Chapter 18. Gains
Lee Yeonhee’s eyes moved back and forth between my face and Confirmation Bias’s face.
For a moment, I could see a cold emotion flicker in her eyes.
I had a pretty good idea of what she was thinking.
I wasn’t worried about it.
As long as Lee Yeonhee was thinking normally, she would soon realize that it wasn’t what she thought.
“Y-Yuhyeon… were you married?”
“Yeonhee.”
“…Y-Yes.”
I pointed at Confirmation Bias, who was clinging to me like a cicada.
She looked like a cute girl somewhere in her early teens.
Her bright, innocent eyes were filled with tears after our long-awaited reunion, making her especially charming.
Lee Yeonhee stared blankly at Confirmation Bias’s face before muttering,
“She looks like you…”
“…What?”
“I didn’t know you were married… You never mentioned anything like that in the Backrooms.”
I was about to calmly explain the situation, but then I paused and looked at Bias’s face after hearing that she resembled me.
Her mysterious jet-black hair looked as though it had been spun from the darkness of space itself.
Her sparkling eyes resembled a galaxy scattered across the night sky.
Her face was wrapped in jade-white skin, with a beautifully raised nose and adorable crimson lips that looked as though they had been carved from a plum.
She looked like me?
Now that I thought about it…
Maybe she did.
That made me feel strangely pleased.
At that point, I decided it was time to clear up the misunderstanding.
“Lee Yeonhee.”
“…Yes.”
Her eyes, which had completely lost their light, turned toward me.
If I had to describe them, they looked like land cracked apart by a severe drought.
They were slightly dead inside.
“Lee Yeonhee.”
“…Yes.”
I pointed toward Confirmation Bias.
Then I asked,
“Lee Yeonhee, how old do you think she looks?”
“Well… maybe around thirteen—huh?”
Lee Yeonhee suddenly stopped in the middle of her sentence.
Like a malfunctioning robot, she slowly turned her head with stiff movements and opened her eyes wide.
Judging by her appearance, Bias looked at least ten years old.
Meanwhile, I was twenty-two.
Only then did Lee Yeonhee realize that I was physically too young to possibly have fathered Confirmation Bias.
The moment she understood that fact, her mouth fell open blankly.
Then incomprehensible sounds began leaking out.
“A-Ah… Ah. Uh. Ah. Agh. Ugh.”
Her face steadily turned red like a ripening fruit, while the trembling of her body became stronger.
A dying groan filled with countless mixed emotions escaped from her again and again.
Finally, she covered her face with both hands.
Of course, that only made her bright-red face stand out even more against her pale hands.
“AAAGH… Aaaagh… hic…”
She leaned against the wall, and I could see her eyes through the gaps between her fingers.
Her pupils looked unfocused.
Oh dear.
It seemed Lee Yeonhee had completely broken.
“Dad? Why is that person acting like that?”
I decided to give her some time alone.
I took Bias’s hand and headed toward the bedroom.
She looked up at me with innocent eyes before pointing toward Lee Yeonhee.
“Is that person my new mom?”
“No.”
Bias nodded with a disappointed expression before climbing onto my lap.
Confirmation Bias nestled into my arms, practically purring like a cat.
For some reason, she felt even cuter than before.
Was it because my mind was more relaxed now?
Or maybe because I had just gone through something so serious?
I felt like I had been reminded of how precious ordinary life was.
Everything around me now felt much more valuable and precious than before.
I spent some time stroking Confirmation Bias’s head.
It didn’t take very long for Lee Yeonhee to recover.
A knock came from outside the door.
When I opened it, Lee Yeonhee stood there looking somewhat calmer.
Her ears were still red, though, so it seemed she hadn’t completely gotten her emotions under control.
Physical activity was usually helpful when dealing with emotional stress.
I looked at her for a moment, then took off the bag hanging from my back.
“Why don’t we organize everything first?”
It was time to sort through everything we had obtained from the Backrooms.
There was far too much for me to handle alone, so I asked her to help.
Lee Yeonhee covered her ears with her hands and nodded.
I opened the bag.
Inside were all sorts of things I had collected from the Backrooms—food, various supplies, and even large pieces of furniture.
[22. Scq222 - Infinite Bag]
This bag was one of the Mysteries I had taken from the [Relic Corner].
It contained an infinite separate subspace within it.
Thanks to that, I couldn’t feel the weight of anything inside, yet I could store an unlimited number of objects in it.
It was an absurdly overpowered Mystery.
Time didn’t even flow inside it, so there was no need to worry about food spoiling.
Taking things out was also extremely easy.
If I reached inside while thinking about the item I wanted, my hand would automatically grab it.
“Up we go.”
I took roughly half the items out of the bag and placed them around the house.
The remaining half would be kept for emergencies.
They were supplies in case the house collapsed or we suddenly had to escape.
“You really brought a lot of things back.”
There truly was all kinds of stuff inside the bag.
We had passed through so many different Corners that the variety of items was enormous.
Looking at everything even brought back memories.
In a way, everything inside the bag was like a small record of our history in the Backrooms.
“There’s a huge amount of food. Even if five people ate three meals a day, it looks like we could easily survive for twenty years.”
“Hehe. Whenever we found a food-related Corner, we basically cleaned the entire place out.”
Lee Yeonhee laughed while sorting through the supplies.
She seemed to have returned to her usual self.
“This needs to stay frozen. Since it won’t spoil inside the bag anyway, let’s just leave it there.”
“Carbonated drinks? Should we leave these inside too?”
“They’ll get warm if we take them out, so leave them inside. We don’t have enough refrigerator space anyway.”
“Yes! Oh, and this is… a large-caliber sniper rifle? We picked this up from the Gun Corner!”
“Put it outside with the other guns.”
“What about this rocket launcher? It’s already loaded!”
“That one… let’s keep it in the bag. It takes up too much space. And if it accidentally goes off, it’ll be a disaster.”
By the time we finished organizing everything according to those general rules, the moon had already gone down and the sun had risen.
When I checked the time on my phone, it was already noon.
No wonder I felt exhausted.
We must have taken far too many things from the Backrooms.
Despite their small bodies, Confirmation Bias and Lucy had worked hard to help me.
After saying goodnight, the two of them went to sleep.
I was tired enough that I wanted to sleep immediately too, but there was still something I needed to do.
I lay down on the sofa and turned on my phone.
It was time for one of the most important activities in an apocalypse.
Gathering information.
I watched videos recommended by the algorithm on MyTube and searched through news articles.
I gathered huge amounts of information from the internet and tried to determine what was true and what was false.
While I was doing that, Lee Yeonhee, who had been lying exhausted on the floor until a moment ago, came over.
“Oppa? What are you doing?”
“I’m searching for information.”
She sat beside me and stared at my phone screen with slightly hollow eyes.
At the moment, I was browsing through online communities.
There was nowhere else with this much information.
Posts about Mysteries.
Information about people’s everyday lives.
Updates from overseas.
Online communities were places where practically every kind of information gathered.
“What are things like right now?”
“It doesn’t seem very good. Zombies have apparently been almost completely wiped out inside Seoul, but other regions are still overflowing with them.”
“Ah…”
“And zombies aren’t the only problem. Even reports of Mystery sightings are being uploaded two or three at a time in real time.”
Mysteries had already been appearing frequently before I went to the mart.
But apparently, the number being seen now was on an entirely different level.
More Mysteries wandering through the streets.
Increasing zombie numbers outside Seoul.
And many other problems.
Among all that information, I focused especially on Mysteries.
While researching them, I also learned about several famous Mysteries that had become widely known to the public.
I showed Lee Yeonhee three pictures.
The first picture showed a single door standing alone in the middle of an empty street.
“What is this?”
“Apparently, it’s a Mystery that’s been appearing a lot recently. It randomly appears in different places, and when you open the door, there’s an entirely different world on the other side.”
“Uh… is that it?”
She asked in confusion.
“Yes. That’s basically it. The problem is that not a single person who entered one has ever come back out.”
A door that you could enter but never leave.
It was a fairly common Mystery without anything particularly unusual about it.
Even so, the reason it had become famous was because of the sheer number of doors appearing.
Apparently, the estimated number of doors that had appeared in Korea alone had already exceeded ten thousand.
The government had supposedly even sent out emergency safety alerts warning people not to open those doors carelessly.
When I saw curiosity beginning to appear on Lee Yeonhee’s face, I showed her the next picture.
This one was a screenshot of a game uploaded to the Gugol Store.
“What about this? Isn’t it just a game? What do they call this kind of thing again… a tower-climbing game?”
“Apparently, if you play it, you get possessed.”
I paused briefly.
“More precisely, you get possessed the moment you install it.”
Perhaps because this Mystery could be accessed by anyone with a phone and an internet connection, it was the most popular of the three.
The fact that it had reached five million downloads worldwide said everything.
Its fantasy genre probably contributed greatly to its popularity as well.
How many of those five million people had installed it without knowing they would be possessed?
Apparently, there were also quite a few people who could no longer endure the miserable lives they had been forced into by the apocalypse and installed it almost as if they were throwing themselves off a building.
“No one who installed this Mystery has returned either.”
Finally, I showed her the long-awaited final picture.
Unlike the previous Mysteries, which had been inanimate objects, the subjects in these pictures were human-shaped.
There were two photos.
One showed a group of knights wearing armor that looked as if they had stepped straight out of a fantasy game.
The other showed people dressed in robes.
The officially recognized names given to them by the government were respectively—
[Swordsmanship Preservation Association]
and
[Magic Preservation Association].
Of all the Mysteries I had just described, these were the ones that interested me the most.
