I loaded the Mysticism panel.

Chapter 464: Hidden Stone House

When Richard arrived on the island, he discovered that it was much larger than it had appeared.

He walked up the cobblestones for more than thirty steps before stepping on the grass. The wind was strong on the island, and the grass was suddenly blown by the wind toward the side where people lived.

Further up, Richard saw a cluster of round houses, more than a dozen in total.

The house was sealed off by layers of dry-laid stone slabs piled up to the top, with the stones pressing down on each other.

From a distance, it looks like someone has placed a bunch of bowls upside down on the grassy slope, with the rims chipped by the wind, but the bottoms are still intact.

Richard stopped in front of the outermost building; once inside, it was much warmer than outside.

The wind turned a corner at the doorway and didn't follow in.

The stone surface on the west side had been plastered with a layer of ash.

Someone carved words on it; they were in Latin.

The strokes are straight and clumsy, indicating that the carver was not a stonemason, but rather someone who was used to holding a pen and suddenly switched to holding a chisel.

Richard carefully read the inscription, which read:

"We eat one meal a day, and before we eat, we put one portion outside the door, because the Lord was once a guest on the road."

Richard had read a lot about the rules of hermits, and those in Ireland were the most difficult. Even the professors at the seminaries in the capital would shake their heads when they mentioned them.

They eat only one meal a day, live in stone houses and sleep on stone beds, and in winter they go into the sea and stand in waist-deep water to recite poems.

But this one is a little different; they don't talk about ascetic practices, they only talk about hospitality.

If someone only eats one meal a day, and they have to divide that meal among themselves, who should they give it to?

He turned around and walked towards the door.

There is a standing stone there, and there are also engravings on the edges of the stone. The characters carved on it, running horizontally and diagonally along the edges, are in Ogan script.

Richard crouched down, and O'Gumpin needed to read from bottom to top.

The gist is this: "Leave a portion for each night; if you leave, you're a guest; if you don't, it becomes something else entirely."

Richard squatted there, lost in thought.

The text on the wall is in Latin, which is the word of the church.

The section of Ogan text on the door frame is many years older than the one in the church.

But both paragraphs are actually about the same thing.

Yesterday evening, when Richard returned the tide chart to McFaye, he couldn't help but ask:

"Professor, there's something I don't understand."

The people we're sending off tonight all have very different backgrounds.

Queenstown, Liverpool, Hamburg, Bergen... there were Irish, Germans, Rus', even merchants from the Eastern Continent, and a few places that said New World.

They come from all over the world, but we're on this high mountain using Gaelic's judgment—will they really listen to us?

McFee plucked a heather from the grass and crushed it between his fingers.

Do you think dead people can really understand what you're saying?

Richard thought back to that night in Black Ditch: "I think they should really be able to understand."

McFee then said, "Then think about Whitcomb. That being underground for so many years, did it really understand medieval church Latin?"

Richard frowned, realizing a blind spot in his thinking:

"You're right... It was suppressed in pre-Roman times, before the concept of Latin existed."

McFaye brushed the broken piece of heather off his hand:

"Sometimes the pronouncements are indeed spoken to the dead, but sometimes they are spoken to those behind the curtain, or rather, to the land behind the curtain."

He raised his head and continued speaking:

Why did the seal at Whitcomb rot?

Because the medieval church directly and crudely identified her as the underground demon.

That land originated in pre-Roman times, and they crudely sealed it off with their own system.

The land doesn't recognize it, so that one can have a bunch of children under the seal.

He continued:

"You will see two types of dead people tonight."

What can be accepted is our task for tonight: to send them back one by one.

But if someone dies at sea thousands of miles from home, their hometown separated by an entire ocean.

The church wouldn't accept him either; he was either unbaptized, a heretic, or his name wasn't even registered.

His line in the shipping company's register was blank; no one had claimed it.

"The branch office's brochure writes it as sluagh na marbh (the group of the dead), or simply the dead group."

"The booklet categorizes it under the category of aggregated evil objects, which is written for laymen."

It doesn't come together on its own; rather, it rolls around.

"Every dead person inside was once an outcast, drifting on this river estuary until they lost all sense of who they were, before merging with the previous group."

"Once they've gathered a certain number, they'll start picking up people."

"Over the years, batches of people have been rolling up the ranks."

"It has no leader, nor does it hate anyone; it simply adds people to itself out of instinct."

McFee held up one finger: "But he can only pick up the unacceptable."

Richard suddenly remembered the west-facing windows in the village: "So all the west-facing windows in the village have to be closed."

"Yes, the living people keep their doors and windows tightly closed and don't make a sound, just to prevent this."

Last night, McFaye said something that, combined with the stone carving in front of us, means: if you stay, you are a guest; if you don't stay, you become something else.

The inscription on the stone pillar illustrates this very point.

Richard slowly stood up, his knee accidentally hitting the edge of a stone, which felt a little numb.

The hermits in Ireland don't go into the city or build any grand cathedrals.

They boarded the boat and headed west, stopping at the farthest rock to build a circle of stone houses. They ate only one meal a day and never returned.

They call this the Christ's Wanderings, and since they are guests themselves, they can understand the older inscription on the stone.

When they maintained the seal, they translated these words into their own language.

Richard compared this seal to the one in Whitcomb.

"No wonder some seals can last for 1000 years, while others rot away in 300 years."

He untied the canvas bag and took out the rubbing machine.

Unscrew the brass cap and turn the crank.

The condensed liquid seeped into the paper cup, making words appear on the paper.

Once the words on the paper had been rubbed, Richard held it up to the dim light outside to examine it.

There are a total of nineteen sets of markings on this side of the material world.

On the other side of the curtain, it was densely packed.

Outside the stone house, shadows rose from the depths of the curtains.

The water level outside is still rising, and the road that rises from the sea is almost reaching the edge of the island.

………………

On the other side, McFaye sat at the center of the circle formed by the twelve standing stones.

He began to recite the first incantation:

"éirigh, a mhuintir na mara. (Arise, man of the sea!)"

The eight women on the slope struck the wet mud with their hands, producing the first dull thud.

The girl driving the cart started singing. She sat on the outermost side with her child at her feet, pounding the cloth as she sang.

Richard saw from the island that the west was already faintly lit up.

For a thousand years, someone has been guarding a fire on the western side of this island, leaving a meal for everyone who comes ashore.

Until the hermits all died out, the two hunter clans in the village moved away, and the other clan was wiped out.

No one went up the mountain to reinforce it this April, so they are passing on this story today.

Richard set up his caduceus; extradition did not require him to make an invitation.

He had prepared a very detailed judgment in the past few days.

He considered the three Latin affirmations of church rites, the chain inscription of Gugel, or the one from that night at Black Gulch.

But now all of that is useless.

The people who return along this road speak at least dozens of languages: Irish, Gaelic, Norwegian, Germanic, Yiddish, and various Slavic dialects whose names I don't even know.

Even if he shouts until his voice is hoarse, most people might not be able to understand what he's saying.

The power of judgment lies in the hooks, but the hooks on this page are not in the language at all.

Richard held his double-snake staff horizontally, the two golden snakes parted, and the door to ferry them across was now open.

He began, "The ship from Queenstown."

The entire group of people in the line looked up at the same time.

The port's name is written on the ticket stub, and it's also in the heart of everyone who has boarded the ship.

That was the last place they looked back at, a place that transcended language.

"And, the ship that boarded in Liverpool."

Then a second group of people looked up, this one made up more of the people in military uniforms.

"The ship that boarded in Delhi."

"The ship that boarded in Glasgow."

"The ship that boarded in Bergen."

"The ship that departed from Hamburg."

Although it was a port of an enemy country, the crowd that looked up was no different from the one from before.

They were all looking this way, wearing wet clothes and carrying cloth bags tied with ropes.

The group began to move, and they all squeezed through the gap in perfect unison.

Richard stood behind the cane and watched, realizing that these people had also lined up to board the ship in their previous lives.

The gangway is very narrow, allowing only one person to pass at a time, and the heel of the person in front of you is right in front of you.

Over the years, across dozens of routes, this rule has never changed.

Those who passed through the crevice sank into the stone one by one; they were all very honest.

Richard saw the fire in the village not far away flicker and become a little brighter.

The first round of extraditions took nearly an hour, and Richard lost count of how many there were.

All he knew was that as the count progressed, the line that had been so dense that the road was no longer visible gradually thinned out.

He held his knees and took a few breaths before he could get the Mirror Condensation Technique running again.

But many people remained motionless, scattered along the roadside, some at the very front and others at the very back.

There was a man standing less than 20 meters away from Richard, his hands empty and carrying nothing.

Richard noticed that the list still had columns for ship names and cabin classes, and he prepared to try them one by one.

Just then, the sheep on the slope suddenly began to fall down.

The three closest to the center fell first.

Sheep are the most vocal of all livestock. They bleat when they are sheared, when they are herded into the pen, and even when they dream at night.

But without uttering a sound, the three of them collapsed to their knees, their legs giving way. They knelt facing west.

Immediately afterwards, the sheep on the slope also fell to the ground in rows, neatly arranged as if someone were pushing them from west to east.

Someone in the village shouted, "Sheep! What's wrong with the sheep?"

The girl driving the cart stood up first. She put the wooden mallet on the long plank and turned to go up the slope to check on the sheep.

Sheep are one of the most valuable assets of the people here.

But the old woman quickly stepped forward and pushed her to the ground.

The blow was swift and brutal, and the girl was pinned down.

Before she could even cry out, the old woman had already pulled off her dark shawl and covered her head with it.

"Don't look up!"

"That sheep..."

The old woman pulled her shawl down tighter: "The sheep will get up on their own, but if you lift your head, you won't be able to!"

Of the eight women, the other six never stopped.

The mallet continued to rise and fall, the wet mud continued to pound on the long plank, one sentence leading and another responding.

The two who stopped were women who had married into the village from another village. They paused for a moment and then immediately followed them back.

Richard saw on the island that the faint light on the sea had been wiped away, leaving only a black expanse without any background color.

The scene before him inexplicably reminded him of flocks of starlings that flew by at dusk in autumn.

They gather together in the sky in thousands, sometimes stretching out, sometimes contracting, twisting into fish and then into hands, and sometimes even into an inverted bell, before scattering into thousands of points.

He had once seen such a strange sight at the entrance of a slag heirloom, and he was so mesmerized that his neck ached before he realized what it was.

The black patch in the sky looked exactly the same, except that they didn't make the sound of flapping wings when they changed formation.

When flocks of starlings pass by, their fluttering sounds can drown out the sound of horse-drawn carriages.

But as Richard crossed the border, he only heard a large group of people talking in the distance.

There are many people talking across several walls, or across an entire street, or through a layer of rain... You can only hear that someone is talking, someone is arguing, someone is laughing, and someone is reporting some number.

But Richard always missed hearing a word by half a word.

The more he tried to hear clearly, the closer the darkness seemed to get.

Richard silently activated the Mirror Condensation Technique, transforming himself into a still surface of water, and the half-word he had heard was automatically pushed out of his ears.

This should be the group of the dead that Professor McFee mentioned before.

The unclaimed dead flew along this path of return, picking through the bodies from the back to the front of the line.

Richard saw a local woman who was wearing a shawl, barefoot, and with her arms empty.

She was picked up from the road on her way home, but she did not struggle until her feet were off the ground.

After being carried up to about three stories high, she dispersed on her own.

After it dispersed, that small piece fell back into the blackness without even a crease.