Chapter 78: Eye of Wisdom (3)
“……”
I didn’t say anything more. After pondering for a bit, I jumped off the roof, with Sword Demon Miss hot on my heels.
We landed on the not-so-spacious street in front of the small church. I turned my head and spotted a twisted corpse not far from me, so I headed over.
“They were burned alive.”
Hearing Sword Demon Miss’s faint voice, I frowned and nodded slightly. “I know.”
“But it wasn’t directly by fire. If it were fire, they’d look a lot worse.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Are they from the Church?”
“…Maybe. Who knows?”
I shrugged, suppressing the strange emotions bubbling in my heart. I approached the nearby corpse and bent down a little to take a closer look.
…This seems like a female corpse.
Judging the exact gender is difficult from the shriveled, charred skin and the horrifyingly twisted face. However, the blackened, wrinkled, vaguely raised area on her chest suggested she wasn’t sporting a man’s chest.
Unless it was a very fat man.
This corpse’s back was facing the church door, her face turned towards the end of the street, maintaining a posture as if she was about to flee. But her back foot was stubbornly stuck to the dirty, moss-covered stone slab beneath her, one hand reaching out, as if trying to grab something. In this awkward, stumbling pose, she had been dead for who-knows-how-long and still hadn’t fallen over.
I stood a couple of steps away from the corpse, squinting at her face—half of it shrouded in shadow from the wall behind her. Under the dim yellow light, only one dark, hollow eye socket was visible. Below the hollow eye socket, her nose was flat, the nostrils burned and glued shut. Her mouth was crooked and gaping, lacking lips, revealing a set of yellowed teeth, some of which had already fallen out. Her hair had been burned away completely, leaving her head bald, giving the impression of a skull wrapped in a layer of dry tree bark. With a twisted, grotesque face, you could tell she must have been extremely terrified and panicked in her last moment.
Of course, her clothes had long been burned to a crisp. I couldn’t figure out if she was a civilian or clergy members that used to be stationed here—though the likelihood of her being clergy was higher.
The ones who died here…
Those lying on the ground or still maintaining their stiff posture were likely like this too.
Sword Demon Miss was right…
At a glance, these corpses clearly perished from high temperatures, their bodily fluids evaporated in what must have been a very short time, but they weren’t burned in flames like this.
I had seen plenty of people who died by fire; their bodies resembled charcoal, crumbling at a mere touch. Many burnt areas reveal blackened bones, it was impossible for them to retain skin this intact, let alone maintain such a bizarre standing position. Their limbs ought to have been more twisted.
If the flames had been any stronger, maybe they wouldn’t have even looked human… and there were no signs of fire left! Besides, how long has it been? Most of the dead bodies around here still looked whole…
…Yet.
Even though I didn’t want to get closer to her, from two steps away, I still caught a whiff of that unique, metallic scent of Sin Fire emanating from the corpse.
Maybe it was because of how long it had been, but the smell was faint, so faint that even Sword Demon Miss seemed not to notice. But I was particularly sensitive to it, and the moment I got closer, I felt it.
This time…
It wasn’t an illusion.
“Hey.”
Even without eyeballs, the corpse’s eerie face and those hollow eyes seemed to bore into me, making me feel uncomfortable. I didn’t want to keep looking; I couldn’t discern anything more anyway, so I turned back to the female swordsman and asked, “Can you figure out their time of d*ath?”
“……”
Sword Demon Miss fell silent and took a step forward.
Next, she went to examine the corpse…
Ah.
Did that guy just slap me with a ghostly hand?
Uh…
I felt a bit speechless and instinctively took half a step back, glancing at the part of my sleeve that had just been touched… Hmm, good. No disgusting corpse oils or any bizarre sticky stuff.
“…I can’t smell anything.”
Unaware of my current emotions, Sword Demon Miss mumbled after a superficial examination of the corpse, “The body… has some stinky, bizarre odor.”
“Bizarre odor?”
“Yeah.”
Isn’t the smell of a corpse already bizarre…?
“But these bodies died earlier… I think.”
Sword Demon Miss continued, not waiting for my question, “Just a hunch.”
After saying that, she gazed towards the small church. “The disaster started from there. Those closer to it were directly hit by the high temperatures and ended up like this. The ones further away, like us, fell into an illusion and died slowly.”
“Oh?”
I raised an eyebrow in surprise at her.
This shorty seems to have her moments of brilliance.
Well…
That’s probably how it went.
“So do you think those knights are still stuck in the mirage, dreaming away, or like us, have already escaped the illusion and realized this chilling, horrible truth about the Silent Fortress?”
Sword Demon Miss pondered for a moment and slowly shook her head. “Not sure.”
She then looked at me, seemingly hoping to extract an answer from me.
I didn’t respond.
I just paused to refocus my gaze on the church’s entrance, ignoring the slightly creepy corpses around, and stepped forward. “Let’s go.”
“Once we’re in the church, if they’re still alive… we could save some lives.”
“…Yeah.”
Sword Demon Miss followed behind, agreeing.
As we approached the fan-shaped steps of the small church, many parts had already crumbled apart. Green moss was spreading between the cracks of the stone steps, all the way into the shadowy depths of the doorway.
Near the entrance, several corpses in golden armor—which had probably once been shiny bright but were now dulled, yellowed, and blackened by heat and time—were twisted and grotesque, some blackened, solidified liquid oozing from the moss-covered armor.
We quickly passed by those dried-out figures in armor, both slumped and upright, and arrived in front of the small church. After a brief moment, we stopped.
Through the broken stained-glass windows, faint light filtered in, allowing us to vaguely see the church hall’s layout.
The long extinguished candles lay askew, the benches were collapsed, and the once-massive chandelier had long since fallen, shattered in the center of the hall, littering the floor with shiny metal fragments.
Just ahead, through the dim light, I could faintly see a golden cross hanging from the pulpit tilted at an angle. The donation box was toppled over—one corpse lay sprawled across it, dried up and contorted, its horrid, strange face directly facing the entrance, mouth agape as if it had tried its best to scream before dying, its darkened eye sockets staring right at us as we entered the hall.
Combined with the surrounding dark environment, the scene was indeed a bit eerie.
“Whoa…”
I couldn’t help but take a deep breath.
Small scene… small scene…
How could I possibly be afraid of a dead body now?
Ha!
What a joke…
“Why did you stop?”
Sword Demon Miss, sensing my hesitation, urged me from behind, sounding puzzled.
“Cough cough.”
I cleared my throat and said without turning, “We don’t know what’s inside, better be cautious.”
Then, steeling myself, I took two deep breaths and stepped in.
It felt like stepping into another world; as soon as I entered the hall, the light around us abruptly vanished into darkness.
