Chapter 329

"The residential area, kitchen and dining hall, storage warehouses, and stable—we need to clear these areas first."

Kraft, who had spent most of the night waiting in vain, yawned and began assigning cleaning duties.

The outdoor camping experience was terrible; the mountain nights were far colder than the north, but humidity was high, and every morning he felt like a stale steamed bun left in a steamer—cold, damp, and stiff.

If possible, we should move in tonight so everyone can rest.

Comparing with the building plans, most of the space we currently need lies in the auxiliary buildings south of the central church; only the stable is on the north side against the wall, suggesting the original design likely intended to concentrate daily functional zones and keep animals as separate as possible from people.

"There are many sleeping rooms—enough to house several times the size of our team—but it's best to concentrate living quarters and assign night watches."

"At least five or six people should guard the stable, with Kup or Yvon accompanying them."

"Use the warehouse closest to the residential area first; daily rotating inspections and records are required for stored supplies. The blueprint shows the water reservoir and well are nearby—use the drawn water for the packhorses for a few days to ensure safety before using it ourselves."

"As for the kitchen… depends on need; the food we've brought doesn't require much cooking, and we can buy fresh ingredients from below the mountain later."

Once settled, they would gradually designate the remaining space as a library, teaching area, administrative offices, graded laboratories, and so on—but that would take many days.

The preliminary work begins with the original cultivators' residential area; beyond housing needs, since this was the monks' private zone, there might be a chance to find lingering clues.

It was a semi-enclosed cloister building adjacent to the church, built around a smaller central courtyard, with the well and reservoir located in the center of this space for convenient daily water use.

The cloister's side facing the courtyard was supported by continuous arched structures and stone pillars; the other side featured neatly arranged small rooms, tidy like a school dormitory, nearly indistinguishable from the outside.

Pushing open the door, its lock rusted shut, light suddenly dimmed; the narrow, elongated windows provided limited brightness, making it hard even in daylight to illuminate areas beyond the writing desk.

Most living quarters could only be described as crude: two or three simple cots occupied nearly half the room's usable space; the rest held a small cabinet, its lower tier storing personal items and its upper tier holding writing tools.

A few spare pen shafts, dried ink bottles, and scrapers for correcting writing errors and flaws; candlesticks piled with thick, layered wax, showing how much time the room's owner had spent here.

They preferred such humble material conditions, squeezing out limited funds to buy candles so their spirits could wander the Lord's realm each long night.

Yet after checking several small rooms in succession, no books or paper were found—no semi-finished products, no spare blank sheets, not even a single cheapest linen sheet preserved.

Hand-carved softwood religious emblems sat on the cabinet shelves and empty desks—the very places where books and paper should have been.

The wooden desks were covered in scratches, nearly stripping away the surface; after wiping away thick dust, ink stains deeply seeped into the grooves.

This reminded Kraft of the shared desks in academies, where bored people left graffiti and notes, layer upon layer accumulating over years, forming overlapping strata of information like cross-sections of sedimentary rock compressed with fossils—requiring imagination to reconstruct meaning.

But here, they had been scraped away—not as if for simple cleaning, but as a unified, deliberately targeted act: every stroke meticulously erased, leaving no trace, even if it left the desk uneven and prone to tearing paper with slight pressure.

"Is this some kind of tradition?"

"At least I've never heard of it."

Lei Mengde yanked open the drawer; a few clinking small objects rolled out from a torn lining—several copper coins, black silver coins, and small metal ornaments, likely belonging to some monk's personal property.

"I thought they liked studying, given all those books. But this… not even a single holy scripture." The young monk from Dunling returned from the adjacent room and handed over a dull pendant.

"And this—I can't say."

"Thank you, Dominique." Kraft took the object and walked to the window to examine it.

A common amulet, seemingly handcrafted from a silver coin; the front bore a double-winged circular design etched line by line, with a hole drilled at the top—likely meant to be worn as a pendant.

Kraft had received similar religious amulets from the Church; they usually had inscriptions engraved on the back. This one should have too, but it had been violently scratched out with something sharp like a awl.

The attitude wasn't like that toward a protective saying—it was more like discovering a venomous insect crawling beneath one's clothing.

"Honestly, this place is strange. What do you think, Professor?" Dominique still wasn't used to the title.

"Could it be… heresy? Uh, I'm just guessing, don't mind me."

He carefully uttered the word, watching Kraft's reaction; for a great monastery, this was a serious accusation, and his new superior had reportedly worked with the Inquisition. Even though it had been over twenty years, if things blew up, someone might still be held accountable.

But his findings made it impossible not to think of the worst possibility: "Not just this—I saw the wall admonitions and maxims scraped off too."

Unless they had betrayed their faith, it was hard to imagine a monastery doing such a thing—even illiterate bandits would show basic respect for these things.

"It's not necessarily heresy," Kraft patted the young man's shoulder, soothing him gently. "I've seen real heretics—even pagans—and their behavior rarely looks like this."

【Heretics and pagans don't bother scraping off words—it's too lowbrow】

"You're observant. Let me know immediately if you find anything new, all right?"

Dominique exhaled, his spirits lifted by the recognition, and continued cleaning with renewed energy.

Watching his relieved back disappear, Kraft rubbed the pendant, feeling the faint, trembling force of fear in the scratches, and gave Lei Mengde a slight nod:

"There's definitely something wrong."

Without any intuitive hint, he could sense the problem: a collective aberration of cognition—so typical, no need to wait for specific unnatural phenomena to judge.

The core question is: what does this aberrant behavior represent? A strange thought surfaced: this wasn't about destroying or searching for specific text—it was like hunting an extremely agile burrowing creature, futilely sealing every tiny crack and hole found, waiting for it to surface in the light.