Krafft's Notes on Anomalies

The darkness in the bottle poured over, flowed into the throat through the lips and teeth, and slid into the depths of the digestive tract.

I didn’t have time to taste the taste carefully. The thing was tasteless, or it had a concentrated taste of every substance in the world, but it still couldn’t taste like a mouthful of water. It was extremely complex and at the same time extremely bland, and I couldn’t find a single taste. To describe something, it is similar to all things that are passed through the mouth.

Before it enters the stomach and the last trace of coolness is assimilated by the body temperature and disappears, the thoughts from the bottom of the heart tell the drinker that if you want to understand, you must first touch it. The degree of certainty is comparable to reading the words before the ink is dry on paper copied by one's own hands, without thinking or doubting.

The mouth of the bottle is still on my lips, waiting for the remaining liquid to fall, and incredible changes have already occurred.

She felt that this building made of rock became as fragile as tissue paper, as illusory as a half-awake dream bubble, and could not bear her light weight.

This didn't make sense. Normally, the potion she drank should have an effect on her body. She was prepared for stomach pain or pain in more places, but in fact, everything except herself was changing.

Before she could figure it out, everything seemed to be brittle and could no longer bear the weight of her body. The support shattered and her body fell vertically downwards.

It's like falling from the first floor of a building to the lower floor, but the scenery is still and the floor is not broken.

Color dots appear everywhere you look. They are mushrooms that expand at a speed that is too fast to be seen, forming a strange shape and a size rarely seen in the world, swallowing up the walls and furniture.

She seemed to have touched the "floor", but her fall did not stop. The weak "floor" shattered the moment she touched it, and her body fell to the lower level. At the same time, some completely confused information flows through the senses at high speed.

The complex colors of those colorful mushrooms blasted in my ears, and my nose smelled the dull light spilling in from the cracks in the window. These contents combined with the high-speed descent create a feeling of mental nausea that makes people want to vomit out their internal organs and empty their abdomen to relieve it.

Between the first and second floors, a soft white light and numerous gazes paid attention to her, but she quickly fell away and exceeded the observable distance.

The growth of the fungi reached its peak, filling every inch of space, with the vague sense of gaze from before flowing through it. The condensation embedded in the fungus and having the same texture as the pendant glowed red when they arrived.

The fall continued, and she fell through several "floors" countless times. Those unreasonable contents filled her consciousness like prosperous mushrooms, crowding out the space for independent thinking.

The surrounding environment has undergone the same drastic changes as the fall. The mushrooms have flourished and declined, dried up and rotted, and the permanent stone walls have collapsed. It seems that countless years have gone by in a blink of an eye, or it may be that time has gone backwards, and everything has gone to nowhere. Order and destruction return to a minimalist state.

The immature consciousness formed by only more than ten years of memory is not as good as a brick in the castle. When all this is over, I stand in the desert among the rubble on the desolate ridge, unable to remember where I came from or what I did. Like all the sand on the beach slipping away from your fingers, leaving only one or two grains behind

【I think……】

Yvonne stood there sluggishly, still maintaining the movements she made when squeezing and drinking the liquid. Her instinct made her want to breathe, but there was no usual thin but full feeling pouring into her lungs. Her body could not capture the necessary energy to maintain operation. substance.

She guessed that she might be suffocating. The little strength she had left was taken away from her body bit by bit. There was one more thing she understood. It turned out that this was how suffocation slowly approached.

At this time, she should probably be afraid, regretful, afraid of death, regretting not listening to her parents' warnings - according to what she knew, this should be the case, but the "parents' warnings" were thinner in her memory than what she was inhaling now, and for death fear...

[Man himself is in a kind of chronic death]

People who are paralyzed in bed die helplessly, and the vast majority of people are unable to resist everything around them and struggle in vain, like a drowning person on the boundless sea fluttering their hands to delay the arrival of their destined fate.

She remembered why she came here, the persistent idea cultivated by her short life of more than ten years. She did not want to accept the fate of "chronic suffocation" and needed a power beyond common sense, like a paralyzed person growing new limbs or a drowning person growing both legs. Cheeks grow gills.

This thought drove her to move and look up, looking for where she fell.

There are no pavilions piercing through the layers above. There is just a huge, dark celestial body hanging high on the desolate land. Dense and unforgettable cracks are densely covered on the surface.

The feeling of falling came again, in the opposite direction. When traveling between "floors", the feeling of watching in the white light and the fungus also came again.

This time they came eagerly, wanting to catch this ride and go to the "upper level".

The remaining consciousness that longed for something unreasonable readily agreed and accepted him on the journey.

…

…

"I finally figured it out!" Kraft pushed away Coop's support and returned to the church in vain. He ordered the team to seal off the corridor on the second floor, and at the same time, he lifted Martin down from the upstairs with his weak hands and feet.

There is nothing wrong with the "spell" invented by Edward. Even if a person who has established contact with the deep creatures fails to resist its pull for a while, the most they can do is die cleanly without bothering others to collect the body.

But once this thing is actually used, two problems will arise.

First, what will happen after multiple or even dozens of uses? Whether Edward had considered this issue or not, Kraft did not know, and there is no follow-up part in the manuscript, but this believer who was found to be confused by another world and "angels" certainly did not think about it, and was "sending people to the Father." Kingdom” I never thought about it once.

After devouring dozens of creepers, they became unprecedentedly large, and their proliferation may have exceeded the size of those bodies. It is impossible to determine whether this is a factor out of control.

The second question is, is there really only one kind of creature in the deep layers? The answer is obviously no. The depths are a very complex place, and the biological environment has significant regional characteristics. The crawling creatures will interact with other things that God does not know what they are.

This may be the main reason for the loss of control, at least one of them. Then the bacteria that took over the creeping creatures, those things that were suspected of being spiritual bodies, used this as a channel to come to the world, catalyze the growth of fungi on a large scale, infect animals and plants indiscriminately, and look for bodies to host.

Fortunately, perhaps because creepers have similar origins with human tissue, they chose human bodies. Otherwise, if a brown bear controlled by parasitism pops up here, things will develop differently.

However, the vast majority of fungal species are actually not suitable for infecting the human body. Apart from slowly changing the environment and relying on inhalation of high-concentration spores, I am afraid that only some people with low immunity will have resident fungal infections, such as human immunodeficiency virus, or... tuberculosis.

Kraft probably guessed what was moving during the Duke's two lung percussions.

That was a very lucky individual. When the old Duke traveled around the territory, came here on vacation and tasted mushrooms, he found a long-term living host with the fungus. He enjoyed the rare coexistence of host and fungus and was taken everywhere. .

Now, Kraft is going to meet the culprit sitting behind the desk again.

When he felt someone entering the study, he seemed to still want to pretend to be immobile and repeat his old tricks, but the person staying at the door made him take the initiative to raise his head again.

Although there are no eyeballs in the eye sockets, it is not difficult to know its clear autonomous consciousness from its movements, and it can also identify incoming people. The reappearance of the victim caused him some confusion, and then his chest swelled, preparing to use that breath again.

"Breathing requires a closed chest to create negative pressure." Kraft raised his hand and pointed a cocked hand crossbow at the guy who didn't need to recite a spell but still needed lung capacity. He released the machine expander. .

"You can see on his chest how the external intercostal muscles lift up to expand the volume of the chest cavity. We will have the opportunity to explain this in detail in the future, but there are very few opportunities to see it with our own eyes."

The small arrow with the thickness of a pen plunged into the target that had failed to be inflated, interrupting his inflation process, and small streams of spores spurted out from the tail of the hollow arrow shaft. He insisted on continuing, but the second arrow pierced his right lung completely put an end to this idea.

"Times have not changed, Mr. Spellcaster, spells are no match for flying arrows. If your master gives you any other moves, feel free to use them and try them."

This frivolous attitude toward the Father had a distinctly irritating effect, and he struggled to sit up in his chair, growling incomprehensibly as the air leaked out of his lungs.

Craft, who felt that extra insurance was needed, nodded to Coop, who picked up the winch crossbow, and the heavy arrow that dealt with the armor flew out and pinned the opponent to the back of the chair.

Seeing that there was no hope of resistance, the coral horn-like mushroom held its crown high and was as gorgeous as the body of a priest in a ceremony. Like the legendary saints who still practice their teachings even when they are dying, they reached out to their chests and tried to draw an imaginary circle with a pen.

The feeling of a very weak, almost breath-like air flow swept through the room, passing through various objects without any obstacles, reminding Kraft of his own mental organ, except that the scope was much smaller and weaker. Hardly felt.

As if under great impact, the movement of drawing the virtual circle was terminated, and the rest of the scaly mushroom-covered face twisted into some unclear but identifiable "surprise" expression.

"..."

A fainter sound, but this time different from before, still oddly pitched, possibly distinguishable from normal Norse development.

"What?" Unexpectedly, the irritation would bring unexpected joy. Kraft cautiously did not get closer and pricked up his ears to hear what was being said. Even if it was a curse, it might be of some use.

"...Say to them, do not be afraid...I am telling you..." The sentence sputtered out intermittently from the diseased throat, but he tried his best to pronounce it accurately and word by word, as if he had prepared a lot. Again, “it is news of great joy… for all people.”

It wasn't a curse or anything like that, it was probably a certain passage from the holy book. He couldn't finish reciting it, and his body fell down without support. His head hit the table and the mushrooms shattered.

Kraft and Coop looked at each other.

"So what's this about?"