Chapter 150: The Airway and Mushrooms

"That cult didn't take the body away?" The corpse clearly belonged to a cult member, marked by a highly distinctive ring symbol but lacking the double wings.

According to Martin, at least a night passed before they realized something was wrong and found the scene. Even if the enemy was as dull as they were, there was no reason to leave a corpse exposing their identity behind.

This is the kingdom's core territory, the place where noble and church power is strongest. Who would want to throw themselves into the open to oppose them? If they truly had that capability, they wouldn't be called a cult; they should have established their own sect and renamed themselves the New Church.

"Diego didn't give them that chance; that was the most correct thing he ever did." Martin looked at the corpse in the box, or rather, at the sword wound on its chest. "This was the most important one among them. Amidst a pile of cowardly corpses facing away, Diego was the only one who faced his sword toward him."

"I want to know why a man without weapons could scare off soldiers holding weapons, and why my friend had to kill him."

He knelt halfway, his hands stiffened by armor deliberately avoiding the wound, and tugged at the fabric soaked and dried with red-black blood. After several tries, he tore open the clothes on the corpse's chest to expose the wound more clearly. "So I found this. Although I didn't study in the medical school, I know this isn't right."

Kraft squatted beside him, took out a mask and gloves, and looked at the fatal wound.

From the outside, the entry wound wasn't large; it was a regular-edged, horizontal slit about a finger's length, parallel to the ribs, located at the fourth intercostal space near the sternum on the left chest. Unless something unexpected happened, it was literally a broken heart, with massive blood loss.

The scene must have been grotesque. A large volume of blood pumped from the still-contracting heart, causing blood volume to plummet. These liberated fluids sprayed from the wound or accumulated in the pericardial and thoracic cavities. Within seconds, he lost consciousness.

This was not surprising; what was noteworthy was the white substance on the wound. It wasn't much, just a peculiar discoloration standing out against the red and black, catching the eye. At first glance, one might think it was dust accidentally picked up during transport, but it was hard to imagine anything so thin and mist-like.

It resembled spider silk in some unknown corner, but denser and more hazy, carrying an inexplicable regularity within its irregularity, like some plant growing randomly on the earth.

And this interwoven white filamentous matter existed centered exactly on the wound, dense to sparse. Its form didn't match something stuck on from the outside; rather, it looked more like... growing from the inside out?

Kraft pressed on the edge of the coffin, leaning in to observe those strange threads. They were indeed not floating on the surface but deeply embedded within the cut surface of the wound, forming while adhering to the chest wall tissue. In many places, they were so fine they hung like thin gauze on the attached matter.

These strange things were like solidified smoke filling the wound, blocking the view behind the web.

"Was the sword still stuck in the wound when you found him?" Kraft wanted to pry the wound open with his hands but couldn't bear to ruin his gloves, so he broke a grass stem, placed it outside the web, and slowly rotated it. The white threads, appearing as fragile as they felt, were easily coiled up due to their stickiness.

Pulling the blade out would have easily shattered such a delicate structure; this must have happened after the body was cleaned and boxed.

"When the sword was pulled out, some of it still clung to the blade; there must be more inside." Martin shook his hand in disgust, flicking away an invisible repulsion and discomfort. He always felt that something would crawl onto his body like insects during contact, burrowing into the gaps of his armor.

"It is growing."

"Yes, when we threw him into the box, I remember there wasn't this much." Even for someone accustomed to life and death, this situation was too terrifying. It was like using the human body as soil for a plant. Martin couldn't imagine what it felt like to have something alive taking root and sprouting inside one's body.

"Have you seen this before? Some disease, or a curse?"

"Seems not." Kraft answered hesitantly.

【Yes】

A certain voice in his heart gave the opposite answer. It had no source and could not be grasped by consciousness. Like other inspirations formed by combining and colliding within a pile of information, it flashed and vanished, leaving no cause or effect to pursue.

"What about the others?"

"All dead, including those cultists, with not a single fatal wound on them, in the other boxes." Martin stood up, walked to the other boxes, and pried open the lids one by one, displaying the corpses inside that looked as if they were sleeping. Their faces were frozen with a contradictory expression of consistent hope and painful discomfort.

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He lowered his voice and whispered to Martin, standing side by side: "I can only dispose of these cultists. No offense intended, but I often hear there are methods in the medical school to examine the inside of a dead body?"

"What about the others? I mean those who went with Diego." Martin's hint was not denied by Kraft. "Are they all the same?"

"All the same. A shameful death, facing away from the enemy. Pity they didn't escape far; they died without value." One could hear contempt and mockery of those who fled the battlefield, these two intentions deliberately strengthened to mask the hidden fear beneath.

He could vaguely sense that Diego had encountered something capable of crushing the morale of an entire squad, rendering common-sense protection useless. Even with full armor, he couldn't feel safe before this corpse that had been dead for a long time, after all, there was still "part" of something alive inside.

"All of them?"

"After verification, a few people are still missing, including one of Diego's squires. Perhaps they fled during the attack, or died in a place we don't know about." Martin was also helpless about this. Given the environmental characteristics of the Westminster area, vast forests and green seas were the norm. Tracking along the squad's path wasn't difficult, but blindly searching the entire region was asking too much.

Standing among the corpses frozen with strange expressions, Kraft pondered for a while.

Indeed, a little further corroboration was needed to catch the slippery inspiration, transforming it from something formless into logical, solidified information.

As for reasons, one could find piles of them, such as being already involved, project support needs, or infiltrating the circle. But none of these could mask a thought that had been stirring restlessly in his heart; he truly wanted to know what was happening.

There existed a connection, like the faint sweetness of chewing rice grains spreading out, making one unable to stop, seeking that elusive feeling and trying to grab it.

"Find a convenient place to handle this, go to the workshop and find my squire; he knows where I put my tools." Squatting beside a cultist's corpse, he examined the ordinary farmer's face, which had no distinctive features. "Pity these tools won't be usable on living people anymore."

"You will soon have a better set." Martin promised, picking a lucky one from the soldiers who looked uneasy, and leaving the eerie courtyard to fetch the tool kit.

A very Westminster-style solution. Kraft nodded in satisfaction, pulling a flat wooden strip with rounded ends from his breast pocket; he had just snatched it from the workshop yesterday.

"I'll take a look here first."

Skillfully inserting the wooden strip into the mouth, prying open the jaw and pressing down the tongue, he observed the interior under the overhead sunlight. The most convenient way to cause the situation Martin described was inhaling something lethal, so one could start checking from the mouth and nose.

Under the tongue depressor, he felt an awkward pressure, as if some membranous or sticky substance lay between the tongue surface and the wooden strip. It almost made him feel the tongue muscle, still twitching, was slipping from his hand, or that a layer of secretion had been coated inside.

As sunlight shone in, Kraft saw what was obstructing him: a layer of "tongue coating," a turbid white coating covering most of the tongue surface. The palate and both cheeks also had white attachments spreading like a carpet.

The heavy white extended into the deep, dark places where light struggled to reach, crossing the palatoglossal arch, turning the uvula into the shape of a rotten fruit with branches and leaves, doubling in density on the posterior pharyngeal wall, and overflowing from the velvety white throat tube where mushroom-like small bumps were vaguely visible all over.

Kraft discarded the wooden piece, pulled out a new one, and pried open another cultist's mouth. The scene inside showed this was not an isolated case.

"Where exactly did you find them?"

"A forest, so dense you could get lost in a few steps." Martin leaned in to look, blocking the light source, revealing only slightly swollen contours inside the oral cavity.

"Is there anything special about it?"

"Uh, if you must say, there were a lot of mushrooms there." He made a "big" gesture, then felt it wasn't enough, so he simply spread his arms to describe the unimaginable quantity. "Although mushrooms have always been plentiful here, I've never seen them in such numbers; they seemed to be everywhere."

"Mushrooms?" Perhaps his mind was too active in combining various possibilities, arranging a line of thought so absurd he wanted to immediately expel it from his brain.

The strange spherical lesion occupying most of the Duke's pulmonary tubercular cavity, leaving only a narrow crescent-shaped space, setting aside various unexplainable symptoms and signs, really matched the imaging presentation of a standard tuberculosis complication very closely.

【Aspergillus】

And the "white carpet" spreading through the cultists' airways reminded him of a less common oral infection manifestation, only magnified countless times to a degree where it was hard to connect.

【Candida】

"And mushrooms... are there fungi everywhere in Westminster?" The climate here was truly too suitable for their reproduction. Lawns, forests, even stone cracks; basically, there was nowhere they couldn't reach. They could freely enter and exit every corner of nature and the human environment, and even walk onto the dining table with impunity.

Those interwoven threads, like a net or thin gauze, clinging to the airways and meninges, wove together an unreasonable connection.

Irrational inspirations and revelations surged forth, briefly breaking the mental frameworks built by knowledge, and rudely presenting a finished logical chain. Consciousness, defying reason, acknowledged its rationality.

"Fungi? What kind of fungi is this?"