I Became the Simp Character I Roasted Online

Chapter 70: The Wrong Room

The figure fully turned around, and what Revan found staring back at him wasn’t the reanimated corpse.

It was an old man.

Alive, technically.

Swaying slightly in place, his head tilted at an angle that suggested his neck had given up on proper alignment a long time ago.

The lab coat hanging off his frame had lost any right to be called white a long time ago. His spine curved like a question mark, shoulders hunched so far forward it looked like his body had forgotten what standing straight felt like.

The man squinted at Revan through eyes that were simultaneously vacant and disturbingly sharp.

"Heuummm... the rotation already changed?" the old man rasped. "That was fast. Or did I lose track of time again?"

Without waiting for an answer, he scratched his jaw with dark-stained fingers and turned back toward his workstation.

’Huh? Rotation? What rotation?’

His brain, which had been running full combat protocol a second ago, slammed into a wall of confusion.

This man — whoever he was — had just watched someone crawl out of a maintenance shaft, land face-first next to a pile of corpses, scream loud enough to echo through the entire corridor, and his reaction was to ask about a shift change?.

’How long has this old man been down here?’

It took Revan three more seconds to connect the dots.

This man thought Revan was part of the staff rotation.

With no time to hesitate, He immediately played along.

His spine softened, his shoulders dropped to the exact angle of a man who was paid too little to care, and his voice came out flat and professionally disinterested.

"Apologies, sir. The schedule’s been a mess lately."

The old man grunted and turned back to his work.

Or rather — to the body lying on the iron bed frame.

Only now did Revan get a clear look at what the man had been hunched over when he arrived. A corpse. Not fresh, but not ancient either — the skin had gone waxy and grey.

The old man was prodding at the body’s exposed ribcage with a thin metal instrument, peering inside the cavity with one eye squeezed shut like a jeweler inspecting a gemstone.

"Seventy-three percent crystallization at the fourth hour mark," he muttered, tapping his instrument against bone. "No... wait. Was it seventy-three? Or seventy-one?"

He scratched the back of his head violently, leaving his thinning hair sticking up in three different directions.

"Heummm... seventy-one. No. Three. Seventy-three." He shook his head and leaned closer to the body. "But the lattice collapsed before the fifth. The binding agent can’t hold the frequency. It’s not the formula — the formula has always been perfect. Always. So why—"

He cut himself off mid-sentence, straightened up so fast his spine made a sound like cracking knuckles, and spun around. His eyes, which had been dull and unfocused a moment ago, were suddenly burning with a frantic energy that made Revan’s hand instinctively twitch toward the gauntlet trigger.

"The notes! The notes! Where — aha — where did I — yesterday I was — no, not yesterday. What day is it?" He looked at Revan accusingly, as if it were somehow Revan’s fault that he didn’t know the date. "When was the last rotation?"

Revan’s heart skipped a beat.

’How the hell should I know?!’

Revan cleared his throat, spitting out a random number before the old man could suspect anything.

"Three days ago, sir."

"Three days..." The old man’s face crumpled. "Then it wasn’t yesterday. It was... haah, does it matter? The documentation. I wrote it down. I always write it down. Where did I—"

Dropping to his knees, he started digging through the pile of corpses nearby.

Revan’s jaw went slack.

The old man’s bony hands disappeared into the mound of rotting flesh, shoving aside limbs and torsos with the casual familiarity.

Occasionally he pulled something out — a broken vial, a rusted clamp — examined it, frowned, and tossed it aside before digging deeper.

"I left it in here somewhere. I know I did. Between subject forty-seven and — ah, damn it, the fluids have gotten into everything again."

He yanked out a sheet of parchment that had been wedged between two decomposing bodies. The paper was slick with something yellowish and translucent.

The old man held it up to the flickering light, squinting at the smeared writing as if this were the most natural thing in the world.

’This man is completely insane,’ Revan thought.

’His wires are completely fried. I bet he doesn’t even know what color the sun is anymore.’

"Aha! Here." The old man smoothed the parchment on the iron bed frame, right next to the open ribcage, completely unbothered by the proximity. "Crystallization rates — no, that’s the old batch. Where’s the latest — ah. Sleep paralysis onset in subject fifty-two occurred at the eighteen-minute mark. Cardiac arrest at twenty-three. The binding failed because the resonance window was too—"

He cut himself off again and glared at Revan.

"Are you just going to stand there?"

"Ah — sorry, sir. I wasn’t sure what you needed."

"What I need," the old man spat, jabbing a stained finger at the mess around him, "is for the rotation staff to stop treating this sector like a waste pit. Look at this. LOOK. How am I supposed to maintain documentation standards when every batch of expired material gets dumped in my workspace without cataloguing?"

’Expired material?.’

Revan’s eyes moved to the pile of corpses.

’He’s calling them fucking expired material.’

"And the source quality — don’t even get me started." The old man was pacing now, waving the soaked parchment like a war banner. "Every shipment worse than the last. Grade C at best. The resonance patterns are degrading. You can’t build a cathedral from rotten wood, no matter how brilliant the architect!"

He grabbed a glass apparatus from the workstation and thrust it toward Revan. A droplet of dark red liquid crawled down the tube inside.

"See this? See this color? This should be vermillion. This is brown. BROWN! The curse concentration is barely above threshold. If the Steward sends me one more batch of diluted—"

He stopped himself, inhaled through his nose, and seemed to remember that he was talking to "staff" and not a colleague.

"The new supply from the western route," he said, forcing his voice into something resembling calm. "Has there been any update on the delivery schedule?"

Revan stared blankly, space-brained.

’I have no idea what the hell this old geezer is talking about. Western supply route? What the fuck is that?’

Every word this man spat out in his rambling was a piece of a puzzle that Revan couldn’t see the full picture of yet.

Realizing he had paused for a fraction too long, he quickly smooth-talked his way out.

"Haven’t received any updates on that yet, sir," Revan said, delivering a safe, generic answer to keep the act alive. "I’ll check with logistics."

"You do that." The old man turned back to the body on the bed frame, already muttering again. "And tell them — tell them if they let the cold storage fluctuate by another half degree, I will personally go up there and show them what happens when crystallization destabilizes at room temperature. They think they know what a containment breach looks like. They don’t. They don’t know anything."

’Come to think of it, looking at this old geezer reminds me of my mother.’ Revan scoffed internally.

Revan let out a silent, weary sigh.

’Hah, forget it. There’s no point in dealing with this lunatic.’

Revan glanced over his shoulder and spotted a heavy iron door at the far end of the room.

He turned back — and found the old man’s gaze already on the door.

He stared at it for exactly two seconds. Then his hands resumed their work as if those two seconds had never happened.

Revan stiffened.

’Did he just—’

But the old man was already muttering to himself again, hunched over the corpse, completely indifferent to Revan’s existence.

’...Okay then.’

Revan started walking toward the door, his steps slightly stiff and awkward.

He pushed it open and stepped through.

Before the door closed behind him, one last detail caught his eye.

On the workstation, half-buried under stacks of yellowed notes, lay a photograph. Small, faded, and with edges curled from age. It showed a girl — no older than seven — smiling brightly at whoever held the camera.

’I hope she’s doing better than the rest of this place.’