For a moment, Lumian suspected that it was him, hallucinating;
There was no such couple at all, and no attempt was made to blow out the candles!
If the memory was not so deep, if Lumian did not have a very clear understanding of the dangers of underground Trier, he would definitely look for the problem in himself instead of searching here for any traces of the couple's existence.
Several guests who were behind the couple quickened their pace and caught up with the people in front, filling the sudden gap in the team. They were not surprised, frightened, or confused. Everything seemed normal.
Lumian, who was already being watched by countless invisible eyes, had tiny goose-skin-like bumps on his body that became even more obvious.
He subconsciously looked at Kendall, the grave manager who was walking in front of the two policemen, to see how he reacted to what had just happened.
Kendall, wearing yellow trousers and a blue vest, held an extinguished calcium carbide lamp in one hand and a quietly burning white candle in the other, and walked straight ahead along the same path he had come, toward the exit of the catacombs.
He seemed to have no idea what was happening in the team next to him.
Suddenly he turned around and his eyes met Lumian's.
"What's matter?"
Kendall's slightly deep voice echoed in the passage with tombs on both sides and reverberated in the hollows of nearby skulls.
Lumian didn't seem to be surprised and replied calmly, "I'm afraid I'll lose you."
Kendall nodded imperceptibly, "Then I'll go slower."
He continued to walk towards the exit, his pace slowing down a lot. He walked leisurely, staggeringly, and silently, like a zombie described in some horror novels.
Lumian held up a white candle with a swaying yellowish flame, and walked past the group of newlyweds who were still laughing and deliberately looking at a white skull. Thoughts flashed through his mind one after another: "Did they really not notice that someone was missing? When they leave the catacombs, will the families of the man and woman find out that their relatives are missing? I was thinking before, the catacombs are open to the public, and college students often come here to take risks and dance with the skeletons. Will there really be no problems? Even those who accept the guidance of the tomb manager will not heed the warnings, not to mention the young people who just brought a white candle and entered the catacombs. I originally thought that there were safer protection measures, or the frequency of accidents was not high, so they could not scare those people. Now it seems that it is a different matter."
Lumian suspected that those who were "swallowed" by the catacombs would not only disappear physically, but also have their existence erased from the minds of their friends and relatives.
Why can I remember them? Because Thermipoulos is sealed in my body, and my fate is connected with her to some extent. Why do the government and the two major churches open such a dangerous place to the public
The catacombs needed a large number of living people who frequently went in and out to suppress something, and those who did not heed the warnings would be considered necessary sacrifices.
The more Lumian thought about it, the more his hair stood on end. He forced himself not to analyze it any further. Lacking sufficient information, he couldn't analyze it any further. Anyway, there was nothing in the catacombs worth his risk of exploring.
It's okay to do this occasionally as long as you follow the rules. From the moment you entered the catacombs, the talkative policeman Robert fell silent and seemed not to be used to the environment here.
He didn't talk, and there was no one to chat with.
In the indescribable silence, the four of them returned to the natural doorway with exquisite reliefs and walked out.
As soon as he crossed the line, Lumian immediately felt that countless invisible gazes disappeared.
He no longer felt the chill inside his body, and his skin quickly returned to normal.
"Huh." Robert let out a long breath.
"Every time I go into the catacombs, I feel uncomfortable all over. Kendall, how can you go in there more than a dozen times a day and still be so happy?"
Kendall laughed and said, "You think we are not affected? As long as we don't have to stand guard, those who have families will rush to find their wives, and those who don't have families will go to places like the City Wall Street to warm themselves with the warmth of others. To be honest, after staying here, I feel like I am slowly turning into a corpse."
While chatting, Kendall lit the calcium carbide lamp, extinguished the candle in his hand, and walked all the way back to the ground. Robert looked around and stopped at the market outside the entrance building.
In the carriage of the District Police Headquarters, he smiled awkwardly to his colleagues and Lumian, "I have been feeling uncomfortable for a long time, so I need to pee. Wait for me, I will go to the bathroom first."
After saying that, he walked towards the two-story mud-gray building where tickets to the catacombs were sold.
Lumian looked at the dome covered with stone reliefs, then stood next to a pillar at the edge and looked aimlessly at the people walking in and out of Purgatory Square.
The other policeman got into the carriage and sat waiting.
At this moment, Lumian suddenly felt a little chill again. This was very similar to the feeling he had after entering the catacombs, but not as strong. He instinctively turned around in alert and saw the catacombs manager Kendall standing behind him, staring at him expressionlessly.
"What's the matter?" Lumian asked calmly.
Kendall, who had a thick brown beard, asked in a deep voice, "What were you looking at?"
Lumian's heart sank slightly, and he asked half sincerely and half in performance, "Which time are you referring to?"
“On the way back, when I passed by that group of people.”
Kendall's tone was flat.
Lumian pretended to be enlightened. "I am very interested in the wedding held among the dead. They don't seem to be afraid at all and they are having a lot of fun."
Kendall stared at him for two seconds, then nodded and said, "Don't learn from them."
After saying this, the tomb manager, holding an unlit calcium carbide lamp, walked towards the mud-gray two-story building that belonged to them.
Not long after, Policeman Robert came along the side road and the carriage returned to the Honest Market area.
In the Market District Police Headquarters, in the [Relic Room] deep in the corridor on the first floor, Robert walked to the wooden shelf divided into multiple grids and pointed to one of the grids and said, "Here, Flemish relics."
There was a dark suitcase stuffed with pens, papers, ink bottles and several mostly closed books.
Lumian pulled out a book, flipped through it briefly, and found that it was a mineralogy textbook on Trier's underground rock strata. For him, a young man who had dropped out of school, the content was very difficult and there were even a lot of words he didn't recognize. Those were technical terms in mineralogy. Several other books also covered mineralogy, some were basic textbooks, and some were more complex collections of papers.
After a quick check, Lumian took out the suitcase, put it on the ground and opened it. In addition to two sets of clothes and necessary daily necessities, the suitcase was filled with small, gray and white cloth bags.
They had different names written on them in pen: flowers, sedges, sheep, and so on.
These were the names of the different rock formations under Trier that Flamand had mentioned. The bags contained the corresponding mineral specimens. After a brief recollection, Lumian roughly guessed what was in the bags.
After Flamand went crazy, he did not forget to bring his research subjects with him, but these meant nothing to Lumian, so he began to consider letting the Police Headquarters handle it on their own.
At this moment, he heard Thermopylae's majestic voice: "The cloth bag on the far right."
Hey, you loser finally spoke again. Lumian's first reaction was to laugh at Ermypolos, and then he looked at the bag that the angel of fate hinted at with surprise and suspicion.
The cloth bag was located on the far right side of the suitcase, with Flemish socks on top and his razor on the bottom. On the surface of the bag, written in dark blue ink was a composite term: Earth Blood.
The earth, the blood. Lumian, who was squatting beside the suitcase, muttered silently. At the same time, he calmly picked up the cloth bag and opened it in front of policeman Robert.
There was a flaky stone in the cloth bag. Its surface was brown and full of pits. In each pit, there were dots of dark red spots, as if the earth was oozing blood. For some reason, Lumian felt quite irritated just by seeing this thing.
He did not touch the mineral specimen with his hands. He tied the cloth bag again and put it back into the suitcase. Then, he quickly flipped through the mineralogical material about the underground rock strata in Trier.
Because his purpose was clear, he quickly found the answer: the blood rock layer was located between 55 and 56 meters underground in Trier and was about 0.76 meters thick.
This is the deepest layer of minerals we can collect. Below that is the ancient ruins protection area, which is not allowed to enter.
To this textbook description of the Emperor, Flamand's familiar handwriting added a few notes, saying that a small amount of minerals in the blood rock layer were more special than the others and were suspected of containing volatile toxins that could make people irritable and even suffer from a mental illness called mania.
One researcher suddenly went crazy and injured his colleague. He had to wear appropriate protective equipment before he could touch the specific mineral specimens of the geochondritic rock formation.
The Earth Blood is a rock formation near Trier in the Quaternary Period, and it has obvious peculiarities. No wonder Thermopylae drew my attention to it.
While Lumian was thinking, police officer Robert urged him, "Do you want it or not? Make a decision quickly."
“Yes!” Lumian stood up.
Although all he wanted was the mineral specimen of the Geochaete stratum and the mineralogy textbook describing the underground strata of Trier, in order not to arouse suspicion, he signed and took away all of Flemish's relics.
After returning to room 207 of the Golden Rooster Hotel, Lumian didn't bother to wash off the occult makeup on his face.
He asked Thermopylae in a low voice: "What is so special about this mineral specimen?"
Thermipolos' voice once again echoed in Lumian's ears: "You don't think it's normal that the ghost of Montsouris never came to kill Flamand."