Transmigrated as the Side Top used as an Emotional Trash Can

“I want to rest. Are you going to eat me?”

“What the…. Then rest.”

Thump.

I heard someone sit down behind me. Was that another sound the Jangsanbeom had made? I could even feel the breeze shifting, but the sound was far too light for something as large as the Jangsanbeom sitting down.

“It’s cold.”

My body began trembling as the temperature dropped.

I curled up and buried my face between my knees. I imagined nothing but a blank white sheet and prayed for morning to come safely. I probably shouldn’t fall asleep with something beside me when I didn’t even know what it was. But I was so tired that if I let my attention slip for even a second, I felt like I would lose consciousness….

“This is yours, right?”

Something was draped over my shoulders.

I felt around with my hands and realized it was my padded jacket.

“How did you…?”

When I asked in surprise, an irritated answer came from beside me.

“When I dropped in here, it was lying on the ground.”

“You picked it up and carried it around?”

“I picked it up, and then you showed up in front of me.”

Was Kim Jihwan’s strangely quick composure right now the result of some kind of protagonist correction, like during the ‘death game’ and the ‘creepypasta’?

“Ha, no service…. Fucking hell.”

I could even hear him using his phone. There was even light from it, flickering and flashing across me. It felt far too realistic for the Jangsanbeom.

“Jihwan-ah, is it really you?”

“If you’re gonna talk nonsense, go the fuck to sleep.”

I lowered my guard a little and tried talking to him. No way, I thought I had escaped properly onto the Han River bridge, but had the system pulled Kim Jihwan and Cha Gwonhyeok in with me as another one of its tricks?

“You know, there’s a monster called the Jangsanbeom wandering around here. Do you know about it?”

“Yeah, someone wandering around here warned me about it. Dunno if it’s true, though.”

“There are other people here?”

“Yeah. I met an ahjumma.”

An ahjumma? So other people besides me really had been dragged into this place?

I couldn’t tell through conversation anymore. Was I too exhausted to judge properly, or was this really Kim Jihwan? Was the information I was hearing true, or was it false?

“Where did that ahjumma go?”

I moved toward the bicycle I had parked on my knees. Then I stood up and looked behind me through the side mirror.

“Dunno, she kept running around saying she didn’t want to die.”

Inside the side mirror, Kim Jihwan was staring at his phone with a sulky expression.

“Oh, you really are…!”

You have died.

Would you like to restart?

Yes / No

It was the Jangsanbeom.

Everything had been an illusion.

When I turned my head, I made eye contact with the red-eyed beast and died. When I looked toward where I thought the light had been shining from, there was nothing but darkness. When I checked the side mirror again, it was filled with nothing but the Jangsanbeom.

“…It can use illusions?”

I had really believed it this time, so the shock was greater. A lie this elaborate. It was becoming more and more meticulous as time passed. I needed to get out of this forest quickly.

“If it can use illusions, why didn’t it do that from the start?”

And with a body that huge and claws that threatening, why go through the trouble of using auditory and visual hallucinations?

I observed the Jangsanbeom, which had stopped and was watching my corpse.

“Is it huge but not very strong?”

Like the saying that a barking dog doesn’t bite, if it was all noise and actually weak, that would make sense.

“If it could use illusions, it could’ve made a person appear and confused me with ventriloquism.”

The fact that it hadn’t done that earlier meant it couldn’t. Maybe its limit was making lights flicker and manipulating reflections in mirrors.

“If I want to learn more, I’ll have to test it myself.”

Yes

Following the stream led to the waterfall, so pass. Wandering around aimlessly would only wear down my body, so pass.

Then what I needed to do while my body was still in decent condition was….

“Find the ahjumma from the conversation I had with Kim Jihwan earlier.”

Suddenly, my own voice echoed from behind me. Was it imitating me this time, instead of someone else?

I slowly reached a hand behind me. My fingers touched soft fur.

“Hello, Jangsanbeom.”

Even when I grabbed its fur and shook it, it didn’t attack me. It only kept repeating my voice.

“Do you eat people, or do you just kill them?”

“Do you eat peo….”

Without turning around, I grabbed its snout tightly. I couldn’t feel a pulse, but it was the jaw of a large mammal.

So it doesn’t attack me physically. Is it really weak?

“Urk…?”

Suddenly, nausea surged up. I let go and dropped to the ground, vomiting up everything inside me. The fruit juice I had drunk at the café before coming to this forest came up sour.

“Urk, blegh, ugh….”

I helplessly retched and emptied my stomach. My head spun, and my vision scattered dizzyingly. It felt like I was looking at the world through a kaleidoscope. Light scattered everywhere, and it felt like all five of my senses were malfunctioning.

“Bleegh….”

Splatter, splatter.

I saw writhing insects among the vomit pouring out of me. I had never swallowed any bugs, so was this another hallucination? I don’t know. I’m too dizzy. I feel like I’m going to vomit up my intestines too. The bugs are disgusting. Bugs. So many bugs. Too many bugs. Thousands of bugs. Bugs. Bugs. Bugs. Bugs. Bugs. Bugs. Bugs. Bugs. Bugs. Bugs. Bugs. Ahh, there are too many bugs….

“Student, no! You need to wash yourself quickly…!”

You have died.

Would you like to restart?

Yes / No

I died with someone’s shout as the last thing I heard. It sounded like a warning telling me to wash my body.

“Why? Does washing cure it?”

I looked down at my body. The fingertips of the hand that had touched the Jangsanbeom had turned purple. They looked as though blood circulation had been cut off and the tissue was about to become necrotic.

“I didn’t… actually throw up any bugs….”

Still, I really had vomited clear stomach fluid, because the grass around me and the area around my mouth were wet. I hadn’t died in a particularly pleasant state this time, so I didn’t want to keep looking at myself.

“I should avoid touching it…. But who was talking to me?”

I looked around for the person who had warned me. The voice had sounded quite close, so they should have been nearby, but no matter how much I searched, I couldn’t find its owner.

After spending some time looking for them, I decided it would be more useful to start the next turn and gather information rather than waste more time searching.

“Still, I learned that I should run instead of confronting the Jangsanbeom. And that if I touch it, I need to wash myself.”

Yes

This time, I tied my padded jacket around my waist, got on the bicycle, and headed toward the area below the waterfall.

I needed to see whether I could wash off the effects after touching the Jangsanbeom, and what would be waiting downstream past the waterfall.