Chapter 67: The Central Hub

It was a rather chaotic mass of combustion products, its original shape completely unrecognizable, though to be fair, it never really had anything that could be called a "shape" to begin with.

The interior had been burned hollow, the outer carbon shell collapsed and crumbled into a substance that could only be described as a "pile"; if one were to make an inappropriate analogy, it was like boiling an egg without adding water, and you discovered it far too late.

Stepping over the scattered blackened fragments of ash, dodging the charred remains where small flames still flickered, the soles of his shoes were scorched by the residual heat of the ground.

The air here still felt grainy, with dust from the combustion drifting aimlessly. Kraft pulled his collar up to cover his mouth and nose, approached the large lump of charred remains still emitting black smoke, and used his sword to pry open a small piece of the burnt shell.

This was likely a layer of relatively thick tissue from the original; during the burning, the core hadn't had time to contract, preserving a considerable amount of moisture and a trace of its original structure. The combustion was incomplete, even acting as a barrier, but in the end, the result was meaningless.

The embedded bone plates that had been visible lost their support and fell into the pile of wreckage, jumbled together with other messy debris, creating severe difficulties for identification and giving a sense of not knowing where to start.

Kraft lit another candelabra, held it to the side, and used two small wooden splinters it had just knocked out to poke at the remains lying between corpse and ashes, highly doubting anything valuable could be found there.

"Tsk."

He made a sound of disgust; this thing, by any measure, should not be under his jurisdiction.

Yes, he had indeed participated in autopsies and studied burns, but no one had ever taught him how to handle something burned to this extent.

If a classmate from the neighboring police academy had come over to help back then, there might have been hope. In his eyes, this was just a perfect cremation that only needed to be crushed a bit more to be boxed up. Hmm, it would need a big box.

Forced by circumstances, Kraft decided to temporarily play the role of an archaeologist, slowly sifting things out of the ash and rearranging them.

He found a relatively thin wooden splinter to serve as a makeshift brush, and the cleaning began.

The first things removed were the thin shells formed by clumped soft tissue; this wasn't hard to distinguish, since the broken cross-section lacked the spongy internal structure of bone tissue, making it easy to sort out and pile separately.

Kraft had no desire to assemble them like a jigsaw puzzle; he simply set them aside. He had already examined its outline and shape enough, and he wasn't a biologist, so there was no need to do it again.

These shattered shells made up the main part of the top layer; once they were completely cleared away, he truly entered the nightmare-like internal structure.

Buried in the loose ash was the ultimate hodgepodge of trunk bones and various bone plates.

Many of those irregular bone plates had been embedded on the outer surface while it was still alive; like the distorted facial features, they were discarded parts that had grown wildly. Their origin could no longer be traced, and their source could only be studied from the few pieces with distinctive structures.

His superhuman memory came in handy; from the arrangement laid out in order, he picked out two bones that seemed completely unrelated.

After adjusting the angle, a bone beam growing horizontally on one side could barely fit together, forming a bony structure close to an arch.

He held the two bones up to the candlelight and examined them again, ruling out misjudgments caused by poor lighting; the credible degree of match confirmed his earlier inspiration.

"Zygomatic arch? What kind of zygomatic arch is this?"

This was a fairly distinctive marker. Running a hand forward from the ear canal, one could easily find a prominent bone beam extending horizontally across half the side of the face. It was actually formed by the union of parts of two facial bones: the zygomatic process of the temporal bone and the temporal process of the zygomatic bone.

This indicated that the two skull fragments in his hand had been separated and placed in two widely distant locations, their shapes having undergone massive changes, leaving only this marker unremoved.

Following this line of thought, Kraft continued searching downward, abandoning the overall form and focusing instead on finding special markers within the bone plates. He quickly figured out quite a few intriguing things. The closer he got to the interior, the more distinct the shapes of the bone plates became.

As he delved deeper, he found not only skull fragments approaching their original form but also batches of vertebrae being unearthed segment by segment.

The first time, it was just one or two segments, which didn't draw attention, but then he found several more on the opposite side, meaning this was no longer a random occurrence. Kraft didn't move them; he continued clearing the surroundings, carefully peeling away the debris and ash to avoid knocking them out of place.

As the clearing range expanded from the inside out, a certain pattern of arrangement emerged. These vertebrae hadn't been stuffed in randomly; there were many of them, scattered in every direction, roughly forming a radial pattern.

Overall, the places where vertebrae were found were closer to the interior; thoracic vertebrae were most abundant in the middle ring, while outward lay lumbar vertebrae possessing broad, plate-like spinous processes.

Just by the sheer number, they couldn't have come from a single spine, and the overly regular distribution made Kraft believe they had once been complete; before shrinking and burning, there could have been several spines conforming to real-world anatomy present here.

Within the vertebral canal protected by ring-like vertebral foramina, had the spinal cord once passed through?

Based on the pattern of the vertebrae arrangement, any potential spinal cord would have extended outward from the central position, with nerves reaching out to control the peripheral movement structures of the tentacles, which were mainly composed of long bone tissue.

The densely distributed skeletal remains; anyone who hadn't seen the original form would certainly judge this to be a mixture of several human skeletons, and then be horrified by this fused, lumped-together form.

Its utilization of human structure far exceeded Kraft's imagination; it wasn't limited to the peripheral parts but likely involved the central nervous system. On second thought, it made perfect sense: using the same set of neural tissue to control a homologous motor system was like using the original soup to dissolve the original food.

If it could arrange the spinal cord to control tentacles supported by the long bones of the limbs outwardly, then wouldn't it also make sense to infer the structure inwardly?

The increasingly regular skull fragments deeper inside, with their origins pointing toward the central spine, all led him closer to a conclusion he found hard to believe.

【Skull, Central】

Relying solely on the spinal cord, a place for lower-level reflex centers, was insufficient to command so many tentacles; even having reflexes was pushing it. Naturally, it required a corresponding structure with a governing function to dominate the entire body.

This seemed to be... a skull?

Once the idea took hold, everything suddenly seemed logical.

It was not a creature developed from an embryo; the process of parts forming in an orderly fashion and developing individually made no sense.

It was as if overly proliferated tissue surged from the center, growing outward wildly and chaotically, tearing apart the semi-formed skull, then expanding directly, constructing spines in various directions to prepare for the emergence of the motor system, and finally twisting limbs into tentacles, each spinal cord connecting individually to the center.

In the downward search for the core, this hypothesis was further confirmed by more vertebrae of varying models; Kraft even discovered a spine containing unfused sacral vertebrae, something usually found only in adolescents, while the ends of most other spines had already fused into a single sacrum.

This indicated that their developmental sequences were not entirely identical, with large and small tentacles emerging in succession. Even after forming, new directions still attempted to grow new tentacles.

Infinite growth destroyed this central region that should have formed the craniofacial area. The excessive number of extracted tentacles pushed aside normal flesh and bone plates; each additional one caused it to expand further, until even the skin could no longer cover the whole, turning it into a mass of flesh tumors.

The selected craniofacial bones were spread out in several large circles around Kraft; they had been repeatedly manufactured to stop this trend, but the constantly emerging new tentacles were unstoppable, shaping the skull into its current form through endless destruction and reshaping.

"Truly terrifying." This scene bore a startling resemblance to the cancer cells Kraft knew, growing outward recklessly, pushing aside and compressing normal tissue until it deformed and shrank, making its original form completely unrecognizable.

The difference with the tentacles was that amidst this incomprehensible infinite proliferation, they somehow maintained their own regular growth; these two things were contradictory.

【Source】

Kraft tossed aside the small wooden splinter, picked up his sword, and drove it diagonally downward, shoveling away a pile of ash and bones together.

He had had enough of the torment these things caused; his intuition told him that the center must hold special significance, capable of explaining it, and was the source from which the writhing things were released.

Shoveling away another section, he seemed to be getting closer; the vertebrae here had already converged to the point of being squeezed into a mass, with at least a dozen spiraling inward around the central point.

The volume of the vertebrae themselves limited their density; given this number, the cervical section couldn't possibly be fully formed. The space for the first few vertebrae must be sacrificed to make room for that central hub, which wasn't exactly small in size.

"Clang." The sword struck a flat bone plate; it was a parietal bone whose appearance was basically indistinguishable from normal. The vertebrae bypassed it and continued converging downward, the density increasing, spinous processes interlacing, the space becoming narrower and narrower, with unburnt ligaments weaving a network.

A strange sensation of dizziness and nausea surged up, a kind of oscillating feeling, like being carried up and down by waves in water, feeling heavy-headed and light-footed.

A precursor similar to falling or rising, it disrupted his movements. The wreckage before his eyes seemed not to be dead; the dead vertebrae twisted and writhed, pretending to be alive, creating a momentary illusion of facing tentacles filling his vision again, but upon steadying his gaze, nothing had changed.

The sword blade inserted into the gap, pried open the obstacle, and exposed the contents.

The extension of all vertebrae ended at this position; beyond this, there were no vertebral segments, and the first few cervical vertebrae did not exist.

They were remarkably consistent at the terminating segment; that particularly fragile cervical vertebra, revealing a sinister, grotesque smile on its cross-section, lay stacked upon one another.

This macabre image was drawn on the last page of "Human Anatomy," signed by a real-or-fake Edward. The same symbol also appeared in that heretical old book, in which the professor had fervently immersed himself.

【Fifth Cervical Vertebra】

Amidst the vast array of vertebrae smiling in guard, the central system governing this malevolent body transformed into an indescribable black-and-white substance, flowing out through the pores and evaporating until only shriveled fragments remained.

A creation whose form was utterly unlike biological tissue lay quietly at the bottom, deepening the illusion of oscillating and sinking.