I Became a Professional Horror Story Cleaner

Myeong Haebin’s body, as she walked ahead of us, suddenly sank.

“Haebin!”

“Uah! No, since when has this been here……? I’m sure the puddle was farther ahead……!”

Myeong Haebin struggled to get out of the puddle, which had turned into something like a swamp.

Park Hyeonho grabbed her firmly by the hand and barely managed to pull her out.

“Ptoo! Cough, cough.”

As I patted her on the back to help her spit out all the mud that had gotten into her mouth, Park Hyeonho rummaged through the plastic bag hanging from his wrist.

“Uh…… do you want to drink at least this?”

“Isn’t this the last bottle?”

“There’s still one more.”

“Then I want it!”

Even so, Park Hyeonho was adapting quickly.

Although it would be more accurate to say that he had no choice but to adapt in order to survive.

“Boo. There’s barely anything left.”

“That’s why I said ‘at least this’…….”

The plastic bottle he handed to Myeong Haebin barely had enough liquid to cover the bottom.

In reality, it was as if we only had one bottle left.

“Haah…….”

Perhaps feeling guilty for no reason, Park Hyeonho wiped his sticky forehead with his damp sleeve and let out a deep sigh that seemed to be swallowed by the fog.

A cheerful voice cut through the depressing atmosphere.

“Still, this makes exactly fifty!”

“Fifty what?”

“The number of times we’ve discovered a new anomaly! When Boss said he’d counted every single one of his steps, I was impressed and decided to start counting too.”

Despite having nearly died just moments ago, Myeong Haebin casually wiped her mud-covered arm on the bench, crossed her arms, and nodded in satisfaction.

Park Hyeonho shifted his eyes back and forth until he finally couldn’t hold back and asked.

“And what does that mean?”

“That discovering fifty new anomalies might be the trigger for escaping. If we’re lucky, it means we might actually be able to get out this time. If we’re unlucky, maybe we’ll have to find more.”

“And if we’re even unluckier, the number of anomalies we discover might not even be a condition for getting out.”

I thought he would complain, but Park Hyeonho merely raised the corners of his lips.

“Still…… that sounds good.”

We had even gotten used to writing our complaints in the ‘Citizen Suggestion Box’.

“Uh, you forgot the store. The bars on the container.”

“Ah, did they disappear again?”

After looking at the same scenery nearly thirty times, even I missed a few things.

Whenever that happened, I justified it to myself by saying that this was no longer a matter of observational ability, but of physical and mental endurance.

Clack.

We put the postcard in and kept walking.

But we couldn’t escape.

Fifty became sixty-two.

Sixty-two became seventy-seven.

Seventy-seven became ninety-eight.

It was almost astonishing that so many anomalies could exist in such a small park.

All the trash fish turned the same color.

The pond water, transformed into a highly acidic liquid, splashed over us.

One of the trees in the forest walked out and attacked us.

A hanging vine suddenly wrapped around a neck and pulled.

The machines in the exercise area shattered into pieces, and their fragments shot toward us.

The minor injuries also continued to accumulate.

Myeong Haebin’s forearm ended up covered in a dark bruise.

Vine marks remained around Park Hyeonho’s neck.

My uniform melted and was left in tatters.

Fluid began oozing from the rash that had appeared on Myeong Haebin’s ankle.

Park Hyeonho cut the palm of his hand.

My left knee ended up wrecked.

Park Hyeonho stopped asking how much farther we had to go.

He probably knew too.

There was no point in asking.

At some point, I stopped counting how many laps we had completed.

The cushioning in the insoles of my battered sneakers had completely collapsed long ago, and the pond water and mud that had seeped into my shoes rubbed against my blisters, causing excruciating pain.

And so we reached anomaly number one hundred.

[Inverted East Gate of Chodam Park]

It was damn hard to find even a shred of hope.

“Let’s rest for a while.”

“I can still keep going a little longer……!”

“We’re really going to rest. Let’s take turns keeping watch.”

Continuing like this was too much.

I could feel that both our bodies and minds had been worn down to their limits, and that we were only continuing to move by forcing ourselves.

We had to rest, even if we had to force ourselves to do that too.

“How are we doing on food?”

“We drank all the drinks, there are a few candies left, and this is the last bread. Though there’s only half left.”

“It’s better than nothing.”

Park Hyeonho, who had ended up becoming the one in charge of our supplies, took the last cream-filled bread out of the bag.

We split that half once more and divided roughly equal pieces among the three of us.

No matter how much I chewed the bread until it practically became a paste, I couldn’t taste anything.

I only hoped it would at least help fill my stomach a little.

“Let’s decide the order of the watch shifts.”

“I don’t care which shift I take! What about you, Hyeonho?”

Park Hyeonho seemed to think about it for a moment as he scratched at the ground with the tips of his dirty fingers.

“I’ll take the second shift.”

“That’ll be the most exhausting one. You know that, right?”

“Y-Yes, I know! It’s just that you two have been walking for much longer than I have. That’s why.”

Just look at how much our Park Hyeonho had changed.

Where had that guy who distrusted me and treated me like a lunatic gone? Though, of course, after an endless march through a hellish place like this, even camaraderie that hadn’t existed before could develop.

“Then I’ll take the first shift. Boss, you get some good sleep first!”

“And how are we going to measure the time……?”

“Let’s take two-hour shifts.”

“……I don’t want to stay here any longer than necessary. Wake me up in two hours.”

In this place, where time seemed to have stopped with the moon fixed in the sky, it was impossible to know what time it was.

However, the basic functions of our phones still worked. Not the clock, which remained fixed at 19:00, but things like the timer.

“Haebin, you still have enough battery, right? Use the timer.”

“Of course. Go to sleep already, go to sleep.”

Although we were in the middle of damp fog, without a blanket or anything that could even protect me from the moisture of the ground, the moment I rested my head against the earth, sleep descended upon me.

Actually, saying that I fell asleep wouldn’t be entirely accurate.

It was more like losing consciousness.

Darkness.

“…….”

Rustle, rustle.

It felt as though I had barely closed my eyes for an instant when that sound reached my ears, which remained alert.

My eyes snapped open.

When I hurriedly sat up, Park Hyeonho, who was crouching there doing nothing, looked at me in surprise.

“W-What’s wrong? It’s not time yet…….”

“Didn’t you hear something just now?”

“Absolutely nothing.”

I touched the phone screen beside Park Hyeonho’s feet to turn it on.

[Timer]

0:08:13

There were a little over eight minutes left until the shift change.

I had woken up almost ten minutes early.

Perhaps because I had woken up in the middle of such a brief sleep, exhaustion weighed painfully on my shoulders.

‘If I go back to sleep now, I’ll probably end up even more tired.’

I could start my shift a little early.

“Hyeonho, you can go to sleep now. I’ll take care of the rest.”

“Uh, um, hey…….”

Park Hyeonho, who had been about to lie down with obvious relief, called out to me quietly.

“Aren’t you hungry?”

“Why ask something you already know the answer to?”

Park Hyeonho’s shoulders visibly flinched.

“What a temper…….”

It’s your fault for asking a hungry, thirsty, exhausted person if he’s hungry.

Park Hyeonho rubbed the back of his neck and, after thinking for quite a while, finally opened his mouth.

“When we get out, I’ll treat you to a meal.”

“There’s no need.”

“I own a meat restaurant in the next neighborhood over. After going through all this hell together, we can already consider it some kind of fateful encounter. I can at least do that much.”

“…….”

“W-Why are you looking at me like that?”

“You’ll wake the girl. Shh.”

Since I merely stared at him in silence, Park Hyeonho nearly raised his voice.

He clamped his mouth shut, and his dark eyes shifted nervously.

“If you don’t want to, forget it……”

“I’ll go. I was just surprised.”

“It’s just that, if you hadn’t been here, I would’ve…….”

He was talking about Woo Minhyeong.

Perhaps regretting bringing up a memory he had tried to push out of his mind, Park Hyeonho’s face twisted uncomfortably.

“Earlier, I asked whether you saw an environmental campaign when you entered the park.”

“Yes. Why are you suddenly asking about that?”

“You answered that ‘nothing happened.’ I want to know exactly what happened.”

Park Hyeonho didn’t seem particularly eager to talk about it, but he answered anyway.

“It was just a person who was a little…… strange. Out of nowhere, they started asking whether we were trash, and then they asked us a question…….”

“And?”

“It was about a bag of potato chips. I said it should be thrown away with the plastics, but they told me I was wrong.”

Of course.

Potato chip bags had to be cleaned before being disposed of with plastics, or otherwise thrown away with general waste.

“Didn’t they ask you to participate in another campaign?”

“Yes. They told us to pick up trash. But that person gave me a bad feeling, so we refused. That’s why I said nothing happened.”

“Then you didn’t receive the wristbands either.”

“No. Did I do something…… wrong?”

Bzzz.

The phone vibrated and the screen flashed as the timer reached zero.

“Time’s up. Go to sleep. You must be tired.”

“I didn’t do anything wrong, did I?”

“At this point, knowing wouldn’t help anymore. Too much time has passed since then.”

Park Hyeonho asked me again, but eventually seemed to give up. He settled down on the ground and curled up.

I set a two-hour timer on my phone, and when I looked at him again, his shoulders were already rising and falling regularly.

He had fallen asleep.

Rustle.

This time, I heard it clearly.

An anomaly?

Or a creature like that duck?

I raised my head while reaching out a hand, ready to wake the other two at any moment.

Amid the bushes where my gaze had stopped, a white figure set something down on the ground and quickly disappeared, staggering away.

‘What was that? It didn’t even attack us.’

I looked at the two sleeping people and then headed toward the place where I had sensed that presence, making sure not to make any noise as I walked.

There was a bag about the length of a forearm lying there, making me doubt my own eyes.

[Classic Puffed Rice Cakes]

They were those crunchy cakes made by compressing grains of rice and popping them under high pressure until they formed flat discs.

It was one of the products I had seen in the store.

Since they didn’t seem very popular, they had been on the lowest shelf……

‘Why are they here?’

I looked around for the white shadow that had disappeared, but no matter how much I searched, I couldn’t find it.

Just in case, I opened the bag and took one out.

Crunch.

The light, crispy rice cake broke when I bit into it and stuck to my tongue.

I didn’t feel any strange pain, unpleasant sensation, or out-of-place taste.

It was a completely normal puffed rice cake.

How strange.

‘In this place, we couldn’t consume the food we brought in from outside, nor the things we stole from the store.’

Who the hell had that been?

How had they managed to buy something from a store that was already closed?

Why exactly one bag of these rice cakes?

And why had they left it in front of us?

Nothing but questions.

But there shouldn’t be anyone in this horror story besides us.

I would have to consider it an anomaly.

‘A friendly anomaly…….’

We had never encountered anything like that.

The sound of the bag might have been bothersome, but Myeong Haebin and Park Hyeonho must have been completely exhausted, because they remained deeply asleep, oblivious to everything.

“Haah.”

I sat down with my back against one of the bench legs.

There was only silence.

We had already lost the opportunity to escape through the normal route.

It was only a guess, but the normal escape route was probably related to the environmental protection campaign.

If, when we first entered the park, we had used the bags handed out at the booth to collect all the trash around the pond, perhaps the West Gate would have appeared with almost disappointing ease.

That was probably why the creature had offered the same thing to Park Hyeonho and Woo Minhyeong when they entered in the middle of the loop.

Of course, both they and we had ignored that offer.

Even so, it seemed there was still some way to escape.

‘The store owner said, “Throw the trash into the perfect pond.”’

Would anything change if we threw even more trash into a pond that was already excessively polluted?

I turned on the phone, where the timer was still running.

[Achievements]

! Get rid of the two civilians. (Not achieved)

Reward: New function update

Amid the silent fog, only the app’s screen cast a cold light over my eyes.

‘I don’t know what this new function will be, but I’m sure it’ll be useful.’

Both the digestive function enhancement and the tool enhancement had been useful to me.

Maybe abandoning Park Hyeonho would make it easier to clear this horror story.

“But after telling him I’d go eat at his restaurant, abandoning him here would be a real asshole move…….”

Without realizing it, I vigorously scratched my mud-covered hair.

‘A way out…… A way out…….’

I kept turning it over in my mind again and again until, almost without realizing it, the two hours passed and the timer announced its end.

“Time’s up. Get up.”

“Uuuh…… already? I feel like I just fell asleep.”

“Doesn’t even feel like I slept. Yaaawn……”

The two of them, consumed by exhaustion, seemed to wake up completely the moment I showed them the huge plastic bag.

“Huh?! W-What the hell is that……? Where did it come from?!”

“Uah! Can we eat it?”

“Somehow. An anomaly brought it.”

“An anomaly?!”

Even as she said that, Myeong Haebin had already bitten into one of the rice cakes.

“It’s true! Uah, we really can eat it!”

Park Hyeonho glanced sideways at Myeong Haebin and quickly took one out as well.

“Eat in moderation…… No, forget it. Eat.”

The two of them, covered in mud, leaves, and sweat, looked so pitiful as they nibbled on those rice cakes that I couldn’t bring myself to stop them.

I probably didn’t look much better.

Yes.

If only to lift our sunken morale a little, we at least needed to fill our stomachs.

“I really was starving to death. What did you say these things are called?”

“It says right here. Wait, you’ve never eaten puffed rice before?”

“No! Well, these things happen.”

The effect those simple puffed rice cakes, which we normally wouldn’t even have looked at twice, had on our morale was surprisingly good.

Of course, reporting that anomaly in the ‘Citizen Suggestion Box’ seemed like the most logical decision.

……Until we got an unexpected result.

[Notice]

The number of complaints regarding issues that have not been clearly verified is increasing.

To ensure the proper operation of the park, please refrain from submitting unnecessary complaints.

※ This notice is intended to prevent accidents.

—Chodam Park—

My head was a mess.

‘So those rice cakes weren’t the result of an anomaly in the park?’

“It was an anomaly! It definitely was!”

“Was it simply an act of goodwill? But there shouldn’t be anyone here. And if it wasn’t a person……”

What the hell had it been?

No, if it wanted to help us, it could at least have told us that it wasn’t an anomaly itself.

I was starting to get irritated with it.

“Uh, you two…… I think you should see this too.”

The water-level gauge had finally reached the very end.

[Current Status of Our Pond]

[Dry]…[Insufficient]…[Average]…[High]…[Abundant]…[Perfect]

The pond had reached the ‘Perfect’ state.