# Chapter 44
Walking while feeling along the wall for 5 minutes, Lee Hwan finally reached a plausible position. Since it was said to be about 400 meters from the entrance, the hidden room with the gravity skill stone should be around this area, roughly estimated.
So now, did he just need to mutter prayers here? No matter how many times he went over it, there were no variables, but he couldn’t understand why he felt so nervous.
There was no point in wasting time. Lee Hwan looked around and finally cleared his throat and opened his mouth.
“Ahem, um… Our Father who art in heaven…”
Awkward prayer sounds filled the surroundings. With his only religious experience being a childhood visit to a church for cotton candy with a friend, standing in an empty gate praying felt strangely embarrassing to Lee Hwan, even though there was no one listening.
It felt exactly like standing in front of a pulpit and scamming the System.
“But deliver us from evil…”
His voice seemed to tremble at times, but maybe not.
“…forever and ever. Amen!”
Nevertheless, he managed to finish with some confidence. He had chosen the most popular and shortest prayer text, but it was questionable whether it would work.
“…”
As expected, not only did no skill stone appear, but a silence so complete it made breathing difficult filled Lee Hwan’s surroundings. It was as if the gate was asking, “What are you doing right now?” Gulp. He swallowed.
‘…Was the religion slightly wrong?’
Lee Hwan hurriedly made the sign of the cross. Again, only silence remained.
‘Was it not this god?’
Thinking he shouldn’t expect to get full after just one spoonful, Lee Hwan steadied his increasingly wavering heart and began praying again with a cracking voice. This time he switched religions and recited a Buddhist sutra.
“Ah, ah! Mahaprajnaparamita sutra, Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva, practicing the profound Prajnaparamita…”
However, even after finishing the final verse of the Buddhism scripture—so long it made him want to vomit and almost impossible to understand—there was still no change in the gate. Lee Hwan’s face, already red and swollen from being beaten up, turned even redder.
“Graaah… aah…”
Lee Hwan let out a strange cry. The location was definitely around here. If he had been doing this in the wrong place, there might be some hope, but according to his memory, a path to the hidden room should be generated around here.
Yet there was no sign of a hidden room; not even a hiding bug came out. Only Lee Hwan’s irritation kept creeping up.
Maybe he should just try breaking the wall. But if the skill stone would emerge that way, they wouldn’t have recorded the discoverer’s testimony in the first place.
“Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim…”
Wondering if perhaps the discoverer was one of the rare Korean followers of Allah, he awkwardly recited even the Quran. Though he didn’t expect it, sure enough, there was no change.
‘Damn it.’
Lee Hwan glanced toward the gate entrance and sighed deeply.
After going through such hardships to get here, he couldn’t waste time like this. He needed to get the skill stone as quickly as possible, leave this place, hurry to beat someone up… It was a day full of remaining tasks.
Maybe his heart wasn’t in it? Lee Hwan led his aching body to kneel down and tried to have reverent thoughts.
He neatly put back together Kang Dongha’s head, which he had been chopping up in his mind, and also tidied up Taesung’s hair, which he had been pounding.
‘Good thoughts. Good thoughts.’
“Haah… Our Father who art in heaven…”
But it was like a repeat sign. Despite conjuring up three puppies, two kittens, one little lamb in a box, and one large, fluffy alpaca in his mind for a positive mindset, the gate remained stubbornly silent. After chattering for a long time with his already painful throat, Lee Hwan was exhausted on his own.
“Does non-religion not work…?”
There was no answer from the gate despite his question.
Lee Hwan sat down. To think that in a gate, he would be drained not from combat but because of prayers. Feeling dejected, Lee Hwan took off his bag, hugged it tightly, and hunched his body. It felt like his body creaked with every movement.
Even after that, mournful prayer sounds flowed for quite some time, but there was no change in the gate. Towards the end, the original prayers were gone, replaced by selfish, lengthy requests for money, magic stones, peace, and skill stones, but even those didn’t work, making it all the more frustrating.
Lee Hwan slammed the wall, then clutched his head and crouched down again.
How could he overcome this situation? What did he need to do to make the gate obediently open the hidden room so he could go in and swallow the skill stone?
He had clearly recited a lifetime’s worth of prayers. At this point, maybe the condition wasn’t prayer. Perhaps he needed to say specific words, or it was another issue that even the discoverer hadn’t noticed.
‘Then how am I supposed to guess that…?’
To be honest, there was no way to know that condition. Since opened gate paths don’t reappear or respond to the same conditions again, they rely entirely on the discoverer’s testimony for records.
Just like how the discovery of the regression skill stone was buried by Kang Dongha’s silence.
‘The discoverer probably didn’t even pray this seriously. It was probably just like, “Fuck, please save me!”‘
Thinking that far, Lee Hwan turned his head toward the gate entrance repeatedly, like someone who had left their bag on the street. As the time to obtain the skill stone stretched on, the recent fierce battle kept flashing through his mind.
“Haah…”
Though he really didn’t want to think about it, if he left here, Taesung might be waiting for him. To catch him. To beat him up. And he had nowhere to turn for help. Because Kang Dongha must have created this situation.
It was incomprehensible why situations always deteriorated to this extent. His relationship with Taesung kept running on parallel lines. When they seemed too distant, a point of contact would suddenly appear, and when he approached, another incident would happen.
And in that commotion, Lee Hwan would arbitrarily expect, and then be disappointed. Again and again without getting tired. Then suddenly, he would be completely isolated. Thanks to someone’s machinations.
‘In this situation, why pray… I’m not in the mood.’
Somehow, it felt like this world was forcing him to be obedient. To praise with a smile. As if saying, “We even made you regress, what more do you want?”
Moreover, after recalling Taesung’s face with blood flowing, his hands kept trembling bit by bit. With the feeling of his heart sinking coldly, his teeth gritted automatically.
“Fuck…”
Finally, the curses he had been forcibly suppressing flowed from Lee Hwan’s mouth. His mood was so terrible that he felt unable to endure without cursing out loud.
“Prayer or whatever, this is really fucking shit.”
Clutching his aching head, he spat out curses one after another, and somehow the pain from his wounds seemed less.
In the dark gate with no one to talk to and lighten the atmosphere, Lee Hwan somehow felt like an animal being driven into a trap.
How fortunate that this was a gate and not a rabbit hole. Otherwise, Taesung would have rushed over and lit smoke at the entrance.
“Ugh, haah…”
His side pulled again. If he had known this would happen, he would have brought painkillers; he had been too careless in his preparation, thinking there would be no combat.
He decided to be more thorough to prevent such incidents in the future. But that resolve would only be effective in the future and was of no help to Lee Hwan now, who was nursing his painful body.
So Lee Hwan was already uttering harsh words for the umpteenth time. He really should clean up his language.
Before the regression, when he was with Taesung, he didn’t speak so roughly because of his age. Taesung was also on the polite side except when playing pranks on him, so he hardly heard such words even during combat.
Then, becoming this young and being separated from him, curse words stuck to his mouth.
Well, who cares. Cursing was the only way to feel less like exploding. Lee Hwan tried to rationalize.
“Our System who art in heaven, you fucking bastard.”
If the System had any sense, it should offer up the skill stone. The blunt curse was more pitiful than rough.
That’s when it happened.
“Causal relationship? Companion regression? I should just rip your fucking eyeballs out…”
Grrrr-.
Lee Hwan, who had been muttering curses, flinched. Along with a faint sound coming from somewhere, he could feel a subtle tremor under his feet.
‘What was that just now…’
It was a very subtle sensation. So faint that an ordinary person would never have noticed it.
But left alone in the silence, Lee Hwan could tell. He realized that this faint tremor was resonating from deep within the gate.
“…”
Lee Hwan stopped moving and surrendered his body to the stillness. For a long time, he stood frozen without even breathing, trying to sense the change.
What was that just now? What was it? Was there an underground monster he didn’t know about, pounding the ground, wanting to tear humans to pieces?
No. Not only had he never heard of such monsters appearing here, but the tremor just now wasn’t that type.
That feeling was… the movement of the gate itself.
Lee Hwan’s face, which had been wondering if it was possible, showed bewilderment, and then soon a strange certainty lingered. If he was right, the gate, which hadn’t budged an inch when he was pretending to pray devoutly, started moving only after being cursed at.
“No way… f-fuck?”
Though no sound came, Lee Hwan jumped up on impulse and shouted:
“FUCK!”
There was still no change. But as Lee Hwan began to move his mouth in earnest,
“What did I say earlier…? Eyeballs? I’ll rip your fucking eyeballs out!”
Grrrr-.
“You son of a bitch, you call this a regression!”
The walls beside Lee Hwan, who was rolling his eyes like someone possessed and spewing curses, were gradually shaking. Soon after, a huge sound, “kung-gung,” shook the foundations.
With just a few curses, almost like a joke.
Grrrr, kwajijik-!
The gate moved blatantly.
Lee Hwan, who had stopped cursing, turned to the side with a blank expression. He was surprised that part of the wall had moved quite significantly. Moreover, that spot was wide open, forming a long corridor.
Lee Hwan screamed, cleared his blood-tasting throat, and turned his body with an incredulous expression.
‘In the world, what kind of condition is this…’
Over his blankly frozen face, an expression that wasn’t purely happy slightly contained irritation.
“What, prayer? Praaaayer? That hunter bastard who doesn’t even know the basics…”
At the same time, curses burst from Lee Hwan’s mouth again.
In the not-too-distant future, the condition under which an inexperienced hunter found a hidden room in this dungeon wasn’t devout faith. It was cursing. Whether out of fear, irritation, or some emotion, it was cursing with deep feeling.
Perhaps the original discoverer was too embarrassed to be recorded in history for this fact, or afraid of future repercussions, and couldn’t reveal it properly. The content that he had dared to curse sincerely behind his seniors’ backs.
So that hunter bastard had lied to the gate mechanism. If changes occurred again based on that, it could lead to serious trouble.
If a gate transformation accident had happened here, people might have been annihilated sitting and just praying without knowing the method.
“That bastard… cough!”
Lee Hwan clicked his tongue but his throat hurt, making him cough dryly for a while. Then, with a voice that was almost hoarse, he muttered weakly:
“What on earth is this…”
Since the regression, everything had been strange. It felt like all the events he would experience in a lifetime were rushing to happen one after another in a short period.
‘What year is it now… When is my samsae…?’
Though Lee Hwan, who thought himself cold-headed, didn’t want to believe in things like fortune readings, life wasn’t being cooperative at all.
