After being removed from the delegation, Fr. Paul returned to the Silver Ring and plunged headlong into the Third Inquisition, the place of duty before the visit. No one knows and no one cares, what he's busy there, people only know two things.

1. He was originally a popular candidate for the next bishop, but he was completely alienated by Bishop Fabian.

Second, the colleagues who visited with him gave him a very bad evaluation.

And today, to everyone's surprise, the bishop actually agreed to his request and was willing to meet with him alone for ten minutes, which gave the church staff a new idea.

When Paul walked into the expository hall, he looked thinner, his jaws were deeply sunken, and only his eyes were still amazingly bright.

The bishop glanced at the priest and motioned for him to sit across from him.

In the old man's impression, Paul is a very talented person, but this talent is limited to the ability to think and act, and the other party's terrible level of handling interpersonal relationships has given Fabian a headache again and again.

But then again, Paul's disdain for factionalism is what Fabian admires most about him. After all, in this world, there is no shortage of capable people, but there are only a handful of loyal and reliable people.

Even if Paul did not tell himself the reason for the events of this mission, Fabian would have been able to guess the incident. The original meaning of the latter was to let the former rest for a while and cool his head. But judging from the flame of revenge burning in the eyes of the other party, the priest still can't get over this hurdle in his heart after all.

"Paul, you've disappointed me......"

Bishop Fabian's words made the person concerned grit his teeth, sink his head, and said hatefully: "I made a serious mistake in the matter of this mission. ”

The fact that shame followed courage is another thing that the bishop admires about this man.

The old man leaned back in his chair and said slowly, "Say, let me hear what you have found." ”

The priest took out a large pile of cloth bags and notes from his bosom and spread them out on the table.

This inexplicable move left Fabian confused.

"At first I confronted Brother Todd and thought he was just a hypocrite whose soul had been dominated by greed. But I looked away, and the evil he hid was even more terrible than I had imagined. Paul pulled out a piece of paper with dense notes and a model of a refining furnace.

Fabian glanced at it, then looked up at the person opposite, waiting for his further explanation.

A cold wind blew through the cracks in the window, and the priest shrank back, pulled his hands into his sleeves, and whispered: "When I was dismissed as head of the mission, I spent a day in the camp and began to sort out some of the things that I thought were strange. ”

Dropping a hand and placing it on the paper, Paul continued: "First of all, there is the silver refinery at the foot of the monastery mountain. The contents of this piece of paper are information that I bought from a craftsman at a great price, and it records the process of refining silver, with a degree of complexity and sophistication that mortals cannot imagine. And according to him, all of this stuff came from Todd. ”

Bishop Fabian touched the top of his head: "It's nothing, that kid named Todd has a monk master, maybe he learned it." ”

"Perhaps......" Father Priest pulled out a second piece of paper, on which were many notes of time and notes.

"I found the man in charge of the monastery's monastery and asked him to write to me Todd's daily routine. I compared almost ten days of records and found a strange coincidence. Scrolling his finger over the records and the time points, Paul said: "From 12 noon to 5 p.m., nine out of ten days, Todd disappeared, not in the dormitory, in the library, in the church, in the meditation hall, in the lecture room, that is to say, during this time period...... Gone. ”

The old man shook his head: "Maybe he walked out of the monastery and went down the mountain or somewhere." ”

The priest immediately refuted this hypothesis: "The gatekeeper of the abbey, who also confirmed, rarely saw Todd going out in the afternoon. ”

"And one last point......" Paul carefully opened the small paper bags on the table, some of which contained powders of different colors, some of which contained crystals of different sizes, and some of which contained some strange metals.

Putting on the crystal glasses, the old man observed it carefully, his face full of puzzlement.

The priest began to explain one by one: "This yellow powder is sulfur, this white lens is salt, this black metal is heavy iron (ferric tetroxide), and the rest of the contents of the paper packet, I asked many people, and they didn't know. But they only confirmed one thing, only a grandmaster-level alchemist could refine alchemy materials of such purity and so many types. ”

The bishop heard a familiar word and looked up in surprise: "Alchemy?"

In the Church of the Father, alchemy is regarded as one of the "demonic arts". Tracing back to the source, the most important reason is the pressure that the alchemist Sutherland caused to the church thousands of years ago.

The priest carefully wrapped the paper packets and asked, "My lord, do you know these things, where did I find them?"

"Where?"

"The cemetery of the monastery. Someone buried them in the ground as waste and covered them with dirt. It's a pity that they forgot that the color of the newly covered soil is too different from the color next to it, and a little closer inspection will reveal the difference. According to the testimony of the grave keepers, these objects have not been seen in the past few years, and only recently they have been buried there for two months. ”

Paul propped up the table with his hands, facing Fabian, and said in a low voice: "A fifteen-year-old boy, born into a peasant family, without any education, and with mediocre and ordinary qualifications since childhood. After entering the monastery, he learned the teachings in a short period of time, created the complex art of silver refining, survived the fire, traveled north and returned safely, and possibly became an alchemy master...... All this, if all explained by coincidence, is too far-fetched. ”

Bishop Fabian rubbed his forehead and asked, "Then ...... you mean?"

"Todd has a demon living in his body, a demon from the depths of hell!

Seeing off Father Paul, Bishop Fabian sat in his chair and looked out the window at the sunshine, but his heart was uncertain and swaying from side to side.

In his opinion, it didn't matter if Todd did those things, and it didn't matter if Todd was a demon or not. What matters is whether the monk is useful, how useful is it, whether he can use it for himself, and that's the key.

Fabian's train of thought was interrupted by a knock on the door, and without waiting for the bishop's permission, the assistant priest ran into the room unusually, with a look of urgency: "Your Excellency, Your Majesty the Queen is here!"