novelraw Chapter 629: First Probe
Chapter 629: First Probe
Chapter 629: First Probe
The burly male wizard brought the salt grains to his nose and sniffed, then licked them with the tip of his tongue. “It’s just ordinary salt, exactly the same as the salt in this jar. No anomalies at all.”
“So that’s how it is. I understand now,” a soft female voice spoke.
It was the female wizard who had remained silent until now.
She stood in the darkest corner of the kitchen, wearing a black cloak. The hood covered most of her face, revealing only a pale section of her chin.
She was a wizard specialized in curses.
“That finger uses genetic material as a medium,” her voice was light, yet every word was etched clearly into everyone’s ears. “It applies the curse at the soul level through this connection. As for the content of the curse… it should be something like ‘exchange between flesh and salt.’”
She walked to the stove and extended a pale finger, gently tapping the edge of the salt shaker.
“But this is not a complete exchange. If it were complete, the victims would instantly turn into piles of salt, which would actually be straightforward. However, the designer of this curse… or rather, the Strange itself does not want quick death. It wants torment.”
Her gaze turned toward the doorway. Carl’s view was blocked by Jie Ming, so he could not see the expression beneath her hood, but the youth’s body still trembled involuntarily. “That’s why it designed an ‘incomplete exchange.’ A vague, unstable correspondence is established between the victim’s flesh and salt. While they are alive, this exchange is partial and reversible. Their kidneys begin turning into salted meat but can still barely function. Their bodily fluids start becoming salty, yet blood can still flow.”
“And after they die, this exchange reverses. Salt turns back into flesh, and flesh turns back into salt. That’s why we see the corpses in a pickled state. It is not that the curse is still actively working, but that the curse has already completed, leaving behind only the traces of ‘having once been exchanged.’”
She finished speaking and raised her head. A pair of pale gray eyes was revealed beneath the hood.
“This is why we cannot detect any anomalies. Because the carrier of the curse is not the finger itself, but the victims’ genetic material. The finger is merely… a signal. The signal it emits is not energy, but a ‘connection’ based on laws.”
The kitchen fell quiet for a moment as the wizards quickly analyzed the information.
The middle-aged male wizard in the deep blue robe took a deep breath. “So when we see the finger, it has already finished its job. Through the genetic connection, it ‘wrote’ the curse into the souls of Hans’s family. The finger itself is just a doorbell—once pressed, it becomes useless.”
“Exactly,” the curse witch nodded.
The final piece of the puzzle clicked into place in Jie Ming’s mind.
This was why both he and the Fate Subsystem had failed to detect any anomalies from the finger: because there truly were none.
It was simply a carrier, a container, a one-time-use “key.”
The truly terrifying thing had already entered the souls of Hans’s family before they even saw it.
The wizards exchanged glances. Although no words were spoken, they could all see the understanding in one another’s eyes.
This was everyone’s first encounter with this kind of Strange, yet through their respective knowledge reserves, they had basically figured out its operating principles.
This was the terror of high-ranking wizards.
They might not have seen something before, but they had seen enough and studied deeply enough that when facing the unknown, they could quickly derive the unknown patterns using known knowledge.
“So the current questi—”
Jie Ming’s words were suddenly interrupted by a shrill scream.
“Salty! So salty!”
It was Carl.
The youth staggered back from the doorway into the center of the living room, both hands desperately clutching his throat. His entire face had turned purplish-red.
His lips trembled violently, saliva flowing uncontrollably from the corners of his mouth. His eyes bulged as if they were about to burst from their sockets.
“So salty! Water… give me water…”
He stumbled toward the dining table, grabbed the cup of water Jie Ming had poured earlier, and gulped it down in one breath.
But the water did not relieve his suffering. Instead, it made his expression twist even more, as if even the water had turned into brine.
“The curse has activated,” the curse witch’s voice remained calm, though her speech quickened noticeably. “He saw the finger, so the genetic connection has been triggered. The finger pressed the doorbell, and now the door has opened.”
The middle-aged male wizard in the deep blue robe acted first.
“Soul Protection!”
He let out a low shout, hands forming seals. A silver-white ring of light spread from his palms and enveloped Carl.
Dense runes appeared on the ring, each spinning rapidly as they attempted to strip away the abnormal state on the youth.
The ring stabilized, but Carl’s expression showed no obvious improvement.
He continued to dry-heave in pain, hands gripping his throat so tightly that his nails had dug into the skin.
The young female wizard followed suit.
Blood automatically seeped from her fingertips. She used the blood to draw a complex sorcery array in the air. The array spun and flew toward Carl, adhering to his forehead.
“Dispel Curse.” Her voice carried a strange cadence. “Strip away involuntary attachments and remove abnormal state interference.”
Carl’s body jerked violently. A layer of gray mist rose on his forehead—the sign of the curse being peeled away.
The burly male wizard joined in as well.
His body modification sorcery proved useful now. Dark green light covered Carl’s body. His muscle fibers swelled slightly under the light, and a tough membrane appeared on the surface of his skin.
He was reinforcing Carl’s physical endurance so that his body would not collapse immediately under the curse’s impact.
Other wizards were taking action too.
Some released spiritual calming spells to ease Carl’s fear and pain. Others set up isolation barriers around him to cut off the connection between the curse and the finger.
Jie Ming stood at the outermost edge, watching these sixth-ring wizards display their various methods without rushing to act.
Although their casting energy levels were restricted to the third level and the enemy’s methods seemed quite bizarre, these wizards still easily saved the young boy.
In fact, the reason they acted in sequence rather than clearing the curse all at once was deliberately to reduce the effectiveness of their sorceries and test various data points about the curse.
It could be said that with a single round of action, these wizards had basically grasped most of the relevant information about the curse.
To be honest, Jie Ming was not particularly skilled in dispelling curses… after all, he was better at enduring them head-on.
However, since the other wizards had already stepped up to test the data, he could not simply stand by and watch.
His right hand reached into his storage space and pulled out a fist-sized piece of liquid refined gold.
Using Alchemy Technique, his spiritual power infiltrated the liquid refined gold, breaking down its internal structure to the most basic particulate state. Then, in his consciousness, he constructed an extremely precise “coating” model.
It was the same thing he had applied to himself back when he first refined gold.
Only now, Jie Ming’s manipulation precision was far higher. He could integrate with Carl’s skin, muscles, and even cell membranes at the molecular level.
Without affecting normal physiological functions, he built a dual barrier at both the physical and spiritual levels.
After the others had finished casting their sorceries, Jie Ming raised his hand and flicked his finger.
The liquid refined gold turned into a silver stream of light and shot precisely toward Carl. The moment it touched the youth’s skin, it burst apart, transforming into countless microscopic particles invisible to the naked eye that evenly coated his entire body surface.
From the outside, Carl simply appeared to have gained a nearly transparent sheen on his skin, as if lightly rinsed with water.
But Jie Ming knew that this coating had already penetrated the surface of every one of Carl’s cells.
Even if the Strange attacked again later, this curse could be easily blocked.
Carl’s body suddenly stiffened.
Then, he stopped struggling.
The bloodshot eyes that had been filled with pain slowly regained clarity. The hands clutching his throat slowly loosened. His chest heaved violently as he gulped down large breaths of air.
“I…” His voice was hoarse, carrying the dazed feeling of having survived a disaster. “I don’t feel salty anymore.”
In the kitchen, the wizards quietly recorded the data they had just collected.
After comforting Carl for a while, Jie Ming suddenly thought of something and turned his attention to the salt shaker that had been left open earlier.
“Strange. The finger hasn’t reappeared. Didn’t the intelligence say that even if it was destroyed, the finger would continue to appear?”
Jie Ming’s spiritual power swept over the salt shaker as well.
Inside the jar were only clean white salt grains. There was no foreign object among them.
He expanded his spiritual power to cover the entire kitchen and the whole house, but still found nothing.
The other wizards were doing the same.
A moment later, everyone retracted their spiritual power.
“No new emotional fluctuations detected,” the young female wizard said.
“No new life fluctuations either,” the burly male wizard said.
“I scanned the entire town,” the curse witch’s voice came from beneath her hood. “Within a five-hundred-kilometer radius, there is no object matching the finger’s characteristics.”
“Nothing underground either.”
The wizards exchanged glances.
The combined coverage of nine people’s spiritual power was enough to turn the entire area inside out.
If the finger were still in any corner of this town, it could not possibly escape the joint search of nine high-ranking wizards.
Yet it had simply vanished.
No—it had simply never reappeared.
“Was it because it confirmed it could no longer kill the last person, so it gave up on its own? Or, according to the Strange’s mechanism, it judged that the killing was complete and naturally disappeared?” the blue-robed wizard speculated.
Jie Ming walked to the salt shaker, reached in, and pinched up a small pinch of salt grains.
The grains rustled between his fingers—fine, dry, and completely normal.
He brought the salt to his nose and sniffed, then lightly touched it with the tip of his tongue.
It was just ordinary table salt.