Chapter 348: The High-Level Puzzle

Despite the people on shore reacting quickly, many of the scattered fragments had already drifted away.

They had to dismantle two baskets to fashion a filter net, catching the remaining debris and carefully retrieving every small object from the water, laying them out on cloth spread on the shore to drain.

With a few slightly larger fragments—not even half the size of a palm—Kraft finally found some barely recognizable features.

There was no doubt: these fragments were bone.

At least Kraft couldn’t imagine anything else with such a standard dense outer layer, porous internal structure, and joint surfaces preserved due to their relative strength.

To laypeople, these were chaotic scraps meant only to be bundled up and handed in as a perfunctory task; but to a middle-aged novice medic locked in a life-or-death struggle with anatomy, they resembled a particularly challenging puzzle.

As more salvage was recovered, the cloth now held a fair number of sizable fragments. From a novice’s perspective, none had strayed beyond the bounds of known anatomy—they were sufficient to infer approximate locations.

Thinking of this, he sat down beside them, attempting to sort the bone fragments, wondering whether this was the target they sought—or merely some unfortunate animal crushed beneath a rock.

Overall, one category of the recovered bone fragments accounted for a significant portion.

They were severely shattered, but their cross-sections revealed a flattened shape; a few slightly longer ones curved gently.

After turning them over repeatedly, he finally found a faint longitudinal groove on one intact side, running nearly parallel to the bone’s axis.

This inconspicuous groove had once been emphasized in lectures: it lay along the lower edge of the rib, housing blood vessels and key structures, dictating that thoracic punctures must enter only along the upper border.

Kraft swept the sorted flat bones into a pile, leaving half the cloth suddenly empty.

If these were indeed ribs, no ordinary person could possibly reconstruct a full set of ten or more nearly identical fragments broken into pieces—knowing what they were was enough.

“So bad luck?”

What kind of luck would get you precisely struck by such a large falling rock—right on the thorax?

Then again, a small rock hitting true was worse—it caused heavier injuries; a large rock hitting true was better—it ended the pain faster.

The thorax was probably second only to the head as the “best” target—likely over in mere seconds.

As he pondered, the cultivators unearthed more bone fragments; their blocky shapes were easier to guess—likely several vertebrae.

With ribs and vertebrae identified, the creature’s overall size could now be sketched out.

Even allowing for error, Kraft felt strong confidence: this was something roughly human-sized, perhaps even…

【It was a person】

He suspected bias from having studied “Human Anatomy”—after all, these bones were unnaturally light, so light they seemed as if a stronger breeze could blow them away, defying all prior impressions.

He picked up each fragment, weighing it; his hands, accustomed to fine manipulation, immediately sensed the unnerving lightness.

From cross-sections, the cortical bone was thinner, while the trabecular interior remained fully filled; upon closer inspection, the woven trabeculae were sparse but arranged with unusual regularity.

If ordinary bone was like a sponge, these fragments were like dried loofah—geometrically structured, three-dimensional latticework forming a loose yet elastic new architecture.

Less hard than ordinary bone, but far more flexible.

This might explain why fragments remained discernible after the impact.

Kraft tried summoning his fellow disciples to help assemble the puzzle, but Yin Feng gave no response, only worked harder, preferring to flip every stone larger than a man in the stream rather than take over.

Mental labor fell entirely on Kraft’s shoulders; he resigned himself, sat down, and began comparing each fragment one by one.

When immersed in work, time slipped away unnoticed. The silt settled; all visible skeletal remains were sifted through; the bones on the cloth finally formed a rough outline.

Fortunately, no more fragments turned up—saving the already overwhelming puzzle from further complexity.

The result remained incomplete, but sufficient for Kraft to confirm his hypothesis: half a thoracic skeleton.

It included ribs primarily from the right side, a shoulder blade shattered into over ten pieces, and a single humeral head. The uncrushed portions had likely long since floated away after soft tissue decomposition.

Even to laypeople lacking professional knowledge, this was unmistakably a human skeleton.

“Fell down?” This was the only explanation Kraft could conceive.

An unfortunate corpse had tumbled into the valley when the tower collapsed, then been pinned beneath falling boulders, ending up like this.

Yet something felt off—he looked upward. The steep cliff edge at the mountain’s summit lay a considerable horizontal distance away, separated by a patch of stunted, leaning trees and a gravelly shore.

These bones should have been found directly beneath the cliff.

Lying on his back with arms folded under his head, he stared at the treetops and the gray, hazy sky—the same angle, the same sky. Perhaps this was the final image frozen in the dead person’s pupils.

He imagined the scene: what had caused this unfortunate soul—whose very bones were astonishing—to end up in the stream, then be crushed by a boulder rolling down with perfect precision?

But no matter how he rearranged the imagined scenario, it never matched the actual fracture patterns of the bones before him.

Several cultivators still rummaged in the puddle, carefully parting the silt at the bottom, searching for possible clues.

They seemed to have found something again; after a brief discussion, a series of splashing footsteps approached—a dark object with glinting reflections entered his view.

Kraft reflexively raised both hands, ready to catch it.

But his motion froze. Something had been triggered—unintentionally, as if a bone fragment had just slipped perfectly into its correct joint socket, seamless, natural, effortless.

He felt his own movement: arms extended upward, lying on his back, as if embracing something unseen.

Right…

【Embracing】

A flash of memory: his vision spun uncontrollably upward through gray, dim chaos—the ground vanished. Above, something waited; his weightless body clung to the nearest, heaviest object, plummeting into the abyss, even fear of death unable to loosen his grip.

He jolted upright, pierced by the crushing despair he had felt.

Certain memories stirred, emitting an unsettling milky-white glow. A completely different scene—but the sensation was identical.

The cultivators handed him the glinting object—unexpectedly, it was no sinister artifact.

Just a holy symbol, likely silver, its circular rim underweight and badly deformed by pressure; the two elongated, overly broad wings were dark and dull.

(End of Chapter)