Chapter 215: Withered Essence
Chapter 215: The Essence of Blight
It was almost dawn when Heine finally saw Hui Yu’s figure.
He couldn’t help but breathe a sigh of relief.
He had planned to go along.
However, on the surface, Mr. Xia euphemistically said, “Your subterfuge needs to be honed”, but behind his back, he was exclaiming, “Crap, he’s crazy, Brother Goat, please come and persuade him”.
He had to sensibly dismiss the idea.
Then came the wait, and the experience from the Zanla Plateau.
First there was a steady stream of small experiences, then a huge pile.
Luckily, after the last Blight Mark, his experience slots were more than enough to hold this.
A level six Ancestor was still inferior to Underguard Srega Southgate.
It was just that he was curious, wasn’t the deal to infiltrate and then behead them?
They couldn’t have failed to infiltrate and attacked instead, could they?
Soon, Hui Yu landed in the courtyard of the Gitil manor, where they had departed from before.
As soon as the giant eagle landed, Catching Sheep jumped down in a flurry.
He was also carrying someone on his back.
Heine detected a hint of a deadly aura and hastily opened the pupils of the dead.
Sure enough, the dead qi is squeezing into this body …… No, it s a corpse.
This person is already dead.
“He said his last name was Gitil, Lloyd.”
“What???”
Heine was shocked, how could he go to the Zanzibar plateau and bring back a Gitil.
And a dead one at that?
Wait, why does this name feel like I’ve heard it somewhere before ……
Lloyd ……
He instantly remembered that the day Barry returned to the manor, Dylan turned over the genealogy tree, and that was the name that was right behind Barry.
This was Barry’s oldest son!
“Send it to the floating city and we’ll talk about this later.”
His face was grave as he said, “Are you all okay? The dive didn’t seem to go too well?”
Catch the Goat: “It’s fine, the infiltration went well, no one spotted us”
“That’s good,” Heine nodded, “What about this one? Did you guys take advantage of the chaos to save him?”
“Someone will tell you that.”
Catching Goat carried Lloyd’s body towards the floating city.
Mr. Summer: “I’ll I’ll I’ll I’ll! It’s time to show my brothers my vocabulary! Keys!”
The line “Listen to me, here’s the thing” had just floated above his head when Heine connected directly to him with a psionic spell.
“It’s faster to communicate this way.” Heine said.
Mr. Xia: “Shit ……”
…
“…… He said he was Lloyd, so my skeleton saved him and then took him on the back of a bird. Then as he entered the mountains of McCalla, his consciousness went fuzzy, and then his soul bizarrely disappeared and his body died, leaving only this bottle behind.”
Heine placed the glass bottle with the brown leather fragments on the table.
The moment it entered his hand, he realized that it was also a wooden teardrop.
And the quality was no worse than the one Quirkus had left him.
But there was something weird inside, and he didn’t dare to touch it recklessly yet.
After listening to the narration, Dylan had an odd look on his face.
“I didn’t expect you to save another Gitil back ……”
“I have a premonition that there will be more Gitil in the future.”
Heine joked, “Your generation may get lower and lower.”
Dylan grunted seemingly disdainfully, but the depression in his eyes still slightly revealed his heart.
This dead pride.
Heine laughed before asking for business, “So is this body normal? Is it possible he faked his death? Or hid his soul somewhere?”
Dylan studied the little old man in front of him, who bore a seven or eight percent resemblance to Barry, frowned and shook his head.
“This body is weird ……”
“What’s weird?”
“You may not understand even if I tell you.”
Heine: “? What do you mean?”
Dylan looked at him expressionlessly, “Have you finished reading that Introduction to Soul Science I gave you?”
Heine: “Pretend I didn’t ask okay?”
“Hmph.”
Dylan sneers, then walks over to the other side of the lab and bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.
A few minutes later, the wood elf with a real-bird’s nest on his head walked out.
Both of them froze.
Heine: “On your head ……”
Linumu: “The messenger bird I’ve been raising is going to lay her eggs recently, and there are no trees here suitable for her to nest in, so the material of my hair is perfect.”
Heine: “Then how do you sleep at night?”
The wood elf shows him how the hair stretches and then holds the bird’s nest flat in his hand.
OK, that’s convenient.
The three of them went to the body, and while the wood elf observed, Dylan briefly belabored what had happened to Lloyd.
A few minutes later, Linumu frowned as well.
He looked to Dylan, “Do you mean for me to take care of this?”
Dylan nodded and asked rhetorically, “Like what?”
“It does look like it, do you need me to plant him as well?”
Dylan: “…… People and trees should be different.”
Linumu: “The methods should be similar, right?”
“Forget it, you talk to him.”
Dylan threw down the two and hurried away.
It looked like he was going to relay the matter to the old man.
The conversation between the two left Heine confused.
How is it that you can’t even understand human language now?
But luckily Linumu quickly began to explain.
“You should be clear that even necromancers cannot go against the cycle of life and death.
“After a person’s death the soul is bound to travel to another realm, summoning the soul of the dead is essentially leasing it from the underworld rather than actually plundering it.”
Heine nodded slightly, signaling him to continue.
“And this gentleman before you, while he is indeed dead, he is again different from a regular corpse. Namely, his soul did not leave as we perceive it to have done.” “So he’s hiding?”
“I don’t know.”
Linumu shook his head:
“Whether a soul hides or not has nothing to do with life or death, I’m just sure he ‘died’.
“It is not that we define the phenomenon of ‘souls traveling to the Shadow Realm or the Underworld’ as death, but rather that ‘after death, souls must travel to other realms’.
“In other words, this gentleman violated this law after his death.
“That is what makes him different from the other ‘dead’. As to where the soul is, I do not know.
“Mr. Dylan was able to discover this because he had handled a large number of normal corpses and was able to discern the difference keenly.
“And I was able to detect it because of having come in contact with the remains of a large number of withered plants. It should be said that there is a similarity between this gentleman’s body and the remains of withered plants, and that he is more of a ‘withered man’.”
Heine: “A blighted man? Parasitized people?”
“No, I’m talking about blight in the broadest sense.”
Heine was stunned, then somewhat surprised, “You nailed this research?”
He hadn’t paid much attention to it after telling the other man about the Quirkus thing.
“Yes.”
Linumu nodded, his face unreadably happy or not.
“I already have a clear direction for my research, it’s just that I haven’t had time to tell you the good news yet, and thanks to you telling me about Quirkus’ experience and communicating with the two necromancers I was able to discover this.”
After a pause, he added, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to say you weren’t a necromancer.”
Heine hadn’t been bothered, but hearing those four goods behind him giggle and giggle made his face look a little worse.
“So what’s a broad blight?”
Linumu: “For example, grass grows on the ground, rabbits eat grass, people hunt rabbits, and we have come to the conclusion after observing the behavior of natural beings: this is normal, instinctive behavior.
“That is, when individuals behave normally, they can be self-sufficient by interacting with an environment weaker than their own, and do not need to prey on the life force of their own kind to sustain themselves.
“However, if there is a type of rabbit that cannot live by eating grass, but can only go on to eat other rabbits that eat grass, or if a human can only live by eating other rabbit hunters, we call it blight.
“This is true of both blighted beasts and blighted plants.
“In the case of withered beasts, for example, they kill and parasitize, the former for the purpose of direct plunder, and the parasitism is no more than a means of increasing the number of the colony and strengthening the power of expansion.
“They do not possess this normal instinct, or ability, and so possess a strong sense of expansion that often requires them to strike out against their own kind, thus causing the proliferation of blight in the broadest sense of the word.”
Heine couldn’t help but wonder, “But wasn’t the earliest blight born in the fields of the elves?”
“Yes.”
Linumu continued, “That’s because plants can’t kill their own kind directly, but when the first wheat plant that couldn’t absorb nutrients from the soil appeared, it needed the Tree Herders to plunder other plants for nutrients to supply itself, an indirect plunder.
“The conclusion that the root cause of this blight is pollution comes from Quilcus, and I have found the exact process from its experience.
“That is, the ‘violation of the law’ just mentioned.
“You will remember the soul-quality mist of the Blight?”
Heine nodded slightly.
So much for him connecting the dots.
The pot of soul-quality broth at the Blight Trail was the home of the souls of countless blighted creatures.
They were supposed to travel to the Shadow Realm, or perhaps be halfway hijacked by the Underworld.
But in the end, they stayed within the fog.
This fog could be seen as an unclean pool of resurrection.
Linumu: “The result of going against the law is ‘immortality’, but at the cost of being born carrying a certain will.
“A normal individual carries out countless commands during their lifetime, but for the blighted creatures, predation is their main mission in living even before their first death.
“When they come back from the dead, the ‘resurrection’ against the law causes them to forget most of their past, but vaguely retain that mission.
“Then comes the countless repetitions of this process.
‘ The ‘mission’ is continually reinforced, while everything else becomes hazy and chaotic, until it has been able to influence the mist in turn when its very existence is for this mission itself.
“At this point, the past source pollution has been transformed into a particular kind of pollution.
“For example, Quirkus, whose contamination from the magic web was negative emotions, and eventually that mist became a blighted hatching pool, is a specialization of that contamination.
“This process can be seen as a kind of ‘pollution template’ that applies to all similar things.
“This gentleman exhibits a similar condition to blight, so I’ll call it a ‘blighted man’.”
Heine looked to Lloyd.
“In other words, the Zanjou Highlander’s condition has been specialized? And it’s similar to the Blight?”
“Yes. From your account, it seems that he may have only experienced a ‘resurrection’ that was contaminated by specialization to a very light degree.”
“But my skeleton said he died suddenly when he was near the mountains of Makara ……”
Heine suddenly realized that perhaps the link between Lloyd and the “Resurrection Pool” was being blocked here?
“It seems you have thought of that as well.” Linumu: “It is true that this place is different from the outside world, and I should say that only here is ‘everything normal’.
“I brought some wilted flowers and plants from the Valley of Mourning Wood here, and after planting them for a while in a confined patch of land, they returned to normal.”
He grimaced as he said this:
“The fact that I stayed here proved to be incomparably correct, all of our past researches were just on the surface, and lacking communication with the outside world, we didn’t know how to go deeper into the soul level.
“Mr. Barry gave me a lot of inspiration, he said that in the past, communication between different professions was more than normal, especially between Tree Shepherds and Necromancers, being the same life researchers, they had a lot of common language.
“It is also true that, Mr. Dylan’s many studies have inspired me, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to study blight so deeply so quickly …… Sorry, I got a little excited.
“So, do you need me to help you plant this gentleman in the ground? I know which soil has the most life in it, and that might help him return to being a normal corpse ……”
“That won’t be necessary.”
Heine stopped him, “I see what Dylan means, so go ahead, I know where to take him.”
“Okay.”
The wood elf grimaced in regret.
…
Heine had just stepped out of the floating city when he saw the old man standing in the courtyard with Dylan right behind him.
He stepped forward and relayed Linumu’s views to the other man.
Since the two of them were involved in the birth of this theory, it didn’t take much effort to understand it.
After listening Barry was thoughtful:
“Are you going to that gladiatorial phalanx?” He asked.
Heine nodded, “If you don’t agree, I can think of something else.”
Going to the gladiatorial phalanx would make him a person of the Career Hall, and he didn’t know how to release that binding for the time being.
This was the only way to “find” Lloyd from this corpse.
And it might help him recover.
“I don’t have a problem with that, he’s dead anyway.”
Barry said lightly, pointing to Dylan behind him.
“Take this guy with you.”
Dylan looked reluctant.
(End of chapter)