Krafft's Anomaly Notes

Chapter 353 Scale

"what is this?"

Dominic took the book. The leather was old and cracked, and the cover was dyed a light yellow like dead bones by lime dust. But he felt a strange feeling when he held it in his hand.

Like picking up a snail shell where a hermit crab hides, the parasite's claws rub against the inner wall, and the silent vibrations are transmitted to the skin.

It seemed as if the tanned parchment had been injected with some kind of life, and something fresh was flowing slowly through it.

The muscles in his palms and fingers twitched slightly, and he almost threw the thing away as if he was shaking off a cold and slippery living thing. He tried hard to restrain his instinctive impulse and moved it to the table as quickly as possible.

Despite this, the rough movement still caused the book to make an unpleasant noise when it came into contact with the table, as if the internal pages were rubbing against each other and the binding was breaking.

"Be careful!" Field's heart trembled, and he quickly slid down the ladder to check the situation. Fortunately, there was no damage or dislocation visible to the naked eye.

"This thing is probably older than both of us combined, and it's a rare copy. If it survives for a few more years, we can consider putting it in an antique shop."

He gently blew away the dust on the surface, placed the book on the V-shaped pillow, and unfolded it slowly and evenly.

The stiff spine of the book groaned as if it was about to break at any second, like an old clam that had been pried open, containing something formed by the invasion of foreign matter.

"Ugh, I knew it was a notebook." Field noticed his companion's hesitation, but he took it as a worry about damaging the unique copy. "Look, I think I saw something about collecting stones for the church. It's really old."

It is so old that it can be traced back to the time when the church below was still a newly reclaimed wasteland. A missionary with only a few luggage and a holy book set foot here for the first time, wrote these words on the stone as a pillow, leaving scratches on the rough surface of the cover.

The reason why it was left here is probably that the narrator was of ordinary status and was not worthy of being sent to a large monastery for collection as a document of special significance.

But that's exactly what they need, something off topic and more personal.

Judging from the relatively simple or difficult conditions, this was an independent missionary who did not have a good educational background. He was just influenced by the trend of expansion to marginal areas at that time, so he registered with the religious order and obtained formal permission.

The newly appointed local lord offered limited support, providing a wooden house, a few bags of grain seeds and uncultivated land, and then ignored them - in fact, this was an upper-middle level start.

He needs to learn the local dialect on his own, work to obtain daily necessities, and on the basis of being able to survive, communicate with residents as a stranger, share surplus food, and help with labor.

The next decade was a life of hardship, and compared to the long time, there are very few written records during this period.

At first, he often mentioned the letters he had asked someone to take away to the church and to the lord, but when he found that there was no response, he stopped sending them.

While working hard with farm tools, the hands occasionally take the time to jot down a few thoughts on life skills.

Thanks to the little medical education he had received, he used simple herbal medicine to help treat some diseases with a relatively high self-healing rate, successfully gained a certain social status, and then used his clerical skills to become a link in the transmission of information between the lord and the residents.

At this point, coupled with his long-standing reputation for being kind to others, the missionary's prestige has become unshakable, and the residents regard him as a member of the settlement and a person worthy of respect.

There was almost nothing he didn't know, including some very subtle local "customs".

Just as fishermen on the seashore would pray for safety and catch to the imaginary being that dances with the wind and waves, mountain people would also have similar behavior. The strange thing is that it took him a long time to fully figure out what was going on.

There are usually several types of paganism that the church has encountered in the past: polytheism, nature or ancestor worship, shamanism, etc.

First of all, the situation obviously did not develop to the advanced level of polytheism or monotheism, because there were neither clear gods and corresponding realms nor symbols.

Therefore, I once believed that there was some kind of primitive nature worship prevalent in the local area, and that natural phenomena could be simply explained as the rules set by God for the world.

However, as communication deepened, speculation about nature worship began to become untenable.

The indigenous people do not worship any specific natural phenomena or things. They have awe for mountains and clouds and believe that they have special significance, but they do not seem to believe that they have any spirituality and never pray for protection or benefits.

After reading the classics, he felt that he should correct his thinking and treat it as a quasi-shamanism, because some people in the village have a higher right of interpretation and are believed to be able to touch something extremely mysterious and more ethereal than the spirit. In terms of form, they have a certain degree of similarity with shamans, and they even make things to express the results of their contact and perception.

But when it comes to these specific things, they are different from shamanism.

There are no feathers, fur, or horns to indicate the spiritual powers of the animals, nor are there any musical instruments to imitate the sounds of nature.

The only thing that could possibly be compared to them is the common, totemic shape that is extremely complex and repetitive, and is shown over and over again in the things they make.

He described it as a spiral with a strong sense of layering and dynamics.

Dominic and Field looked at each other, as if they had dug up something they shouldn't have.

Although it is very normal for some local customs to remain after conversion in marginal areas, which is a tacitly acknowledged fact, pagan totems are still widely spread - even if their meaning has been forgotten, it is scary enough.

This is obviously not a secret that is too deeply hidden. The parish should have known about it and deliberately downplayed the impact, which eventually led to the current result. It is similar to simply piling up two shovels of soil when filling garbage, as long as it is not exposed.

At that time, no missionary would be happy to see this situation. After he thought he had a preliminary understanding of the other party's belief, he prepared a plan in advance and looked for an opportunity to visit the other party to communicate and test the waters.

If a pagan claims that he can communicate with spirits and ancestors, he will emphasize that the soul must go to heaven or hell to be judged after death, and there is no middle state.

If the pagans believed that everything has a soul, they would preach that God is the creator of everything and did not leave any spirituality in natural creations when He created them.

All known pagan worship and coping methods were recorded in the "Summa Refutum Contra Paganis", and the preaching process went smoothly.

The other party listened to the sermon carefully from beginning to end, without refutation or interruption, without anger due to offense to faith, and even expressed different degrees of agreement with the doctrine. He only raised a small objection - what you said makes sense, but that is definitely not what you described.

As for what it is like specifically, several interviewees were vague.

In the end, he was unable to debate with paganism. After all, man could not punch the invisible wind, and doctrine could not attack something that did not exist.

The conversion of faith went quite smoothly, and the residents readily accepted the more systematic and beneficial doctrines.

It’s just that spiral, curl, vortex, a shape that doesn’t even have a name, still appears in unexpected places from time to time just when it’s about to be forgotten.

It was like a small thorn stuck under his skin, which made him care more and more, and he frequently visited the last followers of the original faith who had been marginalized.

They were not well-educated people, and although they were eager to express themselves when referring to "that thing", their poor language logic skills and the communication barriers caused by some dialect-made words did not help to improve the missionaries' ability to construct a specific impression from them.

The fragmented records only brought confusion. Perhaps on a very humid day, he used heavily smudged strokes on damp paper to try to summarize his long thinking.

The pen tip stayed in one place for a long time, and the diffused thoughts and ink formed dark patches.

Then, the uncontrollable chaos was projected onto the paper, transforming into an explosive burst of messy lines, without direction, without consciousness, like a lost person shrouded in thick fog, collapsing and running wildly, scratching out the "clouds", smearing the "sky" and "disappearing".

But there seemed to be some force pulling the pen tip, causing the lines to entangle and loop around each other, forming a dense ball of threads.

In the deepest black gap, Dominic read a word that didn't fit in:

"Scales?"

The consciousness automatically took a step towards a direction that did not exist at all.

I've been feeling a bit exhausted lately (◎_◎;), my schedule is very fragmented, and I expect it to be even busier in the future.

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