Anne left happily, seemingly unsuspecting - after all, she was just a kid.
The old guard stood at the door of the cemetery for a long time, looking at the direction Annie was leaving. It took him an unknown amount of time to react suddenly, then he touched his breast pocket with slightly trembling fingers, took out a tube of medicine from it and poured it into his mouth. .
He feels better.
"This is too evil... You must report it to the cathedral immediately... God of Death... This is too evil..."
The old man muttered, turned around and walked quickly towards the direction of the guard's cabin. After entering the room, he closed the door and went straight to the bed to look at an old and ordinary looking desk - after opening a cover on the desk, What is exposed below are exquisite pipes and valves, as well as buttons and handles.
Several metal capsules lie quietly in the grid next to the pipe.
The old man took out the letterhead from the desk drawer, sat down and picked up the pen next to him, and began to write a report quickly. Then he rolled up the report and stuffed it into the metal capsule compartment. Then he opened the pipe in the secret compartment of the desk and put the capsule compartment in groove.
"May Bartok bless this pipe and the airflow rushing within it...May the valves operate smoothly and not jam, leak, or burst—may the differential machines in the sorting and delivery center make no mistakes."
The old man prayed briefly, then reached out and pressed a button next to the pressure pipe. After the green light in the dark compartment came on, he pulled the handle next to the button.
A strange grunting sound came from deep in the pipe, which sounded like the movement when the air flow was blocked, but soon the sound disappeared, followed by the hissing sound of the normal operation of the pressure pipe and the sound of the capsule device sliding rapidly. sounded.
The old man glanced at the pipe with some concern and murmured: "...It couldn't be because the letter mentioned something about a superior being that affected the machine..."
After a while, the two green lights indicating that the "express" was delivered to the superior sorting center turned on, and the old guard finally felt relieved and closed the cover of the secret compartment.
Alice was walking on the street holding a big paper bag, looking curiously at the surrounding buildings, observing this city that was completely different from Plane, and observing people's lives in this city.
In the paper bag were the things she had just bought from the corner store - some vegetables, eggs, frozen hard butter and two pieces of mutton, which were the ingredients for today's lunch.
Alice can already buy things independently. Although she is not very skilled and occasionally makes mistakes in the amount of change, she has been working hard to learn all this - making progress every day, although not much.
She lowered her head slightly, holding the paper bag with one hand, and took out a note from the bag with the other hand, confirming the content on the note.
There were some letters written in crooked handwriting on it, which was a shopping list for today. Part of the content was words she could read and write, and the other part was replaced by simple pictures - she wrote this list herself, and it took a lot of effort. effort.
Make your own daily menu, plan the ingredients you need to buy, write your own shopping list, go to the store to buy things yourself - try to calculate the amount of change, and then try to get home on time. If you can do this, the captain will will be happy.
Alice would be happy too.
After confirming that the list and the contents of the paper bag were all right, Miss Doll put away the note with satisfaction and continued walking towards her temporary residence on Oak Street.
But just when she was halfway there, a commotion coming from the corner suddenly caught her attention.
She looked up in the direction where the sound came from, and saw about a dozen people gathered next to an old-looking residential building. Some people were pointing upstairs, and everyone was chattering. They were discussing something, and occasionally heard words like "that woman is crazy," "poor person," and "the church is alarmed."
Alice couldn't help but slow down, getting slower and slower, and finally stopped, looking in that direction with great hesitation.
It was... lively. The captain said not to join in the fun casually, because if your head falls off in a crowded place,
, the excitement was too great.
But it looked really interesting over there, and what they were discussing seemed to be something the Captain would be interested in.
Alice became entangled, and moved in that direction, then moved again.
"I just went to check on the situation... I am helping the captain collect information... This is not just joining in the fun, this is taking part in the fun seriously..."
Alice put all her wisdom into convincing herself, and she succeeded.
Pressing her head with one hand and holding the paper bag with the other, Miss Doll quickly joined the gathering crowd and looked up with them at the residential building in front of her.
Different from the two-story building where the captain temporarily rented, the building in front of him looked older and more cramped. The narrow windows and external gas pipes looked crowded and chaotic. It seemed that there were many independent residents. Gather inside this building.
The discussion among the people around her was chaotic. Alice listened for a long time without understanding what was going on, so she carefully patted the shoulder of the person next to her and asked politely: "Excuse me...what happened here? ?」
The person next to him was startled, but after seeing that the voice was just a young girl wearing a veil, he relaxed, raised his head and pointed upward: "A woman is crazy and insists on saying that she killed My husband also wants to strangle his child to death... First the police officer was alerted, and now even people from the church have arrived. I think this matter is not a big deal."
As soon as he finished speaking, someone else spoke next to him: "Speaking of which, even people from the church are here...could it be that something bad is happening?"
"...I hope nothing big happens," a woman muttered in the crowd, "I live downstairs from them. If something happens, we won't have anywhere to go..."
"Whether you have something to do or not, it's best to go to the church today and ask the priest to help you perform an exorcism. It's always better to be careful."
The crowd around them started discussing again, and soon they reached an area that Alice didn't understand. She was a little distracted in this messy discussion, and her eyes slowly drifted into the air.
Light threads floated in her field of vision, and more thin threads extended from nearby residential buildings, fluttering in the air, like hair swaying in the wind, stirring quietly. looking at the sky.
Alice blinked suddenly.
She suddenly noticed that some of the lines floating over the city-state looked particularly illusory and transparent, and even flickered like a poorly connected electric light.
There was a faint musty smell in the old residential building. There was a slight leak in the old pipe system. The sound of dripping water could be heard from time to time. Guards dressed in black and holding canes and lanterns gathered. In the living room, the room that is not spacious enough becomes even more cramped.
A woman with long, disheveled hair was nestled in the corner of the sofa, lowering her head as if she was frightened, occasionally mumbling vague sentences.
There were two guards in black standing nearby, guarding this insane woman.
The guards are examining the remaining clues in the house. They have been busy here for two hours.
At this moment, a gray wind blew through the corridor, passed through the open door, and swirled into the living room.
The guardians stopped what they were doing and paid tribute to this gray-white whirlwind.
Agatha's figure stepped out of the whirlpool, her eyes scanning the room.
"What's the situation now?" She raised her head and looked at the highest-ranking guard at the scene.
The guard captain was a neat woman with short black hair. Faced with the gatekeeper's inquiry, she immediately took a step forward: "We collected a small amount of mud on the floor of the alliance washroom. Samples were confirmed and... The samples collected before are consistent.”
"Elements..." Agatha said softly, then frowned, "A small sample? How many? Only that many?"
"About one test tube," the female captain with short hair raised her hand to gesture, "That's all the samples - we have searched the entire building, only the one in the alliance bathroom
A little remains on the ground. "
Agatha was silent, then turned to look at the long-haired woman curled up in the corner of the sofa.
"She is the person involved?"
"Yes," the squad leader nodded, "She rents here. We have investigated it. She has a clean background and has no criminal record before. She is an agent accountant of a nearby firm. In addition, her husband once worked in Feijin Mine. Work information shows that he died in a mining accident three years ago."
Boiling gold mine. Mine disaster...
Perhaps affected by what happened recently, Agatha instinctively noticed these words. Then she calmed down and came to the side of the woman who was still mumbling.
"Madam - I am the gatekeeper of the city-state, you are safe now," Agatha said in a steady voice, quietly using the power to soothe her spirit, "Tell me, what exactly happened?"
When the long-haired woman on the sofa heard the sound, the trembling on her body suddenly stopped, and then she muttered something vaguely, and then she suddenly raised her head.
A pair of eyes still filled with fear and madness stared at Agatha.
"He's back, he's back... I killed him, I killed the monster... in the bathroom! It melted in the bathroom!"
