Chapter 69
“This isn’t going to be a trivial story.”
Juhyeok was about to take off his clothes and show the tattoo right away, but he glanced at the butler standing nearby.
“I’d prefer fewer ears listening.”
“Raising my expectations won’t do you any good.”
“It’s because of a toy you made, so please bear with me.”
“…Hmm.”
After sinking into thought for a moment, he waved his hand as if telling them to follow.
“Shall we talk somewhere quiet? You keep an eye on the front gate.”
“Yes, sir.”
At the order, the butler immediately left.
Garristo didn’t even spare him a glance as he headed underground, and Juhyeok followed behind.
“I’ve made so many things that I can’t even guess what it might be.”
A wide, circular staircase stretched downward.
There were no safety rails along the sides; one wrong step and you’d plunge straight down—a dangerously precarious place.
As Garristo descended step by step, he voiced his curiosity.
“Judging by your mana capacity, you didn’t make a contract with Mephisto… so I’m really curious how you managed to fight my butler on equal footing.”
“…”
“Did you burn your lifespan or something? I haven’t leaked that anywhere yet.”
Garristo mentally sifted through the inventions he had created one by one.
Even so, nothing definitive seemed to come to mind, and he continued muttering to himself.
“You’ll find out once we get there.”
Saying that, he stopped at the iron door at the bottom of the stairs they’d descended together.
It was a massive door—so large it was hard to imagine a small child like Garristo opening it—but the moment he stood before it, the door recognized its master and opened automatically.
“This is the first time a human’s come in here with their sanity intact—no, wait. Anyone who comes here in the first place isn’t normal to begin with.”
As Juhyeok entered the laboratory with him, the iron door closed automatically behind them.
The interior wasn’t all that complicated.
It looked like a school science lab, only with a slightly more medieval aesthetic.
Aside from the modified demons lying around here and there and strange devices of unknown purpose, it wasn’t all that different.
“Now then, we’re here. Go on—tell me.”
Garristo turned around and approached Juhyeok.
He looked up at him closely, his face brimming with curiosity, and Juhyeok stepped back and immediately took off his shirt.
“….”
One might have expected surprise at such a sudden display, but Garristo merely watched with an emotionless expression.
Juhyeok revealed the artifact sigil on his body—something he had never shown anyone before.
“Do you see it?”
“…I see it very clearly. Quite a rigorously trained body, too.”
“Not that.”
At the completely off-target comment, Juhyeok thrust forward his left arm.
Pointing at it with his other hand, he repeated himself.
“The sigil. Right here.”
“Yes, the sigil… does it have some special meaning?”
“…”
He’d thought that once Garristo saw it, he’d immediately grasp what the problem was.
But Garristo only looked at it with a puzzled expression, as if he had no idea.
“It’s a mark created because of an artifact you made.”
“Because of an artifact I made?”
“Yes.”
He truly seemed clueless.
Juhyeok then spoke a name he had never told anyone else.
“The Room of Training. It’s an artifact you made.”
At first, he hadn’t been certain.
Maybe Garristo had made it, maybe not—but at the very least, there was a chance he could remove the artifact from his body.
But the demon he’d met inside the artifact.
And Garristo, whom he had seen within that demon’s memories.
There was no doubt anymore. This was an artifact Garristo had made, which was why Juhyeok could speak its name without hesitation.
“The Room of Training…?”
A question mark appeared plainly on Garristo’s face.
Then, after a brief pause, he burst out laughing.
“Haha… puhahaha! That’s an interesting thing to say.”
How long did he laugh to himself?
Clutching his stomach, he laughed endlessly before wiping tears from the corners of his eyes and finally replying.
“Yes, the Room of Training is certainly one of the artifacts I created.”
He acknowledged it.
That the Room of Training was an artifact Garristo had made.
But Juhyeok couldn’t understand why he was laughing so hard.
Still smiling broadly, Garristo asked,
“You’re not about to claim that you went into that room and came back out, are you?”
“…I really did.”
“That’s a hilarious joke.”
He took a drink from a container of some unknown liquid beside him and continued.
“No matter how you learned about the Room of Training, it’s an artifact that neither humans nor demons can escape from.”
It wasn’t a matter of looking down on humans.
It simply meant that no thinking being could endure it.
“Once you enter, you fight endlessly until you lose your mind. In the end, you can’t withstand the mental damage, and the artifact itself breaks.”
Even artifacts that block damage can’t heal mental damage.
If they could, it would truly be the ultimate training artifact—but implementing that was still impossible.
“In the end, whoever enters gets trapped in the subspace created by the Room of Training and lives on as a madman.”
Once the artifact is destroyed, the exit disappears as well.
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say you become a drifter lost in zero gravity.
“You escaped a place that horrifying? Ridiculous.”
“…”
Juhyeok only blinked silently, staring straight at Garristo without saying a word.
“…Why are you staring at me like that?”
“I’m just thinking about how to explain it.”
The other man clearly had no intention of believing him.
As Juhyeok pondered how to prove that the Room of Training was engraved into him, he rubbed his left arm.
“Mana replenishment for operating and upgrading the Room of Training.”
“….”
“That’s a message you programmed, isn’t it?”
Garristo’s face went blank.
The moment Juhyeok recited the message word for word—the message now hovering before Garristo’s eyes—his expression changed completely.
Naturally so. That message only appears after clearing the artifact.
It was proof.
Proof that Juhyeok had cleared the Room of Training and returned.
“You… don’t tell me—”
“How many times do I have to say it for you to understand? I went in and came back out. Out of the artifact you made.”
“…Uh.”
Only now did belief seem to dawn on him as his mouth slowly fell open.
His pupils began to shake, and he grabbed Juhyeok’s shoulders with both hands.
“H-how? To get out of there, you’d have to defeat the dolls about a million times! And stay sane while doing it!”
“I beat them about a million times. And stayed sane.”
“That’s impossible… impossible…!”
Muttering to himself, Garristo kept touching the sigil engraved on Juhyeok’s left arm.
He examined it closely like an archaeologist who had just discovered something monumental, and the mismatch between his childish appearance and that behavior made Juhyeok uneasy.
“I scribbled that thing without much thought back when I didn’t know better and sold it off cheap—never imagined someone would actually clear it and come out!”
“Okay, I get it, calm down.”
“R-right. I do need to calm down a bit.”
He was nowhere near calm.
Stepping back slightly from Juhyeok, he glanced at him cautiously and asked,
“Do you need something to drink, maybe?”
“…No thanks. That’s kind of scary.”
“What would I do to an honored guest!”
The dignified demeanor he’d had earlier was gone, replaced by the speech and behavior of an excited child who looked ready to start bouncing around.
Feeling a strange sense of dissonance, Juhyeok stayed still, and Garristo looked him up and down—at his still-bare torso—and asked,
“So what exactly did you come here to ask about the artifact? I think I’ll need to touch it a bit to answer properly.”
“….”
Should he just leave?
Entrusting himself to this guy felt terrifying—like he’d be dissected from the tips of his toes to the ends of his hair.
Juhyeok stared at him, momentarily at a loss for words in the face of such pure, sincere madness.
Noticing that look, Garristo seemed to realize something was off. He cleared his throat and took a step back.
“Was I getting ahead of myself? Right, don’t feel pressured. It’s just that I’ve never seen a human with such a… exper—experimental mindset before.”
“Didn’t you almost call me an experiment subject just now?”
“Of course not. I was simply happy to meet someone with the experimental spirit necessary to use the Room of Training.”
That was definitely not true.
He’d clearly been about to say “test subject” before quickly changing his words after reading the room.
‘Should I run?’
The more they talked, the more dangerous he seemed.
Juhyeok wanted nothing more than to escape immediately—but unfortunately, this was the man who had created the artifact.
“Butler!”
“Yes, sir.”
At the call, the man who had been nowhere in sight suddenly emerged, cutting through the air itself.
Had he been listening to everything they said?
As Juhyeok wondered that, Garristo pointed at him and asked,
“This fellow… what’s his name?”
“Jung Juhyeok.”
“Right. Treat Jung Juhyeok as an honored guest. He must have had a hard time coming all this way, so provide him with whatever he needs.”
His status shifted from intruder to honored guest.
It would’ve been natural to feel something was off, but the butler accepted Garristo’s order without the slightest hesitation.
“Yes, sir.”
“No, wait a second.”
Something about this conversation was going in a strange direction.
Juhyeok stepped in and stopped them.
“I’m just here to finish what I need to do and leave. I’m not interested in anything else.”
“And what is it you need to do?”
“Remove the artifact from my body.”
“What?”
Garristo looked genuinely shocked.
Then, as if he’d just realized something, he softened his expression and spoke as though soothing a child.
“Ah, right. I understand wanting to remove it. After a place like that, it makes sense not to want to go back in.”
“No, that’s not the issue.”
If he could keep using the Room of Training, he’d actually welcome it.
The problem lay elsewhere.
“An artifact embedded in a human body—there’s no telling when it might explode.”
An artifact that could detonate at any time.
It had shown stable behavior for nearly a year now, despite being lodged in a human body—but there was no guarantee about the future.
“Yet your current mana state is extremely stable…”
Garristo murmured, apparently recognizing that fact as well.
“Anyway, why don’t we think this through more calmly over a meal?”
“There’s something else, too.”
“What now?”
Removing the artifact from his body was one thing.
But there was another task he still had to accomplish.
“I promised to help the demon you trapped inside the artifact escape.”
A demon Garristo himself had sealed within the artifact.
Juhyeok had promised to rescue that demon, and because of that, a mana stone now sat inside his body like a ticking time bomb.
If he failed to fulfill the condition of helping with all his might, it would detonate—so he had to get that demon out through Garristo, no matter what.
But then—
“…”
Garristo’s expression turned strange.
The same expression he’d had when Juhyeok first showed him the artifact sigil.
With genuine, unfiltered curiosity on his face, he replied,
“I’ve never once used that artifact myself.”
