"Chocolate, did you see what happened just now?"
After wandering around for a long time but failed to enter the dilapidated Nolan again, Jenkins talked to himself uncertainly, but he didn't expect the cat to nod.
"By the way, your intelligence seems to be enough to understand what I said."
He patted his head, then rubbed the cat's little head.
"Since Chocolate also saw the old city just now, the possibility of hallucinations is further reduced. But what is that?"
Taking advantage of the time before lunch, Jenkins visited the old elf who lived in the center of the city and Miss Audrey who lived in the dense fog on the outskirts of the city, and told them what he had just encountered.
But neither the experience of the elves nor Miss Audrey's divination could give Jenkins a definite answer. Miss Audrey was injured during the divination. Out of caution, Jenkins did not let her continue the divination.
"I'll take care of this myself, and be careful when walking around the city recently."
He warned the elves and fortune tellers respectively, and then returned to Loen in a depressed mood.
The girls came back on time for lunch, and Jenkins told them about Miss Capet's discovery that morning, and about the decaying city under the yellow moon.
Miss Capet's name was indeed found in the clues left by Miss Broniance, and when Alexia asked, Jenkins replied that she would return to Nolan to deal with this matter. The princess and her teacher They were all visibly relieved.
As for the city, Alexia didn't know what happened to Jenkins, but since he couldn't reproduce the scene no matter how many times he repeated it, it meant that it was a small probability event.
"Be careful when you returned to Nolan recently."
Alexia said with some concern, in her opinion, as long as Jenkins encounters something in Nolan, it will definitely not be a small matter.
She gained a lot today. When she was looking for old books in the private library of the Stuart royal family, she accidentally found some books that had long been listed as contraband by the Orthodox Church. In those books, she had found accounts of the mad poet, and now she and Jenkins both wanted to know where the poet had gotten that weird machine.
"In this prayer book full of crazy ravings, the fourth subsection of the third chapter describes the ending of the mad poet... Of course, this can only be considered in detail, and this may really be the madman's wild imagination."
What Alexia held was the original in the library, which was also a manuscript. According to her judgment, the ink was made of animal blood, but because too many years had passed, she didn't know what kind of animal blood it was.
The book is a mix of the author's own fantasies and crazy stories transcribed from other crazy books, and there's even a small passage from A-09-1-7300 Necronomicon, but that doesn't make the book produce any value.
In the passage Alexia points out, Jenkins reads The Mad Poet's Death from illegible letters and an upside-down narrative timeline.
The story is very clichéd, the mad poet who played the flute and persuaded the children of villages and towns to throw himself into the river met a similar outsider one day. The outsider is not named in the story, but the Mad Poet is depicted with some crazy tricks against him.
Later, the mad poet was killed by the outsider, and his body was hung on the flagpole in the village by angry villagers for seven days. During these seven days, disasters such as locusts, rainstorms, fires, and plagues appeared in turn. After seven days, the villagers who couldn't stand it abandoned the bodies of their relatives and escaped from their homes where they had lived for generations with the help of that outsider. .
Only the dead body of the mad poet was left hanging on the flagpole, and the black crows hovering around quietly watched all this.
"It's really crazy... Are there any other records? I'm actually more concerned about the story of the mad poet before he died, that is, the story of how he got the machine."
Jenkins asked.
"That happened in the fifteenth century, thousands of years ago. It took me three days to find the clues related to him. Do you expect me to find the clues you want in three more days? Do you know all the information?"
Alexia asked half angrily, and Jenkins quickly apologized, knowing that such things should not be rushed.
Dolores was busy with the affairs of the throne and the Ministry of Finance, while Alexia had a lot of information to read, which made Jenkins, the only one who had no serious work to do, feel that he was eating soft food. In the afternoon, Dolores mentioned that she had invited Jenkins to give a speech related to finance, and the time had been fixed, so Jenkins had something to do.
But the manuscript was finished in an hour and a half, and he once again fell into a situation with nothing to do.
"Let's go to Nolan again, maybe we can see what happened in the morning again."
So he came out of his closet again at three o'clock in the afternoon, leaned against the window with the cat in his arms and looked out, but there was no one outside the window, and Miss Yindi next door was lying in the bedroom. So I decided to go to the professor to have a look again, and wanted to talk about the slate.
The professor has no class today, and the only thing he does is to write papers at home. After Jenkins knocked on the door for the third time today, he looked very busy, so after Jenkins apologized for the interruption, he didn't go in.
"I recently met a friend who is a gifter. He has a very deep research on similar strange ancient objects, and is also proficient in ancient knowledge. He may have a deep understanding of the meaning of the burning moon you mentioned last time. Maybe you can ask for advice She, but also remember to disguise her identity, she is an unregistered benefactor."
The nickname of this friend introduced by the professor is Miss Magic. No accident of duplicate names, this is the woman Jenkins knew.
He thought for a while that he was fine now, and followed the professor's guidance to the place where Miss Magic might be. Because the professor and Miss Magic talked very well about the history of elves, Miss Magic gave the professor her own contact information.
That was a more convenient method of contact than the fake address Jenkins knew, because the professor knew she could be found in a building somewhere in town every weekday afternoon.
It was in a remote and quiet wealthy area in the east of the city. Jenkins looked up at the five-story building, wondering whether it should be called a tower building with some hesitation.
The nearby buildings are very sparse. After turning from the small road over there, there is a large distance between the scattered buildings, and this place is already close to the outskirts of the city.
Soon after knocking on the door, someone answered the door, no surprise, it was a strange face. This is Miss Magic in disguise, her real face Jenkins has seen.
"What's the matter, guest?"
"guest?"
Jenkins hesitated, wondering if he was in the wrong place. The woman inside the door immediately knew that the other party was not her customer, and then saw the alert cat on his shoulder.
"Oh, it turned out to be Mr. Candle, please come in, I thought it was the guest who made an appointment last week."
"This is your shop?"
Jenkins followed the woman through the door, and then saw all kinds of strange things scattered on the first floor, such as broken crystal balls, smeared divination cards, and feathers of unknown birds.
Looking up, you can see the roof of the five-story building all the way. The floors other than the first floor are all connected by circular corridors.
It's very dark here, the curtains are all drawn, and the light comes from the crystal chandelier hanging from the roof and level with the third floor. I don't know what kind of candles Miss Magic used. The light they emit is a dim blue.
"Yes, I am here to provide people with some occult consultation and services, which is my main business."
"Isn't your main business the detective agency in the city?"
Jenkins cursed in his heart, and then walked into the office on the first floor with her. Compared with the mysterious decoration in the hall outside, this place is much more normal.
"I won't ask how you found it. Anyway, you people have always been supernatural. But I'm not always here. I only open the door from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. from Monday to Saturday. Rareness is the most precious... Okay, let’s get down to business, Mr. Candle, what is a busy person like you looking for me for?"
She sat behind a large desk, and Jenkins sat diagonally across from it in a comfortable ottoman.
"I'm not a busy person. I've been very free recently. As for looking for you, it's for this."
As he spoke, he stretched his hand behind his back, paused for three seconds, and took out a stone slab the size of a book.
Miss Magic tilted her head slightly, but she didn't see where it came from.
"This is carved out of ordinary stone, but judging from the pattern on the surface, it seems that it is not that simple. I have already asked someone to translate the cat's claw-like inscriptions on it, which means [poetry] and [disaster]. "
"Oh? I seem to have heard of something similar."
Miss Magic muttered, and then took the heavy stone from Jenkins' hand. She didn't wear gloves, but directly rubbed the five ring-shaped indentations with her fingertips.
"It turned out to be this."
"you know?"
"of course I know."
The woman answered confidently, and then saw the skeptical look on Jenkins' face.
In fact, it’s not surprising that Jenkins was suspicious. After all, even the Church of the Sages couldn’t be sure what it was, and even knowledgeable people like Alexia and Miss Audrey couldn’t identify it. And Miss Magic can give the answer just by looking at it and touching it, so there is reason for him not to believe it.
"This is the Disaster Poetry, and I bet you won't find anyone on the entire west coast who understands it better than I do. It involves a mystery of my sect. Except for those who believe in our Lord like me, you Probably just try your luck at Beldyran's Temple Library—if you can get in."
"Um... so what is this?"
Jenkins asked hesitantly.
Miss Magic did not answer directly, but shook her head first, and then twisted her fingers at Jenkins:
"We're friends, so I can give you a great price."