Chapter 346

What is this?

Dominic took the book—its ancient, cracked leather cover stained pale bone-yellow by lime dust, yet it felt strangely unnatural in his hands.

Like picking up a hermit crab’s shell, the hidden creature’s claws scraped the inner walls, transmitting silent tremors to his skin.

It seemed the tanned parchment had been infused with some kind of life, something alive slowly flowing within.

His palm muscles twitched faintly, nearly forcing him to fling it away like a cold, slimy living thing—he fought back the instinct, moving it to the table as fast as he could.

Even so, the rough motion made the book emit an ominous sound upon touching the tabletop—like pages rubbing together and binding threads snapping.

“Watch out!” Field’s heart jolted; he slid down the ladder at once to check—luckily, no visible damage or misalignment appeared on the surface.

“This thing’s probably older than both of us combined, and it’s a unique copy. A few more years and you could consider putting it in an antique shop.”

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

The stiff spine groaned as if about to snap—like an ancient oyster pried open, containing something formed by foreign intrusion.

“Ugh, I knew it was a journal,” Field hadn’t missed his companion’s hesitation, but he took it for concern over damaging a rare book. “Look—I think I see mentions of stone collection for the church. Really old.”

Old enough to trace back to when the church beneath their feet was still virgin land, when the missionary first stepped here with barely any luggage and a single holy text, writing these words on a stone pillow, leaving scratch marks from the rough cover.

The reason it remained here was likely the scribe’s ordinary status—he had no value as a significant document worthy of storage in a grand monastery.

But that was precisely what they needed: something tangential, more personal.

From the simpler, or rather harsher, conditions, he was an independent missionary with little formal education, merely swept up by the tide of expansion into frontier regions, registered with a religious order, and granted formal permission.

The newly appointed local lord offered limited support: a wooden hut, a few sacks of grain seeds, and uncultivated land—then vanished from sight. In fact, this was a fairly decent start.

He had to learn the local dialect himself, labor to obtain necessities, and, once he could survive, interact with residents as a stranger—sharing surplus food, helping with labor.

Then came nearly a decade of austere living. Compared to the long span, the written records were painfully sparse.

At first, he frequently mentioned sending letters—via messengers—to the church, to the lord; after receiving no replies, he stopped sending them.

His hands, calloused from farming tools, occasionally took brief moments to jot down one or two notes on practical life skills.

Thanks to a modicum of medical training, he used simple herbs to treat relatively self-healing illnesses, earning a degree of social standing, and eventually becoming the liaison between lord and villagers through his literacy.

By this point, combined with his long-standing reputation for kindness, the missionary’s prestige was unshakable—the villagers regarded him as one of their own, a worthy and respected man.

There was almost nothing he couldn’t learn, including certain subtle local “customs.”

Just as fishermen by the sea prayed to imagined entities that stirred the waves for safety and catch, mountain folk had similar practices—what was strange was how long it took him to fully understand what they meant.

The church had previously encountered several forms of paganism: polytheism, nature or ancestor worship, shamanism, and so on.

First, the situation clearly hadn’t evolved to the level of polytheism or monotheism, since no distinct deities or corresponding domains had emerged, nor any symbolic objects.

Thus, the scribe once believed the locals practiced a primitive form of nature worship, easily explaining natural phenomena as rules set by a Heavenly Father for the world.

Yet as communication deepened, the nature-worship hypothesis began to crumble.

The indigenous people did not worship specific natural phenomena or objects. They revered mountains and mist, believing them to hold special meaning, yet seemed to perceive no spirit within them, never praying for protection or favor.

After reviewing texts, he thought he should revise his view—treat it as a form of shamanism, since certain individuals in the village held higher interpretive authority, believed capable of contacting something profoundly elusive, more ethereal than spirit itself.

In form, they bore some resemblance to shamans, even producing objects to manifest their perceived experiences.

But in detail, these objects differed from shamanic traditions.

No feathers, furs, or antlers to signify animal spirits; no instruments mimicking natural sounds.

The only similarity lay in a shared, totem-like shape—extremely complex, repetitive, monotonous, endlessly repeated in everything they made.

He described it as a spiral with strong depth and dynamism.

Dominic and Field exchanged glances—they had dug up something they shouldn’t have.

Though it was common for converted frontier regions to retain local customs—a tacit, unspoken truth—pagan totems still widely persisted in circulation; even if their meaning was forgotten, they were terrifying enough.

This was clearly no deeply hidden secret—the parish must have known and deliberately downplayed its influence, resulting in the current state. Like burying trash with just two shovelfuls of dirt—so long as it stayed off the surface.

At the time, no missionary would have been pleased by such a situation. After believing he had preliminarily grasped their belief system, he prepared his arguments in advance, seeking opportunities to visit and probe.

If pagans claimed they could commune with spirits or ancestors, he emphasized that souls after death must enter heaven or hell for judgment—no intermediate state existed.

If pagans believed all things possessed spirits, he proclaimed that the Lord alone was the Creator, who had endowed no spirit to His created nature.

All known pagan beliefs and countermeasures were recorded in the “Compendium Against Pagans,” and his preaching proceeded smoothly.

They listened attentively from start to finish, offering no rebuttal or interruption, showing no anger at perceived blasphemy—even expressing varying degrees of agreement with the doctrine. They raised only one small objection: “What you say makes sense, but it’s not quite as you describe.”

As for exactly how it was, every interviewee’s account was vague.

In the end, he never managed to debate the pagans—after all, one cannot punch at an invisible wind, and doctrine cannot attack something that does not exist.

The conversion of faith proceeded smoothly; villagers readily accepted the more systematic, beneficial doctrine.

Yet that spiral, curl, vortex—the shape without a name—continued to appear unexpectedly, whenever it seemed about to be forgotten.

Like a tiny splinter embedded under his skin, it made him increasingly uneasy; he frequently visited the last remaining followers of the marginalized primitive faith.

They were not well-educated; though eager to speak of “that thing,” their poor linguistic logic and obscure local neologisms created insurmountable communication barriers—the missionary could never construct a concrete impression.

Fragmented notes yielded only confusion. Perhaps on a day thick with dampness, on waterlogged paper, he tried to summarize years of thought with smudged, blurred strokes.

The pen tip lingered long in one spot, spreading thoughts and ink into a deep black blot.

Then, uncontrollable chaos erupted across the page—explosive, tangled lines, directionless, mindless, like a lost soul lost in fog, frantically sprinting, crossing out “mist,” smearing “sky,” “disappearance.”

Yet some force seemed to pull the pen tip, causing the lines to twist and coil into a dense knot.

Between the deepest black seams, Dominic read a word that did not belong:

“Scales?”

His consciousness automatically took a step toward a direction that did not exist.