I loaded the Mysticism panel.

Chapter 461 The Door is on the Ship's Bones

The pastor had already read up to the second page.

Richard turned to leave, but the old woman chased after him.

She was holding a small tin pot in both hands, with the lid on the rim.

The pot was still hot; you could feel it even through two layers of cloth.

"Here's some fresh fire." She handed the pot over.

"That area on the slope belongs to the village. We won't feel at ease until you have a fire lit on the bank before you go there."

Richard accepted it with both hands.

The old woman said.

"Remember to only open when you reach the destination."

She wiped her hands on her apron and stepped back.

"If there's only ash left at the bottom when you turn it on, pour out the ash and turn around and come back."

"Never order it yourself."

McFee was already waiting at the sheep passage.

He was carrying a lantern covered with black paper, the wick turned to its smallest setting.

The two walked downhill, the wind blowing in from the sea. After walking fifty steps, the sound of cloth being pounded on the slope was completely swallowed up by the wind.

They walked to the tide line.

"What you need to go to now is actually the landing point."

"The team will be woken up by their names tonight, and they will walk one after another to the shore."

Once they get there, they'll need someone to hold the door open for them.

"Those who have returned to sleep are the new anchors of this circle."

"I'll leave you to work hard tonight; my rank is too conspicuous on the other side of the curtain."

"If a highly skilled expert stands at the landing point, there won't just be people queuing up."

"By then, I'll have to fight a battle first, and by the time I'm done, it will be dawn."

Richard looked down at the still-warm tin pot in his arms.

Well, extradition is exactly what he does with his mask.

"Remember, you're just the doorman," McFaye reminded him again, still not entirely sure.

"What do you mean?"

"They'll come over on their own, so just keep driving."

"If you reach out and take it, the door will open to both ends."

"When they all start crowding this way, you won't be able to stop them."

"I know."

"Also, you have a high level of inspiration, so you're prone to misstepping."

If you misstep, you'll slide into the deeper area, so be careful.

The white-haired giant raised his chin towards the sea.

"Get ashore before dawn. The longer you stay there, the more dangerous it becomes."

"Do you have any insurance measures in place?" Richard asked tentatively.

McFee picked up the lantern.

"If anything really happens to you, I'll let you know."

"How did you know?"

"You don't need to worry about that."

This made it difficult for Richard to ask any further questions.

The diving point is south of the tide line, where a ship's skeleton is half-buried.

The wood was shiny black, and after being soaked in seawater for so long, even insects were too lazy to bite it.

McFaye explained:

"This was a shipwreck in 1814; of the forty-one people on board, only nineteen were salvaged."

"This section is originally a branch of the drowning line."

Three hundred years have passed since the ships sank, one after another; the curtains of this place have long since thinned to a mere sheet of paper.

"This part of the hull is the thinnest, making it easier for you to dive."

McFee took the pot, processed it, and then stood the tin pot upright on the shore.

"I've already set up the fire for you. You can see the fire on the shore when you turn around from behind the curtain, so you won't get lost."

"What if the fire goes out halfway through your journey..." McFee thought for a moment.

"Then don't come back. Just find a rock over there, sit down, and sit until dawn."

Catherine wrote a line in her notebook and held it up: He was joking.

"...I'm not joking."

The red-haired girl was a little embarrassed and crossed out that line.

McFaye crouched down and ran his fingers across the frozen ground.

"Once inside, don't place too much faith in the year indicated by the floor."

"In this area near the shore, there are more than a dozen layers of land piled up in one place. No matter which year the tide rises, the year you are standing on will be the same year."

"Also, the sound of pounding cloth will always linger to your left rear."

He raised his chin.

The long plank on the slope is still echoing, one line leading and another following.

Richard touched the canvas bag on his back.

The Mirror Condensation Technique was activated. After the etheric fluctuations were suppressed, all that could be heard in the ears was the sound of one's own blood flowing, while the waves receded to a great distance.

In the third cycle of holding his breath, he pushed the ether from the Sun's Seat toward the ship's skeleton.

He reduced the pushing force by half, remembering the lesson he learned from his first dive in the highlands.

Captain Field said he had a high level of inspiration, and that he was prone to sinking into quicksand if he took a step.

The ribs of the ship on the sand appeared to him from the other side.

Richard stepped over it.

McFaye glanced at his watch and hurried back to do his own thing.

………………

After the ceremony began, a series of bells rang out on Haiya Road.

A bicycle slowly moved along the edge of the cliff.

The person riding the bicycle was an old man, wearing a white armband from the coastal defense volunteer team.

He was there to check and ensure the lights were on, to prevent enemy submarines in the distance from spotting them.

The old man leaned his car against the wall and pulled a notebook out of his pocket.

The doors of all seventeen households in the village were ajar. The fires from each household had just been brought back from the hillside and were still burning in the stoves, so there was hardly any light.

"strangeness."

The old man muttered to himself, "Where have all the people gone?"

He began to visit each household one by one.

The main one is the window on the west side, which faces the sea.

By the time the old woman came down the slope, he had already seen the ninth house.

The old man didn't even look up: "Good evening, I'm just doing my routine check."

Where did everyone go?

Down the slope.

"What are you doing down the slope?"

"Pound the cloth."

The old man said "oh" and thought there was nothing wrong with it.

Making cloth requires several people, and since there aren't many activities in the village, it's common for everyone to go and watch the excitement.

He then looked down and surveyed the wisps of smoke slowly rising from the seventeen rooftops.

The old man frowned, standing there lost in thought.

"The above regulation refers to 'light sources visible from the sea surface'."

"Smoke is nothing compared to light."

He turned to a new page in the notebook.

"On this trip, I visited forty-one villages from the south."

"Some people just draw the curtains and that's it. When the wind blows them open, the inside is as bright as a market. I was there last week urging them to make changes."

As he spoke, he gave the old woman in front of him a thumbs up.

"The windows in your village are well covered up; you could be considered a model village."

"I'll report you to the district next month, and maybe the district newspaper will even mention it."

"Then I'll have to trouble you."

The old man pushed the cart upright and climbed on it; the bell rang once.

The acetylene lamp flickered twice on the road, and then the person walked along the edge of the cliff.

The old woman stood at the doorway until the light disappeared around the corner.

The custom of closing the west-facing windows in their village predates any submarine-prevention regulations by hundreds of years.

........................

On this side of the curtain, the sea is still there, but its color has changed.

There was no moon or stars overhead; the water seeped up from the bottom, turning the entire mudflat into a bluish-gray color, like a dead person's fingernail.

Richard was about to head west when a jellyfish floated past his feet.

The umbrellas were as big as washbasins, and they walked in groups, skimming the surface of the water.

They don't emit light at all; instead, they absorb a portion of the light, making the areas they pass through darker than other places.

Speaking of which, Whitcomb and Edmund encountered something called a land-based fire that night.

Those lower-level evil creatures specifically target lone, living people.

The creature in the sea, bobbing back and forth, showed little interest in a living, breathing person like myself.

He gathered up the still water and walked around it.

Further in, a layer of white condensed on the tide line.

He initially mistook it for sea salt.

Only upon closer inspection could one see that these were all crystals, both salty and hot, bubbling with steam.

According to the information I had researched before coming here, these should be the tears shed by the people standing on the shore seeing the boat off.

What falls into the sea behind the curtain becomes crystallized tears.

If I collect enough of these, I should be able to exchange them for some money, but unfortunately Richard is busy tonight.

A large patch of black moss grew in the crevices of the reef, and its eyes were smaller and denser than those on land.

This is a subspecies of the multi-eyed black fern in the sea. As he walked over, all the eyes turned towards him.

Richard casually cut off a few pieces and put them into the innermost compartment of the Frost Branch Box.

The water level is already rising. The low tide on the material side will last until 11:40, and the water on this side has already begun to recede.

The exposed rocky ridge on the other side of the island is gradually submerged from the middle section down.

The stone ridge broke off 300 meters ahead, and the era behind the curtain began its first stratification.

Richard only realized when he got closer that the sea had stopped and the ground was frozen.

He stepped over and his boot sank into a thin shell, beneath which lay black mud.

The bottom of the pit was filled with water, so black it reflected light.

This place has densely packed, old-fashioned ridges, which the locals call feannagan (lazy bed).

As the name suggests, by layering seaweed and manure, you can create ridges for growing potatoes.

On the material side, these mounds have long been covered by heather, and no one has turned them over in a hundred years.

On this side of the curtain, they are still new.

What's even stranger is the sea.

The sea presses down on the ridges of the field, and at the same time, it lies beneath the ridges.

Ten steps ahead, there is a piece of land that is both the sea and a plot of land that was just turned over in 1846 and was waiting to be planted.

Two different time periods are strangely superimposed in the same place.

Richard stood there for a long time, and suddenly understood the professor's words that reminded him: "Don't trust the years under your feet."

The top layer of this stretch of road is the sea this year;

What lies beneath is the land burned down during the Qing Dynasty, a time when people starved to death;

Further down, there were even older ones, so old that he shouldn't have looked any further.

Chronologically speaking, the fields and the sea were originally one and the same thing.

The land was cleared out, people were forced onto boats, the boats sank to the west, and then drifted back along the same line.

Richard lifted his foot and took half a step forward.

The hunger would rise as soon as I took half a step down; it was the kind of hunger that seemed to be drawn out from between my bones, to the point that I was even willing to put my hand in my mouth.

This hunger is the kind of hunger that comes from being hungry for seven weeks.

During the first week, I thought I could make it through, but by the third week, I had even started eating the potatoes I had saved for seed.

By the seventh week, people were too tired to move and just lay in the furrows looking at the sky.

Richard started practicing the breathing technique.

[Eating] After reaching level 4, protein, fat, carbohydrates, and minerals will line up in your stomach to report for duty.

He ate half a table of food last night and two bowls of porridge this morning. He has everything he needs right now.

Everything is there.

"...This isn't my hunger."

When he uttered those words to himself, the hunger became unbearable.

It retreated from his stomach and into the furrow beneath his feet.

Richard took two steps back, retreating onto the yellowish-brown grass, and held his knees while catching his breath.

[博闻] looked up the relevant information.

This should be féar gortach, meaning famine grass.

It grows specifically where people who have starved to death have fallen, and anyone who steps on it will experience a kind of hunger that seems to be pulled out from between their bones.

Richard sighed.

"This place has etched the fact that we didn't get any food into the soil."

The furrows of the field, of course, did not answer him; they were still hungry.

Richard thought for a moment, then two small wings on his ankles stood up, lifting him far off the ground.

Then he took another half step onto the patch of grass and came up exactly as he had.

Richard immediately pulled his foot back.

"...How could this happen?"

That patch of grass wasn't contaminated with poison; it faithfully recorded the great famine of 1846.

"Then I'll take a detour, okay?"

He summoned the shadow that was waiting beneath him.

"Black dog."

As the name was placed down, the center of gravity of that black mass shifted forward, and the faceless head drooped down.

The perception that was originally spread out like a net has been gathered into a single line, pointing straight ahead.

"Let's go around it."

"You don't need to scout out any traps for me," Richard said.

"You show me the way."

"Go to whichever piece of land is still in use this year."

The shadow walked out, skimming along the ground.

It moved in a strange way, first veering seven or eight steps to the left, then circling around a patch of grass that looked quite ordinary.

I turned back and walked along an old ditch for about twenty steps, then suddenly cut to the right.

Richard followed behind, walking along a path that was so winding it made no sense.

He walked behind the shadow and suddenly felt that something was off about the scene.

I feel like a hunter taking his hounds out.

The shadow had turned back and was standing motionless two steps away from him.

Richard knew what it meant, so he took out a small piece of low-concentration material and threw it over.

The shadow's tentacles shot out and grabbed the scraps, sucking them in with a rapid, loud sound.

Richard sat on the embankment watching, and suddenly chuckled.

He himself felt that it was inappropriate to laugh out loud in this place, but he just couldn't help it.

"After you finish eating, keep walking."

The shadow gnawed away the scraps, retracted its whiskers one by one, and moved forward again.

Nothing else happened on the rest of the way.

He only turned around to look when he heard the sound of the sea coming from the other side of the frozen swamp.

The hundreds of grass squares are still there, each one perfectly flat and neat.

The sound of the pounding cloth or the fire were still behind him to the left.

Beyond the field ridges, the mudflats came into view.

A pony stood in the middle of the mudflat.

Its entire body was shiny black, and its mane was so wet that it clung to its neck in clumps, still dripping water.

It was lying on its side, with its back to the sea, and it had no saddle on it.