Chapter 346: Scales

"What is this?"

Dominic took the book; its ancient, cracked leather was stained a bone-like pale yellow by lime dust, yet it felt strangely indescribable in his hand.

It was like picking up a shell hiding a hermit crab, where the crustacean's claws rubbed against the inner wall, transmitting a silent tremor to the skin.

It seemed the tanned leather had been infused with some kind of life, with something vivid flowing slowly within it.

The muscles in his palm and fingers twitched slightly, almost wanting to fling the object away as if discarding a cold, slippery living creature; he struggled to suppress the instinctive impulse and moved it to the table as quickly as possible.

Even so, the rough movement caused an ominous sound when the book contacted the tabletop, as if internal pages were rubbing and the binding thread was snapping.

"Careful!" Field's heart gave a sudden jolt; he quickly slid down the ladder to check the situation. Fortunately, there was no visible damage or misalignment on the exterior.

"This thing is probably older than both of us combined; it's a unique copy. If it lasts a few more years, we could consider putting it in an antique shop."

He gently blew away the surface dust, placed the book on a V-shaped book rest, and slowly and evenly opened it.

The stiff spine emitted a groan as if it would break in the next second, like an old clam being pried open, hiding something formed by the intrusion of foreign objects.

"Ugh, I knew it was a notebook." Field had noticed his companion's hesitation, but he took it as concern over damaging a unique copy. "Look, I seem to see content about the church collecting stone materials; it's truly old enough."

Old enough to trace back to when the church beneath their feet was still a newly reclaimed wasteland, when a missionary carrying only a pitifully small amount of luggage and a single holy scripture first stepped onto this land, writing these words while resting his head on a stone, leaving scratch marks from the rough surface on the cover.

The reason it remained here was likely that the recorder was of ordinary status, lacking the value to be sent to the great abbey for collection as a document of special significance.

However, this was exactly what they needed: something off-topic by a wide margin, with more personal characteristics.

Judging from the relatively simple, or rather arduous, conditions, this was an independent missionary without a good educational background; he merely registered with the order under the trend of expansion into border regions at the time, obtaining formal permission.

The newly enfeoffed local lord provided limited support: a wooden house, several sacks of grain and seeds, and uncultivated land, after which he paid no further attention—indeed, this constituted a middle-to-upper-level start.

He needed to learn the local dialect on his own, work to obtain living supplies, and, on the basis of being able to survive, communicate with residents as a stranger, sharing surplus food and helping with labor.

Following that was nearly ten years of austere life. Compared to the long duration, the written records during that period were pitifully few.

At first, he often mentioned letters entrusted to others to be taken away, to the church, to the lord; after finding no response at all, he stopped sending them.

Hands holding farming tools, amidst arduous labor, occasionally took a moment to jot down one or two insights regarding life skills.

Benefiting from the slight medical education he had received, he used simple herbs to help treat diseases with relatively high self-healing rates, successfully gaining a certain social status, and subsequently, relying on his document-handling ability, became the information transmission link between the lord and the residents.

By this stage, combined with his long-standing good reputation for being kind to others, the missionary's prestige had become unshakable; the residents regarded him as a member of the settlement, a person worthy of respect.

There was almost nothing he could not know, including certain very subtle local "customs."

Just as fishermen by the sea would pray to an imagined existence that danced with wind and waves for safety and catch, mountain dwellers would have similar behaviors; the strange thing was that he spent quite some time without fully figuring out what was happening.

The heresies the church had encountered in the past usually fell into a few categories: polytheism, nature or ancestor worship, shamanism, and the like.

First, the situation clearly had not developed to the high level of polytheism or monotheism, because neither clear deities and corresponding domains nor symbolic objects had appeared.

Therefore, the author had for a time believed that some form of primitive nature worship circulated locally, which could simply explain natural phenomena as rules set by the Heavenly Father for the world.

However, as communication deepened, the speculation of nature worship also began to become untenable.

The natives did not worship specific natural phenomena or things at all. People held awe for Gaoshan and the mist, believing they possessed special significance, but it seemed they did not believe they possessed any spirituality, nor did they ever pray for protection or benefits.

After reviewing the classics, he felt he should correct his train of thought and treat it as a shaman-like religion, because certain individuals in the village possessed higher interpretive authority, believed to be able to contact something extremely mysterious, more ethereal than spirit.

In form, they bore a certain similarity to shamans, even both producing things to express the results of their contact and perception.

But when it came to these things, they differed from shamanism.

There were no feathers, furs, or horns used to display animal spiritual power, nor were there instruments imitating the sounds of nature.

The only thing that came close was possessing a common, totem-like shape, extremely complex yet repetitively monotonous, manifested over and over again in the things they produced.

He described it as a spiral shape with a very strong sense of layering and dynamism.

Dominic and Field looked at each other; it seemed they had dug up something they shouldn't have.

Although it was quite normal for border regions to retain some customs with strong local characteristics after conversion, a tacitly understood fact among everyone, the widespread existence and spread of heretical totems was still enough to be frightening—even if their meaning had already been forgotten.

This was obviously not some secret hidden too deeply; the diocese should have been aware of it and intended to downplay its influence, ultimately resulting in the current situation. It was similar to hastily shoveling two scoops of earth over trash when filling a landfill, as long as it didn't appear on the surface.

At that time, no missionary would have been willing to see such a situation. After believing he had initially understood the form of their faith, he prepared a draft in his mind and seized an opportunity to visit and probe through conversation.

If the heretic claimed to communicate with spirits or converse with ancestors, he would emphasize that souls must inevitably enter heaven or hell for judgment after death, with no intermediate state.

If the heretic believed that all things possessed spirits, he would preach that the Lord was the creator of everything, and that no spirituality was left for natural creations at the time of creation.

All known heretical worship and methods of dealing with them were recorded in the "Compendium Against Heretics," and the preaching process went very smoothly.

The other party listened carefully from beginning to end without refuting or interrupting, without any anger at the offense to their faith, and even expressed varying degrees of agreement with the doctrine. They raised only one small objection: "What you say makes a lot of sense, but that is indeed not the shape you described."

As for exactly what shape it was, the accounts of several interviewees were vague and unclear.

In the end, he still could not debate with the heresy; after all, one cannot throw a punch at invisible wind, and doctrine cannot attack something that does not exist.

The conversion of faith proceeded quite smoothly; the residents accepted the more systematic and beneficial doctrine readily.

It was just that the spiral, the curl, the vortex, a shape without even a name, still appeared from time to time in unexpected places whenever it was about to be forgotten.

Like a small thorn stuck under the skin, it made him care more and more, frequently visiting the last followers of the marginalized primitive faith.

They were not well-educated people; although they had a strong desire to express themselves when mentioning "that thing," it did not help improve their poor language logic abilities or communication barriers caused by some dialect-specific coined words, so the missionary could never construct a concrete impression from them.

The fragmented records only brought confusion; perhaps on a very humid day, on dampened paper, with heavily blurred strokes, he tried to summarize his long contemplation.

The pen tip lingered in one spot for a long time, and the spreading thoughts and ink formed a deep black patch.

Immediately, uncontrollable chaos projected onto the paper, exploding into chaotic lines without direction or consciousness, like a lost person shrouded in thick fog running wildly in a panic, crossing out "mist," smearing out "sky," "disappearance."

But it seemed some force guided the pen tip, causing the lines to tangle and loop around each other, forming a dense ball of thread.

In the deepest black crevices, Dominic read a word that was out of place:

"Scales?"

Consciousness automatically took a step, toward a direction that did not exist at all.