Chapter 55: The Drowned One Awakens

Li Si lifted the lantern to illuminate the ceiling above, finding no waterlogged, discolored wood, nor any dripping water.

The air was saturated with uniform, pervasive moisture, so thick it made him feel as though he were by the seaside at dusk, where the sea breeze carried the steam rising from an endless expanse of water, shrouding all directions; not particularly cold, yet bearing an inescapable sense of grandeur.

Yet this was merely a small room, standing out as utterly incongruous amidst several consecutive days of clear weather in Wendeng Port.

"Are you telling me that someone who supposedly 'stayed in the room all day' has vanished into thin air?" Li Si dragged the landlord into the room, holding the lantern almost up to the window. "What does this mean?"

His tone carried anger used to mask panic; the internally locked doors and windows, the unusually damp room, generated a subconscious fear that boiled within, a rejection of the incomprehensible anomaly, an inability to accept a supernatural development defying logic.

Instinctively, he wanted to leave this strange room, to escape this matter and return to an untroubled, ordinary life, yet this development answered his question precisely: regarding Chengming, there must exist a deeper, terrifying correlation, and he could not accept that the only person who could bridge the connection had gone missing.

Moreover, he was already entangled within it; failing to uncover the truth would leave him restless, unable to eat or sleep.

"This is impossible..." the landlord whispered, unsure whether he was frightened by the bizarre disappearance or pressured by Li Si.

Li Si walked around the room, stepping on the floorboards; these laid planks were quite solid and reliable, neither loose nor displaced. "Is there any way to bolt the inside of the door or window from the outside?"

On further thought, it was not impossible; with a tool fine and hard enough, plus some skill, it might be done. He removed the wooden bolt from the inside of the window and examined it under the lantern's light.

It was a hard, straight wooden strip, at least two fingers wide, made of good timber, slightly heavy in the hand; while a slender object might pry it open through the gap, reinserting it was something impossible to achieve from the outside.

The landlord did not answer his question but retreated to the doorway. "Mr. Li Si, perhaps we could go to the church and find a priest who can help."

"No, no." Before Li Si could speak, Lu Xiusi preemptively rejected the suggestion. He set down the wet quilt in his hands, his attitude firm. "You wouldn't want your inn to gain a reputation for being haunted, would you?"

"Yes, please go downstairs first; we will handle it ourselves," Li Si agreed, patting his pocket where coins clinked. "Oh, by the way, we can discuss compensation for the door bolt later."

"No need." The landlord fled the room as if escaping, leaving behind a string of hurried footsteps.

Lu Xiusi picked up the quilt and rubbed it carefully with his palm, confirming Li Si's sensation. "It's wet. Why is this?"

"I don't understand either. You've spent more time with Kraft; do you have any leads?"

Li Si walked to the door, peered out to confirm no outsiders remained in the corridor, then closed the room door. The humidity difference across the threshold was still very distinct; water seemed to have "invaded" this room, clearly marking the boundary between two sides.

Inside was an unusually damp seaside, while outside was a normal, dry environment. If Kraft was experimenting with something, he had found no vessels whatsoever; it felt more like some ghost story.

In a coastal city like Wendeng Port, such strange tales were never lacking, spreading among dockworkers and passing sailors. What thin, tall creatures crawled out of the sea at midnight, leaving wet dragging marks; Li Si had heard enough of these in the taverns, so it was no wonder the landlord wanted a priest to exorcise the place.

He pushed open the window; below lay a dark alley, the lantern's light unable to reach the ground.

"If someone took Kraft, or if he left without being detected, he would still have to go through the window." Lu Xiusi discarded the fantastical imagination and looked down alongside Li Si. "Why not go down and check for footprints or something?"

"Then how is it possible to bolt the inside from the outside?"

"No need to consider that; just assume there's a method we can't think of for now. Let's go down and look first." According to Li Sidun's idea, there was no need to proceed step by step; guessing the result first and then concocting a roughly matching process was acceptable, a typical student's approach to passing an assessment.

"Makes sense." Since standing here longer wouldn't clarify anything, Li Si agreed with this view.

Thus, the two went downstairs; Li Si insisted on finding the landlord to pay the compensation for the door bolt, even overpaying by a portion. In Lu Xiusi's view, the price was enough to replace the entire door.

"If we find footprints, should we follow them? The lamp oil doesn't seem to last much longer." Standing at the alley entrance, Lu Xiusi shook the lantern in his hand; the flame was much smaller than when they first left.

"We'll decide once we find them." Li Si stepped into the alley first, holding little hope for this.

Wendeng Port was not yet wealthy enough to pave every such small road with stone slabs; in these most complex parts of Wendeng Port's traffic network, dirt occupied the vast majority of the surface, with the remainder paved with gravel and sand according to the preferences of nearby residents.

The inn's back alley was rarely visited; naturally, the landlord had no time to improve the narrow road surface, and discarded clutter made this place seldom frequented.

Sunlight-deprived dirt mixed with certain dumped, easily rotting garbage, forming a soft, crumbling texture; if one could not fly, leaving footprints on such a dirt road was inevitable.

Even so, searching for these traces at night was not simple; the dimming flame required bending down to inspect the ground, and every step forward raised suspicion that one had missed traces hidden in dark corners.

In just over twenty short steps, the two somehow took several minutes, winding around to the position directly beneath the corresponding window of the back alley.

"Did you find anything?" Lu Xiusi held his waist, his spine emitting a lack-of-exercise crack; walking behind, he could only see Li Si's footprints.

"I found that I should wash my shoes when we get back." Li Si carefully lifted his foot, stepped back two paces, and yielded the position to Lu Xiusi. "You go first; my eyes are blurring, and I'm afraid I'll miss something."

Regarding the matter of finding footprints, Li Si had already lost hope; since there were none beneath the window, it was unlikely any would be found elsewhere.

The two swapped positions, with Lu Xiusi in front.

Lu Xiusi maintained a serious attitude, shining the lantern on every corner, trying to find a clue. Under the faint light, his spirit was extremely focused.

He rounded a pile of clutter, and as he turned to look, a pale face suddenly appeared before his eyes without warning.

Skin lacking blood color, as if the fluids sustaining life had been drained away, even the lips showed a pale, bluish-white hue.

"Ah!"

Highly concentrated spirit, combined with limited vision, caused this face to deliver an immense shock instantly. A state between life and death, difficult to distinguish, amplified human fear of something resembling a fellow creature, plunging into an irrational extreme of terror.

Lu Xiusi fell to the ground, scrambling backward on hands and feet; the lantern rolled aside and extinguished in the darkness.

"What's wrong?" Li Si pressed his shoulder; his voice and the pressure on the shoulder effectively calmed his emotions.

"Right there, the face..." Lu Xiusi, still shaken, pointed at the pile of clutter at the edge of the light; from this angle, nothing behind could be seen, so only when rounding it did the suddenly appearing face frighten him.

Lu Xiusi had seen dead people before, but in this environment, even a loud shout nearby could frighten someone to death; encountering a face unexpectedly was simply too terrifying.

Helping Lu Xiusi up, Li Si pushed him behind himself, holding one hand protectively before his chest while carrying the lantern around the clutter pile. Lu Xiusi watched tensely from behind.

"Kraft?!"

In the light, Li Si's expression twisted, as if he had seen something incredible.

"What?" Hearing the name, Lu Xiusi cast aside his fear and hurried forward to look at the face.

Fully exposed to the light was Kraft's signature golden hair; that familiar face, due to its extreme paleness, looked strangely terrifying, showing no trace of his usual healthy appearance.

Were it not for the hair color and the long sword hanging at his waist, he would almost have been mistaken for another stranger resembling Kraft.

Li Si set down the lantern, held his fingers beneath Kraft's nose; faint breath proved that life still existed within this body, indistinguishable between life and death.

"He's still alive; we must get him out." He supported one of Kraft's shoulders under his armpit, while Lu Xiusi hurriedly lifted the other.

"Wet?"

A cold, damp sensation seeped from the contact points; Kraft seemed as if he had just been fished out of seawater, his clothes soaked through.

Grasping Kraft's wrist, the hand met a chill. Li Si had only felt such temperature on a few patients, mostly those soaked in ice water for too long, or suffering hypothermia from drowning, their lives flowing away with the lost heat.

"Hurry; we must carry him to a warm place."

Kraft was placed in the spot closest to the stove in the inn's front hall; visible white mist rose from his clothes, and who knew how so much water could be inside.

Lu Xiusi pulled him a bit farther away, pressed his neck, counted silently in his heart for a while, then let go. "Good, at least the pulse is fine, and the body temperature is improving."

"I just have one question: what are these?"

Some white substance remained on his fingertips, taken from Kraft's body; even the parts of his clothes dried by the fire felt slightly rough to the touch, and powder could be rubbed off.

Li Si and the innkeeper squatted nearby and, imitating Lu Xiusi, rubbed Kraft's body; this powder was some kind of extremely fine crystal, with the larger grains reflecting light beside the stove fire.

Before anyone could stop him, the tavern owner stuck his finger into his mouth and licked it.

"Pah, is it salt?" He spat to the side; the bitter, salty taste did not seem like edible salt, but rather water scooped directly from a puddle dried on the beach.

But where could seawater have come from in the alley behind their own inn to soak a person through and through? The innkeeper suspected his sense of taste had failed and reached out to pinch a bit more to taste.

A cold hand blocked him; when no one expected it, Kraft, lying on the ground, opened his eyes, wearing an unfamiliar look never seen before.