Krafft's Notes on Anomalies

"The living area, kitchen and dining room, storage warehouse, and stables, we need to clean these parts first."

After squatting for most of the night without seeing anything, Kraft yawned and began to assign cleaning tasks.

The camping experience in the wild was very bad. The nights in the mountains were not as cold as in the north, but the humidity was very high. Every morning when I woke up, I felt like a steamed bun forgotten in the steamer, cold, damp and stiff.

If possible, it would be best to move in tonight so that everyone can get a rest.

Comparing with the architectural drawings, most of the space they currently need is in the annex building on the south side of the central church, and only the stable is on the north side against the wall. It may be that the daily functional area was considered to be concentrated at the beginning of the design, and the animals were separated from people as much as possible.

"There are many accommodation rooms, enough to accommodate several times the number of people in the team, but it is best to live together and arrange night patrols."

"At least five to six people should be arranged to guard the stables, and let Kupu or Yvonne accompany them."

"The warehouse should first use the one closest to the living area, and the reserve materials should be checked and recorded in turns every day. According to the drawings, the water tank and well are also next to it. The water drawn up will be given to the packhorses for a few days to ensure safety before use."

"As for the kitchen... it depends on the needs. The food we bring now does not need to be cooked too much. In the future, we can purchase fresh materials from the foot of the mountain."

After settling down, they will gradually plan the remaining space into libraries, teaching areas, clerical offices, grading laboratories, etc., but that will take a long time.

The preliminary work will start from the original monks' living area. In addition to the accommodation needs, considering that this is the private area of ​​the monks, there may be a chance to find some clues left behind.

It is a semi-enclosed cloister-style building next to the church, built around a smaller atrium open space. The well and reservoir are also located in the center of this open space for convenient water for daily life.

The corridor is supported by continuous arches and stone pillars on one side facing the atrium, and on the other side are small rooms arranged in an orderly manner, which is as neat as a school dormitory and looks almost the same from the outside.

Pushing open the door whose key has rusted, the light suddenly dims. The narrow and long windows provide limited brightness to these rooms, and it is difficult to illuminate other areas outside the writing desk even during the day.

The layout of most living rooms can only be described as simple. Two or three simple beds occupy a small half of the activity space in the room. In addition to tables and chairs, the rest of the area is also stuffed with a small cabinet. The lower layer is for personal belongings, and the upper layer is for some copying tools.

Several spare pen holders, dried ink bottles, and scrapers for removing writing errors and flaws, and the candlesticks are piled with multiple layers of heavy wax, indicating that the owner of the room has spent a long time here.

They would rather maintain such a simple material living environment, but also squeeze out limited funds to buy candles, so that the spirit can travel in the kingdom of the Lord every long night.

However, after checking several small rooms in succession, no books or papers were found, no semi-finished products being copied, no spare blank papers, and not even a piece of the cheapest linen paper was kept.

The cork holy emblems carved by himself in his spare time were placed on the bookshelf of the cabinet and on the empty table, where books and papers should have belonged.

The wooden table was covered with scratches, almost peeling off a layer of the surface. After wiping off the thick dust, you can see the ink that has penetrated deep into the table between the scratches.

This reminded Kraft of the public tables and chairs in the college, where bored people would leave graffiti notes on them, piling up and covering them year after year, forming some information layers that were intertwined in time and space, like fossils compressed in the cross section of sedimentary rocks, which require a certain imagination and restoration ability to extract the meaning.

But here, they were scraped off, not just for cleaning, but some unified and purposeful behavior, carefully erasing all the handwriting, not leaving out any strokes, even if it would make the table uneven and pierce the paper with a little force.

"Is this some kind of tradition?"

"At least I haven't heard of it."

Raymond pulled open the drawer with force, and some small objects jingled out from the broken interlayer. They were several copper coins and black silver coins, as well as small metal ornaments. They should be the private property of a monk.

"I thought they liked to study very much, after all, there were so many books. But this... there is not even a holy book." The young monk from Dunling returned from the next room and handed over a gray pendant.

"And this, I can't say."

"Thank you, Dominic." Kraft took the thing and walked to the window to check.

A common amulet, which seemed to be handmade from a silver coin. The front was a double-winged ring pattern carved out by strokes, and the top was punched, perhaps to be used as a pendant.

Craft had also received this kind of holy emblem amulet, which was given by the church. They usually have inscriptions on the back, and this one in his hand should have one, but it was roughly scratched off by a sharp tool like an awl.

That attitude was not like treating a motto that could bring protection, but rather like discovering some poisonous insects crawling in the hidden places of underwear.

"Honestly, there is something strange here. What do you think, professor?" Dominic was not used to this title.

"What could it be. Heresy? Uh, I'm just talking casually, don't mind it."

He uttered the word carefully, observing Kraft's reaction. After all, for a large monastery, this was a very serious accusation, and his new boss was said to have cooperated with the Inquisition. Even if more than 20 years have passed, if it gets out of hand, someone might really be held accountable.

But his discovery really made him think of the worst case scenario, "Not only that, I saw that the admonitions and mottos on the wall were also worn away."

If it wasn't a betrayal of faith, it would be hard to imagine that a monastery would do such a thing. Even illiterate thieves who broke in would at least have basic respect for these things.

"It's not necessarily heresy." Kraft patted the young man's shoulder and comforted him gently, "I've seen some real heretics and even pagans, and they probably wouldn't behave like this."

[Heresy and pagans generally don't do low-end things like erasing words]

"You are very careful. If you have any new discoveries, please tell me in time, okay?"

Dominic breathed a sigh of relief and continued to clean up with a good mood of being affirmed for his efforts.

Watching him leave with a relieved back, Kraft stroked the pendant, feeling the looming horror in the scratches, and nodded slightly at Raymond:

"There is indeed a problem."

He could feel the problem without intuitive prompts. Collective abnormal cognition is simply too typical, and there is no need to wait for specific unnatural phenomena to judge.

The core question is, what does abnormal behavior represent? There is a very strange thought: this is not like destroying or searching for a specific text, but more like hunting down some extremely flexible burrowing animal, and can only seal every tiny gap and hole that can be found in vain, waiting for it to appear in the light.