Whispering Verse

Priest Augustus found the location of the tomb through the tombkeeper's records. When the two were searching in the cemetery, the occasionally disturbed snakes and rats hiding in the ground became the only things that could bring them surprises.

Because the cemetery is not big, the two found their target quickly.

It was an inconspicuous little tomb located on the west side of the stone building that served as both a "church" and an "entry to the crypt", close to the cemetery fence. The tombstone embedded slightly above the ground says that the name of the person buried here is Mushir Lee Naim. This poor guy died half a month ago.

Apart from this information, there is nothing on the tombstone, no date of birth, no cause of death, and no life comments left by others who spent money to bury them. But considering that this is just a small cemetery in the countryside, this situation is understandable.

After all, being able to have an undisturbed regular cemetery after death is a treatment that many poor people cannot imagine.

"This is it, Shade, come on, dig it up with me."

Priest August spat into the palm of his hand twice, then rubbed his hands and prepared to work.

"Priest, do you have a grudge against this gentleman?"

Shade asked hesitantly.

"Of course not. I have done good deeds throughout my life. Even if I have some unfriendly acquaintances, I will not touch their graves."

The priest replied and told Shade not to waste time. The ceremony must be arranged before two o'clock in the morning.

"Then what are you..."

"Oh, you are confused about this."

The priest smiled as he shoveled the soil, and Shade put the cat on the fence and prepared to work. I originally wanted to warn the cat not to touch those rats that were definitely carrying infectious diseases, but looking at the cute look of Mia squatting on the wooden post of the fence, squinting her eyes and raising her head to bathe in the moonlight, it probably wouldn't bother. of chasing mice.

After all, little Mia, the city cat, doesn't look like the kind of cat that's good at catching mice.

"A few days ago, I met a believer who came all the way from the countryside to the church to confess. She was a peasant woman from a nearby village. She confessed through a small window in the prayer room that she had not arranged a funeral for her husband."

"Isn't this a nice cemetery?"

Shade took off his coat, and he and Priest August were digging side by side, piling the soil under the fence with their shovels.

"She and the deceased gentleman were outsiders and had no acquaintances in the village to help with the funeral. Therefore, the peasant woman entrusted a man who happened to be staying in the village and claimed to be a scholar to help with the funeral. Everything went well at first, but after the funeral , the peasant woman always dreams about her husband, and the dead man claims in his dream that his soul has been tortured.”

The priest struggled to lift the soil from the grave, and when he told the story, his words were intermittent:

"The scholar who was paid to help organize the funeral has already entered the city, and the peasant woman suspected that the scholar had desecrated the body, so she went to the church to pray to God to forgive her for being disrespectful to the funeral. That woman never thought of digging up the body and looking at it. Condition."

From this point of view, there is indeed something fishy about this matter.

“So why don’t you let the church handle this?”

"This is not a matter in the city, and there is no clear evidence that it has anything to do with the Ring Warlock. Even if the church accepts the case, it will take several weeks to send out personnel to investigate the matter. After all, the really important things in the city are not A lot.”

The priest explained, and Shade understood what he said. Like the three commissioned tasks that Iluna gave him last week, they were things that were backlogged in Blackstone Security Company and were not taken seriously.

The results also proved that although those things sounded strange, there was really no need to deal with them in a hurry.

"So how did you determine that there was something wrong with this matter? If you had to check it yourself every time you encountered similar things, I think there would be too many things to deal with."

The priest nodded, breathed heavily and looked up at Shade:

"Looking at it from this perspective, why has your skin become so good? What have you encountered recently... Oh, I probably haven't mentioned it to you. I have a strange ability. When a person is confessing, he can I can vaguely distinguish whether he is lying. This vague feeling allows me to easily distinguish what the believers want to express. This is not an easy thing. When I listen to people's confessions, I have seen countless dark stories. .”

Shade was very lucky that when he prayed to the priest in Coldwater Port for "falling in love with multiple girls" in order to report Darkness, the distant priest did not have the skills of Priest Augustus.

"But is this the special ability of Father August's 'other self'?"

Boom~

The shovel in Shade's hand hit something. Because it was hollow inside, the dull sound was completely different from the sound of digging soil and hitting rocks.

"etc."

The priest immediately knelt down on one knee and pushed away the floating soil, and sure enough he saw the wooden coffin lid that had not rotted yet:

"found it!"

The priest was very happy that the old man came out so late and even invited Shade in the name of Angel Potion, just to confirm the contents of the coffin, not for reward.

From this point of view, although Priest August always believed that people's hearts were dark, he was probably one of the noblest people Shade knew.

The body had not been cremated. After opening the coffin lid, the choking smell made both Shade and Priest August frown. After the summer, the corpses buried deep in the ground were severely rotted, and the insects nourished by the corpses even swarmed in large areas under the moonlight.

Shade held back his nausea and looked up at little Mia. The timid cat also saw this scene, but it didn't seem to be afraid at all. Probably in the eyes of cats, this is just something ugly.

"Priest, don't tell me, we're moving this body out... Do you have gloves? I'm going to wear three layers."

Shade frowned and asked, and the old priest held back his nausea and answered in a muffled voice:

"Don't worry, if we're lucky, we won't have to touch the body at all. I'm going to arrange a ritual to appease the body and free the soul. Before I arrange the ritual, detective, use your moonlight to help illuminate it and see if there is anything abnormal about the body."

As he spoke, Priest August also brought up the lantern he borrowed from the tombkeeper, lighting up the disgusting scene over the tomb. The moonlight on Shade's fingertips also lit up, and the silver light shone on the corpse, and there was actually a faint black mist rising upwards. This at least means that there is something evil in this corpse.

"Look at this!"

Priest Augustus pointed to the hands clasped together on the chest of the corpse. The bones could almost be seen in the rotten hands, and the flesh and blood in the skin seemed to have been hollowed out by insects. And in his hands, there was a black dagger.

No matter where in the Kingdom of Drarion, there is no custom of letting the buried person hold a dagger in his hand.

"It's not a relic. There are no traces of sensory elements."

Shade covered his nose and said sullenly.

"That's good news, let me get it out."

The priest sensibly did not reach out, but used the spell [Move Object] to carefully remove the dagger from the corpse's hand.

However, when the black metal dagger was completely separated from the corpse's hand, the hands actually grabbed it upwards, grabbed the dagger again, and then restored it to its original position.

The cemetery fell silent for a moment, and Shade and Priest August looked at each other in surprise.

"Detective, I shouldn't have been dazzled just now, right?"

the priest asked in surprise.

"I saw it too."

Shade said, thought for a while and asked:

"Priest, if you don't mind desecrating the corpse, then I will cut off the corpse's hands."

I thought the priest would disagree, but he thought about it and nodded:

"Okay, we'll sew it up later."

Shade sincerely hoped that "we" meant the priest and the cat, not the priest and the detective.

He did not summon the Moonlight Sword. This sword was too sharp and could penetrate the corpse accidentally. Shade took out two Rhodes cards from his arms, flicked them lightly, and the sharp cards flew towards the two wrists of the rotting corpse.

call out!

The card cut through the relatively cool air in the middle of the night, but the next second, it was pierced from the center by a sharp dagger.

"Oh, I knew it wouldn't be that easy!"

Shade and Priest Augustus retreated at the same time, while the cat waiting on the fence quickly jumped up to the big tree next to the tomb, looking down with wide eyes. In the dark night, the cat's eyes seemed to glow.

The corpse, holding a dagger, sat up from the tomb.

"Priest, was this what you expected?"

Shade asked and prepared to fight, but after the corpse crawled out of the tomb, it actually jumped towards Priest August.

The old priest dodged awkwardly, then kicked him over. His original intention was to kick the corpse, but he didn't expect that his kick penetrated the fragile corpse's abdomen.

Rotten pieces of flesh, worms, and pus flowed out of the corpse, and it silently raised its dagger to stab Priest August's head.

The old man pointed his finger and spoke quickly the ancient mantra word that represented the power of the elements:

"wind!"

The invisible wind was like a ribbon, wrapping around the corpse's hands. Then Shade ran from behind the corpse, raised his sword with both hands, made a big jump, and neatly split the corpse into two pieces diagonally from top to bottom.

The black dagger fell from his hand and stabbed into the ground. The land that originally grew green grass immediately began to turn black and smelly with the dagger as the center.

Priest August ignored the dagger and hurriedly took out a bottle of brown liquid that was familiar to Shade from his pocket. After falling onto the corpse, the old hand pointed again:

"fire!"

Raging flames immediately ignited on the corpse.

That bottle of liquid was a powerful fire oil that Shade and the doctor had used once when they shot people, set fire to people and scattered money.

"Priest, does this constitute desecration of a corpse?"

Shade was surprised by the priest's skillful movements.

"This is an undead, not a corpse. Detective, don't make this basic common sense mistake."

The old priest said, and then with Shade's even more surprised expression, he squatted down and pulled out the black dagger.

The dagger that corroded the earth immediately had a more terrifying effect on the priest's right hand. The arms, which were already thin due to aging, immediately shrank and turned black and withered.