Chapter 242: Reporting the Task

"What exactly is this?" the priest pressed.

A flame named confused curiosity ignited beneath his greyed emotions in his eyes, like a spark meeting oil, instantly filling his entire pupils.

Some urgent thought drove him to seek information, to stitch together a torn corner of his cognition.

The rift between his worldview and what he saw seemed to become a wound in reality, throbbing faintly in his mind, even more than the discomfort on his body.

"It's a long story." Under Green's gaze, Kraft finally didn't have the heart to put the thing into his own pocket. "But it can also be said briefly."

"A rough explanation: you can understand it as an 'artificial' animal, um, in every sense of the word."

"Everything in the world—animals, plants, humans—is the Father's creation." According to the Holy Scripture, the Heavenly Father indeed holds the patent rights to all living beings, especially humans, who belong to the highest order among all creations, beyond doubt.

Everything else serves this highest creation; humans are the meaning of the world, beings inherently possessing the right to enjoy all other creations.

"No offense intended, but this is just leftover material from the creation of humans, assembled differently, becoming what you see now." The professor had no intention of questioning this point; in his view, revisiting the Holy Scripture was merely an instinctive self-protection reaction, a way to stabilize one's cognitive world.

"Of course, you can't say it's human, just as if you demolish several houses and use the materials to rebuild a church on the original foundation, you cannot say the church is the original house."

It had to be explained in a more common way, even if this would lose some accuracy; there was no way to precisely convey the grotesque nature of reconstructing tissues and organs into an alien form.

At least, as someone who had never had a foundation in biology, Green understood the general concept and raised a question: "So its purpose is to find more 'building materials' and then expand?"

"From a behavioral logic perspective, that's about right. What you encountered should be a 'juvenile version,' similar to insect larvae or pupae."

"What about after it matures?"

"Then it becomes something entirely different. It will differentiate limbs, many limbs, like some marine creatures. Have you seen an octopus? Yes? It's similar to that, but much larger, and it has some new functions that are hard to deal with."

"Actually, it's quite lucky. I can't imagine what to do if something large enough to block the waterway and move quickly appeared. With no space to dodge, perhaps everything would be over before you could react."

Kraft placed the prism on the coffin lid; the stone was still in some incomprehensible state of activation, faintly casting a circle of pale white light and shadow around it.

"As for this stone, you can roughly understand it as its core, equivalent to a brain or heart. It's easier to identify, after all, it's unlikely you'd find a second stone with similar texture and faint glow."

The priest nodded, half-understanding, striving to digest the information received. It was still too difficult for people to accept the existence of an animal assembled from their own kind, with a stone as its core.

He tried touching that stone; a gloomy sensation, as if it had not been touched by sunlight for thousands of years, rubbed against his fingerprints. The cold light seeped into his memory, connecting with something.

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

"Yes." Kraft answered without hesitation. In his memory, whether the prism extracted from the crawling creature's body or the source of these stones—that celestial body—both maintained a dim state, emitting a faint glow almost imperceptible.

A chill suddenly shot up his arm through his body. Green shivered, suddenly having an ominous thought: "Then what if... I tell you, I saw this kind of light gushing out from beneath that well?"

This question directly silenced the professor. When Kraft realized the other party wasn't just asking casually, an equally ominous feeling swept over him.

"Has anything else happened?"

"Cracks, the same cracks as before, just appeared out of nowhere. As if a sword, a very long and invisible sword, had split the stone."

It sounded very similar; the same experience had just occurred on the other side not long ago, only scaled down many times, small enough for heretics to exploit as a deadly ambush tactic.

"Oh, Father Green, then I have good news and bad news. The bad news is, just as you think, there might be something big beneath that well."

"And the good news?"

"This phenomenon is understandable to a certain extent, even controllable. For example, the heresy we are dealing with can reproduce it on a small scale." Moreover, this reproduction might not be the first time in history.

"Your understanding of good news differs from that of ordinary people."

"Believe me, this is absolutely good news. Someone has done the preliminary research for us, proving there is a path forward. Is there anything better?" Kraft took out a piece of cotton cloth, wrapped the prism, and handed it to Green. "Keep this temporarily for now. Let's go see my discovery."

The item brought to Green received the most proper care, stored in an independent tomb chamber within the upper catacombs, guarded by a dedicated person.

With last night's experience as a foundation, when opening the tightly bound package, the priest only showed a look of disgust.

On this corpse, which could no longer be defined as human, one could directly see how the Heavenly Father's most perfect creation was gradually twisted, developing in a completely unfamiliar direction.

And the stone embedded in the right palm confirmed the claim that heretics possessed unnatural means.

"I must say, Professor Kraft, at least in terms of combat, I admire you. If you were born into the Church, you would become the sharpest sword of the Heavenly Father on earth."

"Come on, and then we'd go out on the streets every day, catching fake heretics who scam the elderly and middle-aged out of their money?" Resolving an enemy within a relatively conventional range did not give Kraft any sense of achievement; when the opponent's tricks could be perceived, failure was inevitable.

"Look at this."

Flipping the heretic's right hand over, Kraft showed Green the hollow on the back of the hand; something corresponding should have been embedded there, matching the grey-white stone in the palm.

"There was another piece of... that kind of stone?"

"I thought so at first." He rolled up the corpse's sleeve; the black veins on the excessively pale arm were more prominent and swollen and deformed than last night, like parasitic nematodes under the skin. "Guess what's inside?"

"Blood clots?" Although he said so, Green felt it wasn't right; the blood vessels with depleted blood should be shriveled and empty.

Following an already opened incision, Kraft cut open a small segment of the vein, revealing black material inside that almost burst the vessel walls, appearing as tiny ice crystals, solidified within the blood vessels, seemingly something of a rock or mineral nature.

"It wasn't like this yesterday; part of it was still liquid, able to flow out from the blood vessels."

"What do you mean?"

"This is the thing that was originally embedded in the back of the hand. Under certain conditions, it melted and flowed back through the veins. And when it was liquid, you paid attention to it before."

Green stared blankly at these things solidified in the blood vessels, unable to recall at all when he had ever been connected to them.

"Think about it: if this grey-white stone causes endless demand and growth, then you need a powerful, inhibitory thing to balance it relatively." Upon seeing that black solid-liquid mixture, Kraft recognized part of it.

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

【Perhaps it could be called Clarity】

"Let's make a deal: leave this arm for a few days; I need to research under what conditions they will melt. Just say the right arm was chopped off and couldn't be found; take the rest back to scare the Bishop, the Inquisitor, and the like. Don't expect anyone else to be able to help with this."

"Agreed." Green agreed to this request. He only needed something impressive enough to report; whether or not this thing was missing an arm was of little consequence.

"By the way, what do you plan to do with that armor? Even if no one notices the insignia, the fact of its existence cannot be hidden."

"It doesn't matter. The situation is urgent; it's quite normal for the chest plate patterns to scrape off during transport, isn't it?"