Chapter 329

"We need to clear out the residential area, kitchen and dining hall, storage warehouses, and the stables first."

After spending most of the night waiting in vain, Kraft yawned and began assigning cleaning duties.

Camping outdoors was awful; the mountain nights weren’t nearly as cold as the north, but the humidity was extreme—every morning, he felt like a stale steamed bun left forgotten in a basket, cold, damp, and stiff.

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

Comparing with the building plans, most of the space they currently need lies in the annex buildings south of the central church; only the stables are on the north side, against the wall—perhaps the original design had already prioritized concentrating daily functional zones while keeping animals separate from people.

"There are plenty of sleeping rooms—enough to house several times the size of our team—but it’s best to concentrate everyone in one area and assign night watches."

"At least five or six people should guard the stables, with Kup or Yin Feng 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... we’ll see. The food we’ve brought doesn’t require much cooking; later, we can buy fresh ingredients from below the mountain."

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

The initial work should begin with the former monks' 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 a well and reservoir placed in the center of the yard for convenient daily water access.

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

Pushing open the door, its lock long rusted shut, the light abruptly dimmed—the narrow, elongated windows provided little illumination; even in daylight, they struggled to light up areas beyond the writing desk.

Most of the living quarters were crudely arranged: two or three simple cots occupied nearly half the room’s usable space; the rest held a small cabinet, its lower shelves storing personal belongings and its upper shelves holding writing tools.

A few spare pen shafts, dried ink bottles, and scrapers for correcting writing errors; candlesticks piled with thick, layered wax, indicating the long hours the room’s owner had spent here.

They preferred such humble material conditions, yet squeezed 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, they found no books or paper, no half-finished manuscripts, no spare blank sheets—not even a single cheap linen sheet remained.

Hand-carved softwood religious symbols 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 the academies, where bored people left graffiti and notes, layer upon layer accumulating over years, forming overlapping strata of information like fossilized strata in sedimentary rock—requiring imagination to reconstruct meaning.

But here, they had been scraped away—not as if for cleaning, but as a deliberate, unified act: every stroke meticulously erased, not leaving a single mark, even if it left the surface uneven and prone to tearing under slight pressure.

"Is this some kind of tradition?"

"At least, I’ve never heard of it."

Raymond yanked open a drawer; small clinking objects tumbled out from a torn compartment—several copper coins, black silver coins, and small metal ornaments, likely personal belongings of some monk.

"I thought they were fond of learning, given all those books. But this... not even a single holy scripture remains." The young monk from Dunling returned from the next room and handed over a dull pendant.

"And this—I can’t say."

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

A common amulet, apparently handcrafted from a silver coin; the front bore a hand-carved double-winged circle, with a hole drilled at the top—likely meant for hanging.

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 pick.

The attitude wasn’t like that toward a protective mantra—it was as if they’d discovered a venomous insect crawling beneath their clothing.

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

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

He whispered the word carefully, 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 this—even illiterate thieves would at least show basic respect for such things.

"It’s not necessarily heresy," Kraft patted the young man’s shoulder, soothing him gently. "I’ve seen real heretics, even pagans—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 else, all right?"

Dominic exhaled in relief, his spirits lifted by the recognition, and continued cleaning.

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

"There’s definitely something wrong."

Even without intuition, he could sense the problem: a collective aberration in cognition—so typical, no need to wait for unnatural phenomena to confirm it.

The core question: what did this abnormal behavior signify? A strange thought surfaced: it wasn’t about destroying or searching for specific text—it was like hunting an extremely agile burrowing creature, frantically sealing every tiny crack and hole, waiting for it to surface in the light.