Old-time musicians

"Pigments!?...Not necessarily."

Several people stared at the bright red mark under the eyeballs at the door, and in the blink of an eye, they thought of many other possibilities.

For example, traces of paint, coagulated blood, or marks left by well builders on underground structures.

But the first reaction was a splash of paint.

Because its shape is not like the meandering slide of liquid under the influence of gravity, but the texture, thickness and movement of brush strokes.

Even if it wasn't painted with a brush, it would have to be wiped out with something like a finger.

Sheeran marveled at how she had become so associative in just a few seconds. She took out the rope from her backpack and put it down, letting Fanning tie it to the escalator and around her waist.

With a slight push from Fan Ning's crowbar, half of the door fell backwards, kicking up a cloud of dust.

Two minutes later, several people entered the door in the same manner.

"It still stinks in here..." After taking a few steps inside, the expressions of several people changed.

The corridor was the same as before, but the two sides were no longer empty. Things similar to picture frames were lined up on the wall one after another, extending to the dark end.

These "picture frames" are unevenly distributed, some are more than two meters apart, and some are almost right next to each other. The sizes are not exactly the same, but they have one thing in common, that is, they are all very large. The height fluctuates around the average height of an adult, and the width It's a little wider than a human being.

Fan Ning took the flashlight from Sheeran and moved closer to one of them to observe carefully.

The frame appears to be made of wood, while the inside is made of cloth, with colorful abstract paintings on it.

"...Here, is this an impasto painting?" Sheeran said, "Caron, this touch is so thick. Look at the places with the most paint, they are almost five centimeters above the surface..."

"It's a bit strange..." Fan Ning said to himself in confusion, "The color units in these paintings are extremely beautiful, but there is no technique at all. The composition is messy, and the lines are... no different from those randomly drawn by children."

"Is this the style of abstract painting?" Joan asked.

Fan Ning shook his head: "Even if it is an abstract painting, its components are deconstructed from real things or emotions. Even if it does not talk about natural perspective, it must also consider the layout and composition in an aesthetic sense. Even if it does not reflect a recognizable realistic image, , we must also consider the self-consistency of color, logic or emotion...Although there are some stunning colors in this frame, it is just a pile of paints piled up randomly. This may not be called a 'painting'..."

Moreover, in this era, even the "suggestive flow" or "impressionism" were still in their infancy. Although abstract paintings existed, they were unpopular and unsystematic. They were basically experimental playthings with low market value.

"Yeah, but the color unit is really stunning and beautiful... maybe this is some kind of avant-garde art that I can't appreciate yet."

The three people who continued to walk in gradually discovered that this corridor was like a "gallery". Looking back and forth, except for a few blank frames, they were all weird "giant thick-painted abstract paintings" of this type.

"Caron, after I walked out of the secret door of this exhibition hall today, I feel more and more like I'm dreaming."

Joan looked at these human-height patterns in the dim light. They were brightly colored and had claws and teeth, like some unknown creatures with vitality and hard-to-identify shapes.

"The forms of things in dreams are not so stable, right?" Xilan responded.

"I just feel that these paint patterns are unstable, and I always feel that they will...??" Qiong said, "And lucid dreams are inherently self-aware. The difference between them and reality lies in the sense of confinement, detachment, and overly divergent and erratic emotions. and thinking.”

"I didn't find any indication of dream interpretation." Xilan looked around, "The sense of insularity and detachment you mentioned is indeed a bit, but we are three people now, is this something I feel alone? In the dream, the two of you are sleeping in bed? Or maybe who is leading the dream? Carol... How do you feel? "

"Maybe it's because everyone's inspiration is still at a high level now." Fan Ning looked straight ahead, "I feel okay. The only thing that makes people feel strange is that after being watched by that ancient existence, I don't know where to start. change."

After several people walked more than two hundred steps along the corridor, they came to a slightly open, similar to a connecting hall. There were passages in the other three directions of the room, and huge picture frames were hung on the walls. Except for two or three blank spaces, they are all gorgeous 'heaps of impasto paint'.

Fan Ning took a few steps forward and walked to the middle of the hall.

Here, candlesticks hang from the ceiling, and what looks like a large sink sits on the floor.

A pungent and foul smell penetrated his nose.

"Do you think that the source of that stench is not only the suspected contaminated underground river water under the cracks in the cave at the bottom, but the smell of this thing is also very similar?"

He grabbed the flashlight and raised it above his head, letting the bright light envelope the object.

The other two people also joined in.

It is made of gray stone, about three meters wide and two meters long, and the height exceeds my belly button. There are many muddy pimples on the outside.

The shape is unremarkable, but what's a little strange is...it's almost full inside.

"Is this the smell of the liquid?" Qiong got closer and sniffed.

The liquid appears to be turbid and opaque gray under the light, with oily stains of various colors floating on the surface.

"Just looking at the appearance, why do I feel like I've seen this kind of liquid somewhere?" Sheeran asked doubtfully.

"Of course I've seen it, I've seen it every day before..." Fan Ning took a deep breath, "Isn't this similar to the bucket used to wash brushes when painting?"

This is what it looks like after the paint is washed with turpentine... But Fan Ning always felt that it was very unreasonable to have such a large sink here, and he couldn't see clearly what was in the water.

And...it's true that turpentine is irritating, but it doesn't have such a strong stench that it can wash away in an art museum, right?

"Why do I feel like we've been having trouble with paint lately?" Qiong turned around and asked.

"Yes." Fan Ning pointed at the ground with a crowbar.

Naturally, no one would dare to touch this unknown liquid, but he had just thought of poking it down with a crowbar, but he immediately suppressed his curiosity: "...Let me think about it, since the day the conductor took office, the rehearsal At the end, after discussing the door and key secrets, we headed to the Prudence Auction House. We encountered various things related to paint..."

The painting-burning incident, the Salon for the Outcasts, the Llangevni workhouse, the car chase with Benjamin, and then here.

Could it be that the "Law of Secret History Entanglement" is at work?

Too much irritation and foul smell can make people feel dizzy and narcotic, and other aspects of perception become dull.

Everyone took a few steps back, and then Qiong let out a soft "Yeah".

Her heel stepped on something relatively soft, and she subconsciously prepared to say sorry.

But when he lowered his head and looked down, he saw a futon made of cloth. Many large holes had been broken into the black cloth, revealing the rotten and brittle weaving grass inside.

Only then did everyone notice that there were seven or eight such futons forming a circle on the floor of the connecting hall, which seemed to have been used for people to kneel and worship.

Combined with the huge 'pile of paint' that can be seen everywhere on the wall, and the large water tank placed in the center, it seems as if this place had held an unheard of weird ritual many years ago. Thinking of Ms. Hamilton's previous comments about this address The ominous warnings from the hospital's past, as well as the poor people's files filled with blood-red question marks found in the workhouse, cast a shadow over everyone's minds.

There are three forked roads next, and everyone is not too entangled in the action plan. Even if it is a complex maze, exploring it one by one together is the safest choice.

Before leaving, the three of them couldn't help but look back at the large tank. They always felt that in this dark and silent environment, this large tank of turbid liquid was overly unsettling, but it was neither pouring it out nor stirring it. It's not about buying the bottom, it's not about ignoring it, it doesn't matter how you think about it.

After walking for more than ten minutes, everyone discovered that this was not a maze. On the contrary, the architectural pattern was easy to understand: it was roughly a "gallery" with vertical and horizontal lines interspersed with each other - the angle was not vertical, some were skewed, there were ups and downs, and there were no Completely symmetrical, there is a slightly open connecting hall with a water tank at regular intervals.

After wandering around these "galleries", the three of them came to a relatively spacious room in the innermost room. There were seven stone doors on one side of the nearly 20-meter-long wall. The decorative style of the doors was the same as that of the previous ones. The "bulging eyeballs" are the same, but there are more scratches of different colors on them, which look like messy faces in the dim light.

They were not locked, so everyone went over and took a look one by one. There seemed to be a stone staircase-like path inside, pointing upwards, but they all collapsed to varying degrees. The doors in the worst condition, shined the flashlights on high places inside. It was found that the walls were falling off, soil was overflowing, broken rocks and collapsed pillars had almost completely blocked the road.

Considering the real danger, the three reluctantly chose a road with the least collapse, and climbed to a higher point.

This is a larger circular building, much larger than the previous two-story symbolic hall, but it is no longer empty. There are many rooms inside, and only the outer layer is a circle of curved corridors. On the outer wall of the corridor, windows and huge "paint piles" appear alternately. Through the turbid and yellowed glass, you can also see the soil and rocks outside.

The curved corridor is not unobstructed. In fact, its collapse is also very serious. It is no exaggeration to say that this place is in a state of "semi-connection" with the outside world. The mud and rocks inside the mountain have poured in from many gaps, blocking the way. Part of the access road is dead.

Fortunately, this shouldn't be the only passage. In a building with such a layout, the rooms inside the corridor often connect to each other.

When the three people searched the rooms, they found that some rooms had patterns painted on the floor and ceiling, or some drawings hung on the walls, which reflected celestial bodies, constellations, herbs, minerals or rough human anatomy diagrams, and some rooms had piles of There are some badly weathered bottles and jars or weird-shaped instruments. In some rooms, weird dolls and masks are hung on the walls, and in other rooms, skulls and teeth, handprints and footprints, plaster statues or animal specimens are displayed.

There are also some things that look like paper or text, but the edges have been eaten away by black ashes, as if they had been burned by fire, and the intact parts are also eroded by mold, making it difficult to read the writing on them.

These things were confusing, but they were better than the series of strange scenes they had witnessed before. The three of them had planned to carefully search all the rooms that had not collapsed, but what happened next forced Fan Ning to stop this plan in advance.

——The dense and sharp sound that Sheeran and Joan heard seemed to have an increasingly serious impact on them.

In the small room, Fan Ning watched the two of them resting for a long time with a worried look on their faces. During this period, Qiong also let the two of them take an elixir to resist dizziness. After they recovered a little, Fan Ning Offer to retreat.

However, the three of them had already explored the deeper area. There seemed to be a spacious space in front of them. Due to the circular structure of the layout, it was a faster way to get out from here. So the three of them decided to retreat directly after exploring this large room. .

But as soon as he stepped through the door, Fan Ning's pupils suddenly shrank.

All six sides of this room are covered in colorful paint!

Red, green, white, blue, purple... It's as if someone took a paintbrush as big as a person, dipped it in these gorgeous and complicated slurries for free, and then painted it everywhere, even Fan Ning saw many "brush strokes" in the shape of splashing or splattering, as if they had poured paint buckets directly onto the wall!

The touch of the ground under your feet is hard and uneven, which is enough to show the degree of "thick coating".

This weird scene made the three of them look at each other for a few seconds, but there were some other furnishings in this room that caught Fan Ning's eye. In the middle, there seemed to be a "boiler" sunken below the horizon, with a diameter of more than five meters and a hemisphere. The interior was polished very smooth, and there were no messy paint stains. It was dark and shiny under the light of the flashlight. There were also futons that had been seen next to the "big sink" scattered in many places.

But what finally caught Fan Ning's attention was a set of furniture in the corner of the room similar to a "work desk cabinet". In addition to animal specimens and strange-shaped instruments, there were also dried ink bottles and weathered scraps of paper. and quill.

Further up was a row of books, coils of rusty wire twisted in grotesque ways, which Fanning carefully unscrewed, effortlessly but leaving many sheets of paper scattered and shattered.

In the end, Fan Ning discovered that this was not a row of books, but a collection of a dozen booklets more than 20 centimeters thick. The spines had long lost their fixed function, and the cover said "Okgun" in Tulungarian. transcript".

Looking at Sheeran's thoughtful expression, Fan Ning asked: "Do you know this person's name?"

"Recent new learning results." Sheeran nodded: "Okegon was the last president of the Continental Alchemist Association more than 250 years ago."

"Could this be his research site during his lifetime?" Fan Ning's eyes narrowed.

Several people immediately thought of the meaning!

——The last president means that Okegang is a key figure in the process of the "Continental Alchemist Association" separating from the "Bologna School" and degenerating into the "Reconciliation School"!

But doubts followed.

Continental Alchemists Association? The school of reconciliation? ...This may be related to the cause of Benjamin's madness or the clues about the paint in the Langevni workhouse, but...what does this have to do with the Tulungarian dynasty and the Grand Court School?

One is from the 6th to 7th century of the New Calendar, and the other is from the 3rd century. They are too far apart. If the deep well outside was built by the alchemists to explore the underground tower of the Grand Palace School, it is not necessarily true. They later put the entire research into The venue has also been moved here?

The three of them were deep in thought when they suddenly heard a small "clang".

"Did you hear anything?" Fan Ning immediately raised his head and looked around.

As long as no one spoke, this place would be too quiet. A few people were already very perceptive, but they felt their hearts skipped a beat due to fright.

"Yes...did the wall collapse somewhere again? Did a stone fall or something like that?"

Qiong patted her chest with lingering fear, walked to the door where she came from, and carefully checked her surroundings.

"Bang Dang——" "Bang Dang——"

There were two more sounds in succession, and Fan Ning felt that the sound seemed to be from a long distance away. The volume was small but penetrating, and it could be vaguely heard in a quiet and dark environment.

He shook his head in confusion: "It doesn't sound like a wall or stone. My spiritual sense told me that it sounds like the sound of something like a wooden shelf hitting the ground?"

Sheeran suddenly remembered something. She took out the "Alertness Record" from her lapel. This ritual instrument can show signs of life with extraordinary factors in the surroundings. Previously, three bubbles could be seen near the center of the circle.

The two people who came closer took a look, and their expressions suddenly changed.

At this moment, this palm-sized ritual vessel was filled with bubble-like things. They appeared and burst in cycles, and the entire dark disc seemed to be boiling!

－－－－－－Digression－－－－－

Thanks to the monthly votes of Lechun Yunzheng, Luoyue Station, Hanshao Xianhuang, PS Kuangmo, Takashiiiiii, Eucalyptus, and book friends with tail numbers 7871 and 5116 on August 10~