Chapter 336 Rat Catcher
"The living area, kitchen and dining room, storage warehouse, and stables, we need to clear these parts first."
Kraft, who had been watching for most of the night and found nothing, yawned and began to assign cleaning tasks.
The experience of camping in the wild is very bad. The nights in the mountains are far less cold than in the north, but the humidity is very high. Every morning when I wake up, I feel like an overnight dumpling forgotten in the steamer, cold, damp and stiff.
If possible, it would be best to check in tonight so everyone can get some rest.
According to the architectural drawings, most of the space they currently need is in the annex building on the south side of the central church. Only the stables are on the north side against the wall. It may be that the concentration of daily functional areas was taken into consideration at the beginning of the design and the animals were separated from people as much as possible.
"There are many accommodation rooms, enough to house several times the team, but it is best to live in a centralized place and arrange night watch inspections."
"Arrange at least five or six people to guard the stables, and let Coop or Yvonne accompany them."
"The warehouse will be the one closest to the residential area first. The storage of supplies requires inspection and records in turn every day. The water storage pool and well are also nearby according to the drawing. The water brought up will be given to the pack horses for a few days to ensure safety before use."
"As for the kitchen...it depends on the needs. The food we bring now doesn't require much cooking. In the future, we can purchase fresh ingredients from the mountains."
After settling down, they will gradually plan the remaining space into a library, teaching area, clerical office, grading laboratory, etc., but that will have to wait for a few days.
Preliminary work will start from the original monks' residential area. In addition to accommodation needs, considering that this is the monks' private area, there may be a chance to find some clues left behind.
It is a semi-closed cloister-style building next to the church, built around a smaller atrium space, with a well and a water reservoir also located in the center of this space for the convenience of domestic water use.
The side of the cloister facing the atrium is supported by a continuous arch structure and stone columns, and the other side is an orderly arrangement of small rooms. It is as neat as a school dormitory, and looks almost the same from the outside.
Pushing open the door with a rusty key, the light suddenly dims. The narrow and long windows provide limited brightness to these rooms. Even during the day, it is difficult to illuminate other areas outside the desk.
The layout of most living rooms can only be described as simple. Two or three simple beds occupy a small half of the living space in the room. In addition to tables and chairs, the rest of the area is also stuffed with a small cabinet, and personal belongings are placed on the lower floor. Some scribal tools were placed on the upper floor.
Several spare pen holders, bottles of dried ink, and scrapers used to remove writing errors and imperfections, and thick layers of wax accumulated on the candle holder, indicate the long time the owner of the room spent here.
They would rather maintain such a simple material living environment, but also squeeze out limited funds to buy candles, so that their spirits can travel to the Lord's country every long night.
However, after checking several small rooms one after another, no book paper was found, no semi-finished products in the process of copying, no spare blank paper, and not even a piece of the cheapest linen paper was retained.
The cork holy emblems carved by myself in my spare time are placed on the bookshelves of the cabinets and on the empty desktops, where books and papers should originally belong.
The wooden tabletop is covered with scratches, almost peeling off a layer of the surface. After wiping away the thick dust, you can see the ink marks that penetrated deeply into the tabletop between the scratches.
This reminded Craft of those communal tables and chairs in college, where bored people would leave graffiti notes on them, which would accumulate and cover them year after year, forming layers of information that crisscrossed time and space, like compressed fossils in sedimentary rock sections. , it requires certain imagination and reduction ability to extract the meaning.
But here, they were scraped off, not just for cleaning, but as a unified and purposeful act, carefully erasing all the writing, not missing a single stroke, even if it would make the table uneven. It's not flat, and the paper will break with a little force. "Is this some kind of tradition?"
"At least I haven't heard of it."
Raymond opened the drawer forcefully, and some jingling small objects rolled out from the damaged compartment. They were several copper coins, black silver coins, and small metal ornaments, which should be the personal property of a certain monk.
"I thought they liked studying. After all, there are so many books. But... not even a holy book." The young monk from Dunling returned from the next room and handed over a gray pendant.
"And this, I can't say."
"Thanks, Dominic." Kraft took the thing and walked to the window to check it.
A common talisman, it seems to be hand-made from a silver coin. On the front is a double-winged ring pattern carved with a single stroke, with a hole punched on the top, perhaps to be used as a pendant.
Kraft also received this kind of Holy Emblem Talisman, which was a gift from the church. They usually have inscriptions engraved on the back. The one in my hand should have been there, but it was scratched out roughly with a sharp weapon such as an awl.
That attitude was not like treating a motto that could bring protection, but rather like discovering a poisonous insect crawling in the hidden places of one's underwear.
"Seriously, there's something weird here. What do you think, Professor?" Dominic wasn't used to this title yet.
"What could it be? Is it heresy? Well, I'm just talking casually, don't worry about it."
He spat out the word carefully, observing Kraft's reaction. After all, this was a very serious accusation for a large monastery, and his new boss had heard that he had cooperated with the Inquisition. Even if more than twenty years have passed, if there is a big fuss, someone might actually be held accountable.
But what he found was hard not to think of the worst-case scenario, "Not only that, I saw that the admonitions and mottos on the wall had also been worn away."
If it were not a betrayal of faith, it would be hard to imagine a monastery doing such a thing. Even the illiterate thieves who broke in would at least maintain basic respect for these things.
"It's not necessarily a heresy." Kraft patted the young man's shoulder and comforted him gently, "I have seen some real heretics, even heretics, and most of them will not behave like this."
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[Heretics and pagans generally don’t do low-level things like erasing words]
"You are very attentive. If you have any new discoveries, please tell me in time, okay?"
Dominic breathed a sigh of relief and continued his cleaning work with a good mood of being recognized for his efforts.
Watching his relieved figure leave, Kraft rubbed the pendant, feeling the looming frightening force in the scratches, and nodded slightly at Raymond:
"There is indeed a problem."
He could sense the problem without any intuitive prompting. The collective abnormal cognition is simply too typical, and there is no need to wait for specific unnatural phenomena to appear.
The core question is, what does abnormal behavior mean? I have a very strange thought: It's not like destroying or searching for a specific text, but like hunting down some extremely flexible cave-dwelling animal. I can only seal every small gap and hole I can find in vain, and wait. It appears in the light.