Chapter 225

The next day, Kraft spent half the day in the clinic with Dai Wei, as agreed, enduring intense labor.

This was a task requiring prolonged focus with no visible end; an unrelenting millstone of patience and energy, the perfect breeding ground for irritation and exhaustion.

The general procedure involved sitting in a small room, opening the door to admit one or two people at a time, sometimes several, asking the same questions in the same tone, condensing subjective narratives into concise, logically clear descriptive terms, and recording them on paper for archiving.

Occasionally, he had to interrupt patients and family members, pulling the conversation back from its meandering digressions.

Dialects and slang made communication even more difficult; family members often spoke at length in agitation, while listeners felt as if they were abroad, unable to grasp a word—Dai Wei had to intervene to "translate" before progress could continue.

Kraft's own phrasing was also hard to understand; even simple instructions like "sit down" or "lie flat" often needed repeating one or two times. When such repetitions accumulated enough, each additional repetition began to genuinely deepen inner irritation.

None were major obstacles, but their cumulative trickle prevented the entire process from running smoothly like an assembly line; instead, it was stretched by countless foreseeable and unforeseen minor snags, efficiency visibly plummeting.

Each time the clinic door opened briefly, he saw no reduction in the throng of heads outside—on the contrary, the crowd swelled as the sun rose higher.

At this rate, no more than fifty patients could be processed in a day, and even that assumed Kraft could sit motionless from dawn to dusk without eating, drinking, or rising from his chair.

Clearly impossible; Kraft couldn't truly glue himself to the chair all day—urgent matters would inevitably burn him off it.

The temporary ward still held many patients confirmed the previous night as suitable for artificial pneumothorax; leaving them to Dai Wei would only pile them up further—they had to be treated before the ward filled again.

He was glad he'd filtered out most of them last night; even so, over a dozen still required intervention.

With two sets of equipment—using one while sterilizing the other at maximum speed—it still consumed his lunch break and half the afternoon, half of which was spent reviewing the original versions of the medical records.

Even after one round of editing and revision, the final products were still difficult to evaluate without offense.

To put it mildly, nearly every third record in this batch invented entirely new terminology; at least half completely overturned one or two volumes of *Human Anatomy*; a few even possessed the potential to replicate the medical profession's traditional art—breaking into literature.

They were either too verbose or too sparse, riddled with basic factual errors.

It wasn't entirely Dai Wei's fault—he'd received raw information of dubious quality, and under haste, he couldn't have improved much.

Kraft silently circled those sections, tucked them into a drawer unlikely to be opened, to avoid the risk of Professor Viren stumbling upon them and entertaining thoughts of revoking someone's degree.

After finishing his work, he glanced into the clinic—Dai Wei was submerged beneath the afternoon's heat and human tide.

New patients filled the recently vacated beds; assistants and apprentices shuttled between them.

Kraft himself successfully escaped the clinic, changed clothes, scaled the backyard wall, and used the last stretch of daylight to check on Father Green's progress.

The weather was decent; presumably, they were still methodically eliminating possibilities in the labyrinthine tunnels.

To his relief, the Inquisition had not yet abandoned the idea of cooperation—the disguised sentries at the cemetery gate allowed him entry with a nod.

Kraft attempted conversation, but the guard claimed no knowledge of conditions below; his duties were limited to standing watch, monitoring weather, and performing normal cemetery keeper tasks—stopping anyone who clearly wasn't merely there to attend a funeral.

It seemed nothing noteworthy had been found below; otherwise, someone would have reported up already.

After failing to conserve energy, Kraft decided to descend personally, inspect the situation, and speak with the commander.

The persistent feeling of being watched last night, and the malice embedded within it, made him suspect someone—or something—had noticed their large-scale operation.

This was anticipated, but he hadn't expected it so soon, or in this form—it suggested the drainage system was not as empty as it appeared, but rather a reversed reflection of the city's hidden veins beneath the ash, exploited by someone with intent.

If not a misinterpretation of spiritual sensory signals, perhaps similar signs could be found on Green's side.

Motivated by the self-reassuring notion that prolonged sitting demanded more movement, and by his "kill and bury" sense of responsibility, he grumbled as he followed his memorized route toward the temporary camp.

A day had brought no obvious change to the camp—only a few crosses added to the sketch.

The empty coffin, originally used to transport supplies, had been repurposed as a makeshift table; a senior Inquisition official sat on the ground with his elbows propped on the coffin lid, resting without dignity.

Several sheets of notes lay beside him, their handwriting unnaturally rigid, as if a hand-copied holy scripture had been shrunk onto the paper.

A team of monks just returned from the sewers sat against the wall, drying their boots, murmuring inaudible scriptures; they stirred alertly upon his entry, confirmed his identity, then closed their eyes again, seizing rest before their next shift.

Kraft had intended to pick up the records directly from the table, but considering their relationship hadn't reached that level of familiarity, he politely tapped the coffin lid—*tok tok*—to wake Green.

The priest sat upright, sharply scanning his surroundings for the source of the vibration; upon recognizing Kraft, he sighed and yawned, surprised that this inquisitive professor had actually shown up.

Without saying much, he merely shook his head and handed over a few sheets of paper.

The records were short, numbered segments, each labeled with the speaker's name—though it was hard to believe they could recall anything clearly after traversing so many nearly identical corridors.

Compared with the sketch, the search had expanded outward from the current corridor in both directions, with two teams operating externally to extend the known boundary; at least one team always rested at camp, awaiting rotation.

Feedback was nearly identical: all tunnels leading to the hall were built of similar brick and stone, occasionally featuring recessed niches in the walls, yet never yielding anything useful.

These repetitions reinforced a preexisting understanding: these were not sewage structures, but rather subterranean passageways designed for transit, with alcoves left for pauses and crossings.

After traveling far enough, the tunnel inevitably branched—like tree limbs splitting, then splitting again after further distance.

Some ended beyond the reach of light, forcing teams to turn back; others had collapsed, impassable, with only water seeping through gaps among the rubble.

For a structure that could be called a ruin, such damage was normal—but each encounter left explorers with an inexplicable unease, a subconscious feeling that the engineering capable of preserving the hall's intact state to this day should not have been so easily destroyed by natural decay.

As the explored area expanded, the frequency of blocked passages increased; bricks and stones, detached from the walls and now conspicuously large, blocked the way; monks reported finding what appeared to be ancient, artificial chisel marks on the fracture surfaces.

One monk, intrigued, tentatively suggested these marks resembled construction traces found on ruins dating to the Kingdom's founding era—distinctive imprints of immature stone-working techniques of that time.

The conclusion: external destruction. Some will had deliberately and violently damaged these engineering marvels, to prevent others from entering through the tunnels—or perhaps to prevent anyone from leaving.

Yet this was advantageous for the team: if they couldn't pass, neither could the heretics—any blocked section could simply be marked with a line.

The real headache lay in the tunnels cut off by distance or excessive branching—these had to be temporarily abandoned, becoming dead ends marked by dashed lines on the map.

"Besides these dead ends and endless branches, have you found anything else?" Kraft asked, more interested in whether anything moved, "Traces of tracking? Fresh activity?"

"No, almost nothing. The search area is still too small—it needs time. More time." Green unfurled the map; from the hall as center, the explored directions spread like the tentacles of an anemone, nearly touching the paper's edge. "But I feel they're nearby. Perhaps changing strategy would save effort."

"Why say that?"

"One team told me that on their return, nearing the hall, they sensed a faint glow ahead—but when they reached the tunnel mouth, they saw nothing." A number on the map was circled.

"Someone must have just passed through that entrance. I believe this was our closest encounter with those bastards. I plan to station a few men in the hall without lighting—next time they pass, they'll be seen."