"Bell...... Bell..."

The monastery bell rang suddenly, leaving a dull echo in the silent night sky.

In the darkness where he couldn't see his fingers, Thor subconsciously rolled over and suddenly woke up from a night of troubled dreams.

It was quiet, and there was a faint musty smell of dampness in the air, and he tried to listen, but the darkness around him didn't respond.

The drowsiness subsided, and Thor suddenly remembered that he was in a deserted dry well, and that the sound of the bell that seemed to be far away was actually his own hallucination.

In fact, the monastery bell had not rang for a long time, and the handyman who rang the bell might have died long ago, or he might have shrunk in a corner, who knows.

Before he had time to think about it, Thor felt a deep hunger take over his consciousness, and then the various after-effects of dizziness and weakness caused by long-term hunger also revived in his body.

Swallowing his saliva with difficulty, Thor could only barely maintain a supine position and endure in silence.

I don't know if my dark eyes are still bright and firm at this moment, or if I have long lost the light like a dead firefly.

But apparently, this damn life is going on......

Last night, just as it was getting dark, Thor found a mushroom.

In the cemetery behind the monastery, in an area that I had long been familiar with, a mushroom magically and abruptly appeared in the bushes next to a tombstone, as if it had always been there.

And before that, Thor hadn't eaten anything for three days.

Was it a timely stroke of luck? the mercy of the gods? or some bullshit fate?

When Thor reached through the barbed bush and endured the tearing of his skin to uproot the mushroom and hold it in the palm of his hand to examine it carefully, the joy of discovery was quickly buried by loss.

The whole mushroom is dead gray, slightly smaller than the palm of the hand, the mushroom stem is thin, and the surface of the mushroom cap is scattered with irregular bright green patches.

It's hard to associate this weird and unaesthetic palette with food.

Thor was pretty sure he had never seen the mushroom in any of the grocery stores in Grey Curtain, and his short experience as an apothecary apprentice was obviously impossible to tell if it was poisonous or not.

But what does it matter?

Even if dying from a poisonous mushroom is not very dignified, it is at least an ending.

So Thor was ready not to wake up again, and stuffed the ugly mushroom whole into his mouth.

It's like swallowing some kind of fat bug.

The bad taste was not much better than expected, it was bland and tasteless, but it was sticky and juicy.

Shivering, Thor didn't even dare to chew hard, only frowning and letting it slide into his already shriveled stomach, then burrowing into a pile of rags and falling asleep with a feeling of nausea.

Thor wasn't a misanthrope, or far from that discouragement at the age of twelve and his meagre life experience, but he was tired enough to sleep forever.

Half a year ago, a plague broke out in Grey Curtain Town.

Most of the unlucky ghosts died in time.

They died in their own way, in their dreams, at the wine table, and suddenly collapsed without warning.

The head slowly cracked open like a crushed sweet potato, and sticky and fishy black blood flowed out, and the body quickly rotted from the inside out, becoming a happy nest for many excited bugs.

The terrible epidemic and panic constantly infected the people around them, and the unique smell of roasted meat from the burning of corpses could be smelled almost everywhere in Grey Curtain during that time.

Initially, there was speculation that the spread of the plague was the result of the rebellion and vengeance of the infidels, but a few scholars believed that the unknown plague was not a plague at all, but rather some kind of punishment from the Lord God for the wanton sale of corpses in Grey Veil.

Later, as more people followed the Grim Reaper, all kinds of doubts gradually died down.

Before the plague, Thor had been living in the Finis Monastery.

As one of the many orphans, he was thin, withdrawn, and helpless, and was often bullied and entertained by other half-grown children.

When the disaster struck, all the orphans were restricted in their freedom and were forbidden to go out.

The priests of the monastery agreed that it was only right to stay in the sacred sanctuary of the monastery, and that if they continued to pray to God, they would be saved.

Perhaps this is true, at least in this catastrophe, the entire monastery miraculously did not have any deaths from the epidemic or infection.

When chaos began to sprout in the town, the clergy blocked the news that the monastery was safe and sound, and decisively closed the backyard, isolating the living quarters of the monastery from the outside world in time.

It's dangerous out there, not everyone who dies dies from the plague, and murder and looting are always happening.

The outer monastery was left open only to the main hall, a slightly larger holy auditorium. Periodically, the clergy perform seemingly mystical ceremonies to appease the panicked townspeople.

At the belet bishop's behea, the nuns and deacons rejected all requests for asylum in the convent, and then quietly retrieved several skeletons that had long since been burned beyond recognition.

After that, the monastery would wrap the nameless bones in a shroud at regular intervals, and then hold one solemn funeral after another in full view of the public, so that outsiders would think that the monastery had also been affected by the disaster.

These subtle tricks did have some effect in the end, and no matter how crazy it was outside, the whole monastery was secretly calm.

When the town's population plummeted to more than half, the plague finally came to an end.

However, those who survived entered a new round of disaster, famine.

In addition to humans, a large number of livestock have died in the epidemic, and the severe shortage of labor has caused the barren farmland. Most of the town's food stocks had been depleted in the first few months, and food had become more precious than gold.

Cannibalism begins in slums and then quickly spreads through the population.

This is not surprising, even before the plague, Grey Curtain had always been a place with little moral line.

The situation in the town is becoming more and more tense, and from time to time news comes intermittently from afar through the letter crow.

It is said that Lord Savyn sent a support army from the territory, and later the support army was attacked by the enemy while walking through the dark wilderness, and after paying a certain number of dead and wounded, they had to withdraw with rescue supplies.

The people of Grey Curtain didn't care what damn monsters the lord had encountered in the Dark Wilderness, after all, everyone had been used to this kind of thing for a long time.

What really broke everyone's hearts was the news of the rescue retreat, which meant that in the following days, due to the shortage of supplies and the barrier of the dark wilderness, the entire Grey Curtain Town would be left to fend for itself.

The situation finally collapsed completely.

The timid and lucky people chose to stay in the town and continue to struggle with bad luck.

A handful of people who thought they were brave decided to leave their lives to luck, and they formed a team of adventurers to leave the town and step into the dark wilderness in search of a way out.

Life or death, these gamblers with small odds of winning never returned.

Grey Curtain is located at the southernmost point of the continent. As a tiny part of mainland Salvinia, this remote frontier town has never been brought to the attention of the world.

For hundreds of years since the beginning of the Dark Calendar, the continent has been overwhelmed by a thick darkness, and people have lived day after day in this land that is not as bright as it gets, and day has become a continuation of night.

A large number of plants have died one after another, and more strange plants have popped up, and tenacious life will always find its own way out. But for humanity, this dark world has long since ceased to be friendly.

The difficult living environment has led to the continuous loss of population, the lack of resources, the shrinking of gathering places, and the decline of human beings.

On this continent of eternal night, the dark wilderness around the town has always been a nightmare for all.

It is said that the wilderness is inhabited by countless monsters and monsters, ghouls and dryads wander aimlessly, and hosts in swamps and lakes are waiting for the flesh of the strayers.

It undoubtedly takes a lot of courage to step into the dark wilderness, and with the exception of a few risk-takers and traders who are willing to take risks for their own sake, the inhabitants of Grey Curtain rarely leave the town.

Even so, the population of the town is never stable, with new life being born and many quietly and bizarre deaths.

A lot of people come and go, and one day someone suddenly "whoosh" disappears, as if they never appeared.

——————

Hunger still threatens everyone left behind in Grey Curtain Town, and the Abbey is finally no longer sacred.

From time to time, mobs climbed over the walls and searched around with blood-red hungry eyes, and when two nuns and three orphans died in the chaos, the priests of the monastery finally realized that the world's fear of God had been shaken.

In the face of existential persecution, faith is nothing more than a joke.

God may occasionally shine a little divine light to blind anyone's eyes, but no one has ever seen Him handing out food.

In order to provide food, the orphans had to start going out in groups.

The boys go around town begging and looking for it, or go steal and rob. The girls, led by a few nuns, took to the streets and sold their bodies to survive.

The town shrouded in darkness is now full of dangers.

Many of the boys disappeared after leaving the monastery, and selling their bodies was no longer an advantage for women, and most of them ended up being toyed with and then cut into pieces and stuffed into someone's pot.

The number of people in the monastery is getting smaller and smaller.

By this time, the emaciated Thor had left the monastery.

Like a little mouse disappearing into a wheat field, Thor's departure did not alarm anyone, after all, no one bothered to waste their eyes on a dispensable existence like him.

Thor knew that his departure was not out of any kind of cleverness or foresight, and rather, it was more like a reluctant escape. He knew very well how dangerous it would be to remain exposed to the eyes of others, even more terrible than hunger itself.

A twelve-year-old child has to face survival on his own, but food, shelter, and safety are ...... There are enough problems to face to drown him.

Thor's original plan was to see if he could find an opportunity to try his luck in the dark wilderness with a band of adventurers, regardless of his capacity, whether he was a servant, a minion, or even a slave.

But in the end he had to give up, because he knew that he didn't have the capital to go to the wilderness to die.

In addition to the lack of attention to age, his thin little body is not even as strong as a wild dog. It's not hard to foresee that a useless drag will hardly end better than to be someone else's food halfway through.

As for the other reason, in fact, in Thor's heart, he may not be optimistic about the team of adventurers that were formed in a hurry.

Although Thor had always lived in the town and had never set foot in the wilderness outside the town, he once read a book.

The book was called "What's in the Dark?" and was written by a man who signed Horn the Liar.

The book is full of banter and irony, and devotes a lot of space to describing the adventurers' encounters in the dark wilderness and the bizarre ways in which they die in the face of monsters.

At first, Saul only read it for fun, and even scoffed at the author's wild imagination many times. But as he read and understood it repeatedly, he suddenly realized that the contents of the book were most likely true.

Because only those who have experienced it themselves can write these detailed descriptions.

Thor had no interest in speculating as to what kind of person the author of the liar Horn was, who had escaped death after death by luck and cowering in countless adventures.

What really scares Thor is that if only half of the book is true, it's enough to imagine how dangerous the dark wilderness has been hundreds of years after entering the Dark Calendar.