Ch.93093 – Food Chain

# 093 – Food Chain

I arrived back at the tomb where the queen was buried. It was an eerie place.

Not a single person was around. The only sign of life was a few people wandering near the management office in the distance.

“Hey, are you sure this is okay?” Jeongseok asked nervously as he looked around.

It was just yesterday that we were attacked by a Joseon ghost at this tomb.

The extreme fear and tension that had twisted our brains then was probably still weighing heavily on Jeongseok. The girls seemed equally tense.

Grip.

I could feel Yang Juhui’s hands tightening around her shovel. For reference, that shovel was brought from the lake house.

“Just try to come out. I’ll hit you with this.”

Yang Juhui seemed determined to swing that shovel at any ghost that appeared. Her expression was serious, and she looked quite tense.

“Dahui, I’m scared!”

Bong Jiyeon was trembling and hiding behind Yu Dahui. Despite her recent interest in superstitions and fortune-telling, Bong Jiyeon was still a scaredy-cat.

Isn’t she the most fearful among the girls?

Actually, that was normal. Yu Dahui and Yang Juhui were the abnormal ones for being so fearless.

“Girls, let’s do the crane dance.”

Teacher Hong Miri clapped her hands to get everyone’s attention.

There was a condition that unmarried women needed to perform the crane dance to summon the queen ghost who owned this tomb.

Yu Dahui started flapping her arms like wings, imitating a crane with bouncy movements.

She danced under the blazing sun.

While everyone was watching this scene with serious yet fearful eyes, I manipulated my status window. I spent 100 points to dispatch the mercenary “Speak of the Devil” to deal with the ghost.

This ghost was a feng shui ghost that appeared because we had been talking about ghosts at the tomb earlier. True to its name, it followed the rule that talking about ghosts makes them appear.

If we talked about dinosaur ghosts, dinosaur ghosts would appear.

I chanted dinosaur names into the air like a magic spell.

“Tyrannosaurus! T-Rex!”

Tyrannosaurus had long been the king of dinosaurs.

A Joseon queen who died from drinking poison was no match for such a being.

Humans have only been ruling the Earth for about 200,000 years at most.

In contrast, dinosaurs reigned over this planet for nearly 200 million years.

Looking at the long history, dinosaurs, not humans, were the true rulers of Earth.

Despite this, wouldn’t dinosaurs feel resentful watching humans strut around calling themselves the lords of creation?

Dinosaurs were the true overlords of the world.

Kings. What creature deserved the name Rex more than dinosaurs?

Compared to dinosaurs, human kings were nothing but monkeys draped in crude fabric.

“Come out, dinosaur! Dinosaur!”

While Yu Dahui and Bong Jiyeon were bouncing around doing the crane dance, I made my fingers into a trident or fork shape and stomped the ground with two dinosaur-like legs.

I was doing a dinosaur dance.

“Jeongseok! You do it too! You need to summon the Tyrannosaurus with sincerity, like you’re performing ancestral rites!”

Why do Koreans perform ancestral rites during holidays?

It’s to feed their ancestral ghosts peeled pears or dried persimmons.

Similarly, if we performed rites for dinosaurs, dinosaur ghosts would surely come to eat. I sincerely performed rites for the dinosaurs, and Jeongseok followed my lead, imitating a T-Rex.

“Kuaooo.”

“Kaooo.”

“Seriously, what are we doing? Is this really going to work?”

Teacher Hong Miri burst out laughing like this was hilarious.

She seemed skeptical about this method, probably because she hadn’t seen the ghosts I’d defeated using dinosaur ghosts before. I got angry.

“Teacher! Can’t you see we’re seriously performing a ritual here?”

Who laughs during a ritual?

If we bring bad luck and the Tyranno-ghost doesn’t appear, we’re all doomed.

To make up for the mood that Teacher Hong Miri had ruined, I shouted with even more passion.

“King of dinosaurs! Tyrannosaurus!”

Rumble-

At that moment, a sound like thunder striking from a clear sky was heard.

The ground seemed to shake.

Is the dinosaur coming!

That’s what I thought, but when I turned my head, I saw a woman dancing on top of the tomb, looking at me.

The tomb ghost had appeared first!

Her eyes were bloodshot, bright red with burst blood vessels, and she was crying tears of blood from her paper-white face.

Her face was so terrifying that I felt like I couldn’t breathe.

“Tyranno! Tyranno!”

I called for the Tyrannosaurus with even more passion.

But either my ritual wasn’t working well or my sincerity wasn’t enough to summon the dinosaur ghost, because there was no sign of any dinosaur appearing.

Bong Jiyeon screamed.

“Kyaak! It’s too loud! Be quiet! It’s too loud!”

What was so loud?

Soon Yu Dahui also covered her ears and crouched down.

“Someone’s whispering in my ear! They’re talking too fast for me to understand!”

Yang Juhui and Teacher Hong Miri were also covering their ears.

It seemed like there was some noise that only women could hear, driving them crazy, while Jeongseok and I couldn’t hear anything. Was this some kind of female-specific empathic ability exploding?

“Tyranno! Please come out! Aaaak!”

The situation was desperate in many ways.

Jeongseok urgently said:

“Hey! Yeongwon! Let’s give up on the Tyranno! Let’s try something else!”

“What else? Allosaurus? Giganotosaurus? Or Spino? Actually, I was thinking about switching to Spinosaurus! T-Rex babies are cowards!”

“No! Not dinosaurs! Do you know what women fear and hate the most?”

What is it?

What women hate the most?

Snakes? Spiders? No, I got it.

“Ugly men!”

“No! What women fear and hate the most is mothers-in-law! The only person Jang Huibin ever found difficult and feared in her life was her mother-in-law, Queen Myeongseong! Sukjong’s mother!”

Summon a mother-in-law ghost?

What a brilliant suggestion.

A daughter-in-law can never defeat a mother-in-law.

That was a tradition and culture that had continued throughout history, both in the East and West.

A perfect food chain.

It could even be considered a hierarchical relationship!

The reason we study history is to understand these traditions and defeat ghosts!

“Dinosaur! Mother-in-law! Anything! Just come out!”

I raised my hand in the air and shouted.

At that moment, a cold, fierce wind like winter blew from somewhere, and Bong Jiyeon stood up with foam in her mouth.

“You wench! How dare you cause such trouble and mischief! You wench! I’ll tear your legs apart and kill you! How dare you! You weeench!”

What on earth was happening?

I could barely stand against the fierce wind, but I could clearly see Bong Jiyeon charging at the ghost like a track athlete.

Bong Jiyeon grabbed the dancing ghost’s hair and shook it violently in all directions.

“You evil wench! You husband-eating wench! Die! Die! Die! Die! Bring back my son! My son! Bring back my son! My son that you killed!”

Wobble wobble-

The ghost whose hair was grabbed shook around like it was dancing for a few seconds.

Finally, text appeared before my eyes.

Ding-

“Congratulations! You have defeated ‘The Dancing Laughing Woman’!”

“Calculating rewards for 6 survivors.”

“You gain 600P.”

“Oh, damn!”

600 points gained in an instant!

All the stress melted away like a snowman in the summer heat, and I felt rewarded for our hard work!

# # #

“Ugh, I feel like throwing up. Uuugh.”

Bong Jiyeon kept retching.

She seemed to want to throw up even though she had already emptied her stomach.

Teacher Hong Miri, who was patting her back, said:

“A ghost possessed your body. It’s a common possession symptom.”

“Why did the ghost enter Bong Jiyeon specifically?”

Jeongseok asked.

He was curious about anything related to Bong Jiyeon.

Teacher Hong Miri looked around and quickly provided an answer.

“They say ghosts often appear to people with weak energy, right? Yang Juhui and Yu Dahui both have strong energy. So the ghost attached itself to Bong Jiyeon, who has the weakest energy.”

That seemed to be the case.

I had thought Bong Jiyeon was of no help to our party, but now it turned out she had the talent to receive ghosts into her body.

Anyway, although we took a detour from the plan of defeating the evil woman with a Tyranno ghost, we defeated a major ghost and earned 600 points as a reward.

Suddenly, I became curious.

“But the mother-in-law ghost said ‘bring back my son.’ Did Jang Huibin kill Sukjong?”

Jeongseok answered my question.

“No. It was actually the opposite. Jang Huibin was forced to drink poison by Sukjong and died.”

Then why did she say that?

Jeongseok soon provided an answer.

“The dancing ghost on Jang Huibin’s tomb is just believed to be Jang Huibin, but it might not have actually been the real Jang Huibin. It must have been some other evil woman from the Joseon era.”

I see.

That made sense when I thought about it.

Anyway, I successfully added the evil woman ghost to my mercenary corps.

Having such a powerful ghost made me feel quite impressive.

684P.

I had enough points to feel full without eating.

First, I decided to spend 100 points to remove Jeongseok’s quirk.

“How is it? Do you feel any different?”

Jeongseok, whose quirk had been removed, looked at his hands and arms.

He also placed his hand on his chest.

“I don’t feel any different.”

That’s how it seemed.

Anyway, we successfully defeated the evil woman ghost!

It was a joyful achievement to accomplish our goal through everyone’s efforts.

“Good job, everyone!”

I comforted Yang Juhui and Yu Dahui who were sprawled by the tomb.

Everyone looked disoriented and dazed like they were heavily drunk.

After staggering around for a while, Yang Juhui seemed to regain her senses and asked me:

“So now we won’t die on the second floor?”

Could we easily conquer the second floor of the Nightmare Corridor using the evil woman ghost?

This was something we’d have to try to know for sure.

While I was thinking about it, Teacher Hong Miri said:

“The ghosts that appear on the second floor… if what you say is true, Yeongwon, they won’t be easy opponents. You said a music teacher ghost appears? The one that ticks and sucks brains?”

“Yes. It claimed to be a teacher.”

Maybe the Yeongji High music teacher became a ghost for some reason.

Perhaps they committed suicide at school…

While I was thinking this, Teacher Hong Miri shook her head.

“I checked the teacher-only intranet, and none of the music teachers who worked at Yeongji High have passed away. They’re all still alive and well.”

“What? That can’t be.”

The Rhythm Ghost wasn’t a music teacher from Yeongji High?

Then who the hell was this Rhythm Ghost?

“…Then what could it possibly be?”