newbobooks Chapter 233 You Have Your Own 144-Hour Visa - S01E07
Chapter 233 You Have Your Own 144-Hour Visa - S01E07
Long story.
Although you agreed to participate in Shirley's plan to go to heaven, you actually know that you have no chance of going to heaven.
...Or rather, from the moment you tore your own soul apart, you knew that the version of yourself now stuck in hell could never go to heaven.
To put it even more bluntly, your purpose in going to heaven is not to cleanse your soul and become a good person, but to figure out whether you can get rid of the chains of hell that will indiscriminately strike you with deadly lightning if you go to heaven.
...However, although your ultimate goal is different from that of most people who go to heaven, you are still trying your best to do good deeds.
Similarly, you are not doing good for heaven.
You control your behavior to avoid betraying your conscience; at the same time, you can also achieve multiple goals by completing the tasks that Shirley assigns you every month.
However, to be honest, given your personality, you should want to kill every sinner you see in hell.
The reason you don't take the initiative is entirely because most of these bastards in hell are Shirley's subjects, so you usually choose to tolerate them. After all, as the head chef of the inn, you have to give your boss, Shirley, face.
Moreover, you are inherently auspicious and have a special identity. Even though you are being corrupted by hell, every move you make is a precise and eradicative strike against the souls and lives that have fallen into hell... Therefore, you are actually restraining yourself from making moves most of the time.
How can I control myself?
Besides preparing breakfast, lunch, and dinner for everyone every day, you actually spend most of your time opening portals to the human world and practicing swordsmanship on the snowy mountains of your hometown.
—This is really not in line with the Western way of entertaining oneself in hell.
And yes, you can actually go back to your homeland... but in a less honorable way.
You can stay in your homeland for five hours at a time, with a cooldown period of twelve hours or more. If you stay longer than the five-hour limit, you will be automatically pulled back to hell by those chains.
But the last time you saw this kind of forced deportation was with foreigners on 144-hour visas.
...And the thing that makes you feel extremely down is that within this time frame, the closer you are to your family, the more your time will decrease drastically.
...Or rather, when you are actually just a step away from your family, your time will be precisely used up.
You know your family is just a wall away, but that wall blocks out their faces and voices.
You've tried countless times, using countless methods, with a sense of unwillingness to give up.
This includes, but is not limited to, exploiting loopholes through writing letters (including emails) or making phone calls, but in reality, the consequences of doing so... will only lead to a more cruel and cold ending each time.
Because all your paths are blocked, an invisible voice will always tell you, when you've almost given up: "As long as you can go back to your hometown, that will be enough."
Ironically, you have a five-hour time limit in your hometown. When the time is up, the chains of your homeland and hell will pull in simultaneously, one banishing you and the other dragging you back.
...But you don't have this concern at all in Western countries.
And having absolutely no worries means that you can stay in any place other than your hometown for as long as you want.
As a resident of your homeland, you are a stranger to your hometown after your death; but you feel at home in every place except your hometown.
...This extremely malicious targeting is so ironic it's nauseating.
As a dragon sealed in a completely unrelated hellish land, you sometimes feel like you're the biggest joke of the century.
After experiencing all this frustration, you realize that your mindset isn't as good as everyone else seems; in addition, the divine nature you've been given isn't a good core, and everything you've encountered has left you feeling mentally and physically exhausted...
As you said, you are by no means a good person, and your temper is extremely eccentric.
By a twist of fate, your divinity took on a strange shape during its development, sometimes compassionate and gentle, sometimes cruel and tyrannical, unpredictable and prone to reversals.
Fortunately, protecting the weak seems to have become your nature, which makes you at least on the surface a decent person, rather than an uncontrollable, cold-blooded monster...
But because you have a bad temper and are an unlucky person, you will not trust any sinners or demons most of the time when you are in hell.
Rather than always spouting lies, they are accustomed to putting a price tag on even more vicious things; even deception is built on illegality, and unless absolutely necessary, you will never have any unnecessary contact with any demons outside the inn.
...Unfortunately, there are always exceptions.
And Alastor's appearance is the most troublesome of all your plans.
As we all know, from a power perspective, when all living beings in the world are stripped of their skin, they are essentially the same to you.
This means that, for most souls that still have a human-like appearance, you don't really care what they look like.
So, when you actually meet the Radio Demon, the real reason you're willing to look him in the eye is because of his gentlemanly manners, a rarity even in hell...
Yes, most "creatures" in hell clearly prefer to start with flirtatious advances or use foul language rather than have normal conversations with you.
Because they've gone to hell, the souls here don't behave very "normally," and very few can be spoken to.
Aside from the more basic hobbies of bloodshed and killing, which are practically like "growing flowers" in Hell, Alastor is unlike most souls in Hell that you wouldn't even want to glance at.
...So you guess you actually liked him quite a bit, in a friendly sense.
In that cold, flesh-and-blood forest, when you're exhausted from protecting your fledglings whose wings haven't fully grown, having some jerk who can chat with you like a human, providing a safe haven for your soul... that feeling isn't so bad.
Although Alastor is mostly a "jerk" in the present tense, you can't deny that you feel good when you're with him watching movies, discussing restaurant cards, and chatting.
There is no doubt that Alastor is a smart man.
Aside from his secretive nature, self-centeredness, and wickedness, his intellect far surpasses his current strength.
Because he is intelligent and very useful to you, you risked being betrayed by him to keep him in the inn; otherwise, you would have cut him into three pieces and thrown him out long ago.
But when you're with Alastor, who clearly has considerable ambition, you can't help but sometimes wonder what kind of mess he'd make of this hell if he had the same intelligence and strength as you.
It's a truly disgusting and repulsive speculation.
Because you always feel a chill down your spine and find it hard to judge his perverse behavior.
Even so, for some reason, you and Alastor always have a lot of interactions throughout the inn; this interaction with an unstable entity makes you feel melancholy and depressed from the bottom of your heart, but you can't think of any way to completely avoid communicating with Alastor... You can't even find a substitute for him.
Because the things you two dislike and like in hell overlap significantly, but your values also diverge drastically; therefore, even though you are both scheming against each other, in the end you are still often "forced" to stay together.
...This is something you never expected.
Although you've lived with the demons at the inn for a long time, Shirley will spend more time with her lover Vicky, while Angel is heavily exploited by her boss.
Although you have your own things to do most of the time, you won't chat much with the demons in the inn about things you like before Alastor enters the inn.
The sheer breadth of your favorite movie genres and interests was enough to deter the three demons staying at the inn at the time... not to mention their opinions on your food and beverage card.
...The truth is revealed in the small things.
You are good friends, even family, with the demons in the inn, and Shirley is your savior; but it is also true that you can't have deep conversations with them about the things you like.