Chapter 156.
Chapter 156 The Cloud of Doubt
Vanna’s gaze lingered on the entry for a few seconds, the Inquisitor’s acumen allowing her to pick up some noteworthy scents from the brief words.
Heretical acts of sacrifice that suddenly appeared among the general population, sacrifices aimed at ineffective existences, sacrificial actions that did not fulfill the needs of the ritual at all but ended up literally drawing the attention of transcendent powers, small-scale insanity, and no follow-up investigative actions ……
Vanna suddenly remembered something and put the file in her hand down, hastily turning over another record she had just seen.
Also in 1889, a little earlier, a street store in the lower part of the city, a sudden armed assault, which was originally the Sheriff’s Department responsible for the incident, should not appear in the Church’s archives, but the investigation proved that the armed assault was a store in the store of a sudden mental disorder of the “customer”, the suspect insisted that in the store window The suspect insisted that he had seen a blasphemous shadow in the shop window and “fought back” with a knife in order to escape from the “unseen object”.
During the subsequent investigation, the Church found traces of heretical worship in the basement of the store, but the ritual symbols at the scene were too confusing to point to any valid presence, and it was revealed through interrogation that the owner of the store, who had been conducting the rituals privately, did not know anything about occult rites and had been guided by “unknown sources” in his haphazard sacrifices.
Again, the rituals were theoretically impossible to perform, and again, they triggered insanity on a small scale, and again, there were no further conclusions from the investigation.
Vanna frowned slightly, these two events seemed to have little connection to the factory leak or the fire that was erased eleven years ago, and they didn’t correspond to each other at all in terms of time, which wasn’t the main focus of her investigation today, but the fact that there were two consecutive incidents of cults with similarities in such a recent past struck a nerve with her as an Inquisitor.
After a few moments, she put down the two files in her hands and continued to rummage through the subsequent volumes on the bookshelf, and this time, she purposely left a few moments of her attention to actively search for records of events that might be linked to heresy worship.
After an indeterminate amount of time again, she came to an abrupt halt.
The third record, still at some point before the “factory leak”, occurred on the edge of the Upper City, when a maid working in a rich man’s house went berserk, seriously injuring three of the servants and the man of the house before locking herself in a storage room, and by the time the church guards and the sheriffs had arrived and broken down the door, the maid had already When the church guards and sheriffs arrived and broke down the door, the maid had already killed herself.
Sacrificial symbols carved with a dagger on the victim’s deathbed were found in the warehouse, and traces of a heretical sacrifice were found in the victim’s room – pointing to yet another invalid presence and a sacrificial process that did not conform to any norms, except that this documented invalid sacrifice drove not the bystanders mad, but the sacrificer herself.
It’s the third one already ……
If Vanna was only slightly concerned when she saw the two records just now, when she saw this third record, the expression on her face had become completely serious.
She was rapidly arranging the intelligence of these records in her mind, doing her analysis based on when they happened and where they happened.
The events happened in a scattered manner, independent of each other in time, unrelated to each other in location, and there was theoretically no intersection between the parties involved.
Moreover, none of them had much to do with the factory where the leak occurred eleven years ago, and the investigation after the incident did not reveal the figure of the Solar Heretic.
Vanna composed herself and continued to rummage through the subsequent files, and it didn’t take long for her to find the information on that factory when the leak occurred.
It was a big deal, with a wide range of implications, and the number of heretics captured in the aftermath was almost the highest in the last twenty or thirty years, so the whole thing was documented in a separate file, a thick and rather heavy book of files, which also included a large number of pictures and interrogation reports.
But it didn’t take Vanna long to go through the entire contents of this file.
For it contained things she had already seen many times elsewhere, and over the past few years she had accessed the documents relating to this old case more than once.
It seemed that even this archive, located deep within the church, had no more information about the factory leak from eleven years ago.
Vanna put back the file on the factory leak, and after searching a little further, she suddenly realized something:
After that “factory leak” incident, records like the three previous “cult” cases never appeared again.
And that factory leak happened in the middle of the year, with half a year to go.
This gave Vanna the feeling that the heresy cults that were “supposed to be ineffective, but came into effect” all appeared in a cluster before the factory leak, and that the factory accident became a point after which all the heresy cults came to a screeching halt… …
Of course, this can be explained by common sense: after the factory leak, the Church and the authorities arrested thousands of cultists, and this large-scale arrest operation cleared the city-state of heretical forces, so it is not unusual for heretical worship to cease in the following six months. But for some reason, she always felt that the logic behind these seemingly unrelated events should not be so simple.
She paused by the large bookshelf, and after a long period of quiet contemplation, she returned to the place where she had started, and drew out the first file on “Heresy Cults”, looking through it as she pondered.
These events were too loose and drowned in a large pile of messy disaster records, if not for the fact that she suddenly had to sort them out like a bull’s-eye today, and had planted the thought of “this matter is suspicious” in her mind in advance, I’m afraid that even she herself wouldn’t have noticed anything strange when she first got these materials! –But something strange is strange, once she realized it, that kind of strange feeling will start to take root in her heart like a seed, making it hard for her to ignore the warning in her intuition.
And just as Vanna was carefully looking over the information, a sound of unhurried footsteps suddenly came from the vicinity, together with the faint odor of motor oil mixed with incense.
Vanna looked up and saw that it was the old priest who was in charge of managing the archives who was walking towards her.
He walked with a limp, and it was obvious that it wasn’t just his right hand that had been injured, but his legs and feet as well.
“There aren’t many people in the archive at this hour, so I came over to take a look,” the old priest said with a smile, “Did you find the information you wanted?”
Vanna exhaled softly, placing the file in her hand back in place, “Found some information, but not the answers I was looking for.”
“Answers?” The old priest was a bit curious, “What aspect of the answers do you want?”
“…… How long have you been here?” Instead of answering directly, Vanna suddenly asked a seemingly irrelevant question.
“Ah, that’s a long time, let’s see …… almost twenty years,” the old priest smiled, “I’ve been in this place ever since I had an arm and a leg blown off by a homemade bomb from those heretical maniacs .”
Vanna thought for a moment and asked curiously, “Is it this cold here on weekdays as well? Does anyone else come here to access these files like I do?”
“Most weekdays are pretty cold – there are people who come to access the archives, but never many,” the old priest smiled, “The scrolls are one’s memories of the world, and this archive is the deepest part of the memories –What’s stored here are ‘old cases’ that have been dealt with, or ‘secret scrolls’ that have been judged unfit for public disclosure, and after they are sealed, they are buried along with the past history in the depths of time. After they were sealed, they were buried together with the past history in the depths of time.
“Countless new things happen in the city-state every day, and everyone is busy moving towards tomorrow, so how can they have so much time to come back and rummage through these sealed volumes. And ……”
The old priest suddenly paused when he said this, and he raised his head, quietly looking up at the volumes that were almost stacked up to the top of the dome for a long time before he spoke softly.
“And …… the sealed up volumes are sometimes more than just a record of a past, there may also be some ‘history’ itself sealed in those pages, the past, present and future of our world are all built on an unstable stable foundation, and too much rummaging around in this archive can’t be good for physical and mental health.”
“…… That sounds a bit like a cautionary tale from the Fire Bearers.”
“Yeah, the Fire Bearers like to caution about that, they guard history and are always worried about something spreading over from ancient times and contaminating the very foundations of our world – they’re so oversensitive in that regard that some people even think that the gang that preaches the ‘Doomsday Pollution Theory’ of the Final Preachers are the Fire Bearers after the Fall ……”
The old priest said and shook his head with a smile, “When I was young, I interacted closely with a few friends from the Fire Transmitter sect, and naturally, I’ve heard quite a bit of their theories, and even though they go in a different direction than the Storm Goddess’s teachings, at least, we all belong to the same Righteous God, and there are a few things in them that are quite worthy of reference.”
For some reason, while listening to the old man’s account, Vanna’s mind also calmed down a little bit, she had a little bit of respect for this senior who had dedicated most of his life to the church, and at this moment didn’t mind chatting with the old man for a few more words, so she casually asked, “Do you still keep in touch with those friends now?”
“No contact,” the old man slowly shook his head, “On a certain morning, I suddenly realized that I never knew their names, so they’ve mostly been martyred in religion, right ……”
(A new month, double monthly votes start, everyone more or less give some votes~~)
(End of chapter)