novelraw Chapter 136: The Shadow of Puppet Town
Chapter 136: The Shadow of Puppet Town
Karl’s childhood drawing of the mysterious “It stole my toys” and the grotesquely shaped “Stitched” creature left a deep impression on both Lin Jie and Julian.
They felt that the childish doodle hid a key to unraveling Oberammergau’s eerie harmony, and it might also be linked to the moment Karl himself stepped into the inner world.
But the clue ended there;
beyond inspiring more speculation, it offered no concrete help for their current situation.
The next morning, sunlight from the Alpine snows pierced the thin mist and streamed into the old wooden house, and the team held a brief meeting with Professor Schmidt.
“There’s something odd about the town’s xenophobia,” Lin Jie was the first to voice his observation, staring at the deserted street outside. The small town was so quiet in the morning that the distant burbling of a stream could be heard.
“Unlike the Irish kind of hostility rooted in historical hatred, this exclusion feels inward and fearful. They’re not exactly hating outsiders, they’re scared of us.”
“I felt that too.” Julian nodded in agreement, his eyes flashing with sociologist’s acuity.
The investigation then began in earnest.
Progress, however, proved far more difficult than they had imagined.
Julian and Professor Schmidt, leveraging their status as native German scholars, went to the town hall and the church to comb through official records and parish documents, only to find that all files concerning missing people and abnormal deaths had been preemptively cleaned. Key pages were missing or blurred, making the town’s official history polished to an immaculate sheen.William used his veteran instincts and went alone to the “Black Forest” tavern where local hunters and woodcutters gathered, trying to extract rumors, but the moment he, an outsider, approached, the formerly chatty locals fell silent. With wary, exclusionary glares, they drank in collective silence aimed at every “outsider.”
After an afternoon, all standard investigative methods had failed. They were like craftsmen trying to pry open a sealed iron box, unable to find a seam to work on.
When the team reconvened at Karl’s ancestral home in the late afternoon, every face showed the frustration of coming up empty.
“This won’t work,” Julian said irritably, throwing his notebook onto the table. “This town’s defensive system is too perfect. Over centuries they’ve woven an invisible cognitive barrier out of collective lies and shared interests. Any investigation relying on the mundane logic of the surface world simply gets bounced off that wall.”
“We need a breach,” William’s hoarse voice rose. “A weak spot that can crack this wall from the inside.”
Lin Jie’s gaze swept across the town map spread on the table and finally settled on the cemetery area marked in green on the town’s eastern hillside.
“Maybe,” Lin Jie’s voice drifted for a moment, “we’ve been asking the wrong questions. We shouldn’t be asking living people who can lie. We should ask those who sleep here and will not lie—the dead.”
When all logic- and language-based investigation fails, it’s time for his “Interpreter” tools—irrational and steeped in mysticism—to do their work.
Lin Jie chose the loneliest and most direct route: he would go to the old cemetery on the town’s eastern slope, said to hold Karl von Stein’s parents and ancestors.
He intended to have a silent “conversation” there with the spiritual mentor who had led Karl into the inner world.
The cemetery was quiet and solemn. Various crosses and gravestones carved from black granite stood quietly on the neatly trimmed lawn under the warm afternoon sun.
In the distance rose the towering snowy peaks and dense forest;
nearby, the town’s red roofs sat irregularly, with smoke lazily curling from chimneys.
The scene was picturesque and not steeped in overwhelming sadness.
Lin Jie quickly found the Stein family plot, a respectable family grave section enclosed by a low iron fence.
Behind several gravestones etched with old German, he saw the comparatively newer joint tombstone for Karl’s parents, polished spotless, with a bouquet of fresh, unwilted edelweiss laid before it.
Clearly, Max Stein had dutifully kept up the obligation to visit and clean the grave until his suicide.
Lin Jie did not linger long on that tombstone. His attention was drawn to a smaller, lonelier stone beside it.
It was a child’s headstone, bearing only a name and dates.
Lina von Stein
1860–1867
The name Lina brought back to Lin Jie the childish doodle of the “Stitched” monster and the plaintive child’s note beside it: “It stole my toys.”
Lin Jie could be certain that this girl, who had died at only seven, must be Karl’s sister—the only audience in Karl’s drawn world.
As Lin Jie tried to read more from the headstone, a rustling of leaves indicated something behind him.
He immediately went on guard and turned quickly, spotting a local boy of around twelve or thirteen standing behind a large oak tree not far away. He wore patched coarse cloth, watched with timid curiosity, and kept peeking at Lin Jie.
The boy was thin, with messy flaxen hair and freckles on his face. One leg looked wrong;
he limped when he walked, making him stand out among the generally tall and sturdy Bavarian mountain children.
When the boy saw Lin Jie had noticed him, he spun like a frightened rabbit to run.
“Wait!” Lin Jie called softly to halt him.
The boy froze, still poised to bolt, and watched the “outsider” with wary eyes.
Lin Jie took from his pocket a fruit hard candy he’d bought that morning at the town’s famous sweet shop and waved it toward the boy while saying, “I mean no harm. I just want to ask you something.”
Maybe it was the candy’s temptation, or the gentle smile on Lin Jie’s East Asian face that differed from the locals, but after long hesitation the boy did not run. He nodded timidly.
“Hello.”
Lin Jie’s voice was gentle;
he did not step forward abruptly so as not to frighten the already fearful child.
“I mean no harm. I’m a historian from Munich, studying this town and the Stein family’s history.”
He pointed to the headstone bearing “Lina von Stein” and asked, “I’m curious. Do you know any stories about this little girl who died long ago? Do the town elders ever mention her?”
This fit his cover identity.
The boy looked at the headstone, confusion on his face, and shook his head.
“No… I don’t know who Lina is. My father and grandfather never let us talk about those who ‘fell asleep’ long ago.”
Lin Jie caught that local euphemism for “dead.”
But what the boy said next made Lin Jie’s heart clench.
The boy’s voice dropped to a whisper, as if telling a taboo horror. “They say… if we keep mentioning the names of those who ‘fell asleep,’ then the Master Craftsman will be displeased. He’ll think we’re missing those imperfect people he took away to make his ‘collections’.”
“Master Craftsman?” “Collections”?
Lin Jie kept his tone warm and curious.
Feigning misunderstanding of those terms, he steered the boy along his logic.
“Imperfect people?”
Lin Jie asked, pretending confusion. “Do you mean, children like Lina who fell ill and then ‘fell asleep’?”
“No… no…”
Fear flashed across the boy’s eyes as he glanced at his withered, abnormal leg.
He did not reach for the candy in Lin Jie’s hand but shook his head, mumbling in a trembling, indistinct voice, “I don’t know… I don’t know anything! The Master Craftsman would be mad! He would take my leg away to make his ‘collection’!”
With that, he dared not linger and limped down the hill as if chased by an invisible terror.
Puzzled, Lin Jie returned his gaze to the headstone.
He would try to pry past the town’s buried past from that stone that had been silent for more than twenty years.
He gently placed his right hand on the headstone.
Reverberation Touch activated!
A not-very-strong flood of memory, steeped in sadness and the sediment of time, poured into his mind.
To Lin Jie’s disappointment, he did not see any unusually clear images.
As he had feared, more than twenty years was too long for a stone exposed to the elements;
intense memories that once clung to it had been washed and worn down by countless days and nights until only blurred, fragmented emotional echoes remained.
He could only feel.
He sensed a young blond boy who had once stood long in silence, crying in anguish before this stone. The regret and self-blame were so intense that, more than twenty years later, they still permeated the stone’s crevices like poison.
He also perceived another young man, somewhat resembling Karl’s features, who had come here regularly over the years.
This young man would diligently wipe dust from the stone and replace the flowers with fresh edelweiss. His face always wore melancholy and confusion.
That was all.
Reverberation Touch failed on this memory anchor, too distant to yield solid detail.
Lin Jie withdrew his hand, a trace of disappointment on his face.
He needed another approach.
He would find an anchor point closer to the present, where information had been better preserved and could link Karl’s past to the town’s current state.
That anchor could only exist in one place.
He turned and strode toward the ancestral house.
He would start with Karl’s possessions.
The sketchbooks and diaries kept indoors, never exposed to wind and sun, were the time capsules that preserved intact memories.
He rushed up to the second-floor room that had been Karl’s art bedroom and studio. This time he ignored the finished works hung on the walls for show;
true secrets never lived in flashy displays.
In a corner sat a huge portfolio thick with dust, containing all of Karl’s juvenile practice pieces and discarded drafts.
He flipped through book after book. The pages showed Karl’s somewhat childish but precociously talented strokes—mostly forests, animals, and portraits of his prematurely deceased sister Lina.
Finally, within a rear pocket of the thickest sketchbook used for practice, Lin Jie’s fingers touched a piece of paper more resilient and smooth than ordinary paper.
He carefully pulled it out.
It was a torn sheet, only one-quarter the size of a normal page.
The material was special—not vellum, not ordinary paper, but a waterproof, oilcloth-like special paper. Printed on it in the official I.A.R.C. font Lin Jie recognized were lines of text.
It was a fragment of a copy Karl himself had transcribed after joining the Association.
Clearly Karl had left it during one of his secret returns to his hometown. On that scrap, Karl had heavily circled in red ink an UMA code and a location.
The code was “T-021.”
Threat level: Town-class.
And its name bore a chilling, morbidly artistic label.
“Limb Collector.”
Below that name, under the column indicating its main activity area, a place name was printed.
It read: “Oberammergau.”