Chapter 102: Anecdotes

“Face? Oh, you mean those things Old Gory painted.” The sturdy woman effortlessly swung her pickaxe, tossed her water bag into the basket on her back, and led them up the slope without a hint of breathlessness.

She showed no reluctance discussing the painting on the rock by the village entrance, even seemed casual about it—almost making Kraft doubt whether his judgment last night had been right: “Since then, he’s become a different person, muttering all day about how they’ll come back, then just painting, dragging people into the caves.”

“But you mustn’t tell anyone else about him—or those paintings. Some folks actually believe that nonsense and won’t listen to reason.”

She wiped sweat from her brow with a thick hand; the salty fluid seeped into dead calluses, dampening the red, raw patches caused by ill-fitting tools.

Even here, where women also bore heavy labor, few were as hands-on as their landlady, swinging the pickaxe herself; yet several such examples existed in the village, while men were fewer than in similarly sized villages before—some faces barely rid of childhood were no older than Yin Feng, or else elderly, too frail to work.

“After that?”

“When the old cave collapsed, Old Gory lost his son.” She dried her palms on her sleeve, opening up the old wound as casually as she would treat cracked skin: “Higher up, you can see it now. To mine any ore today, you have to climb to the summit.”

It sounded like a mining accident—not surprising. Kraft hadn’t heard of similar events in other villages; under the tradition of relying solely on natural caves, the solidity of rock bred false security, or rather, no awareness of prevention at all—they mined blindly, until one sudden, unforeseen collapse buried nearly all able-bodied laborers underground.

That son of Old Gory—husband and father to several families, including her own husband.

The return path led them past the two-meter-high entrance, dark and deep, indistinguishable from the other mine shafts along the way. The collapse must have occurred far deeper, in the eternal darkness beneath the earth, a random flaw in the rock strata that, under repeated hammer blows, suddenly gave way—like an esophagus spasming reflexively after being scratched at an ulcer, unintentionally sealing the intruding vermin inside the mountain.

This suggested that mining within “safe” caves was merely a small accident on a natural scale—that the mountain’s rock could close its jaws at any moment, without warning, without reason.

It happened too suddenly, too deep—for the village at the foot to even realize it had occurred, until evening came and none of the workers returned. Armed with torches and terror, they faced the jagged, interlocking rubble like gnashing teeth—the barrier of collapsed rock thicker than the original layer, blocking them from what lay beyond—the mine had permanently taken some of them.

“That outsider and his attendant died in there too.” She picked up a round stone from the ground and placed it atop the crooked pile of rocks marking the entrance—a makeshift tombstone, the only marker left to tell that it had swallowed half the village and two outsiders.

Something seemed off here. Kraft glanced at Yin Feng, tugged her arm, and helped her scramble over the yellowish boulder blocking the path. The girl, busy keeping up, clearly hadn’t registered who “the outsider and his attendant” referred to. This path was too taxing for Yin Feng—if not for her insistence, perhaps letting Kup stay behind in the village would’ve been wiser.

Though she’d been severely frightened last night, Yin Feng flatly refused the suggestion—whether from stubborn pride or resentment toward the idea of leaving Kup behind, it was hard to say.

The subtle tension between the two was hard to miss. Though mostly one-sided competition from Yin Feng, Kup could never view a little girl as a fellow competitor on the same track—yet this attitude only seemed to fuel her resentment further.

Kraft kept part of his attention on her at all times. Caring for a child’s psyche mattered, but if her body faltered, he’d need to find a sailor to take her down.

If he wasn’t mistaken, there was at least one exception: her father—the alchemist’s attendant—hadn’t died in the collapse. He hadn’t even stayed in the village; he fled without pause, returning to Comfort Harbor, where he spent years in illness.

He escaped—but never fully shed the malice of the southern hills. The choking dust clung to him like a shadow; even at his final breath, his lungs exhaled the bloody, gritty stench of rock dust grinding against inflamed tissue.

The round, silent shadow that refused to dissolve in morning light—its temporary stillness, the cool breath of the underground drifting out, brushing against their thin daytime garments—sent a chill through Kraft even by his own standards, a sensation like a stranger’s whisper against his ear, urging him to hurry past uneasily: “What’s it like inside now?”

“Blocked halfway. Nothing there.”

They didn’t linger at the entrance, continuing their climb toward the summit.

The path had little vegetation, few handholds; they had to grip the sharp edges of protruding rocks, some nearly blade-like, rasping their palms like dull saws. Strangely, no one complained—like silent creatures avoiding a bloated, coiled serpent, unwilling to rouse the long, embedded body slumbering within the mountain.

The dusty trail wound back and forth up the slope; the seemingly modest elevation took several times longer than expected, frequent turns disorienting their sense of direction—only occasionally did they glance up and see the summit drawing nearer, the old mine and its tragedy left behind.

Near the top, the path leveled out, circling half the summit toward the mountain’s shaded side. The sun, not yet at its height, couldn’t reach this flank; most of it remained in the dim, transitional light between dawn and day. Long, slender shadows stretched from the rocks, hiding the so-called new mine until they stood right before it.

Another two-meter-high entrance.

Kraft heard the sailors behind him stir; they halted and turned to look back. With the terrain’s shifts and rock obstructions, the winding path they’d climbed was now invisible. Yet a nearly identical scene replayed before them: after crossing a stretch of loose stones, they stood before another deep, two-meter-high cave.

It wasn’t the old mine—but its size matched perfectly. The only difference: no pile of stones at the entrance, as if they’d circled back to the same spot.

The sturdy middle-aged woman pulled a torch from her basket, lit it from the smoldering ash heap at the entrance; the flame pushed back a corner of darkness: “Here it is. You want to go down?”

“Let’s rest a bit first. Thank you for showing us the way.” Kraft declined, pulling William aside: “By the way—where can we find Old Gory? I know two friends who collect odd things. They might be interested in his paintings.”

“By the well. I don’t see him often. You can look for yourselves—or ask those who believe his nonsense.” Though she had little regard for the self-taught abstract trauma artist, she answered readily enough—for the sake of their lodging fee—and strode into the cave alone, her torchlight vanishing completely into darkness.

“Aren’t you going down?”

“Wait a moment, William. Something feels wrong.” Kraft raised a hand to block his gaze toward the entrance. Since last night’s path, the nature of things had changed.

A sense of unease was brewing: first the mules stumbling, then Kup seeming to encounter something, then that uniquely styled painting—the coiled thing, the face-like pattern on it…

【Connection】

There must be a connection here. He didn’t need prompting to sense their strangeness—only needed to untangle and articulate it, which required a logical breakthrough: “Let’s find Old Gory first. I need to know what he painted.”

“Does this have anything to do with our mission? Superstitious nonsense is everywhere in remote villages—nothing special.”

“This is different. Have you heard of Heterology? My family has studied it.” Kraft lowered his voice to William alone: “Kup said last night the face in the painting felt familiar. You saw how odd he was on the mountain.”

Considering the captain was half a pragmatist, he wouldn’t necessarily reject the possibility of non-church supernatural phenomena—now was the time to voice his thoughts without causing panic.

“Your family studies this too? I thought you were as disinterested in this as you are in the Church.” William brushed his beard, blowing off dust with indifference. “Heterology? I heard a minor noble mention it once—but if hysteria counts, you see plenty of it at sea.”

“Used to be common on long voyages, but since every trip now stops at Comfort Harbor, it’s become rare.”

This alone wouldn’t strike the captain as odd. Those with fragile nerves had long since been weeded out by the voyage’s grind; those left were all thick-skinned, and he was among the thickest.

“Most of it’s worse than my stories. Like that noble kid who told me his family loved Heterology—and one of your academy’s lecturers helped him.” Seeing Kraft’s worry, William shifted topics, trying as usual to distract him with anecdotes.

“A Wenxue Academy man—he claimed to read several ancient scripts, even recognized a few words from before the Kingdom’s founding. So they asked him to bring back a ‘Heterological’ relic from the port. But where in Wenden Harbor would such a thing exist?” For some reason, today’s anecdote started dull—but the effect was surprisingly strong.

The usually hard-to-please audience, who normally required his deepest stories to be moved, was instantly diverted from the original topic.

“Oh?”

His expression looked strangely odd.

“I gave him an idea: use a stonecutter’s practice piece, carve some lines no one could understand as a pagan symbol.” The grin beneath his beard betrayed smug satisfaction—this still made him laugh now.

“If anyone recognized it, say you were tricked. If no one did, say you bought it from a sailor as a foreign artifact—no one could prove otherwise.”

He told it with full passion, even miming the dramatic gesture of pulling the object from his chest and presenting it.

“Turns out no one had any idea where it came from. Ha! Just random carving—how could anyone have seen it before?” William concluded with full confidence: “So you see, most charlatans in this world are just like that. Probably half the Church is too.”

“I’m only telling you this—don’t spread it around.”

“…”