Chapter 348: The Advanced Puzzle

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

They had to dismantle two baskets to make a filter net, catching the remaining shards 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—none bigger than half 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 partially preserved due to their toughness.

To laypeople, these were chaotic, half-hearted scraps meant only to be carried back as token evidence—but to a middle-aged novice medic locked in a life-and-death struggle with anatomy, they resembled a particularly challenging puzzle.

As the haul grew, the cloth now held many sizable fragments. From a novice's perspective, none exceeded known anatomical boundaries—they were sufficient to infer approximate locations.

Thinking of this, he sat aside and tried to sort the bone pieces, speculating whether they belonged to the target he sought—or merely some unlucky animal crushed beneath a rock.

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

They were badly 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 chest punctures must enter only along the upper rib margin.

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

If these were ribs, no normal human could possibly reconstruct a dozen nearly identical fragments broken into pieces—knowing what they were was enough.

"That bad of luck?"

What kind of luck could get you precisely hit by such a large falling rock—right on the chest cavity?

Then again, a small rock hitting accurately was worse—it meant heavier injuries; a large rock hitting accurately was better—it meant shorter suffering.

The chest cavity was probably the "second best" after the head; it likely ended in seconds.

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

With ribs and vertebrae identified, the creature's body size could now be outlined.

Even allowing for error, Kraft had strong confidence: it was roughly human-sized, perhaps even…

【It was a person】

He suspected bias from studying the *Human Anatomy* text—after all, these bones were absurdly light, as if a stronger breeze could blow them away, contradicting all prior impressions.

He picked up each fragment, weighing it; his finely trained hands immediately sensed the unnaturally light weight.

From cross-sections, the cortical bone was thinner, while the trabecular bone inside was fully filled; upon closer inspection, the 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 identifiable fragments remained after being crushed.

Kraft tried summoning his fellow cultivators to help with the puzzle, but Yvon didn't respond—only worked silently, preferring to flip every rock larger than a person 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.

When immersed in work, time slipped unnoticed. Silt settled; all visible bones were sifted; the skeletal fragments on the cloth finally formed a rough outline.

Fortunately, no more bone pieces turned up—saving him from adding further difficulty to an already massive puzzle.

The result remained incomplete, but enough for Kraft to confirm his guess—a half thoracic skeleton.

Including ribs mostly from the right side, a shoulder blade shattered into over a dozen pieces, and a single humeral head. The uncrushed portions had likely floated away after soft tissue decomposition.

Even laypeople without medical knowledge could plainly see: this was clearly a human skeleton.

"Fell down?" That was the only explanation Kraft could conceive.

An unfortunate corpse had tumbled into the valley during the tower's collapse, then been pinned beneath falling stone slabs—now in this state.

Yet something felt off. He looked upward: the steep cliff edge at the mountaintop lay a considerable horizontal distance away, separated by a patch of stunted, leaning trees and a stony shore.

These bones should have been found directly beneath the cliff.

Lying on his back with arms under his head, he stared at the treetops and hazy clouds filling his vision, gazing at the same sky from the same angle. Perhaps this was the last image frozen in the dead person's pupils.

He imagined the scene: what had caused this bone-remarkable unlucky soul to end up in the stream, then been crushed by a rolling boulder in just the right way?

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

Several cultivators still rummaged in the puddle, carefully parting the silt with their hands, searching for possible clues.

They seemed to have found something again; after brief discussion, a series of splashing footsteps approached—a dark-spotted object glinting in the light entered his view.

Kraft reflexively raised both hands to catch it.

But his motion froze. Something had been triggered—unintentionally, as if a bone fragment had just snapped 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 invisible.

Right…

【Embracing】

A flash of memory: his vision spun uncontrollably upward through gray, dim chaos—the ground vanished. Something waited above, and his weightless body clung to the nearest heaviest object, plummeting into the abyss, even death's terror 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—entirely different scenes, yet eerily similar sensations.

The cultivator handed him the glinting object—unexpectedly, not some sinister artifact.

Just a holy symbol, likely silver, its circular base underfilled and severely deformed by pressure; two overly long, broad wings darkened and dull.

(End of Chapter)