I loaded the Mysticism panel.

During the evening briefing, the other two groups each reported an anomaly they had discovered.

Neither report is particularly significant on its own.

When Inspector Harding laid the two reports side by side on the table, his gaze swept back and forth across the map twice.

"The line connecting these two points passes through the B row of tents."

"Platter, take your men and walk along this line, starting from the water source terminal."

Early in the morning, Pratt led Richard's group to the end of the camp's water supply line.

He squatted down at the pipe connection and took a glass bottle out of his pocket.

When the valve was turned on, a spit-out substance mixed with brownish rusty water came out of the pipe before regular tap water flowed out.

He took about two fingers' depth and held the bottle up to his eyes.

The water is clear, and the average person wouldn't find anything wrong with it.

Pratt watched for a while.

"Come here."

He handed the bottle to Richard.

Richard spread out his mind and laid out the still water of inspiration against the bottle wall.

The water was clean, no different from the tap water flowing from the dormitory building of Imperial University.

About three or four millimeters below the water surface, there is a layer floating on the inside of the bottle wall.

It hangs there, neither rising nor sinking.

"There's something in the water." Richard handed the bottle back to Pratt. "It's not a problem with the piping itself."

"Can you read out the way?"

"I can't read the origin." Richard shook his head.

"We can only confirm that it is not water itself, but rather it seeped in from outside."

Pratt didn't say anything, and placed the bottle on the stone block next to the pipeline.

"Continue downstream, taking a sample every twenty yards."

He assigned tasks to the other members of the group.

Edmund and Maggie inspected along the right side of the pipeline, Catherine took samples and made records, and Richard followed Pratt along the left side of the pipeline.

This walk took up most of the morning.

"There's a problem with the foundation in the area where the pipeline passes through."

Pratt crouched down and scratched the outside of the pipe with his fingernail.

He glanced at the muddy ground beneath his feet.

"The warehouse area was a fishing port before the 1870s. There are old stone foundations under the piers, and below the stone foundations are the remains of medieval breakwaters."

What was mixed into the breakwater construction materials is not recorded in the port authority's files.

At the briefing that afternoon, Harding, accompanied by the port authority, applied for limited excavation.

The engineering company sent a group of people the following afternoon.

Six soldiers, carrying shovels and picks, began digging along the edge of the B platoon's tent area.

When they dug to a depth of two feet, the shovel made a different sound.

The engineers replaced their shovels with small pickaxes and began digging out little by little.

After the lime mortar was removed, the underlying stone surface was exposed.

Richard squatted down by the pit and looked down.

Bowen mentally recalled all the relevant images and comparisons.

"Ancient Gaulish inscriptions," Richard reported his assessment.

Maggie squeezed through the crowd and sat cross-legged on the edge of the pit, looking down.

"I've seen these curved paths at home before."

"Not exactly the same, but similar."

She pointed to a group of symbols in the lower left corner of the stone surface, which were mostly covered by mud.

"Look here, the circle facing down has only one meaning in ancient Celtic inscriptions."

"What do you mean?" Edmund asked from the side.

"Leading to the underground."

Maggie withdrew her hand from the edge of the stone.

"This set of inscriptions is guiding the way."

"Where does it point?"

"Pointing to something deeper beneath the surface of this stone."

However, the information that can be gleaned from a single exposed rock surface in the exploratory pit is extremely limited.

Over the next few days, the joint investigation team split into several lines of investigation and proceeded simultaneously.

Montague and Fisher were seconded to assist with sampling, numbering, and data processing along the pipeline route, while Edith was of great help in classifying and identifying the bone fragments found at the pit.

Edmund rummaged through the port authority's box of moldy old files.

Every generation knows there's something underneath, but every generation chooses to close the lid and ignore it.

Richard and Catherine were responsible for transcribing and comparing the unearthed inscriptions.

When the sappers dug down to four feet, their shovels hit the rock again.

But this time, it was the edge of a well.

The wellhead faces upwards and is about two and a half feet in diameter.

"Stop!" Pratt shouted, halting the engineers who were about to continue digging.

He lay down by the pit and peered into the well, his face expressionless.

The hidden groove beneath the inscribed stone has a core function of "triple reception".

The triplet corresponds to the most brutal sacrificial tradition of the ancient Gauls.

The chosen offering must die in three ways.

He was first strangled to death with a rope and then offered to the tree god Essus;

Their throats were then cut open and their blood drained, which was then offered to the tribal god Tutatis.

Finally, he was submerged in water and offered to Thor Taranis.

Three ways to die were superimposed on the same person, and the three gods each took what they needed.

When archaeologists pulled Lin Daoren's body from the swamp, there were ligature marks on his neck, a cut in his throat, and his lungs were filled with mud.

The inscriptions on the stone record the recipients of this ritual.

After the ceremony was completed on the other side of the strait, the offerings were pushed into the water, and the etheric signal traveled along the path at the bottom of the strait to this side.

The receiving end inscription confirms: The offerings have arrived, and the ceremony is complete.

The receiving end will send back a "received" signal.

Once the received signal reaches the sending end, the water surface on the other side will briefly become calm.

The priests called this brief calm on the water "the hiss of God".

It means that God was satisfied and shut up.

But now, the ceremony on the mainland is being performed with machine guns and shrapnel.

It can be done ten thousand times faster and ten thousand times more efficiently than the priest.

Richard lay down on the edge of the pit, bringing his face close to the bottom of the stone surface.

At the very bottom of the inscription, in a crevice covered by thousands of years of lime plaster and soil, is a small object.

He used his fingertips to gently pry away the mud from the edge of the crack.

What is revealed is a fish-shaped pendant.

The fish's shape is extremely primitive, with only a few curved lines outlining its shape, a forked tail fin, and a slightly open mouth.

Richard posted the "Quiet Observation" sticker.

The fish-shaped pendant is warm.

In Gaulish culture, this fish symbolizes "a guide who moves freely in the water".

Richard had no authority to touch the fish pendant; it was part of the sealing system.

In the ten or so seconds that the inspiration was attached to the fish pendant, the available points on the panel increased by about 0.2.

Harding gathered everyone together.

"Summarize what you've read, and you can go first."

Pratt spoke first.

"The well wall stone and the underground drainage stone are from the same batch, and the black mortar composition is also consistent. It is a complete system built by the same group of people at the same time."

Catherine opened the notebook.

"The east side of the inscription bears more weight than the west side, and the distribution of bone fragments around the pit is also more on the east side and less on the west side."

She turned another page.

"The bones were so shattered that it was impossible to tell whether they belonged to a person or an animal."

However, the distribution is radial, with the center pointing towards the wellhead.

Maggie picked up the conversation.

"Those semi-enclosed circles on the stone surface pointing to the ground only appear next to one type of structure in the ancient Gallic sacrificial sites."

She paused.

"Well, a well used for sacrificial purposes."

"The Gauls called it #039, the Well of the Skull #039."

The moment those three words were uttered, everyone's expression changed.

Edmund gripped the silver cross on his chest, his lips moving rapidly.

Richard nodded and offered further details.

"The ancient Gauls were a notorious headhunting people, which terrified the Romans during their conquest of Gaul."

The Gallic warriors cut off the heads of their enemies, hung them on their horses' necks, and brought them back to the village to be nailed to the lintels.

"The head is not only used for decoration; on a sacrificial level, the head is considered the dwelling place of the soul."

Cutting off an enemy's head is like cutting off their soul; soaking the soul in water locks it in.

"The locked souls became the anchor of suppression."

He looked at Harding, the person in charge.

"The ancient Gauls dug these wells on the coasts on both sides of the strait, presumably to soak the heads they hunted in them to suppress any restless creatures beneath the strait."

Harding listened to everyone's reports and nodded.

"I also found some information about the tradition of 'skull well' in the port authority's records."

"When the Romans came, they found it barbaric, so they filled in the well and built a breakwater on top of it."

They didn't retrieve the head from the bottom of the well; medieval people built a pier on the breakwater; people in the 1870s built warehouses on the pier.

He glanced down at his feet.

"Each generation builds something new on the ruins of the previous one, and no one knows what lies underneath."

He looked at Pratt.

"The higher-ups need a complete evaluation report."

"In addition, a pipeline rerouting plan should also be developed."

The problem now is that the sea gate has already been opened.

The "old tributes" that had been submerged in the Flanders lowlands for thousands of years were awakened by the saltwater.

Meanwhile, hundreds or even thousands of people were dying every day on the Flanders front, on that plain submerged by the sea.

Shells, machine guns, bayonets... On the other side of the curtain, the ceremony only recognizes the condition that "the dead must die in the water."

The remains of soldiers submerged in the sea in the Flanders flood zone.

Whether they were blown up or drowned, they were all recognized as new offerings in the ritual system's judgment.

The entire Flanders flood zone has become a still-functioning, automatically harvesting sacrificial site.

The signals received by the receiver on this side of the strait are becoming increasingly dense and stronger.

The skull well and the inscribed stone surface were already on the verge of overload, and what was overflowing was the "moisture" in the camp.

With this discovery, each team added night shift patrols.

The shift is from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m.

The anomaly mentioned in the report, where "saltwater would automatically flow out of the pipeline," occurred during this period.

Nothing happened during the night shifts the past two days.

The tent fabric rustled in the wind, and occasionally the sound of a baby crying came from deep within one of the tents, only to suddenly stop halfway through.

Richard lay on the old wooden crate, wrapped in a coat, with a clean test glass bottle in front of him.

【Wild Sleep】 allows him to remain aware of his surroundings even in a light sleep state.

Consciousness floats on the surface of sleep and wakefulness, and will be pulled up by the slightest movement.

2:43 AM.

Richard opened his eyes.

The sound of the water in the pipes has changed.

"Gurgle."

Richard turned on the testing valve.

He filled the bottle halfway and brought it to his nose.

A foul, fishy smell made him cough.

The saline mud at the bottom of the swamp, the residue that has rotted for thousands of years... are all mixed together, making it fishy, ​​smelly and salty.

The smell lasted for less than half a minute before the tap water came back on.

Richard sealed the half-bottle of water and wrote the time and description of the phenomenon on the label in very small print.

The four of them met up when they handed over their shifts in the early morning.

Maggie was the first to speak.

"Water droplets condensed on that section of the pipe."

"When?" Richard asked.

"Less than a minute after 2:43."

She put both hands into her coat pockets and tucked her chin into her scarf.

"The water droplets climb along the pipe wall in the same direction."

Which direction?

"In the direction of the water source."

Water droplets crawled along the path they had come from.

Richard matched this information perfectly with the time it took for him to have half a bottle of water.

Catherine pulled the small notebook out of her coat pocket.

"Synchronized breathing has reappeared, coinciding perfectly with the timing of the tubing malfunction."

Edmund stood on the outermost edge of the four people.

"The few kids in my tent area on the east side."

"They were asleep, but their lips were moving, so I leaned closer to listen."

"Every child was repeating the same sentence."

"What did you say?"

"l#039eau monte (The water has risen.)"

The gas lamp flickered in the wind, its orange light swaying.