Dad's Coal Pit Hid a Dungeon, Now Guilds Pay Me to Enter novel · Chapter 25 of 32

Chapter 25: Open Lamp

At nine on Sunday morning the old pit cage came up the shaft for the first time in thirty-five years.

The old men on the gravel took off their caps.

It was not Seok-hyun's cage.

His was the steel box with a chain gate that held six, and he had ridden it a hundred times since the ninth of November.

This one came up out of the headframe with a screech of chain and a smell of old grease.

It stood two decks high and as long as a bus, with a number painted on its side that every man in the yard could read.

PIT NINE. 40 MEN.

It stopped at the collar with its gates open and its floor level with the gravel, and nobody moved toward it.

[The Heart has made the cage longer. She asks that everyone come down.]

Seok-hyun had said the Door rule the night before, standing in the glass room with his hand over hers, and he had said it whole.

"None but the Gwon house, and the bearers of a tag from my hand, and on the twentieth of December the people of Taebaek who carry their own lamp, and none who carry a cap."

He had restated the Spawn as well, so that no crawler and no eel would rise at the two o'clock turn on this one day.

His mother had listened with her eyes shut, and when he finished she had said, "Let them come. I want to hear them."

She had slept since eleven the night before, because the Pit was at rest, and the Ledger said she would wake at the turn.

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