"Face? Oh, you said old Gorey drew those things. The sturdy woman easily carried the pickaxe, threw the water bladder into the basket behind her back, and led them up the slope without the slightest breath.

She didn't shy away from talking about the painting on the rock at the entrance of the village, even casually, almost making Kraft wonder if he had been right last night, "Since then he's been like a different person, babbling about what they can come back to, and then painting, leading people into the hole." ”

"But don't say in front of others that he still has those paintings, some people really believe those nonsense, and they can't be persuaded."

The thick hand wiped the sweat from his forehead, the salty liquid seeped into the dead skin calluses, and the redness caused by the wet hand tool was not fit.

Even in this place where women had to do a lot of manual labor, it was rare for their landlord to wield a pickaxe himself, and there were a few more examples of this in the village, but there were not as many men as in the previous villages of the same size, and a few childish faces were not a few years older than Yvonne, or they were old people who could not afford to work.

"After that?"

"When the old cave collapsed before, old Gori lost his son." She wiped the sweat from her palms on her sleeves and casually turned over the old things as if they were chapped on her hands, "You can see it a little higher, and now you have to go to the top of the mountain to dig a few mines." ”

It sounds like a mining disaster, not too unexpected. Kraft felt that he had not heard much of this in other villages, and that mining was traditionally based on natural caves, and the sense of security brought by the hard rock made people wary of the supporting structures, or that they had no sense of prevention at all, and mined blindly, and that a sudden collapse left almost all of the prime-age labor underground.

The son of old Gorey, the husband and father of several families, including her husband.

The turnaround path led them past the two-man high cavern, dim and deep, indistinguishable from the mines they had seen on the way. The collapse should have occurred deeper, in the ground where sunlight has been out of reach for thousands of years, the unintentional loss of a rock formation, under the repeated percussion of an iron pickaxe, suddenly collapsed, like the esophagus that had been scratched to the ulcer was stimulated to contract, reflexively swallowed, and inadvertently blocked the insect in the mountain.

This seems to suggest that mining in a "safe" cave is just a minor accident on a natural scale, and that rocky mountains can close their teeth at any moment without any reason, without warning or reason.

It happened so suddenly, so deeply that the villages at the foot of the hill were unaware of it, until the evening they realized that none of the people who had gone out had returned, with torches and fear in the face of the staggered caries jam of crushed rock, and a barrier thicker than the collapse stood between them—the mine had taken some people away forever.

"The outlander and his henchmen died inside, too." She picked up a cobblestone from the ground and put it back on the crooked sign of several stones at the entrance of the cave, which served as some kind of tombstone, and there was nothing else to tell it that it had swallowed half a village and two strangers alive.

Something seems to have gone awry. Kraft looked at Yvonne and pulled her up, helping to climb the yellow-colored rocks that blocked the way, and the girl who was busy keeping up clearly didn't notice who "the stranger and his henchmen" was referring to. The road was too reluctant for Yvonne, and if she hadn't insisted on following, perhaps it would have been better to let Koop stay with him in the village.

Although he was seriously frightened last night, Yvonne flatly refused when he heard this suggestion, I don't know if it was because he wanted to force his mind to make trouble, or let Koop take care of this option.

It's not hard to notice the delicate relationship between the two men of late, and although it's mostly Yvonne's one-sided rivalry, Coop can't possibly treat a little girl as a competitor on the same track, an attitude that seems to make her even more resentful.

Kraft kept an eye on her at all times. It was important to take care of the child's psyche, but if she was unwell, she had to find a sailor to take her down.

If that's right, there is at least one exception. Her father, the alchemist's henchman, did not die in the collapse. He didn't even stay in the village, he fled the place without stopping, returned to the port of comfort, and spent several years in ailment.

He escaped, but he could not completely get rid of the malice of the southern hills, and the dust that choked his throat followed him like a shadow, and until the last moment of his life, his breath carried the smell of dust and blood from the grinding and inflamed lungs of rock powder.

The round, quiet shadow that did not dissolve in the morning light, the temporary silence, the cool air of the ground blown out like a faint breath, and pounced on the thin clothing prepared for the day's activities, and Kraft also felt a chill, and the feeling of being approached by a stranger like an ear blowing urged him to walk uncomfortably quickly, "What is it like in now?" ”

"The road is blocked halfway, and there is nothing."

They stopped lingering 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 trail, and it is difficult to find a place to hold the hand, so you need to press the edge of the raised rock, some of which can be called almost sharp, and the serrated blunt knife rubs the palm. Surprisingly, no one complained, like a silence bypassing a full-bellied dormant snake, not wanting to wake up the long body that was creeping embedded in the mountain.

The yellow dust trail turns back and forth along the slope and slopes up, and the time consumed by the drop is several times that is not high from a distance, and the frequent change of direction interferes with the sense of direction, and only the intermittent look up to see that the top of the mountain is approaching, and the old mine cave and unfortunate accidents are left behind.

The road near the top becomes gentle, skirting half of the hill and leading to the shady side of the hill. The sun that had not risen to the high point could not reach this side, and most of it was still in the half-light and half-darkness of morning and dusk, and the shadows of the rocks dragged long and thin, so that they came to see the so-called new mine.

Another two-person hole.

Kraft heard the commotion of the sailors behind them, and they all stopped and looked back at the way they came, and the twists and turns of the route were no longer visible under the direction of the change of direction and the obscuration of the rocks. But a very similar scene reappeared in front of him: walking through a rocky area and coming to a deep two-person high cave.

Of course, it is not an old mine cave, but the two are the same in size, except for the entrance of the cave, there are no stacked stone stacks, as if they have come full circle back to the same place.

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

"Let's take a break, thank you for showing us the way." Kraft politely 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 friends who like to collect strange things, and maybe they will be interested in his paintings." ”

"I don't often see him at the well, so look for yourselves, or ask those who believe his nonsense." Even if she was not very interested in the self-taught abstract painter of trauma art, for the sake of the accommodation fee, she answered the question very cheerfully, and walked into the cave alone with a pickaxe, and the fire soon disappeared completely in the darkness.

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

"Wait, William, I don't think something is right." Kraft reached out to stop his gaze at the entrance of the cave, and the nature of things had changed since the night of the previous night.

He felt a certain uneasiness brewing, first the stumbling of the mule and horse, what seemed to have happened to Kupp, and then the peculiar style of the painting, the coiled object, the human face......

【Contact】

There should be a connection, and he doesn't need a reminder to help realize their anomalies, but they just need to be clarified and expressed, and this needs a logical enlightenment, "Let's go find Old Gory first, I want to know what he painted." ”

"Does this have anything to do with us? Pagan gadgets are everywhere in the middle of nowhere, nothing special. ”

"This time is different. Have you ever heard of paramorphism? There's some research on this in my family. Kraft lowered his voice and whispered to William, "Koop said that the painting he saw last night had a face that felt familiar to him. You know, it's not normal for him to look like that on the mountain road. ”

Considering that the captain is a half-pragmatist believer, he may not be able to reject the possibility of a non-church supernatural phenomenon, and it will not cause panic to tell it now, so it is possible to take out the idea and talk about it.

"Your family gets this too? I thought you weren't as interested in this as you were in the church. William lifted his beard nonchalantly and blew off the dust, "Anomaly, I did hear from some of the little nobles, but hysteria is much more visible at sea if it can be counted." ”

"In the past, I could see it after spending a little time at sea, but since I relied on the port of comfort once every time, it has really decreased a lot."

This is far from making the captain feel strange, and the person with a small heart is afraid that he will be forced to retreat long after the long voyage, and all the people who have been screened are rough nerves, and he is the best among them.

"Most of them are not as good as my stories, such as the noble kid who told me that his family likes anomaly, and a lecturer from your academy to help." Seeing Kraft's worried look, William pulled the subject away, trying to distract him with anecdotes as usual.

"The one from the Faculty of Letters is said to know several languages, and even before the establishment of the kingdom, he can recognize a few words, and let him bring a 'heterogeneous' antiquity back from the port, but how can there be such a thing in Wendeng Port?" For some reason, today's anecdote started off with a lot of excitement, but it worked out pretty well.

The audience with a taste that usually has to come up with a story at the bottom of the box to impress the audience was suddenly removed from the original topic.

"Oh?"

It's just that the expression on his face looks very strange.

"I gave him the idea to take the parts of the stonemason's hands, and carve a few carved lines that no one could understand as pagan symbols." The beard couldn't hide the smug smile of the little clever triumphant, and I was still very happy to think about it now.

"If you want to go back and be recognized, you will say that you have been deceived; I didn't recognize it, so I said that it was a foreign object bought from a certain crew member, but I couldn't find a match anyway. ”

He spoke with great devotion, with great emotion, and imitated the act of mysteriously taking an object out of his bosom and offering it.

"No one could tell where it came from. Haha, it's a blind carving, how can anyone have seen it? William confidently concluded, "So, most of the people in this world pretend to be ghosts, and maybe most of them are in the church." ”

"I'll just tell you about it, don't spread it."

“……”

(End of chapter)