Chapter 242

"What exactly is this?" the priest asked again.

In his eyes, a flame called bewildered curiosity ignited beneath the gray haze, like a spark meeting oil, instantly filling his entire pupil.

A pressing urge drove him to seek information, to stitch together a fragment of his shattered understanding.

The rift between his worldview and what he saw had become a wound in reality, throbbing faintly in his mind, worse than his physical discomfort.

"It's a long story," Kraft said, under Greene's gaze, finally too embarrassed to put the object in his own pocket, "but I can summarize it briefly."

"Put it crudely—you can think of it as an 'artificial' animal, in every sense of the word."

"Everything in the world—animals, plants, humans—is the Creator's work." According to the Holy Scripture, the Father indeed held exclusive rights over all living beings, especially humans, the unquestionably highest among all creations.

Everything else existed solely to serve this supreme creation; humans were the meaning of the world, beings inherently entitled to use all other creations.

"No offense intended, but this is simply leftover material from when humans were made, reassembled differently into what you see now." The professor had no intention of challenging this; to him, revisiting the Scripture was merely an instinctive act of self-protection, a way to stabilize his perception of the world.

"Of course, you can't call it human—just as you can't say a church built on the foundation of demolished houses is the same as the original houses."

A more accessible explanation was necessary, even if it sacrificed some accuracy, for the grotesque reassembly of organs into alien forms could not be conveyed precisely.

At least as someone with no biological background, Greene grasped the general concept and asked: "So its purpose is to find more 'building materials' and expand?"

"In terms of behavioral logic, roughly yes. What you encountered was likely a 'juvenile' version, similar to insect larvae or pupae."

"And when it matures?"

"Then it becomes something entirely different. It will sprout limbs—many limbs—like certain marine creatures. Have you seen an octopus? You have? Similar to that, but much larger, with additional, hard-to-counter new functions."

"Actually, you're lucky. I can't imagine how we'd handle something large enough to block a waterway, moving swiftly—no place to hide, everything over before you even react."

Kraft placed the prism on the coffin lid; the stone remained in some incomprehensible activated state, faintly casting a pale white glow around it.

"As for this stone, you can think of it as its core—equivalent to a brain or heart. Easy to identify, since you're unlikely to find another stone with this texture and faint glow."

The priest nodded, half-understanding, struggling to process the information. Accepting the existence of an animal assembled from human remains, with a stone at its core, was still too difficult.

He reached out to touch the stone; a cold, centuries-unexposed dread clung to his fingertips, the icy light seeping into his memory, connecting with something else.

"Is the light from this thing always this weak?"

"Yes," Kraft answered without hesitation. In his experience, whether the prisms extracted from the crawling creatures or the stones' origin—the celestial body—they all remained dim, emitting barely perceptible light.

A chill shot up Greene's arm; he shuddered, suddenly struck by a dreadful thought: "What if… I told you I saw this light, welling up from that well?"

The question left the professor silent. When Kraft realized Greene wasn't asking casually, an equally ominous feeling swept over him.

"Has anything else happened?"

"Cracks—same as the ones before—appeared out of nowhere. Like an invisible, extremely long sword had split the stone open."

It sounded nearly identical; a similar event had occurred not long ago on the other side, only scaled down vastly—small enough for heretics to exploit as a deadly ambush tactic.

"Oh, Father Greene, I have good news and bad news. The bad news is—just as you suspect—something large may lie beneath that well."

"And the good news?"

"This phenomenon is, to some extent, understandable—even controllable. For instance, the heretics we're fighting can replicate it on a small scale." And this replication might not be the first in history.

"Your definition of 'good news' differs from ordinary people's."

"Believe me, this is absolutely good news—someone else has done the preliminary research, proven a path exists. What better could there be?" Kraft pulled out a cloth, wrapped the prism, and handed it to Greene. "Keep it for now. Let's go see my discovery."

The item given to Greene was stored with utmost care in a separate tomb chamber in the upper crypt, under dedicated guard.

With last night's experience as context, the priest merely grimaced as he opened the tightly bound package.

On this corpse, no longer definable as human, one could plainly see how the Father's perfect creation had been gradually twisted toward an utterly alien form.

The stone embedded in the right palm confirmed the heretics' use of unnatural means.

"I must say, Professor Kraft, at least in combat, I genuinely admire you. Had you been born into the Church, you'd have become the Father's sharpest sword on earth."

"Come on—then we'd patrol the streets every day, catching fraudsters who scam middle-aged and elderly people?" Solving a relatively conventional enemy brought Kraft no sense of accomplishment; when the opponent's tricks were perceptible, failure was inevitable.

"Look at this."

Turning the heretic's right hand over, Kraft showed Greene the hollow on the back of the hand—where something matching the gray-white stone in the palm had once been embedded.

"There was another… piece of that stone?"

"I thought so at first." He rolled up the corpse's sleeve; the unnaturally pale arm displayed blackened veins, more prominent and swollen than last night, like parasitic worms beneath the skin. "Guess what's inside?"

"Blood clots?" Though he said it, Greene felt it wasn't right—veins drained of blood should be shriveled and empty.

Kraft cut open a small section of the vein along a pre-cut slit, revealing a black substance nearly bursting through the vessel walls—fine, crystalline, solidified within the vein, seemingly mineral or rocky in nature.

"It wasn't like this yesterday. Part of it was still liquid, able to flow out of the veins."

"What are you suggesting?"

"This was originally embedded in the back of the hand. It melted under certain conditions and flowed back through the veins. And when it was liquid, you previously noticed it."

Greene stared blankly at the solidified substance in the veins, unable to recall any connection to it.

"Think about it—if this gray-white stone causes endless craving and growth, you'd need a powerful, suppressive force to balance it." When he saw the black solid-liquid mixture, Kraft recognized part of it.

"When it was liquid, take a single drop, dilute it in water, and you get a colorless, odorless substance—extremely low concentration, yet sufficient to temporarily suppress consciousness and life activity."

【Perhaps we can call it Clearness】

"Let's make a deal—keep this arm for a few days. I need to figure out what conditions trigger melting. Say the right hand was cut off and lost. Take the rest back to scare the bishop, the Inquisitor General, etc. Don't expect anyone else to help with this."

"Agreed." Greene accepted the request. He only needed something convincing enough to report—whether the thing was missing an arm didn't matter.

"By the way, what are you going to do with that armor? Even if no one notices the emblem, its existence can't be hidden."

"No problem. In an emergency, it's perfectly normal for the breastplate's engraving to chip off during transport."