"what do you need?"
After finding the greedy man dressed as a grave keeper, Jenkins still asked questions directly. He looked at the other party's attire, if he didn't have the eye of truth, he really wouldn't be able to tell it was a fake.
"There is a special soul in the tomb, I hope you help me catch it."
The greedy person holding the oil lamp said that their request is not necessarily a real thing, and there is a very small probability that they are asking for something.
Jenkins nodded, looked at the entrance of the tomb with the door closed, and after confirming that there was no black aura, he opened the door and walked in.
The underground tomb originally belonged to a prominent local family, and it was the home of all members of the family after death. But later the family declined and became the tomb of the town. Squares were dug out on both sides of the long and narrow corridor to store urns. Occasionally there will be a fork in the road, and the left and right sides are larger tombs, but they are also used to store urns.
Cremation of the dead seems to be a small-town tradition, something Jenkins appreciates. He wandered around with a blue-purple miner's lamp symbolizing [Mechanical Light]. At the end of the straight corridor, he saw a rusty iron gate standing in the dark and locked.
The tomb behind the door is the largest in the small town cemetery, where the ashes of the ancestors of that prominent family were stored. After the family's decline, the last successor sold the tomb and left for another country. The tomb keeper who took over here gathered all the urns that had been scattered in every corner of the underground tomb for storage in the last large tomb.
Because there is no one who will come to mourn, and no one in the family will use this tomb, so the tomb is locked forever.
But none of that makes sense to Jenkins, and he doesn't care about this history. He stretched out his hand and pulled the rusty iron door out of the wall abruptly, walked around the deformed iron railing and walked into the somewhat gloomy tomb.
The cat's eyes glowed strangely in the dark, and it stretched out its small paw pointing to the left:
"I saw."
As he spoke, he stretched his right hand to the right, and then a dim cool green light appeared on the right. It's not that Jenkins is shining, it's that he's clutching a soul's neck.
"This is it."
He thought in his heart that he would drag that soul out of here with every step. But at the same time, in every corner of the tomb, dots of dim green light lit up, and one by one souls appeared by the wall with dull eyes, surrounding Jenkins.
"What does it mean?"
he asked.
The soul he choked could not speak because Jenkins himself was suppressing it. The one who answered him was the oldest-looking one among the souls surrounding the wall. He said intermittently in a dialect language:
"Don't take it away."
"Why?"
The soul of a mortal will split after death, representing a part of the essence to go to dominate the world of [Ancient Death] and "go on". That is only a small part of the soul, and more parts remain in the physical world and completely dissipate in a longer or shorter time.
For various reasons, some souls have their own wisdom, and their consciousness is exactly the same as before death, and they can think and judge. This is what is usually called ghosts. The soul of the old man in front of him is obviously like this. In this tomb, there are about five or six such souls that can think.
Of course, the one caught by Jenkins has no intelligence.
"The family left some property, it's in the tomb, you can take those jewels, but don't take away our members."
The old man continued.
Jenkins shook his head:
"I can see that the soul I caught is very special. I think he should have dabbled in mystery before his death? What did it do to make your family completely decline?"
"How do you know... Alas, the family has completely declined."
Next, Jenkins and the cat heard a story that happened about three hundred years ago.
A family that is about to decline welcomes frustrated family members who have returned from other places. The young scholar is determined to revitalize the family. After accidentally discovering an abnormality in the underground of the town, he digs down step by step, and finally drives himself and the whole family crazy, and triggers some mysterious force to invade the ground from the ground.
The Orthodox Church suppressed all of this, but the families involved in the matter at that time were executed by the church because they were too deeply involved. The family began to decline completely from then on.
The young soul captured by Jenkins was the young scholar who returned from afar. He didn't know what he touched, and even his soul was deformed. This distortion has not disappeared for three hundred years, but because of this, it makes his soul stronger and stronger, instead of fading away over the long years.
If Jenkins doesn't deal with it today, it will become a hidden danger for the town sooner or later.
"Let me put it this way."
After listening to the story, Jenkins gave his choice:
"Either I make you all disappear completely, or you let me leave with it. I count to three, and if I don't make a choice, I will assume that you choose the former.
one. "
"You take him away."
The old man made a very wise choice, and Jenkins had no reason to attack, so he pinched the soul and walked out.
But before stepping out of the door of the large tomb that he broke, he turned around and asked another question:
"Speaking of which, back then, what did your family find underground in the town?"
Soon, he returned to the ground with his soul and made a deal with the "greedy man" holding a shovel. The latter took away the soul, and the clue told was that the so-called "treasure" was hidden in a plaster statuette.
This is a fairly clear clue, but Jenkins did not continue to search for the next town, but temporarily stopped the "treasure hunt".
The underground souls told Jenkins that two or three hundred years ago, after the family's young scholar descendants returned from afar, on the first night, they unexpectedly heard a strange sound of "click~click~" under the family mansion. This caused the disaster of subsequent digging down and family disintegration.
Jenkins would not have thought much about it if it was outside of Nolan, but here is Nolan, and he has every reason to believe that there was a one-third possibility that this declining family encountered the difference machine. , or part of the difference engine.
Now the family has completely disappeared, and the soul of the person concerned cannot answer any questions. But the church dealt with this matter back then. Although it was not the Church of the Sages, as long as it was a church in the Nolan area, it must still have the records of the incident from that year.
For this reason, he temporarily gave up the treasure hunt, but found the church of the night watchmen in Honeywood Town. This is also a small church, but because of today's accident, there are also two Blessing Squads from the Evergreen Forest staying.
After Jenkins returned to his original identity, he inquired about the whereabouts of the dossiers related to the incident in the church, trying to figure out whether those dossiers were handed over to Nolan's Church of the Night and the Hidden Church.
As luck would have it, there were dossiers in both places, except that what was left in town was a handwritten copy of the dossier, but it made no difference to Jenkins.
At that time, there was no photography technology, at least not in the town, so when Jenkins got a moldy file bag in the narrow reference room, he only saw a large stack of written materials in it, and there were no more intuitive black-and-white photos.
When the church in the small town discovered a problem, it immediately sent someone to ask Nolan for help. The problem was not very serious, but the smelly black smoke rose near the old house of the declining family, and at the same time, the strange noise of metal friction caused all the townspeople who were active near the mansion to faint strangely.
After Nolan's night watchmen came urgently, they went deep into the old house to investigate. Finally, a gap that seemed to lead to the abyss was found in the basement. After venturing in and killing a metal monster that had never been recorded, the comatose people woke up, but everyone in the old house was dead.
Some family members were not in the house at the time, and through interrogation of them, they learned about the past of the family exploring underground. After the incident, all the people involved were arrested by the Orthodox Church, and the gap leading to the underground was permanently blocked after inspection.
Judging from the description of the incident, the processing flow and final results are quite normal, there is no illegal operation, and there is no concealment of the investigation of the facts.
But from Jenkins' perspective, things are quite suspicious. According to his thinking, perhaps as early as three hundred years ago, the difference engine tried to contact and cooperate with the humans living on the ground of Nolan. Later, something went wrong, and the cooperation was terminated, and one of the cooperating parties was killed. Killed, the difference machine randomly threw out a mechanical monster to take the blame, and he retreated back to the depths of the ground to weave a conspiracy.
This kind of thinking is very bold, and it may really just be that Jenkins is careless. But he has always been a very cautious person. After obtaining the information from 300 years ago, he planned to go to the old house to have a look.
The mansion stands on the western hill outside the town of Honeywood, and you can directly see the whole town from the mansion. Three hundred years ago, when the family's last generation of distant heirs was disposing of the property, they sold the house to the nobles of Nolan for their vacation residence.
Later, the owner of the mansion changed several times. With the help of the mayor, Jenkins found the notarized documents left in the town and confirmed that the last owner of the mansion was a businessman who lived 30 years ago.
The merchant is in the honey business, but he has never returned since he took his family to Cheslan 30 years ago. There is definite news that the merchant's family died of the undead plague 30 years ago.
In short, when Jenkins climbed up the hill along the path that had been flooded by weeds, what he saw was a mansion that had been completely dilapidated.
The mansion is surrounded by iron fences. Although the fence gates are still locked with rusty chains, they jointly perform the duty of guarding the place, but there are several holes in the fences. It seems that thieves and robbers have visited many times.