novelraw Chapter 138: The Missing Fourth Name
Chapter 138: The Missing Fourth Name
The next morning, when the team gathered in the room fragrant with pinewood, each face bore a tacit, heavy solemnity.
Last night's hypocritical and probing "welcome banquet," along with the mysterious note Lin Jie had received, had already torn away the town's facade of "piety" and "enthusiasm," exposing the cold, collectively malicious, and exclusionary nature that lay at its core.
"Our situation is worse than we imagined," Julian said, elegantly wiping the lenses of his gold-rimmed glasses with a pristine handkerchief, his tone laced with disgust. "I'd rather deal with an entire army of Eternal Serpent cult fanatics. At least their evil is written plainly on their faces."
"Whereas the evil here," he paused, as if searching for the most fitting adjective, "is a kind of collective crime of mediocrity, wrapped in a rustic sugar coating, colder and more unsettling."
Since the town's residents were likely all "accomplices" of the UMA, efforts to gather intelligence through conventional visits and inquiries would become utterly meaningless and risked alerting their quarry.
They had to change their strategy, transforming from overt visitors into investigators hidden in the shadows.
Thus, the new day's investigation once again split into two teams.
Julian and Professor Schmidt headed again to the town hall.
Lin Jie and William took on the task of on-site reconnaissance.
Their target was the theater museum specifically used to store props and puppets for the Passion Play.They needed to see with their own eyes what was hidden behind the townsfolk's proudly displayed perfect puppets.
When Lin Jie and William stepped into the empty theater, they found only a handful of visitors. The walls were covered with sacred religious paintings and photographs, exuding a solemn, dignified atmosphere that subtly leaked a sense of dissonance.
They ignored the history on the walls and walked directly through the foyer towards the core exhibition hall, which displayed life-sized puppets.
"Look over there," William's voice sounded as he gestured with his chin towards a corner of the hall.
Following his direction, Lin Jie saw an old man with a hideous burn scar on his face, pushing a handcart. He appeared to be the custodian.
He was holding a feather duster, meticulously and reverently wiping the glass surface of a display case containing a puppet portraying the Virgin Mary.
His movements were as gentle as caressing a lover, his ugly face wearing a sickly, immersed smile of satisfaction.
Lin Jie subtly withdrew his gaze.
He exchanged a look with William, and then the two pretended to be ordinary tourists, beginning to carefully examine the biblical story puppets displayed in the glass cases.
The details they saw sent chills down their spines.
They discovered that it wasn't just the puppet portraying Jesus. All the puppets in the hall portraying important roles that required the display of emotional or physical suffering—such as Judas who betrayed Jesus, Mary Magdalene weeping for Jesus, and the ferocious-looking Roman soldiers scourging Jesus—were crafted with a hyper-realistic level of artistry that transcended normal art.
They could see on Mary's sorrowful face that the skin texture along the two tear-streaked trails differed from other areas, as if from long-term saltwater exposure.
They could see the bulging blue veins on the muscular arms of the Roman soldiers wielding whips, straining with effort.
These details were absolutely impossible to achieve with the woodcarving or waxwork techniques of that era.
The only explanation was that the puppets' skin and their internal structures originated from different humans.
The Limb Collector mentioned in the torn page left by Karl wasn't making puppets;
it was assembling them.
It was a terrifying, perverted "Frankenstein," using the most perfect parts from countless missing travelers to piece together blasphemous artworks that satisfied its twisted sensibilities.
Just as Lin Jie, suppressing his psychological discomfort, prepared to move closer to find more flaws, Julian, far away in the town hall archives, also made a bone-chilling discovery on his own battlefield.
The town hall archivist was a rigid, Prussian-style old man who viewed Julian, a French scholar, with suspicion.
But faced with the authoritative letter of introduction bearing the highest academic seal of the University of Munich, he dared not openly obstruct.
He could only stand guard beside Julian like a jailer, monitoring his every move.
However, what he faced was Julian, a master-level top-tier deceiver in the realms of disguise and social interaction.
Julian did not look at sensitive archives that might raise the other's guard.
Instead, he acted like a scholar obsessed with sociological research, focusing on the most tedious and least likely to hide secrets: tax registration and occupational change records.
Professor Schmidt kept pestering the rigid archivist with boring academic questions about things like the evolution of handicraft tax rates in the Bavarian region.
After several rounds of this, the originally highly tense archivist was worn down to a drowsy state by these scholarly inquiries, his vigilance dropping to its lowest.
Julian seized the brief gap of just over ten seconds when the man dozed off.
With an agility unbefitting his scholarly identity, he swiftly pulled out from the bottom of the large stack of normal archives he had requested a worn archival volume with a cover labeled "Temporary Residence Registration for Foreigners (1868-1888)."
Then he flipped directly to the last few pages.
A bizarre coincidence slammed into his vision.
Over the past twenty years, this volume had recorded a total of fifteen foreigners who had undertaken long-term temporary stays (exceeding three months) in Oberammergau for reasons such as artistic creation or plant specimen collection.
Their nationalities, ages, and professions varied.
But they shared one common point.
On the final page of each of these fifteen files, the crucial column that should have recorded the date and reason for the temporary resident's departure had, without exception, been neatly and cleanly torn out using a professional method.
These fifteen individuals had simply vanished from the face of the earth after a certain day, completely disappearing from the town's historical records, without farewell or reason, leaving only a collection of castrated, incomplete files.
This information roughly matched the Association intelligence William provided yesterday.
And when Julian's gaze swept over the name of the fourth missing person, his pupils contracted.
It clearly stated:
"Name: Archibald North"
"Nationality: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland"
"Occupation: Botanist (specializing in the study of alpine mosses)"
"Temporary Residence Registration Date: Spring 1887"
"Departure Date: (Missing)"
Archibald North! That name! Julian swore he had definitely heard it somewhere before!
His mind raced, and then he suddenly remembered. Shortly after the battle in the Paris catacombs ended, an old friend he visited in London had mentioned it during a casual chat.
"...That brother who participated in the Armenian Highlands mission with me. His main task was to assist us in finding a special moss that only grows in high-concentration spiritual radiation environments in the Armenian region, used to make 'anti-curse' alchemical potions."
"Unfortunately, he left the team a week before we were about to find the moss, needing to travel to the German Alpine region to collect another, rarer specimen."
"I never imagined that would be the last time we saw each other..."
Although that old friend hadn't uttered the full name of his sacrificed comrade, all the key clues—British botanist, specializing in moss research, traveling to the German Alpine region, never returning—precisely matched the information in this missing person's file at this moment.
That sacrificed brother likely didn't die in the Alpine region.
He came to this seemingly safe fairytale town, and then became a victim of that Limb Collector.
Just as Julian was stunned by this discovery, Lin Jie, back in the theater museum, finally decided to conduct a dangerous, direct verification.
Confirming that the custodian in the distance, focused on restoring an artifact, wasn't looking this way.
He walked up to the Jesus puppet display case he considered the most suspicious.
Then he took a deep breath and extended his right hand.
"Lin, don't!" William warned in a low voice.
He knew what Lin Jie was about to do, and he knew that performing a spiritual reading in this place of unknown risk was tantamount to suicide.
But Lin Jie didn't listen. This was his only chance to obtain direct, ironclad evidence.
His fingers touched the cold glass.
[Reverberation Touch]!
He heard.
He heard countless different voices screaming hysterically in his mind simultaneously—an artist's plea for beauty before death, a scholar's lingering attachment to knowledge as he was dismembered, and a British botanist's longing for the green hills of his homeland as he was turned into a specimen.
The resentment of these pitiful souls, whose lives were forcibly taken and whose remains were made into blasphemous artworks, far exceeded the strength of any reverberation Lin Jie had previously encountered.
Lin Jie's body jerked backward, nearly fainting.
At that moment, the custodian old man in the distance, who had been facing away from them, abruptly halted his restoration work.
Slowly, at an angle that defied the limits of human cervical spine movement, he stiffly rotated his head one hundred and eighty degrees.
That burned, stitched-together face fixed squarely on Lin Jie's direction.
His two mismatched eyes pierced through dozens of feet of space and the shadows of countless display cases.
He opened his mouth, revealing a nauseating smile composed of irregularly sized teeth.
Then he said in a cold tone:
"Gentlemen, closing time has arrived."
"Please leave immediately."