When the Saint comes, she does not collect food

#482 - Wet Stone Chamber Viewing Dead Body

“Thump!”

Amidst the loud crash and rising dust, the steps beneath the stone coffin finally came into view.

Pinching his nose and waving away the dust, Horn smiled.

He didn't know how the stone coffin's mechanism worked, but he knew there was a passage beneath it, and that was enough.

He had people smash the altar in the hall with a sledgehammer, revealing the mysterious tunnel that Aigaron spoke of.

On the damp, gray brick walls hung iron-black torch brackets, the darkness obscuring the scene below.

On both sides of the walls were vaguely discernible niches, and beside the steps lay rotten wooden tools and various debris.

It seemed this tunnel had been around for quite some time.

Judging from its design and the stone carving, it probably wasn't part of the palace itself, but constructed later.

Horn guessed that this was likely the tunnel Favarelli used to escape.

Although it was a bit late to catch him now, at least he could collapse this tunnel to prevent any more witchers from running through it.

A Guardsman Holy Marksman took a torch and probed around the entrance, but when the torch went out, he immediately shouted behind him, "Get a Miracle Priest, we need wind."

Two Miracle Priests fussed back and forth for half an hour before finally dispersing the suspicious gas in the stone chamber.

Several Guardsman Holy Marksmen, with ropes tied around their waists, carefully walked down with torches in hand. Horn waited at the entrance for nearly half an hour before he could wander around near the staircase.

Bored, Horn examined and touched around the staircase, trying to find a new hidden passage.

Unfortunately, he touched for a long time and got nothing but a handful of dust.

Bored, he lowered his head and saw a series of neat, square stains stuck to the base of the wall beside the steps.

From the shape alone, Horn could deduce—

That these were originally several scattered pieces of paper, accidentally stuck to the wall, and gradually covered with dust over time, turning into square stains.

Hmm… there seems to be a white scratch next to the square stain?

Raising the fluorescent stone lamp, Horn began to assess the damage to the wall.

Sharp scratches ran down the wall from the staircase, as if something had scraped against it.

Squatting on the ground, Horn ran his fingers over both the steps and the scratches.

His fingertips shimmered with light, revealing tiny black powder and debris. Horn had a flash of inspiration, could this be left behind by the obsidian obelisk?

If that group of witchers didn't take the main path, they probably came this way, and might have left some traces.

Holding the fluorescent stone lamp, Horn's heart beat rapidly. He immediately stood up, "Go, search around everywhere, see if there's anything unusual."

The constables immediately dispersed, searching along the shrines on both sides of the steps and in the cracks in the ground.

The niches were piled with a lot of paper, but it was either blank paper or drafts of copied scriptures.

These papers were too damp and stuck together, the handwriting was blurred and illegible. After searching for a long time, the constables' only gains were a few parchment books.

These books were well preserved, after all, they were parchment.

Picking up the first parchment book, Horn couldn't even wait to go up and eagerly opened it on the steps, using the torchlight.

In the flickering torchlight and fluorescent stone lamp light, Horn nodded frequently as he read the book.

The yellowed pages contained several illustrations with strange geometric shapes, but he couldn't understand the rest at all.

Horn's literacy wasn't low. Although he didn't understand the meaning, he could recognize most of the languages and scripts within the Empire.

But he didn't recognize the words in the book at all. It was a phonetic script written horizontally from left to right, with vertical letters.

These words were winding and twisting, like rows of small black snakes crawling on the book, making one's scalp tingle with just a glance.

This should be some kind of code or the language of a small Nuon tribe, but if this was left by Silov's mother, then she should be able to translate it or have some clues.

Hopefully, this is really a clue left by Silov's mother.

"Check these books, and after confirming that there are no dangers, send them to Silov and ask her if she recognizes them."

After instructing the constables, the people in the stone chamber below finally climbed the steps to report, "It's confirmed safe, Your Majesty."

Rafael, who was following the Guardsman Holy Marksman, excitedly said, "We found the bodies of that Favarelli and the Beastman Queen, they're down there."

Horn hurriedly dragged Jeanna down the stone steps and came to the bottom stone chamber.

This stone chamber wasn't big, only twenty or thirty square meters in size. Rather than a stone chamber, it was more like a passage corridor.

Jeanna sniffed, and indeed there was a rotten corpse smell in the air.

Stepping onto the stone tiles of the chamber, Horn looked down and saw the corpse of the Beastman lying prostrate on the ground near the staircase.

And further away on the opposite side of the steps was another human corpse.

The middle-aged witcher with graying temples was lying on the cold, damp stone bricks. He leaned against the wall, his body in an unnaturally twisted position, his fingernails full of stone chips and dirt.

His eyes were wide open, his eye sockets were deep, and his mouth was open in an O-shape, his wrinkled face full of unbelievable despair.

Not far in front of him was a stone door covered with claw marks, with a hole in the middle that had been forcibly smashed out.

Loose soil poured out of the hole, covering his legs and soiling his once clean pants with mud.

Is this the Favarelli?

"How did he die?"

"Your Majesty, he died of suffocation." After whispering with the investigating constable, Rafael walked to Horn's side to report.

Suffocated to death? Only two days, did the oxygen run out that quickly? Why didn't he open the stone coffin above?

"Call those two witchers over, see if it's him." Horn snapped his fingers behind him, and two witchers appeared at the staircase.

The old witcher walked at the front gloatingly, followed by Aigaron, whose eyes were so swollen he couldn't open them, and whose cuffs, collar, and lips were covered in blood.

His feet were shackled with three layers of fetters, his hands with two layers of handcuffs, and his neck was also bound by an iron collar, forcing him to move only half a step at a time.

Rafael stepped aside and pointed to the middle-aged man's corpse by the wall and asked, "Do you recognize him?"

Seeing Favarelli's corpse, the old witcher was stunned at first, then shook his head self-deprecatingly, "I recognize him, he is Favarelli, ha, I knew it…"

At this time, Aigaron struggled to walk from behind, but compared to the old witcher's calmness, his emotions were much more agitated.

"Impossible, this, Favarelli, there used to be a road here, there was a tunnel." Aigaron took half a step forward, but was stopped by two constables.

He looked at the corpse on the ground, his eyes full of disbelief, Favarelli, just died like this?

"There's a road here, there's a road here." Staring at the back of the stone door, Aigaron shouted incoherently, shouting as he walked towards it.

"What are you babbling about?" The Holy Marksman next to him struck him in the stomach with a stick, knocking him down on his butt.

But he was still muttering to himself, still not daring to believe reality, "Why is there no road? There was a road when we came before, right?"

The old witcher, who was being watched by Aigaron, sneered, "Probably the mechanism of the stone coffin was tampered with, and then the church outside dismantled the supports of the tunnel, so the people inside couldn't get out."

"Why?"

The old witcher wanted to mock him, but in those tearful swollen eyes, he seemed to see his former self, and he sighed, "The church doesn't want us to come back. We were lucky. If we had gone with Favarelli, we would have all died here."

"Master Pierre was also there, how could he allow the church to do this? He's the guarantor." Aigaron still couldn't believe it, "Just because of these dozens of gold coins in the final payment?"

Pierre, as the Master Witcher of the Shattered Stone Wolf Fort, was almost the father and idol of the younger generation of witchers, and even had his own "Witcher Story Collection."

Even Aigaron's joining Favarelli's professional team was introduced by Pierre.

"Who knows how many gold coins, dozens, hundreds, or thousands?" The old witcher looked at the tunnel blocked by mud and the despairing Favarelli, and laughed bitterly, "If Master Pierre was really kind, why did he introduce you to do an assassination mission instead of hunting monsters?

To be honest, I'm not surprised at all that this kind of thing happened in our line of work. On the contrary, you, Aigaron, is this your first day in the Empire?"

Slumped on the ground, looking at the hideous corpse, Aigaron didn't say a word.