A common tavern that connects all fantasy worlds

"It's just that if they come because of that book, there's something that's bound to take care of them."

As he spoke, the old man spread out the notebook beside him and wrote down another formula.

After turning the page and writing some seemingly meaningless words on the back of the formula, he tore the page out and handed it to several people, saying to them:

"Next, it depends on how fast you move and how much power Hill has gained. This formula should not be prepared with any liquid, this is a powder, not a solvent; if the powder can't deal with Hill, then read it to him Say the spell on the back."

A few young men tried to pronounce the mouth-wrenching spell, but it sounded like the grunting sound of some deep-sea creature exhaling.

"Uh... what if we can't pronounce correctly and the spell doesn't work?" After practicing with his tongue out a few more times, Dan finally asked the most important question.

"Then congratulations, you finally don't have to suffer in the world anymore." The old man had already lit another cigarette and smoked it calmly: "...do you guess why we call death 'rest'? Don't bear the burden." What a wonderful thing to have any responsibility and not have to deal with a crazy world."

The young people were silent and could only hold the piece of paper and go downstairs.As the army of living corpses became larger and larger, there was obviously not much time left for them. No matter what they were doing, they needed to act immediately.

Before leaving the library, Herbert turned around and asked the question he wanted to ask: "Is there really no hope for human beings?"

"To others, I'd say 'who knows', but to you...you're smart enough to find forbidden knowledge in that book, so I'll be honest with you: what you're trying to find Things that transcend time and space, beyond all existing laws, and beyond the scope of our understanding, we who are confined to this dimension and this body can only perceive a part of its external projection. This gap cannot be bridged, as long as people Or people... So, the important thing is, what is the 'hope' of human beings in your mouth? Is it to know a higher level of reality and be dragged into that crazy universe, or to live happily without knowing?"

Smoking a cigarette, the old man lay back on his sofa again, hiding his weather-beaten face in the shadow of the window lattice.

His deep voice seemed to echo from the evening bells in a distant land from among the distant mountains: "Well, if you guys can come back alive, come to me, and I will tell you a story."

Herbert nodded, adjusted his glasses, turned around and went downstairs, following in the footsteps of his friends.

The old man sitting by the window turned his head, looked at the dark night in Arkham Town, and sighed helplessly.

"Alan... I can't think of it, even you are gone."

All the living people in this town have been evacuated to the campus of Miscatone, and the rest are those poor people who have been transformed into living corpses.

A few houses are still burning, and firefighters certainly don't have to risk being torn apart by living corpses to save houses that are empty and worthless; power lines are also extensively damaged, if it is not for the occasional flame In a blink of an eye, large areas of residential areas are as dark as the wilderness of a third world country, and an animal may pop up at any time to drink water by the river.

In the night, Amelia is like a ghost that does not exist in the material world, only hearing her voice but not seeing her.

The paladin Jace who was following behind could barely judge her actions and her foothold from the sound, and the occasional living corpses that struggled out of the alley and were ignited by something she didn't know.

When I went to look closely, her figure had already disappeared, leaving only a few burning corpses in the alley.

In comparison, Jess's efficiency is much slower... His flail was hung back by him. Facing this kind of undead enemy, even the most ferocious weapon is not very useful, it is better to directly hold Dan and the others The "self-made flamethrower" that was produced is a fire dragon directly around the head.

Later, Jess's movements became proficient.He first held up the shield, and lifted the lighter in front of the jet valve out of the shield, and with the light reflected from the smooth shield surface, he roughly saw the monsters' positions, and then rushed over with a few shield strikes, knocking them into one Dough, then pull the trigger and bring to a boil.

After advancing like this for a while, Amelia who said she was going to "hunt" suddenly landed behind him silently and whispered, "Sill is not there."

Before she set off just now, of course, she had already scanned the map of Arkham, which was in stock in Miskatonic College, and inputted it into the handheld holographic projection device from another world, and followed Dan and Herbert's instructions. The description indicated the residence of Professor Hill; but after quickly breaking through the blocking of the living corpses and actually inspecting the house, she did not find anything that could breathe... There were a few puddles of blood in the house, human blood , the furnishings, walls, and windows in the house are also messy, but there are no figures of humans or monsters.

This did not come as a surprise to a few people... The nearby garrison is organizing a defense line in the academy. If Hill stays where he is, then the person who will come to his door tomorrow morning may be heavily bombarded.

"Then where should I find him?"

Jess touched his chin and began to think hard, but Amelia already had the answer.

She squinted her eyes, and gave a hint to the paladin in front of her: "First of all, he must still be in the town, and he wants to transform those killed people into living corpses in an endless stream; secondly, since he left home, it means He is also afraid of the hot weapons of this world; in the end, he can probably be regarded as a dark creature, and it is also made of that kind of 'potion'... The most obvious unified feature of these things is that the body is full of rot. Stink."

Where in town could he hide from even modern weapons and hide his stench?

The answer is already obvious.

The paladin nodded, took out the communicator borrowed from Boss Xue without hesitation, and contacted the medical student Dan Kane on the other side.

"...Be sure to pay attention to the sewers, the enemy may surprise through the sewers. They are intelligent."

After being hunted by Amelia and himself many times, these living corpses have now begun to move in groups and use weapons; although they are still no match for the two hunters, it is also a dangerous signal, proving that what they are facing is not The kind of beast that has nothing but instinct left.

Amelia rubbed her metal fingers, thoughtfully.

What these guys show is not just as simple as "having individual intelligence"... The paladin may not be able to see it so clearly in the battlefield on the ground, but he has been staying at a high place, hiding his figure in the night sky, possessing With her dark vision, she can roughly see that these groups of living corpses wandering on the street seem to be connected to each other, and they can quickly respond to the movement made by the two of them... The direction of their movement is more like a conscious conduct encirclement operations.

Maybe, as the boss said, they form a web of group consciousness; or... their creators can control them through supernatural means.

As for which one it is, we will not know until we see it.

"...We also got something that can restrain those guys. After the preparation is complete, we will meet you in the sewer."

In the communicator, Dan on the opposite side said the same.

In the formula given by the old man, all the ingredients are very common... No, it should be said that they are very common, not the kind of special plants that only grow in a certain corner.Before leaving the school gate, a few people had already prepared the medicinal powder. The finished product was shiny, and I don't know if it was not ground fine enough, or it should be like this.

After putting down the communicator, Dan looked at Herbert and Megan beside him, and asked:

"Are you ready?"

The two people on the opposite side just nodded.

All three of them put on work clothes that are easy to move, and prepared some gas masks, fire axes, homemade Molotov cocktails, etc. Although they don't know if they are useful... But at least they did their best.

"Okay... don't use too much powder, try to join Jess and the others first." Dan didn't say anything nonsense, he wanted to persuade his girlfriend not to go together and stay in a safe place in the academy, but she insisted He wanted to go with him, saying that he wanted to confirm his father's fate with his own eyes; Dan couldn't stop him from saying such things.

He found a manhole on campus, removed the manhole cover, and climbed down the foul-smelling waterway first.

Chapter 43 The Nest

The situation in the sewer is not too bad, and I don't know if the other party has not thought of taking this road to enter the school, or is still gathering strength. In short, after the three young people came down from a certain inspection shaft in the school, they walked all the way. Come here until you meet Jess and Amelia in the pipeline below the residential area, but you don't see any living corpses.

These two people with the strongest combat effectiveness are squatting in a certain maintenance passage attached to the underground drainage pipe network, assembling something; according to Boss Xue, it was "the era when the coalition system was still called the Wieland-Tangu Company." The cutting-edge technology has been used to explore the bases of alien creatures.

Dan's response was "There are life on alien planets?", and Jess' response was "What is an alien planet?"

Strictly speaking, this thing should be regarded as a small anti-gravity drone. It will use laser and sonar to scan and model confined spaces, generate a three-dimensional map, and even distinguish the density of the scanned object to a certain extent.

The only person present who can use this technology is Amelia who lived the longest... She tapped a few points on her steel arm, and saw a few light spots suddenly light up in the middle of the arm, slightly off. The blue light quickly formed a holographic projection image in front of several people.

...While practicing the formula passed to her by a certain Taoist priest and changing her own nature, of course she did not forget to use the convenient door of the tavern to connect with all walks of life to upgrade her technological equipment.

Several other people looked at her as if they had seen a ghost. This thing was much more shocking than a living corpse...

Amelia didn't care about that, but concentrated on watching the pipe network modeling image sent back by the drone.

Although Arkham is only a small city, the planning of the urban drainage system seems to be quite complete. Although it is not as large as some large cities with a large population, the interior is spacious, and there are even people living in it, it is complex enough. .

There are more than 2 sewer wells, and pipes of different thicknesses are connected to the main drainage pipes and diversion sewers in each district, and then converged into the tunnel-level drainage main pipes on the next floor to flow to the sewage treatment plants in the suburbs; if this system If there is room to accommodate Professor Hill and a large group of living corpses, it can only be the reservoir of the midway pumping station.

Sure enough, when the drone arrived at a certain location, a certain area of ​​the holographic projection map suddenly swelled up, and the color also changed... That was the representation of the change in "density" in the image.

Amelia reacted quickly and manipulated the drone to lower the altitude, turned off the laser scanning, and slowly flew in that direction, marking the irregularly shaped substance and the similar density in the image as red.

As the sonar scanning image of the drone came further, several college students couldn't help but exclaimed: "What the hell is that!"

In the holographic image, a large pool of red moss-like things was piled up in the corner of the pumping station's reservoir, and there were dozens of humanoid objects standing there beside them, which might be living corpses.

Tentacles resembling octopuses in length and sea anemones in shape protrude from the beach in a large area, respectively going up the nearby inspection wells to the ground; There are living corpses with similar density slowly crawling down from the surface, standing on the ground or in the reservoir near the thing.

"You guessed it right... It seems that he is indeed accumulating strength and wants to attack the defense line from the ground."

After frowning and looking carefully, Jess could only draw this inference.

Only in the space of the cistern, there are nearly a hundred humanoid objects standing there. I don’t know how many there are in the other pumping stations and pipe networks that the drones can’t go to without being noticed. .

Moreover, looking at the place where the living corpses were, even Dan and Herbert's expressions became ugly.

"That 'secret weapon', the thing that the librarian gave us...he especially emphasized that it is a powder and not a solvent, which means that it cannot touch water. And the time is limited, and the powder we have prepared is not much , It may not be enough to use it on Professor Hill."

Dan said.

The current Professor Hill... everyone can only think that it is the biggest lump, the surface is full of tentacles, and it seems that there is a tumor growing on the wall.

The powder brought by several people was not enough to sprinkle on the tumor's head, so how could it be possible to deal with the growing number of living corpses?

Amelia didn't say a word, she really wanted to make a biogas explosion just now, and burn it directly... But places like pumping station reservoirs can't be blown up, the first thing to do in the design of sewage treatment facilities The safety issue to consider is how to discharge combustible gas, especially in places like reservoirs, there must be additional exhaust pipes and ventilation devices.

After much deliberation, she still turned her head and asked the paladin beside her: "How is your 'Holy Light' now? Boss, what did he give you?"

"He gave me a possibility."

Jess answered by lifting the shield in his hand.

That was when he was about to leave, the boss Xue of the tavern called him mysteriously, and handed him a small cross with a silver chain on it.

At that time, he frowned and said: "Although the cross is also used as a symbol, I don't think the religions of other worlds are the same thing as the holy light I believe in..."

Boss Xue replied: "Of course I don't want to doubt your belief, or provoke you with another religious symbol... But maybe it can be useful to you? It was given to me by an old priest who used to be a A man who lost his faith, but then found it again. I asked him too, how he did it...

"He replied: 'I no longer ask faith to give me anything, but I think about why I believed it at the time'. If you think this sentence has any meaning, then keep this thing. I hope you, and I All guests can find what they want just like the old pastor."

Oddly enough, missionaries from other worlds are also called priests... the same thing Sanctuary worlds call them.

Now, in the stinking sewers of Arkham, he began to think seriously about this sentence.

Why did he believe in the Holy Light?

It was supposed to be about fighting demons in the first place.

He spent his childhood in Kedjistan, where the originally rich and fertile grassland surrounded by mountains had been largely deserted by the time he was born.No one is interested in that barren land and the people who live on it, except those who simply claim their lives...

Believe it or not, there really are sects that believe in hell demons.

A cultist came to this land where no one pays attention, held a blood sacrifice in his village, summoned a large number of low-level demons, and tore all the villagers to pieces, except for burying himself in the flesh and blood of his loved ones to escape out of search for him.

A few days later, the paladins arrived, removed the demon, took him away, told him that the place was "completely polluted with evil", and set fire to the whole village.

From that day on, he began to receive the training of a paladin... In order to avenge the demons, he dreamed of going to hell one day and making those guys pay for their blood.

Later, as a Paladin reserve, he began to be ordered to patrol the security of the territory.

The local lord is a former knight and current bishop. He has strong contacts in the hands of Zakarum and even Trevank's senior management, so he can call the young reserve paladins to come.

The job is easy and the pay is good. The other brothers are very satisfied with the job, but only Jess finds out that something is wrong.

At that time, he still couldn't understand exactly what the "holy light" was, so he couldn't use the holy light spell proficiently. He often went back to the lord's arsenal to practice silently after get off work.

One day, when he finished his practice and was about to leave, he saw the lord's dog digging a hole under a tree and burying something.

Out of a young man's curiosity, he went over to take a look, but he scared the dog away, and the thing was only half buried... What was exposed on the ground was half a human bone.

In addition to the obvious dog bite marks on the bone, there is also obvious proliferative tissue, which looks like a raised piece, which reminds him that among the recent reports received by the public security department, there is a case of disappearance, a 12-year-old According to her family, her fractures had not healed when she disappeared, and she was still in a splint... Of course such a child cannot escape by herself, right?Does she even have a problem with "running"?

Jess, who was also a child at the time, had a good eye because he had seen a lot. He didn't tell anyone. He just changed the place to hide the leg bone, and then began to observe where the dog usually liked to go.

A few days later, he dug out a cloth bag from the lord's hunting ground. Inside was a small flower skirt that had been scratched wide by a dog, and contained a pile of human bones that were slightly smaller than ordinary people.He found many mounds of soil with different colors from those nearby, and finally dug out a total of [-] skirts and [-] skeletons.

Taking advantage of the chance that an official paladin from Zakarum came to visit the lord and have a banquet together, he took another opportunity to sneak into the warehouse of the lord's manor.

In the cellar of the warehouse, he found a girl who looked only eleven or twelve years old.

No one knew what Jess saw at the time, and he never told anyone, but when he rushed into the lord's banquet hall, what he shouted was: "Come and feel the same pain!"

What he waved in his hand was a saw blade he found in the cellar.

The lord is an old knight, and his strength is quite strong, not to mention that there are guests from Zakarum's hand present.

However, the holy light on Jace's body was burning like a small sun. Even if he cruelly crushed the lord's limb joints, removed his jaw, and gouged out his eyes, the holy light did not Half bleak.

The lord wasn't dead, the guest got hold of the crazed Jace and hanged him.

Later, according to the interrogation, he kidnapped at least [-] little girls in the territory in ten years, raped and abused them, and finally threw their bodies in his own hunting ground after their death.

[131. No. 131]

Jess didn't know the final outcome of the lord. Before that, he had his entire back smashed by thorns, his weapons and armor were confiscated, and he was thrown out of the Paladin garrison.

That day, Jess finally thought of why he believed in the Holy Light.

The devil is just the embodiment of evil... What he has to fight is the evil itself that may lurk in anyone!

As for the establishment and westward travel of the Holy Knight Brotherhood later, that is another story.

Chapter 44 Justice

Professor Hill does retain full consciousness and memory.

He recalled that when he published "The Transmission Mechanism of Electric Impulse in the Nervous System" at the National Brain Neuromedicine Exchange Conference, the scene where all the experts stood up and applauded him.

At that time, he was in the prime of his life, and he was quite famous even outside the medical circle. He even appeared on a TV show with great influence at that time, and received compliments from the beautiful host.

It's just that, when the fad passed, the mass media soon stopped caring about him and his research.Regardless of whether it is electrical signals or what is transmitted in the nervous system, anyway, when you go to treat a disease, you just take money, buy medicine, do surgery, or it will be cured or not cured...

A few years later, when his research stalled, even the industry stopped caring about him.

In the end, even his laboratory was closed, and a theoretical medical scientist was forced to find a clinical job.Fortunately, he is also a very good brain doctor.

If he hadn't found a job as a professor at Miscattoni Medical College, I'm afraid he wouldn't be able to continue his theoretical research at all.

He devoted his entire youth to medical research, only to find that he was old when he looked back...

Professor Hill has already accepted that maybe his talent ends here. Not everyone in this world can reach the peak of their profession.He has already left his name in the history of brain nerve research, and he was considered a respected upper class person when he was alive. It is by no means a failure that he has reached this point in his life.