Jenkins clapped his hands when he said this, and dropped the black scum to the ground. He asked about the photo on the cabinet. In the photo, the man's head seemed to be spinning on an axis, shaking in a weird way:
"Of course not. Do you think this is some kind of puzzle game? Since you can't solve it, it means that you don't have the talent of an engineer at all. Then come in and accompany me. I can teach you the knowledge you lack."
A pair of pale hands stretched out from the photo and grabbed the clothes on Jenkins' chest.
But then, no matter how hard the hands were, Jenkins stood still.
"What is this? The purpose of this fan lock is that the gear craftsmen will recruit new ones?"
He guessed in a low voice, seeing that the other party was obsessed with grabbing himself instead of answering, he also stretched out his hand to grab the pale arm protruding from the photo:
"May your soul rest in peace."
He very solemnly blessed it.
The flame instantly spread along that arm to the palm, and then spread to the entire photo. The ignited photo burned at an extraordinary speed, and the jumping flames made Jenkins' face flicker, but he just stood there watching, and after confirming that the photo was burned to ashes, he turned and prepared to go to the second floor:
"It's really inexplicable."
Still muttering in his mouth.
There was no trouble on the stairs, and when I came to the second floor, what I saw was not a corridor similar to my own, but a whole large room. The left and right parts are separated by wooden boards, the inner part is the bedroom, and the outer part is the study. The books on the bookshelves in the study, judging from the titles on the spines, were all related to machinery, and most of them Jenkins had never seen.
On the four walls, only the bedroom and the study room have a window, but they are also drawn with thick coarse cloth curtains. Only the sound of heavy rain outside can be heard, and very little light can penetrate.
The darkness here looks a bit like a scene from a horror story. Coupled with the cold air, damp room and the sound of rain outside the window, Jenkins would not be surprised even if the evil spirit suddenly appeared now.
He looked around, following the aura densely scattered throughout the space, trying to find the place where the aura was the strongest. Finally, she looked behind the desk in the study, and a 14-year-old girl wearing a skirt and a butterfly hairpin appeared there at some point.
No matter how you look at it, the young girl does not seem to be alive. The part of her right hand where the sleeve is exposed is entirely copper-colored metal, the left half of the face is like a metal plate, densely covered with some small nicks, and the right half of the face is still flesh, but pale like a corpse.
And, when Jenkins' gaze meets her normal profile, Jenkins doesn't see any humanity in that eye, he just sees the void.
Fei Ni is also at the age of thirteen or fourteen, but due to long-term malnutrition, she is much shorter than the girl in front of her. Jenkins looked at the girl sitting behind the desk with some sadness, knowing that he could not save her.
"My father's books gave me a source of wisdom as a child."
The girl opened her mouth to speak, but it was no longer a human voice. The sound came from her belly, and Jenkins didn't want to think about it.
"I'm also interested in my father's books. The rigorous knowledge, the exquisite design, and the brilliance of wisdom that I couldn't imagine when I was young have all inspired me."
The girl rose into the sky out of nowhere, or more precisely, the steam that spewed from under her skirt made her so high that she could meet Jenkins' eyes. It's like a delicate doll, so delicate that it makes Jenkins angry.
"That day, my father saw wisdom... that day, I followed my father's guidance, and I also saw wisdom."
A book floated out of her back against the laws of physics and stopped in front of Jenkins. Jenkins took the book called "Mechanical Principles and Mechanical Design (Volume 1)" in his hand, but did not open it.
"Stranger, do you have the courage to pry into wisdom? Do you have the talent to acquire wisdom?"
The girl asked Jenkins, the corner of Jenkins' mouth trembled, and he shook his head slightly:
"I don't know what you mean by wisdom."
"Then just open this book, if you can see wisdom from it, then you can move on, otherwise, please stay here with me, and feel the crystallization of wisdom that you don't have the talent to touch."
The book has been influenced by Mysia, which has produced a certain degree of alienation. When you hold it in your hand, you can feel that the weight is not right. After trying to open it, you find that a considerable part of the paper inside has become a mixture of ordinary paper and thin metal sheets.
There is nothing unusual about the contents of the book. Although Jenkins is not very interested in this kind of book, he can also judge that there is no knowledge beyond the level of steam technology in this era.
Only after it was opened, the power of the fan lock applied to Jenkins' body. He sensed that a malevolent force was trying to turn his skin into metal. This is a bit like the metal black tower transforming humans, but much weaker. Even if Jenkins did nothing, there was no way the power of the Mystic would transform him into something else.
The book has about 100 pages in total, which is quite heavy. Coupled with the numbers and explanatory texts that frequently appear in the illustrations for annotation, if you want to read it carefully and intensively, you will definitely not be able to concentrate on it for a day or two without sleep.
So Jenkins just looked at the table of contents, looked at the preface and introduction, flipped through two pages, and put the book on the table.
"Have you seen wisdom?"
"I see."
Jenkins nodded, thinking about whether the girl in front of him should be considered a brainwashed cyborg, or a mechanized corpse that appeared after death. But no matter which one it is, it is cruel enough.
"Then explain the wisdom you see."
As she spoke, the girl stretched out her metal right hand and pressed it on her right side face. The right side face was the part covered by the copper sheet.
The slow force of the hand made Jenkins hear the sound of "squeak~". As that hand moved a little bit to the outside, the metal "face" on the right was lifted off, exposing the inside of the face.
The inside is not bright red flesh with muscle texture, but the interior similar to a high-end mechanical watch, with densely packed gears, large and small, biting together, and the chain drives the power of rotation.
The inside of her right half face is a hollow, which is filled with miniaturized machinery in operation, and some gears are even smaller than the gears produced by Jenkins after irradiating with [Mechanical Light].
"Show me the wisdom you see and fix this half of my face."
"What's wrong with your face?"
"It can't make any expressions."
Hearing this request, Jenkins looked down at the "Mechanical Principles and Mechanical Design (Volume 1)", and then looked at the complex mechanical structure in the girl's lower head:
"I know the knowledge in this book is useful, but..."
He hesitated to pick up the book again, suppressed his anger at the scene in front of him, pretended to open it, and tried to think calmly:
"Those cultists are definitely not using mythos for fun. Even Alexia needs to set up a large-scale ritual like mythos for a long time before it can be activated. Looking at it now, although it will indeed endanger the lives of the entrants, the real purpose , it doesn’t seem to want to kill all the entrants, otherwise there would be no need for these tests, if a few more corpses were concocted into cogs, it would be enough to cause more trouble, so what is it for?”
The wrench that can repair the machinery, Jenkins did not carry it with him at all times, but hid it in the basement of his home. After all, the wrench might be useful for repairing the difference engine, and Jenkins had no reason to wander around with it, and he might be discovered by others about his relationship with a believer in lies.
"So, it's up to me to repair it."
He looked at the girl's face, and after about a few tens of seconds, he realized that it was absolutely impossible to repair it by himself. His current situation is somewhat similar to the two women in the Witch's House who broke into Alexia's apartment, and then were blocked by a math problem.
But those witches can rely on praying to the so-called "shadow of the mother god" to get answers, but Jenkins cannot pray to the sages to get answers, because the church of sages believes that knowledge must be obtained by oneself.
"So we can only force our way in?"
Finally came to this conclusion, but before doing it, I still looked at the mechanical structure inside the girl's cheek. He thought of the unique feeling he got from repairing that ancient machine when he went underground with Alexia yesterday. So he suddenly raised his hand and tapped the girl on the cheek.
The bent finger turned completely copper-colored when it touched the opponent's cheek. At the same time, the mutation was still trying to spread to the wrist, but soon returned to its original appearance with the green light emitted from the arm.
Jenkins narrowed his eyes. The mechanical structure of the girl's face, including the entanglement of flesh and blood in the middle of the cheek, was clearly reflected in his mind amidst the quiet vibration of the knock just now.
Although such a mechanical structure is very complicated, to Jenkins, it is not much more complicated than a small circuit, at least the part he has observed so far. For a living person with a mechanized body, the most critical technology is power, and the algorithm to maintain body activity and intelligence, rather than those trivial structures, so this is not completely incomprehensible to Jenkins.
"Maybe… "
The bored feeling of wanting to sneeze but being unable to do so reappeared in his heart. Jenkins suppressed this feeling, emptied his mind and listened to the sound of rain falling outside, and said after a long time:
"I see, I will use my wisdom to fix you."
He took the white paper on the table, and used [read] to list the exploded diagram of the mechanical structure he had just seen on the paper, and finally pointed out that the size of one of the gears was inappropriate, which caused the expression on the face to fail. The failure, and finally accurately draw the specific appearance of the correct size of the gear.