Krafft's Anomaly Notes

Chapter 104 Anecdote
"Face? Oh, you're talking about old Gorey's paintings." The strong woman easily carried the mining pick, threw the water bag into the basket behind her, and led them up the slope without panting. promote.

She didn't shy away from talking about the painting on the rock at the entrance of the village, and she was even a little casual, almost making Kraft doubt whether his judgment last night was correct, "Since then, he seems to be a different person, talking about them all day long. If you can come back and so on, then you can draw pictures and lead people into the hole."

"But don't tell others that he still has those paintings. Some people really believe those lies and won't listen to them."

Thick hands wiped the sweat from his forehead, and the salty liquid seeped into the dead skin calluses, moistening the reddened cuts caused by ill-fitting hand tools.

Even in this place where women have to undertake quite a lot of physical labor, it is rare for their landlord to personally wield a mining pick, and there are a few such examples in the village, but the men are not as good as before in a village of the same size. Many, the childish faces are not a few years older than Yvonne, or they are old people who are unable to work.

"after that?"

"When the old hole collapsed before, Old Geli lost his son." She wiped the sweat from her palms on her sleeves, and casually opened up the past as if she were chapped on her hands. You have to go to the top of the mountain to dig a few pieces of mine.”

Sounds like a mine disaster, not too unexpected.Kraft feels that he has not heard much about similar incidents in other villages. Under the tradition of mining relying entirely on natural caves, the sense of security brought by hard rocks makes people lose their vigilance against the support structure, or they have no awareness of prevention at all, blindly While mining, an unprepared collapse left almost all the working adults underground.

Son of that old Gorey, husband and father of several families, including her husband.

The trail that turned back took them past the two-person-high hole, which was dark and deep, no different from the mines they saw on the road.The collapse should have occurred at a deeper level, underground where sunlight has been out of reach for tens of millions of years, due to an unintentional mistake in a rock structure, under the repeated tapping of an iron pick, it collapsed suddenly, like an esophagus that has been scratched to an ulcer, being stimulated and contracted, reflexive Swallowing, unintentionally sealed the insects that had entered the mountain.

This seems to suggest that the behavior of mining in the "safe" cave is just a small accident on a natural scale. The rocky mountain can close its teeth for no reason at any moment, without warning or reason.

It happened so suddenly and deeply that the villages at the foot of the mountain were unaware of its happening until evening when they found that none of the people who had gone out had returned. A thicker barrier of collapsed layers stood between them—the mine took some forever.

"The outlander and his valet died in it, too." She picked up a round stone on the ground and placed it back on the crooked sign of the cave's entrance, which served as a sort of tombstone and nothing else. Others can tell that it once swallowed up half a village and two foreigners.

There seems to be something wrong here.Kraft looked at Yvonne, gave her a hand, and helped climb up the khaki-colored rock that blocked the road. The girl who was busy following her footsteps obviously didn't notice who the "outlander and his attendant" referred to.The road here is too difficult for Yvonne, if she hadn't insisted on following, maybe it would be a better choice to let Kupu stay in the village with him.

Even though he was seriously frightened last night, Yvonne, who heard this suggestion, still flatly rejected it. I don't know if it was because he had to force his mind to make trouble, or let Kupu take care of this option.

It's not hard to notice the subtle relationship between the two lately, though mostly Yvonne's one-sided rivalry, and the inability of Cooper to see a little girl as a competitor on the same track seems to make her even more resentful.

Kraft spared no effort to keep an eye on her.It is very important to take care of the child's psychology, but if she is ill, a sailor must be found to take her down.

If so, there is at least one exception.Her father, the alchemist's follower, did not die in the landslide.He didn't even stop in the village, he fled the place without stopping, and went back to Port Consolation, where he spent several years in pain.

He escaped, but he couldn't completely get rid of the malice of the southern hills. The dust choked his throat and choked him like a shadow, and until the last moment of his life, his breath was filled with the dusty and bloody smell of rock powder rubbing the inflamed lung cavity.

The round, quiet shadow that does not dissolve in the morning light that caused all this, the temporary silence, the cool air from the ground blowing out like a weak breath, fluttered on the thin clothes prepared for daytime activities, and Kraft's physique also felt a chill, There was a feeling of being close to a stranger as if whispering in his ears, urging him to walk past uncomfortably, "What is it like inside now?"

"It was blocked halfway, and there was nothing."

They stopped staying at the entrance of the cave and continued to climb to the top of the mountain.

There are few plants and trees on the side of the path, so it is difficult to find a place to hold your hand. You need to press hard on the edge of the raised rocks. Some of them are almost sharp, and the blunt serrated knife rubs against your palm.Surprisingly, no one complained, like silently bypassing a full-fledged dormant snake, not wanting to wake up the long body crawling embedded in the mountain.

The Huangchen trail turns back and forth along the slope, and the time spent on the drop that is not high from a distance is several times as expected. Frequent changes of direction interfere with the sense of direction. Only when you look up intermittently, you can see that the top of the mountain is getting closer. leave behind.

The road near the top becomes gentler, skirts half the top of the hill, and leads to the shady side of the hill.The sun that has not risen to the highest point cannot reach this side, and most of them are still in the semi-dark light and shadow between morning and evening. The shadow of the rock is long and thin, so that they can only see the so-called new mine when they walk to the front. Hole.

Another two-person hole.

Kraft heard the commotion of the sailors behind him, and they all stopped and looked back at the way they came. The zigzag route they had gone could no longer be seen under the cover of the mountain rocks.But a very similar scene reappeared in front of him: he walked through a rocky area and came to a deep two-person high cave.

Of course it is not an old mine, but the size of the two is exactly the same, except that there is no stack of stone stacks at the entrance of the cave, as if returning to the original place after going around in circles.

The strong middle-aged woman picked up the torch from the basket behind her, and lit the fire from the smoldering ashes at the entrance, and the burning flame scattered the corner of the shadow, "This is it, do you want to go down and have a look?"

"Let's take a break first, thank you for showing us the way." Kraft declined the invitation, and pulled William to the side of the road, "By the way, by the way, where can I find that old Gorey, I know two A friend who likes to collect strange things might be interested in his paintings."

"By the well, I don't see him often. You can look for it yourself, or ask those who believed his nonsense." For the sake of this, she answered the question very readily, and walked into the cave alone with the pickaxe on her shoulders. The light of the fire quickly disappeared in the darkness.

"Why don't you go down and have a look?"

"Wait a minute, William, I don't think something is right." Kraft reached out his hand to block his view of the cave entrance. Since the night road last night, the nature of the matter has changed.

He felt some kind of uneasiness brewing. First, the mule and horse stumbled, and Kupu seemed to encounter something, and then there was the unique painting, the twisted thing, and the human face pattern on the painting...

【connect】

There should be a connection here, he doesn't need to be reminded to help realize their strangeness, it just needs to be sorted out and expressed, and this needs a logical enlightenment, "Go to old Gorey first, I want to know what he is What did you draw?"

"Does this have anything to do with our business? There are pagan things everywhere in small remote places, nothing special."

"It's different this time. Have you heard of heteromorphism? My family has some research on it." Kraft lowered his voice and whispered to William alone, "Kup said that in the painting he saw last night, A face that feels familiar to him. You know, it's not normal for him to look like that on the mountain road."

Considering that the captain is also a half-pragmatic believer, he may not reject the possibility of non-church supernatural phenomena, and the notification now will not cause panic, so he can talk about his ideas.

"Your family also does this? I thought you were as uninterested in this as you are in the church." William raised his beard nonchalantly, blowing off the dust, "Alterology, I do listen to which little noble family's People say it, but hysteria is much more common at sea, if it counts."

"I used to be able to see them when I stayed at sea for a little longer, but since I stopped at the Port of Comfort every trip, it is indeed a lot less."

This thing is far from making the captain feel weird. Those who are not serious may be forced to retreat as early as the long voyage. Those who are screened are all rough nerves, and he is the best among them.

"Most of them are not as good as my stories, such as the noble boy who told me that his family liked heteromorphism, and there was a lecturer from your college to help." Seeing Kraft's worried look, William changed the topic and tried to talk to him. As usual, distract him with anecdotes.

"The student from the Faculty of Letters is said to know several languages, even before the establishment of the Kingdom, he can recognize a few words. Let him bring back an 'abnormal' artifact from the port, but how can there be such a thing in Wendeng Port?" For some reason, Today's anecdote is obviously not very attractive at the beginning, but the effect is quite good.

The tricky audience who usually have to come up with a story at the bottom of the box to impress them was suddenly removed from the original topic.

"Oh?"

It's the expression on his face that looks weird.

"I gave him an idea to use the stonemason's hands-on parts and carve a few engraved lines that no one can understand as pagan symbols." The beard couldn't hide the clever and triumphant smile, and thinking about it now is still overjoyed.

"If you want to be recognized when you go back, you will say you were cheated; if you don't recognize it, you will say that it is a foreign item bought from a certain crew member. Anyway, there is no proof."

He spoke with great concentration and emotion, and imitated the act of mysteriously taking objects from his arms and offering them.

"In the end, no one could see where this thing came from. Haha, it was a blind carving, how could anyone have seen it?" William concluded confidently, "So, most of the pretenders in this world are like this, Maybe there are more than half of them in the church."

"I can only tell you about this, don't spread it."

"..."

(End of this chapter)