Chapter 174

This grotesque, malformed thing had long since abandoned human form; one could only identify it as an angel by its positioning, the fresh, gleaming paint on its skin, and the large, radiant white halo behind it.

Numerous arms and limbs, painted on the same flat plane, overlapped and intertwined, making them impossible to count at a glance. The brushwork was sharply defined, layered clearly, even lending a hint of perspective and volume—its realism rivaled the great works in grand cathedrals, revealing the artist's immense investment in composition and detail.

Of course, the greater expense likely lay in the seemingly unremarkable sky background.

The clear, pure indigo blue was stunning, likely derived from some expensive mineral pigment; even with his insensitivity to both money and art, he knew such materials were terrifyingly costly—equivalent to painting the wall with gold dust.

In this seemingly humble chapel, even though most of the altar's rear surface was occupied by the "figures," the remaining empty area was still substantial—yet they had wasted paint so lavishly. Kraft now understood where their stolen money had gone.

Yet the limbs in this painting were malformed, twisted like a child's drawing—softly curved, lacking joint definition, uneven in length. Palms and wrists, ankles and feet showed no distinction; slender fingers and toes spread out separately, some even sprouting from the upper midsections of the limbs.

There were precedents for depicting divine power through multiple limbs, but this rendition had surpassed innovation and entered the realm of abstraction.

It was clear the artist had not painted randomly—his brushstrokes were even and disciplined—but the result resembled the work of someone who had never seen a human, striving with skill to depict something, yet ultimately failing due to a lack of clear, coherent mental imagery.

"Professor, I see you're here."

The clanking of armor approached; Ma Ding shook off fungal fragments from his blade, sheathed his sword, and behind him lay a trail of severed parasitic husks.

"To be honest, sometimes I wonder—do you even have anything you fear? Is this perhaps the advantage knowledge brings?"

"Correct. When one knows nothing of the world, fear comes easily." Kraft picked up a broken brick and hurled it into the hall; it rolled all the way to the pulpit's base, shaking loose a cloud of dust.

There was a hint of the scholar's typical arrogance in his words—Martin was slightly startled, as he rarely saw this in Kraft, even though Kraft certainly had the right to it.

"But greater knowledge also breeds fear—indeed, the more one knows, the more one fears, and this fear demands deeper understanding to fill the void." He took another step, crossing the chapel's threshold; Ku Pu hurried to follow.

"Yet both kinds of fear share the same root: the unknown. The unknown does not diminish with greater knowledge; rather, it expands as the boundaries of understanding widen. Perhaps they are one and the same, constantly transforming into each other."

"I'm sorry—I don't quite understand?" Martin stood frozen, only realizing after they had moved some distance; he gritted his teeth and rushed after them.

Perhaps due to the lack of nutrients for growth, despite the grotesque beauty outside, the chapel's interior remained relatively clean, with only the backs of the pews adorned with cloud-patterned fungal growths.

Martin kept watch on all sides, catching up to Kraft before the pulpit, finally looking up at the mural he had barely noticed at the entrance—the twisted "angel" made him frown involuntarily.

Aside from these angels and the wingless rings, the interior fully conformed to the standard layout of a church, even surpassing it in investment.

Logically, in an isolated environment like this, there was no need to endure such pretense; they could have designed and decorated freely, and they certainly had the financial means—but they still copied the conventional form.

"Are they serious?"

The brainwashing had reached the point where they believed it themselves—now they saw themselves as the "true church."

A holy scripture lay neatly on the pulpit, its thick leather pages Jiazhe a dried leaf bookmark. Kraft, wearing gloves, fumbled through several pages before finding the right one; he barely lifted a corner and found the pages stuck together.

With some effort, he slowly pried them apart—it was dried fungal patches that had eaten through the pages and the standard hand-copied script. The upper portion of the page had already become fungal nourishment; the remaining strokes, in Kraft's view, still bore a dignified, forceful form.

The script was legible, revealing this passage described the chosen saint.

Unfortunately, Kraft could not tell if anything was amiss—he only knew it was another story of a divinely chosen individual granted miraculous powers after being preselected.

He tried reading a bit further, but only half the ending remained: it told how the saint, blessed with unobstructed vision, correctly guessed six items hidden by an unbelieving lord in a sealed box, humiliating him publicly and causing him to renege on his promise and detain the saint.

The saint then confessed to the Lord, admitting he had misused divine power to satisfy his own vanity, and thus found himself in this predicament. His sincere repentance earned the Father's forgiveness, who reached down and lifted him back to the heavenly realm.

The next day, the jailers opened the Cengceng guarded prison cell—but the saint was gone.

The moral: divine power must never be flaunted, or disaster will surely follow.

"Highly didactic—very much in line with my impression of holy scriptures. Probably authentic," Kraft remarked as he peeled back the next page. "But this… really gives me some unpleasant associations."

"How many escape-from-a-secret-chamber miracles are there in the scriptures?"

Naturally, no answer came—none of the three knew anything about theology.

The next page was lifted; Kraft could guess this was the moment of awe, likely followed by the lord's regret and punishment.

But he saw no ending—the back of the page was stuck with a heavily fungus-rotted insert. The writing was not the neat script of the scripture, but a fine quill's personal notes.

"What is this?" He dared not pull it off, carefully using the leaf bookmark to nudge away the unhardened fungal patches, studying the faintly blurred characters.

One edge of the paper was jagged—likely torn from elsewhere. The paper was brittle and yellowed, far older than the scripture's leather pages. Most of the handwriting differed from the rest—fluid, expressive.

The latter half reverted to the rigid, unconnected script of a missionary's copy.

Though many sections were obscured, several high-frequency words remained, preserved by repetition: at least three mentions of "angel," "kingdom," and the most heavily emphasized term: "guidance."

Below, a large block of short words was arranged in vertical columns. Kraft read a few and recognized them as common names.

Names of rural peasants or petty townsfolk—simple, easy to remember—written on this paper with the solemnity of a memorial, now being slowly devoured by mold, swallowed by fungal fuzz.

Behind the many names, a faint symbol was nearly entirely obscured—luckily, Kraft's acute sensitivity to certain shapes allowed him to spot it on the ruined paper, not mistaking it for stain or mold discoloration. It was a symmetrical mark, derived from the human form: a smiling…

【cervical vertebra】