Krafft's Anomaly Notes

Chapter 336 Rat Catcher

"The living area, kitchen and dining room, storage warehouse, and stables. We need to clear these areas first."

Kraft, who had been guarding for most of the night and had not seen anything, 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 leftover bun in the steamer, cold, damp and stiff.

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

Comparing with the architectural drawings, most of the space they currently need is in the ancillary buildings on the south side of the central church, with only the stables on the north side against the wall. It is possible that the initial design considered the concentration of daily functional areas and the separation of animals from humans as much as possible.

"There are plenty of rooms, enough to accommodate several times the number of people in the team, but it would be best if they lived together, and night patrols should also be arranged."

"Put at least five or six people on guard at the stables, and have Coop or Yvonne accompany them."

"We'll use the warehouse closest to the residential area first. The stockpiled materials require daily inspection and record keeping. According to the blueprint, the water tank and well are also nearby. We'll give the water to the packhorses for a few days and use it after ensuring it's safe."

"As for the kitchen...it depends on the needs. The food we brought with us doesn't require much cooking. We can purchase fresh ingredients from the foot of the mountain in the future."

Once they settle down, they will gradually plan the remaining space into a library, teaching area, clerical office, grading laboratory, etc., but that will take some time.

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

It is a semi-enclosed cloister-style building adjacent to the church, built around a smaller atrium open space. A well and a reservoir are also located in the center of the open space for convenient domestic water use.

The corridor is supported by continuous arch structures and stone columns on the side facing the atrium, and on the other side are small rooms arranged in an orderly manner, with a neatness like a school dormitory, and looks almost the same from the outside.

Pushing open the door whose key had rusted, the light suddenly dimmed. The narrow and long windows provided limited brightness to these rooms, and even during the day it was difficult to illuminate other areas outside the desk.

The layout of most living rooms can only be described as simple. Two or three simple beds take up a small half of the activity space in the room. In addition to tables and chairs, the remaining area is also filled with a small cupboard. Personal belongings are placed on the lower level, while some copying tools are placed on the upper level.

There were several spare pens, dried ink bottles, and scrapers for removing writing errors and blemishes, and the candlesticks were covered with layers of thick wax, indicating the long time the owner of the room had spent here.

They would rather maintain such a simple material living environment and squeeze out limited funds to buy candles so that their spirits can wander in the kingdom of the Lord in 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 left.

The cork holy emblems that he carved himself in his spare time are placed on the bookshelves of the cupboards and on the empty desks, places that should have belonged to books and papers.

The wooden tabletop was covered with scratches, almost scraping off a layer of the surface. After wiping off the thick dust, one could see ink marks that had penetrated deeply into the tabletop between the scratches.

This reminded Kraft of the public tables and chairs in the college, where bored people would leave graffiti notes on them, which would accumulate and cover each other year after year, forming layers of information that were like the intersection of time and space, like compressed fossils in a sedimentary rock section, which required a certain level of imagination and restoration ability to extract the meaning.

But here, they were scraped off, not just for cleaning, but as a unified, purposeful act, carefully erasing all the writing, 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 with a clinking sound rolled out from the damaged interlayer. They were a few copper coins and black silver coins, as well as small metal ornaments. They should be the private property of a certain monk.

"I thought they loved studying, after all, there are so many books. But this... there's 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 seems to be hand-made from a silver coin. The front is a double-winged circular pattern carved out stroke by stroke, and there is a hole on the top, perhaps intended to be used as a pendant.

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

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

"Honestly, there's something a little weird here. What do you think, professor?" Dominic was not used to this title yet.

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

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

But what he found was hard not to think of the worst case scenario. "Not only that, I saw that the admonitions and mottos on the wall were also worn away."

It is hard to imagine a monastery doing such a thing if it were not a betrayal of faith. Even illiterate thieves who broke in would at least have basic respect for these things.

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

[Heretics generally don't do such low-level things as 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 cleaning with the good feeling of having his efforts recognized.

Watching him leave with a look of relief, Kraft stroked the pendant, feeling the faint trace of terrifying force in the scratches, and nodded slightly at Raymond:
"There is indeed a problem."

He could sense the problem without any intuition. This collective abnormal cognition was so typical that he didn't need to wait for specific unnatural phenomena to make judgments.

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 crack and hole that can be found in vain, waiting for it to appear in the light.