Chapter 3: What the Hell Are You Talking About?

I finally let out the breath that, for a few moments, I had forgotten how to breathe.

The wound the monster had licked throbbed with unbearable pain.

With great difficulty, I closed the book and took two steps back.

“Boss, first we need to stop the bleeding.”

Perhaps because I had lost too much blood, I felt dizzy as Myeong Haebin tore a disposable cloth and bandaged my wrist.

“Are you okay?”

The other employee, Lee Jaewon, was still sitting on the floor, staring blankly at the monster as if his soul had left his body.

Only then did he turn his vacant eyes toward me.

And when he saw that my hand was missing, he flinched.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t even realize you were like this…”

“Where were you? I don’t think we saw you on the ground floor.”

“I-I… was hiding between the washing machine and the wall in the utility room. When I saw the monster enter the room, I went up to the second floor to hide, but… it ended up following me…”

He spoke in a rushed manner, but it was clear enough to understand.

I had already assumed there was one more person still alive.

But it was also true that I had put off looking for him.

So I couldn’t blame him for being discovered.

“B-But, Hanmu… how the hell did you manage to stop that monster?”

“I didn’t expect it to fall asleep either.”

The reason I chose Worship for He Who Has Forgotten Satiety between the two prayers was very simple.

If someone prepares an altar, offers sacrifices, and even prays, they would hardly call it a beast.

To me, it was a people-devouring monster.

But to the owner of this house, it seemed to be an object of worship.

“It’s not over yet. We have to get out of here.”

“Y-Yeah. We have to get out…”

“But, Boss, didn’t you say we had to find the altar?”

I took the book from Myeong Haebin’s hands and reread the prayer I had recited.

I had been thinking about it for a while.

Maybe.

We had been looking for the altar in the wrong place.

“I think I know where it is. Gather the equipment and let’s go downstairs.”

In case the monster woke up, we made our way down the hallway and descended the stairs, taking care not to make the slightest sound.

The other two took a look at the master bedroom and the guest room they still hadn’t checked.

But my attention was focused solely beneath the stairs.

From a place lower than the earth beneath thy feet, we revere the movement of thy stomach.

That was what the prayer said.

However.

There were no stairs in this house leading to a basement.

What if it couldn’t be seen because it was actually hidden?

I lifted the edge of the thick rug spread beneath the table covered with red candles with the tip of my foot.

Riiip.

The rug was thick and heavy, and barely lifted.

But a fine powder of dried blood clung to the tip of my shoe.

I had a strong feeling that, if there was an altar from which that monster had been summoned.

It was there.

“Jaewon, can you help me move this table?”

“Ah… y-yeah…”

Always quick to grasp the situation, Myeong Haebin helped Lee Jaewon move the table aside before lifting the rug.

“Ugh… How can there be this much blood…?”

Beneath the rug was so much dried, caked blood that the floor itself couldn’t even be seen.

Lee Jaewon quickly put on his mask and covered his nose with his arm.

I raised the mop handle with my right hand and tapped the floor.

Tap.

Tap.

Thunk.

It was that distinctive hollow sound you hear when there’s an empty space underneath.

“If you’re not going to help, you’d better move aside.”

“You’re going to start cleaning at a time like this? Yeah, there’s a lot of blood, but you’re going to clean the floor? Hanmu, now isn’t the time for that…”

Lee Jaewon crossed his arms with a disapproving expression, alternating his gaze between the second floor, where the monster was sleeping, and me.

Myeong Haebin, on the other hand, rolled up her sleeves and grabbed another mop.

“Boss, I’ll help too. We just have to clean here?”

“Yes. I think there’s an empty space underneath.”

“I’ll make it so clean there won’t be a single speck of dust left!”

She pressed the wet mop firmly against the floor.

The blood began to dissolve, and the red stains spread.

‘It’s not easy doing this with one hand.’

The cloth bandaging my wrist was once again stained red with blood.

Cold sweat ran down my forehead.

But it seemed I hadn’t been wrong to choose a mop.

Little by little.

The grain of the wood began to appear beneath the blood.

Whoooosh.

A wind from who knew where blew out several of the red candles.

“Damn it, I don’t care anymore. Is there another mop?”

Lee Jaewon still didn’t trust me, but, clearly uneasy, he grabbed a cleaning cloth and began scrubbing the floor from one corner.

“There’s hair here too. Ugh…”

“If you’re going to throw up, you’d better get out of here.”

By the time the clear water in the bucket had almost completely turned into bloodstained water, the first to notice the change in the floor was Lee Jaewon, whose face was practically pressed against it as he cleaned.

“There really is something here. It looks like a crack…”

On the wooden floorboards, now free of blood, the outline of a square clearly appeared, along with an indentation that served as a handle.

“Could it be a door? I knew there was something here.”

“W-What could be down there?”

Leaving them behind me, I grabbed the handle and lifted the trapdoor.

“…It smells even more like blood down here than it does upstairs.”

“It looks sinister at first glance. What if it’s full of corpses?”

I shone the flashlight down the wooden stairs leading below.

From that dark basement, which seemed quite deep, came an unbearable stench mixed with the strong smell of blood.

I slung the tool bag over my shoulder, picked up the bucket with the mop resting against it, and began to descend.

I had no choice.

No wonder characters in horror movies end up willingly entering the most dangerous places.

“If you’re scared, you can stay up here.”

“I’ll go down.”

“What if that monster wakes up? I’m going too.”

After hesitating for a moment, Lee Jaewon followed us and closed the trapdoor.

In an instant, the basement was plunged into absolute darkness.

Then someone began feeling along the wall.

Click.

With a small click, the filament of a light bulb could be heard turning on.

Shortly afterward, an old incandescent bulb illuminated the place with a dim yellow light.

“At least there’s light down here… Ah.”

Myeong Haebin, who had peeked over my shoulder, abruptly shut her mouth.

If the house upstairs was nothing more than an ordinary home where a monster happened to roam.

The basement was a cult’s hideout.

Blood was splattered across the stone floor.

Symbols resembling a summoning circle, so distorted that it was impossible to recognize their original form.

Red candles scattered everywhere.

Chicken heads.

And human skulls.

“Ugh…”

Lee Jaewon ended up retching when his eyes met those of a chicken head whose eyes were wide open.

“I told you that you could stay outside.”

“I don’t want to become food for that monster. Ugh, this is insane…”

I took a garbage bag out of the tool bag and showed it to him.

“It’s only a guess, but maybe we can get out if we clean this place.”

As if he wanted to leave that place as quickly as possible, Lee Jaewon snatched the bag from me with his gloved hand.

“Then let’s get it over with. Move!”

But.

Was it really that simple?

Was putting all of that into a garbage bag and cleaning the floor enough to leave the altar clean?

Was the answer really that simple?

“Hanmu. What are you doing? We have to get out.”

With a red candle in one hand and a rooster comb in the other, Lee Jaewon looked at me impatiently.

“I don’t think that’s how we’re supposed to do it.”

“What are you talking about? Upstairs, we found the entrance by cleaning the floor too.”

With an expression that showed he didn’t understand at all, he threw everything he was holding into the garbage bag.

“Wait, didn’t that chicken head just move?”

And that was the last thing he managed to see.

“Aaagh!! My eyes!!”

Small black monsters, as though fragments had been torn from the main monster and only a human mouth had been attached to each of them, lunged at Lee Jaewon’s face.

With blunt, uneven human teeth, they tore at his skin and ripped away chunks of flesh.

The sound of their bites mixed with his screams of agony.

“Boss Hanmu! Help me! Why are these things so slippery!?”

Myeong Haebin tried to pull the monsters off his face.

But no matter how many times she pulled them away, they kept lunging at Lee Jaewon again and again.

‘Why are they only attacking Lee Jaewon? And why aren’t they doing anything to Haebin, who’s touching them directly…?’

For ■■ to return, the altar must always be kept clean.

“It’s not enough to just throw everything away.”

It had said that the altar had to be kept clean.

It didn’t mean cleaning everything up and throwing it in the trash.

It meant cleaning the altar so that it remained an altar.

Because Lee Jaewon had thrown the objects into the trash without respecting that.

The altar had regarded him as someone trying to destroy it, not clean it.

I took a cloth and carefully wiped the bloodstains from the summoning circle.

Just as I expected.

There was no blood on the cloth.

There were black stains.

“Haebin, pick up everything that’s scattered around and gather it together.”

The candles.

The chicken heads.

The skulls.

Everything had been placed on the summoning circle.

That was the altar.

“What about Lee Jaewon? Understood. But what are you planning to do?”

“I’m going to reconstruct the altar.”

Cleaning doesn’t only mean removing dirt.

It also means returning every object to its proper place and leaving everything organized.

We had to finish before Lee Jaewon was completely devoured.

‘There’s one here too.’

Beneath the blood I had cleaned away appeared an indentation similar to the one I had seen in the living room.

But it was different.

It wasn’t meant to open anything.

It looked like an engraving filled with incomprehensible symbols and characters.

“Is there any blood left?”

“No. It all spilled out already. There’s only the empty bucket left. I already gathered the candles and the heads. Where do I put them?”

Lee Jaewon, with the flesh on his arms and neck bitten away, could no longer even scream.

His body only twitched in spasms.

“Do you see the melted wax? Put the candles back where they were before. Place everything else according to the indentations in the floor.”

“And the altar circle? We don’t have anything left to draw it again…”

Originally, it had been drawn with blood.

So it could only be reconstructed with blood.

“Leave it to me.”

I untied the cloth wrapped around my left wrist.

The dried blood exposed the stump, covered in scabs.

Just looking at it was painful.

But I couldn’t keep drawing blood from a man who had already lost consciousness either.

“Gh…!”

So, without hesitating, I forcefully twisted my swollen wrist until the blood vessels that had barely managed to close ruptured again.

The pain was so intense that I had to bite my tongue to endure it.

Drops of fresh blood began falling one after another.

“Boss! Have you lost your mind!?”

“It’s the fastest way.”

If I already had a wound that was bleeding.

Why look for another one?

“K… kill me…”

While Lee Jaewon could barely breathe between death rattles and Myeong Haebin remained frozen in horror.

I began redrawing the altar circle using the blood dripping from my wrist.

Little by little, the red candles were placed around me, in the center of the altar.

The chicken heads, which truly seemed to blink, and the skulls returned to their positions.

“That was everything. There’s nothing else left.”

“…Good.”

Finally, I let the last drop of blood fall into the center of the altar.

Fwoosh!

The red candles all burst into flame at the same time.

The newly drawn circle glowed an intense red.

The chicken heads surrounding the altar opened their beaks slightly, as if they might take flight at any moment.

“Let’s go. We have to leave.”

“I’m still hungry!”

The small monsters completely covering Lee Jaewon rolled across the floor and lunged toward the altar.

Thunk!

Thunk!

Something began pounding on the basement door.

And, a moment later.

Without anyone opening it.

The enormous monster slowly descended the stairs.

“…Three.”

It looked at us with obvious reluctance.

But, as if drawn by an irresistible force.

It was sucked into the altar.

Rumble.

Crash.

The entire basement began shaking as though there were an earthquake.

The incandescent bulb flickered.

Fragments of the ceiling began to fall.

“Boss, let’s go!”

“U-Ugh…”

I slung Lee Jaewon’s arm over my shoulder, his breathing barely holding on, and began climbing the stairs.

The steps creaked as though they were about to break.

Chunks of concrete from the ceiling crashed down onto the altar and shattered on impact.

Just one more step.

No.

Two more steps.

Bang!!

We barely managed to get out when, a fraction of a second later, the basement trapdoor slammed shut.

And disappeared without a trace.

“Haa… Haa…”

The living room had returned completely to normal.

Not a single red candle remained.

Nor any trace of blood at the entrance.

Even the rug we had lifted was back in place.

Everything was exactly as it had been when we first entered.

As if it had returned to being a completely normal house.

Bzzzzz—

The phone vibrated for a long time.

[Heartfelt congratulations. You have completed the cleaning.]

An incredulous laugh escaped me.

Apparently.

I had survived.

Then, an extraordinarily cheerful voice, almost too cheerful for the situation, rang beside my ear.

“You passed, Boss. Would you like to join our company?”

It was strange.

My amputated wrist burned as though it were on fire.

Lee Jaewon lay on the floor covered in blood, barely breathing.

And yet.

She was smiling as though nothing had happened.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Passed?

Company?

I didn’t understand a damn thing.