civilwarnovels Chapter 3205 The Shadow of Faraines (2)
Chapter 3205 The Shadow of Faraines (2)
Chapter 3205: The Shadow of Faraines (II)
There was a book under this piece of paper. The cover looked like parchment, as if it was a product of the last century. The name of the book was "Sailor Peake's Diary".
Schiller opened the book and found that many pages were missing. Ignoring these missing pages, the content can be roughly summarized as a man named Peake boarded a big ship and became a sailor. On the way, they encountered a storm, but fortunately they reached the shore in time under the guidance of the lighthouse.
This passage is incomprehensible and has no beginning or end. If I have to say something, it may have something to do with the lighthouse in this village. However, because there is too much missing content, it is unclear whether the lighthouse they encountered is the one covered in snow.
Schiller instinctively felt that this story was very important because the part that was torn out the most was the description of the storm.
Schiller felt that there must be some connection between old Siertke's placing this note and this book here. Could it be that he discovered some conspiracy of the church from this book?
Unable to make out anything, Schiller put the note and the book away and began to investigate more content on the bookshelf.
His literature reading skills finally came in handy, because the books here were not only in English, but also in many minority languages. With this skill, he could basically understand them without any judgment.
Finally, Schiller found an important clue in a book called "Records of Major Insurance Accident Cases in the Past Century" at the bottom of the bookshelf.
The book mentions that about 80 years ago, which may be around 1930 based on the current era, a major safety accident occurred in a hotel in Massachusetts, which caused the deaths of more than 230 guests and was the third most serious hotel safety accident in American history.
The group that owns this hotel once bought a huge amount of insurance for it, and the huge compensation caused by the safety accident of this hotel became a hot topic for a while. According to the insurance company's estimates, they would have to bear more than 2000 million US dollars in compensation, which was an astronomical figure in that era.
Various lawsuits related to the case have been raging for a long time, even for more than half a century. The reason is that most of the victims died in very tragic ways, and the source of the safety accident has not been found.
The hotel is not a cruise ship. Once an accident occurs, there is no other way except to sink with the ship. The hotel is located on the mainland. Even if there is a safety accident such as fire, the guests in the lobby on the first floor should at least be able to escape.
However, the list of deaths in this safety accident included almost everyone in the hotel. Except for a few people who are still missing, almost no one escaped.
Moreover, the local police station also stated that it had not received any calls for help, the fire department had not received any fire warnings, and even the people who were on guard in the neighboring buildings did not hear any noise.
Overnight, all the residents in the hotel died tragically for unknown reasons, and according to reporters at the time, the wounds on some people's bodies looked completely unsound to human beings.
Because the situation was so bizarre, the insurance company questioned the necessity of compensation. The lawsuits between the insurance company and the medical group behind it and the hotel owners and the victims' families have lasted for half a century. In the end, many of them failed to reach a settlement and are still in litigation.
Schiller can tell from the various pictures in this book that this hotel is the same strange hotel that the bishop visited at that time, and the style of the house numbers is exactly the same.
And someone happened to take a picture of the corridor on the 19th floor, and it could be seen that the door number 1913 was missing.
In other words, just as he speculated, this hotel really existed in the history of this world, and it seemed that the tragedy caused by the arrival of the alien gods really happened there.
What made Schiller even more frightened was that he learned from another history book that almost exactly ten years after this tragedy, strange things swept the world.
It was also during this era that the church began to rise gradually. Because they were able to resolve and control strange events very well, various government departments began to allocate resources to them to ensure that the basic form of the state was not threatened.
In the following 70 years, the church gradually grew larger and larger until it became an indispensable part of human society today.
And in a book involving news and current affairs, Schiller discovered that after so many years of evolution, the church has gone beyond just solving bizarre incidents. Their hands have reached out to various fields, and they can be seen in all aspects closely related to human society.
Combining various information, Schiller roughly judged that the current church is probably the world's largest religious oligarchic economy. It looks like a religious institution, but in fact it is a huge global company with very complex subordinate organizations and various intertwined personnel factions.
Schiller actually didn't really know what department he belonged to, because he was arrogant and didn't ask, nor did he set it. He probably didn't expect the church to be so complicated.
However, since he does many things without any checks, we can indirectly infer that he is not the kind of priest who recites scriptures in the church.
After that, Schiller began to focus on looking for books about the church, and finally found favorable evidence of his identity and department in a modern encyclopedia.
This book describes the dress standards for religious people. There are no requirements for ordinary believers, as long as they dress appropriately when going to church. Priests in regional churches wear black robes, which is the very common attire of Catholic priests. Other more senior clergy also wear Catholic attire.
There are several special departments that dress differently. The tribunal, which has replaced the functions of the judiciary, wears black robes with blue patterns and a scale pattern on the sleeves.
The Inquisition, which replaced the law enforcement agencies, also wore black robes, but with golden patterns on them and sword patterns on the sleeves.
Schiller glanced at the long sword pattern on his sleeve and remained silent. So after all this time, he was still an agent.
No wonder Hef thought I was here to silence him when he saw me. The job of this inquisition is to silence people, and my job as a requiem master might really be to physically requiem souls.
The book says that the Inquisition is a global spy organization. If I have to say it, it is similar to S.H.I.E.L.D., which resolves the impact of various strange events around the world.
Schiller certainly knew that this was a euphemism. The Inquisition was basically equivalent to a violent law enforcement agency that maintained the rule of the church, a hammer for playing whack-a-mole, hitting anyone who disobeyed.
Of course, the book also says that the Inquisition has been involved in assassination scandals more than once, but due to the importance of its functions, it was mostly handled with great fanfare and then easily let go, and was almost never truly held accountable.
Schiller continued reading and saw several pictures of the Pope traveling. There was nothing special about the Pope, just an old man with white hair and beard, but he looked in good spirits.
However, there was a caption under the picture, "The Pope travels with his personal guards." Schiller took a look and found that the clothes he was wearing were very similar to the uniforms of the personal guards. Wow, he was actually a Jinyiwei.
So the question is, why did the members of the Royal Guard run to such a remote little village instead of staying in the holy city?
Schiller speculated that there were two possibilities: either he was here to carry out an important mission to silence someone, or he was the person who was silenced and had escaped here.
Schiller felt that the latter possibility was more likely, because there was really no one here who looked like he would need the SS to kill him successfully, and even old Sirtek was not qualified.
Because the victim of the last assassination case that the court failed to fool was the US Secretary of State.
Based on the note, Schiller made a bold guess.
The hotel tragedy was indeed caused by the arrival of the outer gods. To be precise, the Wayne couple provoked Naya at that time. After a series of operations, the abnormality of the hotel broke out and many people died.
However, the strange events that followed were not necessarily natural disasters, because both in terms of manifestation and impact, they were far inferior to the hotel tragedy.
To be more precise, those cases did not seem like something that could be caused by Outer Gods. To put it in an arrogant way, they were too typical and lacked beauty.
The tragedies in the Cthulhu mythology all have a kind of cold weirdness, as if humans are not the losers in a fight, but the ants that happen to be stepped on to death while passing by.
Whether it is the Outer Gods or the Old Ones, they did not come for humans with a clear purpose, but humans insisted on exploring the secrets behind them, which caused the strange aftermath to affect the earth, and they were crushed to death silently.
But these subsequent bizarre cases looked like carefully designed murder scenes, the victims were as miserable as possible, the scenes were as bloody as possible, as if they wanted to engrave the words "I was killed by a monster" on their faces.
Many of the victims in the Cthulhu mythology were not actually killed by foreign gods, and their deaths had nothing to do with gods or ghosts. Most of them did irrational things out of fear, such as jumping off a building because of fear, or dying from insanity and infection.
But these strange things happened later. Among the hundreds of people who died in the whole case, none of them died in a normal way. They had to be ways that ordinary people couldn't die, such as exploding from the inside out, taking off their own heads, and suddenly vomiting out all their internal organs.
And another very important clue is that there were no survivors in the hotel tragedy, not even a single witness left, and it happened in the middle of the night. When the police and reporters arrived in the morning, there was nothing left.
But all these strange things that happened later must have happened in broad daylight in public. They broke out wherever there were many people. Half of the onlookers died and half ran away. Those who ran away gave various interviews to the media, desperately recounting the horrific scenes at that time.
The venues are all college graduation balls or crowded art museum exhibitions, and the victims are all well-known novelists or painters with little fame. At the very least, they are all documentary filming locations, popular tourist attractions, and the like.
And the way the weirdness explodes must be extremely dramatic, with a strongest impact at the beginning, followed by a slow rhythm, and finally a fast-paced chase, just like filming a movie.
Deliberate, too deliberate.
That’s how these cases make Schiller feel.
(End of this chapter)