People living in a civilized society will gradually forget some of their biological instincts over time.
Division of labor and cooperation make human society as a whole more efficient, but at some levels it also weakens the survival ability of each individual.
The hunter does the tracking and killing of the animal; the butcher does the processing of the carcass. In urban areas of most civilized societies, people can easily obtain meat, but they may not even know how to bleed it, how to cut it, or even what the "meat" looks like when it is still alive and walking.
Rather than judging the quality of an item from its craftsmanship and details, you rely more on the words of professionals - and this gives room for eloquent scammers to deceive.
The biggest and most obvious difference between the citizens and aristocratic classes who were born and raised in the city and lived far away from the wilderness and the adventurers and hunters who traveled outside all year round was the application of their own abilities.
The more people live in developed urban areas all year round, the more they will evolve to rely only on their eyesight to judge everything.
Hearing, smell, touch, taste; perception of temperature; control of one's own muscles and bones. Many of the senses and abilities that humans have developed over an extremely long time as a species are as safe and secure as a well-tended garden in a civilized society. The bowels have degenerated.
Fortunately, this degradation is not irreversible.
Even if you grow up in a garden and go out into the wilderness to hone your skills, if you can survive, given time, you can still regain these ancestral instincts.
The touch of skin is the first line of defense for sensing danger. The sharp or irritating experience caused by things that should not be touched will make you subconsciously want to stay away. If a plant is suspected of being poisonous, break off the leaves and rub them on the skin before eating them. Do not eat them if they feel spicy or irritating.
The sour smell brought by rotten items and excrement means poison and harmfulness. The sense of smell and the disgust buried deep in instinct will become the basis for your avoidance. If the fruit of an unfamiliar plant tastes bitter or has an overly strong sour taste, human instinct will tell you to spit it out instead of swallowing it.
Your body knows what is dangerous and needs to be avoided. This is an instinct that has evolved over millions of years - and relying on this instinct is the basis for your survival as an individual in the wilderness.
Instinct rarely deceives you.
So the so-called 'illusion' that people often have.
Or maybe it's not an illusion.
————
This is an indescribable feeling.
It seems that under high temperature and high humidity, the body is obviously very hot but cannot effectively perspire, making it sticky, hot and stuffy. Even if the cool breeze blows through, which is originally regarded as salvation, the whole body will feel itchy and uncomfortable afterwards.
It's like being unable to sleep for more than ten or twenty hours, feeling jittery during an exciting night with intense concentration, and everything you see looks like a startled monster.
This mixed feeling of excitement, irritability and discomfort is enough to ignite the hidden conflicts in a team that lacks professionalism, causing the entire team to fall apart. And even with a very professional team like Henry and the pharmacists who have been providing refreshing essential oil ointments, their performance in many cases is also greatly reduced.
Loss of concentration and lack of concentration. Walking on flat ground, I often feel that the ground is uneven and a little unbalanced. In some sections of the road, there are bushes everywhere, and various clothes are caught and even beaten by the branches that I push aside.
Stumbling around, nothing goes smoothly, and my thinking speed becomes slow and sluggish. Even drinking water will make me choke and cough for a long time. There were a lot of wounds inexplicably, and it felt like everything was wrong no matter how much I moved, but there was no way to get out of this state. In addition, I often get startled by the slightest disturbance. Ordinary people would feel inexplicably angry about this situation, not to mention the highly self-respecting Kazuto samurai.
Henry explained that all this is a phenomenon called "magic halo", a rejection reaction produced by the body after being exposed to an excessively high concentration of magic environment for a short period of time. Symptoms like this are relatively mild, but if they are more serious, the most understandable metaphor for ordinary people would be like a hangover from excessive drinking.
But this brings up the second doubt - only some people actually enter the so-called area with high concentration of magic power - that is, the other world - but this symptom affects everyone except the sage, including those who stayed behind. Everyone showed up.
Moreover, they appeared one after another within four or five days after the contact with Placia. Now they have traveled about ten days and have not faded away.
After the sage, who was a think tank, spread the information, Miss Doctor and he speculated that the reason might still be related to the shrine destroyed by Placia.
According to the legend of New Moon Continent that Aya knew, the shrine was established according to the so-called distribution of spiritual veins. Combined with Henry's knowledge, it can be understood that these shrines are set up on the weakest gap between the real world and the inner world, as some kind of node for suppression. After understanding this in detail, Aya spent a long, long time digesting it. The long history of Crescent Continent has caused many myths and legends to be heard only as folk tales, but a large part of them are actually based on historical basis.
But people today have forgotten it.
Although the Moon Kingdom has a unified government most of the time, natural disasters occur frequently on the land, and various problems are actually not uncommon. There are detailed records of nearly a thousand years of history, but going back further, almost all are only described in the "Founding Myth".
Every Kazuto noble is familiar with the "Founding Myth", which is the cultural foundation of Crescent Continent - or the Moon Country established by Kazuto.
The "Founding Myth", a thick volume describing more than 4,000 years of history, seems lengthy at first glance, but because of its huge span, it actually only records some "major events."
Most of the founding myths, which summarize hundreds of years of history in a few hundred words, are about the great achievements of the royal family as the sons of God in the world. They are full of dramatic stories of conquests and defeating enemies to save the common people. But now that they think about things related to the shrine, there may be only a few records about a certain royal family funding the restoration of the shrine in the past.
"repair."
"There was never any new construction." Ms. Doctor, who has an extraordinary memory, recalled and emphasized this point.
Combined with what Henry knew, a disturbing guess gradually emerged.
Maybe they didn't just forget that the shrine existed.
But there is no way to maintain and repair it.
– But let’s get back to where we started. If according to the hypothesis of Miss Doctor and the Sage, the shrine is a node used for suppression, then the destruction of a shrine must affect the area far beyond the area where the shrine itself is located.
Just like if a dam collapses, it will affect the entire upstream and downstream.
Therefore, the group of people had obviously been ten days away from the shrine, but they could not escape the influence of the magic halo, precisely because in fact, they were still on the edge even after going so far.
This is a frightening possibility when you think about it for a moment.
Because there were villages and even towns within about ten days, that was their originally planned supply location. Even though they were prepared to stay away immediately due to the war nearby, if the situation went wrong.
The mere possibility that someone exists would instantly amplify the seriousness of the situation.
A person whose spirit is hidden, a person who is affected and falls into madness. The greater the population, the easier it is for things to become chaotic and uncontrollable - and that's just one of the reasons.
"It's not just people who will be affected," the sage said.
Where the distinction between exterior and interior becomes less clear-cut, all creatures that have the ability to recognize the existence of a 'road' have the possibility of entering by mistake.
What kind of concept is this?
Domestic cats or dogs may smell something at night and start growling, then run out of the intersection or door and disappear in an instant.
And when they return after a while, even though they may look the same on the outside, owners who know them well can feel that something is wrong.
It has transformed into something beyond mortal cognition. The most disturbing thing is that traveling between the two worlds is about the recognition of 'entrances, exits, roads, and doors', rather than doors and walls in the geographical sense.
Therefore, these creatures that have been corrupted by the inner world will appear from various places that humans cannot understand.
Just think of a cockroach that can identify gaps in closets or small holes in doors and windows as "entrances and exits." They may have entered a wonderful and indescribable weird world right in your home, and then adapted to the environment, produced some kind of mutation, and returned to your home.
After all this was unfolded, many Kazuo people in the team immediately remembered the stories of monsters and monsters that were circulated among the people.
Those glimpses that people have when they are sleepy at night, it is like seeing some weird creature but then telling themselves that it can't happen, it's just an illusion and feel relieved.
But what if they are not illusions?
People who encountered strange things but survived regarded them as a hazy dream, thinking that they were just too tired to distinguish between reality and imagination.
The unfortunate ones never get a chance to contradict these people.
Attacks by mysterious beasts that leave only blood and wreckage for unknown reasons, and even no traces can be found, are not uncommon in the entire history of Crescent Continent. Some of them eventually caught the 'culprit' - usually a fool who was despised by the locals and was beaten into prison. According to official documents, he claimed that he had set up an extremely complicated method to disguise himself as a beast to kill - but more often than not, it was just It became an unsolved case and eventually faded with time.
Only when the place where the tragedy occurred turns into an abandoned house, and the naughty children nearby are curious and bold enough to come to investigate, and hear the indescribable roar of beasts and the sound of some kind of limbs with claws walking on the rotten wooden boards, Only when they ran home screaming in panic and told their parents did they happen to be remembered.
Weirdness and monsters are real.
"Stop." Even though she was dizzy, Miss Doctor still relied on her professional instinct to notice something was wrong with the ordinary-looking dead hare lying on the roadside.
"This fur color." The first thing that attracted her was the snow-white fur color of a domestic rabbit. The hares closer to the north do moult in winter to better hide themselves in the snow - but this is Jeju, where every year It only snows a few times in the coldest months.
And it’s only early autumn now.
But that's not the only weird thing. Henry stretched out his hand to stop Ling who was about to run over to investigate.
"There's no wound, just wait a moment." He said, then picked up a wooden stick from the ground and touched it.
"Squeak-!!" A shrill scream like a mouse came out in an instant, and then the white rabbit corpse on the ground suddenly bounced up and rushed towards Ling at a very high speed.
"Bang!" But it was caught directly by Henry's big hand.
"Squeak——!" Because of the height difference, Miss Doctor was dumbfounded as she witnessed the most ridiculous scene unfolding in front of her eyes - the entire rabbit's chest and abdominal cavity expanded, and the edges of the skin were hidden under the snow-white fur. The sharp teeth with jagged edges are stretched out by muscles - its entire thorax and abdominal cavity become a huge maw with teeth.
The sour smell came out with several tentacles full of spikes, trying to wrap around the sage's arm like a python to fight back against him.
"Click -" Henry broke the neck of this creature that could barely be called a rabbit, but this did not stop it from moving. The sage then dropped it on the ground and stepped on it heavily with boots made of thick cowhide.
The tall sage could kill a wild boar with one kick.
"Poof." The weird rabbit made no sound, and the doctor who came back to her senses picked up a twig and peeled off the trampled rabbit body - the snow-white hair was mixed with stomach acid. , soil and blood, with a little bit of the black liquid that they are now very familiar with.
"The forelimbs have no function, and the shoulder blades have melted." She said after stretching her entire body and looking inside.
"The pelvis is still there. He probably just used his hind legs to jump up."
"The head...has no function."
"The entire abdominal cavity and chest cavity have become a stomach. There is no intestine. It should digest the prey directly after swallowing it, and then spit out the indigestible parts." Miss Doctor sighed: "Because the head has no function and it has no sense of smell. , vision and hearing. They can only passively wait for external stimulation to determine the direction of the prey, and then pounce on it in an attempt to swallow as many parts as possible and absorb them as nutrients."
"It's not so much a rabbit as it is some kind of ambush hunter pretending to be a rabbit. But... lend me the knife." She said and reached out to Lulu next to her, who handed it to her. After using the knife, Aya cut open the legs of the dead rabbit.
"Sure enough, if it was just mimicry, the ability to move just now was too strong." There were complete muscles and bones under the cut skin, and she cut into the front legs that had lost their function, and they also had complete physiological structures inside.
"This is just an ordinary rabbit, or it used to be." She wiped the knife and gave it back to Lulu, who stared at the rabbit's legs for a while. The Luoan girl next to her pulled her and shook her head: "can not eat."
"Will this kind of thing happen often in the future?" Ling looked at Henry and asked, and the latter shrugged and shook his head.
"I hope not."
"Get ready for battle." The sage continued. Others were still a little distracted due to the magic power. Narumi applied mint ointment to his own body and took a deep breath. After being slightly refreshed, he asked: " What's the matter, sir?"
"Maybe you didn't smell it because of the magic halo and the mint ointment that covered it up. It just started."
Henry said word for word.
"There was always the smell of burnt hair in the air."
