"That pagan didn't take the corpse away?" The iconic ring symbol, but without wings, is apparently a corpse left behind by a pagan member.

According to Martin, it took at least one night to find the scene after they realized that something was wrong, and no matter how dull the other party was, there was no reason to leave the exposed body in place.

This is the core territory of the kingdom, the place where the nobility and the church are the strongest, who would want to turn themselves into the light and fight them? If it really has this ability, it should not be called paganism, but should be renamed Protestantism on its own.

'Diego didn't give them that chance, and that's the most right thing he's done.' Martin looked at the corpse in the box, the sword wound in the chest of the corpse to be exact, "This is the most important of them all, and Diego is the only one with a sword facing him in a field of cowardly corpses facing back." ”

"I wonder why, when a man without a weapon can scare off a soldier with a weapon, why my friend had to kill him."

He half-knelt down, his hand, which was not very flexible due to the armor, deliberately avoided the wound, tugging at the cloth soaked red and black and dry, and it took several attempts to tear the clothes on the corpse's chest and make the wound more visible, "So I found this." Even though I didn't study in medical school, I knew it wasn't quite right. ”

Kraft crouched down beside him, pulled out his mask and gloves, and looked at the fatal wound.

From the outside, the entrance to the wound is not large, it is a horizontal opening with a regular edge, about a finger long, parallel to the ribs, and opened in the fourth intercostal space near the sternum on the left chest.

It must have been an exaggerated scene, a large amount of blood pumped out of the still contracted heart, the blood volume fell off a cliff, and the free fluid spurted out of the wound, or accumulated in the pericardial cavity and chest cavity, and he lost consciousness in a matter of seconds.

This is not surprising, it is worth noting the white substance on the wound. There weren't many of them, but they attracted attention as a special heterochromatic color in a patch of red and black, and at first glance I thought they should be dirt accidentally picked up during transportation, but it was hard to think of anything like this.

It resembles the silk threads of spider webs in corners that no one knows about, but they are denser and hazy, with inexplicable regularities in irregularities, like a certain plant growing haphazardly on the land.

And this intertwined white filament just exists in the center of the wound, from dense to sparse, and the shape does not conform to the appearance of the outside world, but is more like ...... Inside-out?

Kraft pressed the edge of the coffin and looked closely at the strange strands, which were indeed not floating on the surface, but were deeply embedded in the cut of the wound, clinging to the chest wall tissue and forming in many places, so thin that they hung in a veil on the attachment.

These strange things filled the wound like physical smoke, blocking the view behind the wire mesh.

"The sword was still in the wound when you found him?" Kraft tried to separate the wound with his hands, but he was reluctant to give up his gloves, so he had to break off a stalk of grass and place it on the periphery of the wire mesh and rotate slowly, the white strands of silk were as fragile as they looked, and had a certain stickiness, which could be easily rolled up.

The blade can easily shatter this gentle structure, which only appears after it has been packed and boxed.

"When I pulled the sword out, there was still some of it on the sword, and there must be more in it." Martin shook his hand in disgust, shaking off the invisible repulsion and discomfort, he always felt that something would crawl up his body like a worm in contact and burrow into the cracks in his armor.

"It's growing."

"Yes, I don't remember that much when we threw him in the box." Even for a man accustomed to life and death, the situation was too terrible, like a plant that used the human body as soil, and Martin couldn't imagine what it would be like to have something alive take root in the body.

"Have you ever seen anything like this? What disease, or curse, or whatever? ”

"I don't think so." Kraft replied hesitantly.

【Yes】

A voice gives the opposite answer in the mind, it has no origin, it cannot be caught by consciousness, and like other ideas that come from the pile of information, it is fleeting, and there is no way to trace cause and effect.

"What about the others?"

"All dead, including the infidels, without the slightest fatal wound on their bodies, in the other boxes." Martin got up and walked over to the other boxes and pried open the lids one by one, revealing the sleeping corpses inside, his face still frozen in a contradictory look of hope and pain and discomfort.

He lowered his voice and whispered alongside Kraft, "Only these heretics I can deal with." No offense, I often hear that there are ways to look inside the body of the deceased in medical schools? ”

"What about the others? I mean, with Diego. Kraft did not deny Martin's explicit statement, "It's all the same?" ”

"It's all the same, a shameful death, with your back to the enemy, but unfortunately you didn't escape far, and you died worthless." Disdain and ridicule of those who have escaped are heard, both intentions deliberately reinforced to disguise the hidden fears that lie beneath them.

He was vaguely aware that Diego had encountered something that could demoralize the entire team, and that the protection of common sense was nothing, and even the armor could not make him feel safe in front of this long-dead body, after all, there was still "some" alive in it.

"All?"

"There are still a few people who haven't been found after the check, including one of Diego's henchmen, who may have fled when they were attacked, or died somewhere we don't know." Martin is also helpless about this, with the environmental characteristics of the Westminster region, a large area of woods and green sea is the norm, it is not difficult to follow the team's tracks, but to blindly search the entire area, it is difficult for strong people.

Standing among the corpses with a strange look, Kraft pondered for a moment.

It does take a little bit of further corroboration to grasp the slippery inspiration and transform it from an amorphous thing into a logical, solidified message.

As for the reasons, you can find a bunch of reasons, such as what is already involved, the need for project support, and the fact that you are in a circle. But that couldn't hide the thought that had been stirring up in his mind, and he really wanted to know what was going on.

There's a connection, like the slight sweetness of chewing a grain of rice that spreads out, and one can't help but go on, seeking that feeling of being parted with and grasping it in your hands.

"Find a convenient place to deal with it, go to the workshop and find my servant, he knows where my tools are." Squatting down beside a pagan corpse, he examined the featureless face of an ordinary peasant farmer, "It's a pity that this set of tools can't be used on living people in the future." ”

"You'll have a better set soon." Martin promised, picking one lucky one from the restless soldiers, leaving the eerie courtyard to retrieve the kit.

Very Westminist-style solution, Kraft nodded in satisfaction, and pulled out a flat strip of flat wood with round ends at both ends from his breast pocket, which he had just picked up from the workshop yesterday.

"I'll take a look here."

Skillfully skewer the wooden strip into the mouth, pry open the teeth and press down the tongue, and look at the inside with the sunlight above the head. The easiest way to cause Martin to describe the situation is to inhale what is lethal, starting with the nose and mouth.

There was a feeling of pressure under the tongue depressor, something membranous or sticky between the tongue and the strip of wood, almost making him think that the tongue muscles were still twitching and about to slip away from his hand, or that they were coated with a layer of secretion.

As the sunlight shone in, Kraft saw what was in his way, a "tongue coating", a cloudy white tongue coating, covering most of the tongue. There are also white attachments on the palate and cheeks that spread like a blanket.

The thick white color derives from the deep seclusion that is difficult for light to reach, and crosses the palatopharyngeal arch, turning the uvula into a rotten fruit-like shape with branches and leaves, doubling the thickness on the posterior pharyngeal wall, and diffusing from the velvet diphtheria duct that is faintly visible with small bumps like mushrooms.

Kraft discarded the wood chips and pulled out a new one to pry open the mouth of another cultist, and the sight inside showed that this was not an isolated case.

"Where the hell did you find them?"

"A wood, too dense to get lost after a few steps." Martin's probe appeared to block the light source, and only a slightly swollen outline was visible in the mouth.

"Is there anything special about it?"

"Well, if you have to say, there's a lot of mushrooms out there." He made a gesture of "big", but felt that it was not enough, so he simply opened his arms to describe the amount that was difficult to accommodate, "Although there have always been a lot of mushrooms here, but there are so many that I have never seen them before, and they seem to be everywhere." ”

"Mushrooms?" Perhaps the mind was overly active in assembling possibilities, and a line so ridiculous that he wanted to expel it from his mind at once was lined up.

The strange spherical lesions in the duke's lungs, which occupy most of the cavity of the tuberculosis and leave only a crescent-shaped narrow space, put aside all kinds of unexplained symptoms and signs, really fit well with a standard imaging presentation of tuberculosis complications.

【Aspergillus】

And the "white blanket" that spread in the pagan airways reminded him of the less common manifestations of oral infections, only to be magnified countless times, to the extent that it was not easy to connect.

【Candida】

"And mushrooms...... Westminster is full of mushrooms? "The climate here is so suitable for them to thrive, there are basically no places where they can't reach, they can freely go in and out of every corner of the natural and human environment, and they can also walk to the table with dignity.

The tiny filaments that are intertwined like a net, like a tulle, clinging to the airways and meninges, weave an irrational connection.

Unreasonable inspiration and inspiration emerged, briefly breaking the thinking box of knowledge construction, and arbitrarily presenting a finished logical chain, and the irrational consciousness recognized its rationality.

"Fungus? What kind of fungus is this? ”

(End of chapter)