Chapter 88 - The Trailblazer II

4

Once you have identified an anomaly’s weakness—its void spot—what matters next?

Spirit, of course.

In refined terms, vitality and mental fortitude. In plain language, sheer tenacity and guts. You have to put yourself in a Marine’s frame of mind and push through on stubborn grit alone.

This is absolutely not a joke.

For example, let me briefly tell you about my ninetieth run, when I operated the Sixth International convenience store.

Although I never mentioned it before, human customers weren’t the only ones who frequented the place. We had plenty of “nonhuman customers,” too.

One night, the bell rang.

DING!

I immediately turned my head. The digital clock hanging by the entrance read 01:59.

“Welcome, dear cus—”

“Uoaaagh...”

“—tomer. Ahem, please take your time browsing.”

A wave of rotten stench washed over me.

A pitch-black ghost was approaching, trailing sloppy puddles of shadow. Its footwork was so distinctive that I wondered when I’d installed a film-festival red carpet in my convenience store.

‘I’m fucked.’

An eminently rational assessment.

Are you familiar with the Pokémon Grimer? Or the Stink Spirit from Spirited Away?

A ghost that looked exactly like that was gliding around the store before making its way to the checkout.

Its little circuit sent me a little crazy, too. The floor I’d painstakingly mopped just five minutes earlier was now beautifully coated in the shitty water it dribbled everywhere.

“Stomaaach...”

The bastard customer spoke.

“Pardon?”

“One stomaaach. Two... kidneys. One heaaart... One lung. Three... fingers. One eyebaaall, pleaaase...”

“...”

I was a small-business owner with commercial ethics firmly embedded in my frontal lobe at all times.

In other words, I possessed the mental fortitude to never forget the words “customer service,” even when dealing with problem customers like this one.

And so I could give it a bright, utterly unclouded smile.

“Sir, would you like a beating?”

“...?”

“Would you like a beating? Would you like a beating?”

The ghost flinched.

I flipped up the counter flap with a clack and instead stepped toward the ghost.

“Can you see this floor? Hm? I haven’t been able to verify whether you have any fucking eyes, so I can’t really say.”

“Uoagh...?”

“It’s all black, like the sewer backed up. And the smell? We sell groceries here, but the stench coming off you is so bad they’ve all spoiled. You’re going to take responsibility for this, right? I asked if you’re going to take responsibility, dear customer. Why aren’t you answering? Hm?”

That’s right.

If there was an anomaly called a “problem customer,” then there had to be a “worthless shopkeeper” as well. Only then could the world regain its balance.

“What? A stomach? Kidneys? A heart? What a load of bullshit, you fucking customer. Hey, pay up. A cleaning fee to get the floor clean again. A mop fee, since I’ll have to throw it out afterward. Compensation for replacing the entire grocery section. And above all, a laundry fee, because your stink got on my uniform. The total comes to the value of your entire existence, asshole.”

“Uuoagh...”

“You don’t have it? No money? You came into my store and trashed it without any money? Ah, fuck! Hey! Call the police. I said call the police! No! From now on, I’m the police, you fucking penniless bastard!”

“Uaaagh...”

It faded away.

At that moment, the anomaly evaporated. The shitty water and foul stench it had scattered all over the store vanished along with it.

The digital clock still read 01:59.

There was exactly one lesson to be learned from this anecdote. Even an anomaly powerful enough to make time briefly hesitate could be defeated with knowledge of its void spot and a healthy dose of fiery spirit.

I am the Undertaker.

Unlike a certain regressor bastard who took extended leave and ran away because he was starved for love, I am a man forever overflowing with the spirit to raise my middle finger at anomalies.

So that you, too, might someday blaze your own trail, I thought I’d use this episode to offer a more detailed look at an expert void-breaker’s “anomaly strategy guide.”

5

I stepped out of the duty room wearing my security guard’s uniform.

A flashlight in my left hand, a suitcase in my right.

I had also equipped myself with earphones and a small microphone. This was my full loadout for a serious anomaly hunt.

Judging by my mood alone, I was Liu Bei himself, wielding his paired swords. The finest swordsman in the Central Plains had descended—one who, given the right conditions, could make even the mighty Lu Bu tremble in fear and terror.

“Uooooh..., ...”

“Hee, hee, hee, hee...”

The moment I set foot in the first-floor corridor, the ghosts milling about quietly edged away.

Naturally.

“Ghosts” were fundamentally anomalies based on human forms. Some possessed intelligence of their own, and most at least had the instinct to recognize someone powerful.

Baekhwa Girls’ High School might boast an unprecedented level of difficulty among tutorial dungeons, but I was a regressor on my 117th run. From the anomalies’ perspective, this was the catastrophe of Cthulhu suddenly descending on a beginner village.

That didn’t mean every ghost fled, however.

Not because they were particularly brave, but because some found it difficult to run away, given the rules of their existence.

Thus, my first destination was the school’s boys’ restroom.

“Hmm.”

SPLASH!

Water squelched beneath my soles. The restroom floor was flooded to a depth of about 0.5 centimeters.

As I looked around, I detected a strange stench beneath the faint scent of bleach. It smelled like a huge pile of cut human hair left soaking in water.

The faucets were off.

‘Well, this is obviously a haunted spot.’

Why hesitate?

There were four toilet stalls. I immediately knocked on the third one, three very polite knocks.

“Miss Hanako, are you there?”

“...”

“Miss Hanako?”

Silence.

I tilted my head.

“Hmmm.”

“...”

It was a deeply suspicious silence.

The instincts of a seasoned anomaly hunter on his 117th run whispered, “There is definitely a ghost here.”

It might have hurriedly shut off the faucets, but with the tile floor already flooded, it was busted.

As a man generous enough to trust himself, I saw only two possible answers. Either the ghost’s Japanese origins meant it couldn’t understand a foreign language, or it was deliberately ignoring me.

In today’s global age, the former was impossible. My intuition pointed to the latter.

“Ah. Right. Silly me. In some versions, knocking alone doesn’t fulfill the conditions for an appearance.”

“...”

“All right. I’m going to spin now, okay?”

With a click, I locked the restroom door and began spinning in place inside the toilet stall.

“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.”

“...”

“Eight, nine, ten, twelve, thirteen. Done.”

I knocked three times on the door.

“Miss Hanako, let’s play. Miss Hanako, are you there?”

“Yes.”

The answer came immediately.

This was the fate of anomalies. They had their own “rules,” and not even they were free of those rules.

Because those rules were what allowed them to exist in the world in the first place.

An anomaly with enormous “physical destructive power,” like Tenlegs, possessed a corresponding void spot: it could itself be physically destroyed.

The convenience-store ghost “can appear as a customer in any convenience store during the Hour of the Ox, from one to three in the morning.” At first glance, it seemed to transcend even spatial restrictions. Conversely, however, it possessed the void spot that it “can exist only in the role of a customer.”

The restroom ghost Hanako was no different.

Hanako “can exist anywhere, provided it is the third stall of an empty restroom.” A kind of place-bound spirit, in other words.

Therefore, Hanako “must reveal herself” to anyone who enters the third restroom stall, particularly someone who recites the incantation.

What if she didn’t answer? She would effectively be admitting that she didn’t exist in the third stall. Extermination complete.

The restroom ghost murmured in a trembling voice—at least, that was how I perceived it; in reality, it was an utterly sinister ghostly voice.

“Would you like red toilet paper... or blue toilet paaaper...?”

“Aha. A crossover with Red Paper, Blue Paper. Not particularly rare.”

“Would you like purple toilet paper...?”

“Oh.”

The anomaly had offered a compromise.

According to one version of the ghost story, requesting “purple toilet paper” would make Hanako withdraw of her own accord. A strategy, a way of banishing her.

Yet I hadn’t even recited that solution. The ghost had taken the initiative to propose a ceasefire.

I almost felt a little touched. What a considerate ghost.

“Purple toilet paper isn’t bad. But what are we going to do about this?”

“...?”

ZZZIP!

I unzipped the leather suitcase I’d brought along. The suitcase was also an anomaly, but that’s a story for another time.

What mattered now was that it contained a conspicuous “roll of red toilet paper” and “roll of blue toilet paper.”

“I brought both red and blue toilet paper, you see.”

“...”

“We’re living in the post-COVID era, aren’t we? With personal hygiene so important these days, you’ve got to carry your own toilet paper for peace of mind. Right, Hanako? Want some, too? Would you like red toilet paper? Or blue toilet paper?”

“Purple toilet paper...”

“I don’t have purple toilet paper, asshole!”

BOOOOM!

I immediately summoned my aura and delivered a forceful stomp. The toilet shattered, scattering white porcelain fragments.

ROOOOSH!

Water surged back up. But H₂O wasn’t the only thing that came gushing out. A ghost in the shape of a little girl wearing a red cape abruptly shot up as well.

I grinned.

“Found. You.”

“...!”

The ghost’s form shuddered violently.

This was one particularly nice thing about human-based “ghost-type” anomalies, unlike other anomalies.

Weak before the strong, strong before the weak. Most of these ghosts possessed that human, all-too-human tendency to become feeble in front of someone strong and infinitely powerful only against someone weak. The more distinctly human their characteristics, as with “Hanako of the Toilet,” the more pronounced this tendency became.

Of course, most ghosts also had the annoying trait of “physical immunity,” but that didn’t matter. With the right approach, even physical immunity could be overcome.

Like this, for example.

“Got you.”

“...! ...!”

In a flash, I wrapped red toilet paper around my right hand and blue toilet paper around my left, then seized Hanako’s head.

However relatively free ghosts might be from physical force, “Hanako” still caused a physical change—death—in the toilet’s user through the words “red toilet paper” and “blue toilet paper.”

This was how to use a void spot.

There were no one-way streets in the world of anomalies. Every road ran both ways. If the other side could interfere with you, then naturally you could interfere with it through the same method.

The result was the scene before me: a restroom ghost dangling from the crushing vise grip of my hands.

“...! ...! ...!”

“Would you like red toilet paper, or blue toilet paper?”

“...”

“The correct answer was both. We’re running a buy-one-get-one-free promotion this month, dear customer.”

CRUNCH!

The ghost’s face turned blue, then burst with a pop. Its entire body transformed into red liquid and melted away without a trace.

Even though the anomaly resembled a human, I felt no sympathy whatsoever.

The reason became clear the moment the restroom ghost was exorcised.

The water covering the tiles turned red, and then corpses emerged like a village submerged beneath a dam’s reservoir.

“...”

Seven bodies in this restroom alone.

Including the other restrooms would easily bring the total to dozens. The students trapped in the “Baekhwa Girls’ High School tutorial dungeon” without knowing anything must have been irresistibly appetizing prey for the anomalies.

I gathered the bodies in one place. They probably wouldn’t decompose until the void was broken.

“Hmm...?”

While arranging the bodies, however, I discovered something suspicious.

“... Talismans?”

Talismans were hidden throughout the restroom. On the back of the toilet from which the Red Paper, Blue Paper ghost had emerged, in the cleaning-supply cabinet, even beneath the sink. Three of them in all.

Had I been past my two-hundredth run, I could have deciphered every last bit of meaning in those talismans. At this point, however, though I’d read the Analects, Mencius, the Great Learning, and the Doctrine of the Mean, I had yet to study the Book of Changes.

Still, I could distinguish between talismans for offering prayers and those for laying curses. The intent of the characters written on them was so utterly obvious that it was impossible to miss.

Death. Death. Death. Death.

Even after the entire restroom had been blasted with water, the crimson characters on the talismans gleamed vividly like snakeskin.

“Hmm.”

Quite ominous. Even fortune-tellers who sold curse talismans would usually write only “ruin.” They almost never inscribed “death.”

I examined the talismans from every angle, scraped at the red writing with a fingernail, and even sniffed it.

“... This is actual human blood.”

Talismans fashioned from writing in human blood. Among the most dangerous of curses.

Why on earth were such talismans hidden in a school restroom?

I folded up the question and tucked it into the wardrobe of my mind, then burned every last talisman for the time being.

Next, I took paper and tape from my suitcase and attached a sign to the first-floor boys’ restroom door.

[Patrol Complete]

A kind of “safe zone” marker.

I didn’t know how many students were wandering nearby, but it would give them at least a small clue toward survival.

“Good.”

I moved on again.

There was a reason I’d gone out of my way to eliminate the restroom ghost first upon entering School Ghost Stories.

Since ancient times, people had regarded “places for urination” as a kind of taboo.

A shrine where rites were performed was a center of sunlight—yang—and a restroom was a center of shadow—yin. Although no human could avoid such places, people still shunned them as filthy.

That was why, within a void, “places for urination” always held ritual significance alongside “places for eating” and “places for sleeping.”

One of the central pillars of School Ghost Stories, so to speak.

By comparison, it was no exaggeration to dismiss the ghosts of science labs, art rooms, or music rooms as completely unimportant.

‘It would be nice to join Cheon Yohwa or the survivor group straightaway, but finding their exact location in a void this distorted is a distant prospect...’

I stepped forward. The beam of my flashlight swept the pitch-black corridor.

The school’s spaces had been unnaturally elongated, duplicated, and grotesquely twisted. The sky outside the windows was stained bright red, and birch trees shattered the glass with white fingers that jutted into the corridor.

Countless anomalies were surely lurking within those white shadows.

I nodded and adjusted the [Security Guard Undertaker] nameplate on my front pocket.

‘Then I’ll just beat the shit out of every anomaly I encounter along the way until I meet up with Cheon Yohwa.’

A shudder...

Perhaps it was my imagination, but at that moment, I felt the School Ghost Stories void tremble.