Chapter 173

"Everyone, wake up!" Kraft caught up to Martin and shouted at the group huddled around the fire—some wildly excited, others unnaturally subdued—pulling each one who sat with head bowed and knees drawn up to their feet.

It was no longer clear whether this was natural emotional expression, a result of influence, or both. When awakened, they all showed signs of daze and scattered attention.

With urgency overriding caution, Kraft unhesitatingly deployed his family's battlefield first-aid technique: the traditional, effective method of physical stimulation to the facial peripheral nerves swiftly restored consciousness to those lost in fog—whether sobbing with grief or curled in silent despair—after just two slaps.

He grabbed the recently pulled-up retainer, raised one finger, and observed the subject's convergence reflex and tracking movement. "Did you see anything? Bright patches? Double images?"

"I think I'm seeing spots," the retainer said, lifting one hand from his face to rub his eyes—his vision seemed only mildly impaired.

"What about you? And you?" Kraft questioned each in turn. The replies were uniformly "spots," "glare," or similar—no one yet reported the fungal hallucinations, so vividly fused with the surroundings as his own.

Yet after the outbursts of intense emotion or prolonged despondency, they felt mental exhaustion, realizing they had been too immersed in their feelings, draining their energy beyond recovery.

These feelings had swelled, exaggerated, spilled over—rendering even battle-hardened veterans unable to control themselves. It wasn't just fear triggered by the extraordinary; it resembled drunkenness, letting consciousness drift unchecked.

Add to that the faint floating light patches, as if in a dream, and even speech took on a hazy, dreamlike lightness.

Barro removed his helmet, shook out his flattened hair with mild irritation, and gagged twice. "Honestly, I feel… kinda squeezed?"

He looked at the half-destroyed, spacious camp and hunched his shoulders—then abandoned the motion as his armpit armor caught.

"I know this sounds weird, but really—it feels like everything around me has been packed solid."

Several others who had just curled up nodded in agreement, confirming they felt the same—though the sensation was too strange, too abstract, to articulate clearly.

Though the surroundings were clearly empty, they felt their noses and mouths clogged, their chests constricted, as if thick matter pressed in from all sides, triggering an instinctive urge to curl up and escape the discomfort.

To an outsider, their breathing appeared normal—slightly accelerated due to subjective perception, yet actually smooth, with calm, unhindered thoracic movement.

Without a stethoscope, Kraft could only press his ear against their chests. As expected, he heard no distinct rales. He leaned toward this being a synesthetic distortion—but what exactly triggered the synesthesia remained an open question.

Thus, only experiential advice could be offered now.

"Don't fall asleep. Hold on a little longer—the sun's coming up soon."

After a moment's thought, and out of precaution—even if only for peace of mind—he added: "If—if you find yourself separated from the group, alone in some unfamiliar place—don't shout. Find cover and hide."

The first scream came in the dead of night. By the time they'd endured their brutal battle against the horrifying things and shaken themselves awake from the emotional wreckage, night had silently slipped into its coldest, darkest hour.

It wasn't bad—the chill sharpened the mind, and signaled that summer's long daylight was near.

They sat in uneasy silence for a while, until someone could no longer bear the background sound of the fungal shells endlessly scratching at the soil, and began chatting about mundane, boring aspects of ordinary life—to fight off exhaustion.

Training, food—even rarely mentioned family ties. Most here were minor branches of minor nobility, stripped of inheritance or status, sent to castles to find new paths. They saw themselves as upper-class, yet in reality differed little from commoners—worse off than some merchant families—a painfully awkward position.

Now, their mindset had subtly shifted. Topics once carefully avoided no longer felt taboo; they could be brought up as idle entertainment.

Their complaints shifted from poor food and lodging to the stingy, heartless old men who refused to give even a little more from their estates—and here, they found common ground.

The conversation quickly spread to those who had everything simply because they were born first, to the favored younger children, to unfair treatment, to what they deserved but never received.

The talk, charged with shared resentment, grew lively and energetic—and time passed swiftly.

Kup listened with keen interest, imagining how much he'd give his younger sons if he ever became "the old man"—but after careful thought, he decided he'd rather pass everything on intact, giving only a little cash.

Kraft silently timed the moments, sensing the changes. He felt no resonance with any of this.

The influence, likely mediated by fungal spores, was visibly weakening. The light patches faded; the ground no longer seemed to ripple like a velvet carpet; the nonexistent fungal spots vanished each time attention shifted away.

【Hallucination】

But it was too real—two indistinguishable layers overlapped unstably in his vision. And that "crowded" sensation, though faint, never fully dissipated.

It wasn't the narrowness that returned after severing mental senses—it was tangible, intuitively imaginable crowding. The polymorphic light patches seemed to solidify from void, compressing his breathing and movement space.

His attention, however, remained fixed on the stationary shells.

At a certain moment, they all synchronized into sluggish stillness—the taut, bone-straining bundles of mycelial muscle fibers relaxed, their solitary caps drooping to the ground.

The chatting group, startled by this familiar change, sprang to their feet, readying for another assault.

Even without mental senses, at this scale, the residual connection to the other side allowed Kraft to faintly sense something withdrawing from within the shells—their latent "vitality" plummeting sharply.

A lively, minute entity slipped into grass, roots, and all hidden mycelia, "conducting" like the neural signal animations he'd once seen.

【Conduction】

It couldn't even be called an "entity"—it was a signal on a carrier, a tiny collective existing between matter and void, faintly perceived as it detached en masse from the shells.

He even thought he saw pulsing spots on swollen roots, fungal clusters trembling faintly in shadows. Kup instinctively lifted his foot slightly, as if dodging a scurrying swarm of rabbits beneath him.

A mottled, upright shell emerged from the woods. The crossbowman strained to crank the winch, aiming warily in its direction—but it stood motionless.

As time passed, the drooping caps and arrows embedded in their chests became visible—they realized it was a shell nailed to a tree trunk, gradually revealed by the brightening light.

Above, the sky, fractured by branches and leaves, faintly glowed with a barely noticeable grayish hue—yet the forest floor would take much longer to be touched by dawn.

Dawn had come. They waited. No more shells approached from the village. It was over—at least for now. An unreal feeling lingered. Even surrounded by corpses, it felt as if waking from a nightmare back into reality.

"Rest a bit. We'll head to the village afterward to finish what's left." Kraft stood, stretched his joints, and met the frightened stares of others without flinching.

"Why not deal with them now? Go back empty-handed and wait for the rest to catch us tonight? Or do any of you think you can walk out of this forest in one night?"

The reasoning was compelling. If another terrifying night came, none here would survive. The best course was to return—to the source, the village—and while the force driving the shells had temporarily receded, smash everything it could control into rubble.

"I'll keep watch this time. Move quickly—best to depart before noon."

…

…

"Professor, you're really alright?" Before departure, Martin asked Kraft, his tone tinged with awe, noting his lack of fatigue.

"Better than you think. Did you know? If you're used to working all night, sometimes the next morning feels sharper than when you first woke up."

This wasn't bravado—he had ample experience with reversed sleep cycles—but his current state couldn't be explained by mere sleep deprivation. After the influence faded, he didn't feel bone-deep exhaustion. Instead, it felt like waking from light sleep.

The odd sensation returned to his left arm, drifting between the embedded components—returning Kraft to his usual discomfort. Subconsciously, he almost missed the previous feeling: the bodily strangeness had calmed, granting a kind of restful peace, subtly shifting his attitude.

His psychological resistance to the influence lessened. Logic told him this was wrong—but the mind's preference for comfort couldn't be overturned by denial, just as the open sensation of his mental senses couldn't be refused.

【Influence】

This too was influence: mental influence acting on the body, and bodily influence acting on the mind.

Kraft considered rolling up his sleeve to check his arm—he suddenly realized he hadn't inspected it in days. The dense stares around him made him abandon the thought.

"Let's go."

The team followed the path once more, returning to the village where the mushrooms grew lush.

This time, he stepped onto that road. The thick soles of his boots seemed nonexistent; a comfortable yet sickening softness, along with trembling, spread from the soles of his feet through his body.

Many gaps had already appeared within it, making it look imperfect, yet also seeming like an invitation for the visitor to fill in those flaws.

From the houses in all four directions came sounds of breaking and toppling; the others were dealing with the remaining shells, pouring out the fear and anger they had accumulated onto these things, while consciously or unconsciously avoiding this road and the center it led to.

Kraft ascended the stone steps with his hands clasped behind his back. Against the backdrop of a facade of broken stone bricks, a ring hung high on the archway. On either side were two unobtrusive patches of different color, where something had once hung for a long time, leaving a shadow.

"Orthodox Church?" He rested his chin on his hand, pondered for a moment, then reached out and pushed open the unlocked main door.

The structure was much the same as other churches; the straight aisle between the pews in the main hall led to the place of worship, visible from the doorway all the way to the end.

Noon sunlight filtering through the broken windows illuminated the tall, wingless ring. Below it were painted numerous ferocious demons and evil spirits being suppressed, their expressiveness far inferior to even a single scale or claw of what had been seen outside.

At the sides, where angels guarded the main symbolic emblem, the paint had been altered with colors much fresher than the background.

The figure that should have had a benevolent face had its wings behind it smeared out, replaced by a halo larger than its body. Its facial features were displaced; it possessed multiple arms and legs, with fingers and toes splayed, bent, folded, and twisted as if boneless.