never surrender their dignity.

Yet Lee Yeon-woo remained unchanged. He preserved his dignity.

“How noble. And how tragic.”

The distant humanity the young man truly craved existed right there. The battlefield he had entered was not one of power or ego, but of humanity itself—a battle he was destined to lose from the very beginning.

“So it’s right not to consume him.”

The young man murmured as if entranced, gazing into empty space.

“If I consume and replace him, I lose myself. But if I maintain the relationship without consuming him… I can learn from his side. I can become more refined. Predation can wait until later. Isn’t that right?”

Tell me this is not my sin alone.

“….”
“….”
“….”

Just as you all have.

* * *

“You always conduct such peculiar research.”
“Oh, what a disheartening thing to say.”

A voice quite high for a man’s.

“Is that it today? That voice, that personality?”
“A cheerful day is always important, isn’t it?”
“Male, below average height, exaggerated….”
“Please don’t insult my height?”
“Hard to understand.”
“It was empty from the start!”
“Empty?”
“There’s nothing for you to read.”
“For something like that….”

I observe the scattered documents and the data on the screen.

“You were always diligent.”

The mysterious mechanical doll mimicked laughter.

“That’s the beauty of machines!”
“Indeed, quite witty.”
“Thank you always for the good scores.”
“A fair evaluation.”

When I was inside that space, there was peace. Thinking back on it now, it must have been because this was the only case of someone like me—who had experienced the same failure—yet existed as genuinely human.

No need to ask “may I eat this?” No need to be packaged as a Monster or some grotesque thing, no need to mimic Nobility. Because we stood on the same boundary.

“Because it’s worth it.”

I regarded them as background rather than purpose.

“Easy to understand, clear thinking, humane….”
“Do you show favoritism?”
“I don’t favor anything.”
“Perhaps you can’t?”
“Unpleasant.”
“Shall I apologize?”
“Empty, you say—I won’t accept it then.”

It was that comfortable.

Because the being before my eyes was merely background, a void, nothing at all. Precisely because he was nothing but a machine and a puppet, I could exist as ‘a being requiring no explanation’.

And yet, his face was always changing.

His voice too,
his body,
his actions.

“If you were to disappear, now that would be something.”

And so, one day, I found myself curious.

“Where might I find you, should you vanish?”
“Oh, sir.”

Whether it was jest,
or earnest truth.

“The Hotel General Manager is always at the Hotel!”

He always referred to himself as the Hotel General Manager.

“―Well then.”
“….”
“Thank you for visiting, Guest.”
“….”
“How may I be of service?”

…
…

Five years ago, concealing his form in the aftermath of war.

Still called by the world ‘The Devil’.

A tale of one… Hotel legend.

* * *

[Memory of Connection: The Feast of Summer Flowers]

* * *

Measured footsteps approached the man seated at the empty Dining Table.

“…So you were here.”
“Yes.”
“Is the meal to your taste?”

The Young Man looked at Lee Yeon-woo.

“You look unfamiliar.”

A few strands of hair trembled at the corners of his eyes, as though brushed aside carelessly. His pristine white shirt, devoid even of a vest, left his broad shoulders entirely exposed, the fabric hanging loose around his waist.

His expression, weathered by exhaustion until it resembled ancient deadwood, made his age impossible to discern….

‘He’s not wearing glasses today.’

His face, devoid of warmth today, yet still composed in measured tone, offered his reply.

“I didn’t come to meet you as the Hotel General Manager today.”
“Hotel General Manager.”
“Yes, merely an ordinary citizen.”
“I see.”
“Will you invite me?”

He asked slowly, tapping the Table.

“Or shall I invite you instead?”
“….”
“Tasteless Guest.”
“….”
“I was curious about your name.”

The Tasteless Guest, who had remained silent for a long while,

“….”
“….”

After a long while, I asked.

“…May I eat?”
“There’s no shame in turning back now.”
“You jest.”
“One must live pleasantly, mustn’t one?”

Lee Yeon-woo sat across from him.

It was a choice he would never have made if he were the Tasteless Guest.

—————
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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