dmims Chapter 29
Chapter 29
Under the cover of the knights, Perfit crossed the last stretch of street, and just as he approached the steps to the hospital entrance, his steps involuntarily slowed. Something in the air had changed.
It wasn't a smell—she was wearing a breathing mask, so smells couldn't get in—but a more primal sensation, like skin directly touching some kind of invisible pressure.
The air here is colder than anywhere in the city. It's not the kind of cold wind that blows over the sea in a swamp in winter, but a kind of cold that seeps out from the ground, carrying a thick, malicious chill that makes it hard to breathe.
Perfit slowly stopped and looked up at the charred stone steps in front of him.
She felt as if she were standing on the edge of an abyss about to collapse. The oppressive feeling was so real that she slightly held her breath.
Judge Sabel stood not far behind her, took the Book of Words from her bosom, opened it, and placed it in the usual spot.
She tried reading a verse of blessing, but after only a few syllables, her voice became dry in the air, her lips moved with difficulty a few times, and she could not read the verse no matter what she tried.
She raised her head, her deep-set gray eyes trembling slightly, and said in a low voice that could not conceal her fear, "The Lord says, He does not look at this place. He hides his face from it. This is a place rejected by the whole Father."
Perfit didn't turn around to look at her.
She stood before the charred stone steps for a long time before turning around and walking back to the knights to give her orders.
His voice was steady, and his tone remained unchanged from when he was at the edge of the ruins.
"You guard this door. No one is allowed to enter or leave without my order." She turned to Ludwig. "While I'm leading the men in, everyone stay alert."
If the infected advance, use volley fire and explosives to hold them off. Use ammunition sparingly; prioritize preventing the formation from being broken up.
He then turned to Belfast and added briefly, "Go into standby mode. Stay here and wait for me to come back."
The exhaust sound from the back of the Steam Knight armor suddenly decreased, and the hum of the steam core's operation was reduced to a minimum.
"Four knights, come with me," Perfit said. "Allen, you come with me. Judge, I need you here." She finally looked at Chernzov. "Lieutenant General, you lead the way."
Cherzov drew his flintlock pistol from his waist, re-examined the powder keg, and then stepped onto the stone steps in front of the hospital.
His military boots pounded on the charred stone slabs, each step echoing heavily.
Pficott followed behind, with Allen, Sabel, and four fully armed knights behind him.
The interior of the hospital lobby looked even more dilapidated than the exterior.
Light leaked through cracks in the collapsed ceiling, casting dappled patterns on the floor, which was littered with broken bricks and charred timber.
The corridor on the left side of the hall was completely blocked by rubble, while the corridor on the right side was still barely passable, but half of the ceiling had collapsed, with plaster and broken wooden strips hanging down from the cracks, swaying slightly in the cold wind.
The ground was covered with dried, blackened liquid traces and scattered medical equipment remnants—broken medicine bottles, bent trays, torn bandages, and several twisted scalpels, their blades rusted so much they were almost fused with the broken bricks on the ground.
Chertzov paused at the entrance of the corridor to get his bearings, then walked to the right.
He didn't light a lamp; the light was barely enough, and he dared not light a fire.
Perfitter followed behind him, and by the dim light filtering through the cracks in the ceiling, he could see scratches all over the walls on either side of the corridor.
It wasn't just one or two scratches, but a large expanse of scratches stretching from the floor all the way to the ceiling, layer upon layer, the furrows dug by fingernails into the wall plaster as dense as some kind of frenzied fabric.
Some of the scratches still contained fragments of broken fingernails, dried and blackened, newer and denser than the marks on the skeletons at the swamp outpost.
Alan asked in a very soft voice from behind Perfit, "These marks...were they made by the infected?"
Perfit did not answer.
She pressed her finger against one of the scratches and ran her hand down an inch along the groove—the depth and width of the scratches matched a human finger, but there were too many of them.
It wasn't one person, it was a group of people.
A group of people, in extreme fear, simultaneously and frantically scratched the same wall with their fingers until their nails were completely flipped open, exposing their knuckles, and then continued scratching.
This is no longer just a matter of infection spreading.
Something far more horrific happened in this hospital.
Cherzov found an iron door leading to the underground at the end of the right-hand corridor in the hospital lobby.
The door was deformed, the hinges were loose, and half of the brickwork above the door frame had collapsed, leaving only a narrow gap between the broken bricks and mortar blocking the door.
The two knights worked together to pry open the iron door. The rusty hinges screeched and bounced back and forth several times in the empty corridor.
Behind the door is a stone staircase leading downwards.
The steps were narrow, just wide enough for one person to pass through. Every so often, there was a groove in the walls on both sides, filled with solidified wax and burnt wicks—there used to be wall lamps here, but they were all extinguished.
After descending about twenty steps of the stone staircase, a bend appeared, and the light disappeared completely.
A knight lit a windproof oil lamp and held it in front of him, the dim light casting a flickering shadow on the damp stone wall.
The air blowing up from below carried a musty, stale smell, mixed with something more unpleasant—not the sweet, cloying scent of rotting corpses, but a dry, bitter decay, as if something that shouldn't exist on the ground had been sealed here for far too long.
Pficott followed Chertzov down the aisle.
Each step she took on the stone steps was steady, but her left hand had unconsciously drawn the old dagger she had brought back from the desert kingdom from her waist.
The alchemical array engraved on the blade emitted a very faint blue glow in the darkness. It was so weak that it could barely illuminate anything, but Perfit could feel the warmth emanating from the hilt—not cold, but warm.
This knife once killed things that shouldn't have lived, and now it is awakening.
At the end of the stone steps was an underground hall.
The light from the windproof oil lamp was completely insufficient here, only illuminating a small area in front of us, while the rest was completely hidden in thick darkness.
Perfit had the knight raise the oil lamp, and by that faint light, she could barely make out the outline of the hall.
The room has an arched stone ceiling, an uneven stone floor, several rusted iron doors on the walls, a few rotten wooden crates piled against the wall, and a dark stain on the floor in the corner that has seeped into the stone’s texture, making it impossible to tell whether it is blood or mold left by dampness.
In the center of the hall, slightly to the left, there is a circular well opening on the ground with a diameter of about three meters.
The wellhead was surrounded by a blackened stone railing, covered with densely engraved characters—not Ros, not Victorian, not any of the Imperial official languages that Perfit had ever seen.
The strokes of those characters are extremely ancient, each stroke looking as if it were carved directly into the stone while it was still molten, with the ends of the strokes bearing the curled texture of cooled lava.
Chertzov stood at the edge of the well, looking down at the writing, his voice deep and resonant, like an echo from the earth: "This is it. The vertical shaft that Dr. Ross mentioned."