Chapter 67

It was a pile of chaotic combustion residues, unrecognizable in form—even if it had ever had any form to begin with.

The interior had been burned out; the outer carbon shell had collapsed, crumbling into a substance describable only as a “pile”—like boiling an egg without water and realizing too late.

Stepping over blackened shards, avoiding charred lumps still flickering with small flames, his soles grew hot from the lingering heat of the ground.

The air here still carried a gritty texture, dust from the fire drifting aimlessly; Kraft pulled up his collar to cover his nose and mouth, then approached the large pile of smoldering char and pried open a fragment of the carbonized shell with his sword.

This was likely a layer of tissue that had been relatively thick; during combustion, its core hadn’t had time to contract, preserving considerable moisture and some original structure, resulting in incomplete burning that even acted as an insulator—though ultimately meaningless.

The embedded bone plates he had seen earlier had lost their support and fallen into the debris, mingling with other chaotic remains, making identification severely difficult, as if he had no starting point at all.

Kraft lit another candlestick and held it nearby, using two small wooden shards—previously knocked loose by the explosion—to sift through the residue between corpse and ash, deeply doubtful anything of value could be found here.

“Tch.”

He made a disgusted sound—this thing certainly wasn’t his responsibility.

Yes, he had participated in dissections and studied burns, but no one had ever taught him how to handle something reduced to this state.

If only a classmate from the neighboring police university had come to help, there might have been hope. In his eyes, this was nothing but a perfectly cremated remains, ready to be ground finer and boxed up. Yeah, he’d need a big box.

Forced by circumstances, Kraft decided to temporarily play the role of an archaeologist, slowly clearing and rearranging the debris from the ashes.

He found a thin wooden shard to serve as a brush and began sweeping away the ash.

The first things removed were thin shells formed by clumped soft tissues; these were easy to distinguish, since their fractured surfaces lacked the porous internal structure of bone tissue and could be easily sorted into a separate pile.

Kraft had no desire to reconstruct them like a puzzle; he simply set them aside. He had already examined their outlines enough—he wasn’t a biologist, and there was no need to repeat the process.

These broken shells formed the main layer on top; once fully cleared, he truly entered the nightmarish interior structure.

Buried in the loose ash was the ultimate mishmash of trunk bones and assorted bone plates.

Many of those irregular bone plates had been embedded on the surface while it was still alive—like its twisted features, they were discarded, wildly overgrown structures, their origins irrecoverable, identifiable only from a few fragments bearing distinctive anatomical markers.

His superhuman memory proved invaluable: from the orderly arrangement laid out outward, he picked out two bones that seemed utterly unrelated.

After adjusting their angles, the transverse bony ridges on each could barely align, forming a near-arched bony structure.

He placed the two bones under the candlelight again, eliminating misjudgments caused by poor lighting; the credible match confirmed his earlier intuition.

“Zygomatic arch? What kind of zygomatic arch is this?”

This was a distinctive marker. Running forward from the ear canal, one could easily find a prominent bony ridge spanning half the side of the face—it was actually formed by the union of two facial bones: the zygomatic process of the temporal bone and the temporal process of the zygomatic bone.

That meant the two bones in his hands were separated fragments of a skull, placed far apart, their shapes drastically altered, yet this single marker remained untouched.

Following this line of thought, Kraft continued searching, abandoning any attempt to reconstruct the overall form and focusing instead on identifying distinctive markers among the bone fragments; he soon uncovered many intriguing findings. The closer he got to the interior, the more clearly defined the bone shapes became.

As he delved deeper, he found not only skull fragments resembling their original form, but also batches of vertebrae, each segment painstakingly uncovered.

The first time, it was one or two segments—ignored. Then a few more appeared on the opposite side; this was no longer coincidence. Kraft did not move them, continuing to clear the surrounding debris with greater care, avoiding any disturbance to their positions.

The clearing area expanded outward from the center; a pattern emerged—these vertebrae had not been randomly dumped; there were many of them, scattered in every direction, roughly radiating outward.

Overall, the vertebrae found were mostly toward the inner side; thoracic vertebrae were most densely distributed in the middle ring, while lumbar vertebrae with broad, flat spinous processes lay further out.

By sheer quantity alone, they could not have come from a single spine; the overly regular distribution convinced Kraft they had once been complete, and before shrinkage and combustion, several anatomically accurate spines had existed here.

Had spinal cords once passed through the vertebral foramina, each ring protecting its own?

Based on the arrangement of the vertebrae, the possible spinal cord extended outward from the center, its nerves controlling the peripheral wrist-foot structures composed largely of long bones.

The dense concentration of bone matter—if seen by someone unfamiliar with its original form—would surely be mistaken for a mixture of several human skeletons, and then horrified by this fused, congealed state.

Its utilization of human anatomy far exceeded Kraft’s imagination, extending far beyond peripheral parts—it likely involved the central nervous system. Upon reflection, it made sense: using the same neural tissue to control homologous motor systems was like using the original broth to cook the original ingredients.

If it could arrange spinal cords outward to control wrist-feet supported by limb long bones, then logically, the inward structure must follow suit.

The more inward he went, the more orderly the skull fragments became, all pointing toward the central spine—pushing him closer to an unbelievable conclusion.

【Skull, Central】

A spinal cord—merely a low-level reflex center—could not possibly command so many wrist-feet; even reflexes would be a stretch. A governing structure was needed to control the entire body.

This looked like… a skull?

Once the thought formed, everything fell into place.

It was not a biological organism developed from an embryo through orderly, step-by-step growth.

It seemed as if overgrown tissue had surged outward from the center, growing chaotically and uncontrollably, tearing apart partially formed skull bones, expanding directly in all directions, constructing its own vertebrae independently to prepare for the emergence of the motor system, until limbs twisted into wrist-feet, each spinal cord connecting individually to the center.

In his downward pursuit of the core, this theory was further confirmed by more vertebrae—of varying types; Kraft even found one with unfused sacral vertebrae, typically found only in adolescents, while the ends of most others had already fused into solid sacra.

This indicated their developmental sequences differed; larger and smaller wrist-feet emerged at different times. Even after formation, new directions continued attempting to grow additional wrist-feet.

Infinite growth destroyed the central region meant to form the craniofacial structure. Excessive wrist-feet pushed aside normal flesh and bone fragments; each new one expanded the mass further, until even skin could no longer contain it, transforming into a lumpy tumor.

The craniofacial bones he had extracted now lay in several concentric rings around Kraft—they had been repeatedly manufactured to resist this trend, but the ever-emerging new wrist-feet were unstoppable, reshaping the skull endlessly through destruction until it became what it was now.

“Truly terrifying.” The scene bore an uncanny resemblance to cancer cells he knew—growing recklessly outward, pushing and compressing normal tissue until it deformed, atrophied, and became unrecognizable.

The difference was that, despite this insane, infinite proliferation, the wrist-feet still maintained their own orderly growth—a contradiction.

【Origin】

Kraft tossed aside the wooden shard, picked up his sword, and plunged it diagonally downward, shoveling away a pile of ash and bone.

He had endured enough torment from these remains; his instinct told him the center held something significant—an explanation, the source that had birthed the writhing thing.

Shoveling again, he seemed closer; here, the vertebrae had converged into a dense tangle, at least a dozen spiraling inward around the central point.

The vertebrae’s own volume limited their density; at this quantity, the cervical region could not have fully developed—it must have sacrificed the space of the first few segments to make room for the central mass, which wasn’t much smaller.

“Clang.” His blade struck a flat bone plate—a parietal bone whose appearance was nearly normal; the vertebrae curved around it and continued downward, their density increasing, spinous processes interlocking, space narrowing, unburned ligaments woven into a net.

A sudden wave of dizziness and nausea surged—some kind of oscillating sensation, like being tossed up and down by waves in water, head heavy, feet light.

A premonition of falling or rising, disrupting his movements. The debris before him seemed not dead; the dead vertebrae twisted and writhed, mimicking their living state, and for a moment he had the illusion of facing again the full field of wrist-feet—then he blinked, and nothing had changed.

He slid his blade into a crevice, pried aside the obstruction, and exposed its contents.

All vertebral extensions ended here; no further vertebrae existed beyond this point—the first few cervical vertebrae were absent.

They ended with startling uniformity: that particularly fragile cervical vertebra, its cross-section revealing a sinister, grotesque smile, stacked one atop another.

This whimsical image had been drawn on the final page of *Human Anatomy*, signed by the ambiguous Edward; the same symbol had appeared in that heretical old book, where the professor had become obsessively absorbed.

【Fifth Cervical Vertebra】

Amid the crowd of smiling vertebrae, the governing central system of this malevolent body had turned into an indescribable black-and-white substance, seeping and evaporating through the gaps, leaving only shriveled fragments.

A creation utterly unlike any biological tissue lay quietly at the bottom; the sensation of oscillation and floating intensified further.