Chapter 351: Drowning Out of Thin Air

The gas lamps across the eastern half of the camp dimmed simultaneously.

A Bronze Whistle sounded in the distance—three short blasts and one long. More followed from different directions around the camp, rising and falling in succession.

Richard looked down at his feet.

Inside the excavated pits, the chisel marks on the inscribed stone surfaces were glowing.

Although the veil hadn't inverted, under Spirit Vision, formless water surged everywhere.

The first drowned victim stood up from the lantern's mouth.

Richard had read about them in the literature before. The term used in the Latin annotations was "mersus," those who sink to the bottom of the water.

The textbook illustrations depicted them as blurry gray outlines, looking like something an art student hastily scribbled to finish an assignment.

But the real drowned victim standing before him looked nothing like any illustration.

It was a translucent, grayish-white humanoid figure.

It was about the height of a living person, complete with a head, arms, and legs.

It bore deep strangulation marks around its neck and a slit across its throat, its entire body dripping wet from head to toe.

Strangled, throats slit, and drowned—the three gods had each taken their share.

The only differences among them were height and build. Some were as thin as bamboo poles, while others were less than four feet tall, likely children used as tributes by some unknown Gallic tribe.

The moment each drowned victim emerged from the ground, they immediately hunched over and reached out their hands.

Those dripping hands reached out from the ground toward the tent flaps, trying to drag people down to the bottom of the water.

The first scream rang out in the Row B tent area.

Pratt traced a line in the air with his left hand, and spiderweb-like threads of ether swept over the three tents closest to him.

When the threads hit the tent flaps, they flicked them open, revealing the situation inside at a glance.

In the nearest tent, two refugees lay on camp cots.

One had rolled over and was struggling, while the other wasn't moving at all.

The motionless person's mouth was slightly open. A translucent hand had reached up from beneath the cot and was resting on their ankle.

"Evacuate!" Pratt reacted quickly.

"Pull everyone out of the tents first! All of you—"

His words were drowned out by a louder blast from a Bronze Whistle in the distance.

Across the eastern half of the camp, the flaps of six tent rows were thrown open simultaneously.

Edmund rushed into the tents, shaking people awake one by one.

Even though the young cleric was a size wider than he had been last year, his legs hadn't slowed down.

Most people were shaken awake, their expressions bewildered as he pushed them out of the tents.

Some were pushed out without even putting on shoes, stepping barefoot into the late November mud and shivering uncontrollably.

A few couldn't be woken up. Shaking their shoulders, shouting loudly, pinching the webbing of their hands—none of it worked.

They lay on their cots, their chests rising and falling in a rhythm that didn't belong to them.

These people had all been "caught."

The drowned victims' hands rested on their ankles, wrists, and shoulder blades, forcing that dripping wet rhythm into their respiratory systems.

Viewed through Spirit Vision, they already had one foot submerged in the water.

Maggie played a crucial role here.

The moment her Azure-Green Ring enveloped them, the drowned victims' "hands" would loosen their grip.

Maggie covered those who couldn't be shaken awake one by one, allowing Edmund to carry them outside.

Catherine guarded the entrance of the tent row's aisle to perform triage.

With a single glance, she could determine which of the people emerging from the tents had been "caught" and which were simply too terrified to move.

There was a subtle asymmetry about those who were caught.

"Her!" Catherine shouted at Maggie, pointing to a middle-aged woman whom Edmund was supporting.

Since urgent matters call for expediency, she could no longer bother adhering to her vow of silence.

Maggie cast the Azure-Green Ring in that direction, and the invisible hand gripping the woman let go.

"This one is fine. Walk on your own!"

Catherine pointed again at a tall, thin man behind them.

The tall, thin man stood blankly outside the tent flap, his bare feet in the mud, hugging his arms and trembling.

When Edmund passed by, he gave the man a push on the back.

"Head toward the warehouse! Don't stop!"

The tall, thin man finally started moving.

While the evacuation was underway, Richard was doing something else.

He crouched at the edge of the pit where the inscribed stone surface was exposed and aimed the Unsealing Formula at the exits of the chiseled channels on the ground.

He initiated Tide-Shifting Breathing. Ether surged from his Seat of the Sun, pressing downward along the conductive paths.

High-density ether formed a minuscule high-pressure zone at the channel exits, completely filling the openings.

When the new drowned victims surged upward from below, they collided with this high-pressure layer, and the first one was forced back down.

The second one was pushed halfway back, struggled for a few seconds, and was then suppressed as well.

It was effective, but the ether consumption was immense.

For every channel exit Richard blocked, his ether dropped a little.

The bottom of a single pit had two or three channel exits, and four pits had been dug in the Row B tent area.

He blocked the nearest three exits, but the fourth was out of reach.

For the fifth exit, he had to rely on his Spiritual Capacity to maintain the pressure.

His Spiritual Capacity dropped down from 20. After blocking it for about three minutes, the underground pressure pushed open the ether he had poured in.

The channel exit reopened, and another drowned victim stood up from inside.

Richard clenched his teeth and poured another layer of ether inside.

It was as if he were pressing his fingers against a drainhole—the water would still seep through the gaps between his fingers.

But by holding down this section of Row B, the number of newly emerging drowned victims was noticeably lower than in other areas.

When his Spiritual Capacity dropped to 8, he activated the connection channel for Astral Projection.

His shadow intercepted a wisp of ambient ether on the shallows behind the veil, transmitting it back through the channel.

The amount was minuscule, as the channel was too narrow, but having some was better than having none at all.

His Spiritual Capacity went from 8 back to 9, then dropped to 7, and returned to 8 again.

In this asymmetrical tug-of-war, his entire job was to keep that number from dropping to zero.

The situation in the Row B tent area was brought under control, but the rest of the camp wasn't as fortunate.

In the neighboring Row C tent area, the four Practitioners in the patrol squad were all on the Hunter path.

What was a Hunter's first reaction? Draw their blades and slash.

Slashing felt satisfying, truly satisfying.

With a direct strike from above, the grayish-white humanoid figure of the drowned victim was split in half from its shoulder to its pelvis, the two halves flying two chi outward to the left and right.

But three seconds later, the two flying halves stopped midair.

They began to converge toward the center. The left and right halves found each other and pieced themselves back together.

Once reassembled, the drowned victim looked no different than it had before being slashed.

Hunching over and reaching out its hands, it continued trying to grab into the tent.

The Hunter slashed again.

This time he struck its neck, and the drowned victim's head went flying.

The head rolled twice on the ground, then flew right back, reattaching itself to the neck with a loud click.

Even the deep strangulation mark remained in the exact same place.

The Hunters slashed for twenty minutes. The drowned victims were cut apart and reformed, reformed and cut apart again, repeating the ordeal an untold number of times.

The squad had consumed more than half of their ether reserves, but not a single drowned victim had been eliminated.

An even more fatal issue occurred during this hacking process.

When a Hunter's blade split open a drowned victim, ether fragments would scatter alongside the weapon's edge.

These fragments landed on nearby refugees who hadn't managed to evacuate in time. The refugees tainted by multiple fragments immediately experienced a change in their breathing rhythms.

They switched from autonomous breathing to synchronized breathing in less than two seconds.

It meant that hacking apart one drowned victim resulted in creating several more "caught" individuals.

By the time the Row C Hunter squad leader realized what was happening and ordered them to stop, more than a dozen refugees had already been infected by the ether fragments.

The squad leader of Row D was more experienced.

Within the first minute of the drowned victims surging out, he made the judgment that they couldn't win.

He ordered a full retreat to the warehouse district, abandoning the tents.

The people were evacuated with very few casualties, but the entire Row D tent area was handed over without a fight.

The drowned victims stood row after row inside the empty tents.

They hunched over, reaching out their hands, even though there was no one left in the tents.

They just stood there in lines, waiting for something.

The squad Montagu was in guarded Row F.

He activated his Ancestral Spell Technique in the open aisle.

A curtain of golden light hung from the left side of the aisle to the right, slicing the row of tents straight down the middle into front and back halves.

Whenever the drowned victims touched the light curtain, they were burned back. As their grayish-white humanoid forms met the glowing surface, they hissed and smoked, their exteriors seared with charred burn marks.

They retreated.

Montagu maintained the curtain of light single-handedly, holding the line right in the middle of the aisle all by himself.

The blond young man's forehead was drenched in sweat, and his shirt was soaked from the collar all the way down his back.

The light curtain's consumption was massive.

A single Practitioner's ether reserves couldn't last very long when independently maintaining such a large-scale purification Spell Formula.

After holding on for nearly ten minutes, Montagu's ether bottomed out.

The curtain of light began to collapse from the edges toward the center. The gold faded to pale yellow, and the pale yellow turned entirely transparent.

Montagu staggered back two steps, teetering as he nearly fell into the mud.

The other two members of his squad caught him from the left and right, dragging him toward the warehouse.

The latter half of Row F was lost as well.

The squad Edith was in was stationed at the outermost perimeter on the east side.

The density of drowned victims on the perimeter was lower than in the central area; only three or four had surged out in total.

Edith's Inspiration wasn't strong enough.

A drowned victim had crawled into a tent through the gap between the bottom canvas and the ground, which was less than half a chi wide.

Flat against the mud, it slithered like a snake, squeezing its way in through the narrowest crevice beneath the canvas.

By the time Edith noticed, the two children inside the tent were no longer breathing autonomously.

The two children lay on their cots, their chests rising and falling in perfect unison.

The drowned victim lay beneath the cots, its two hands resting on each of the children's ankles.

The squad leader rushed into the tent, expending his own ether reserves to tear those hands away from the children's ankles.

The two children were carried out.

Edith crouched next to the squad leader, her hands shaking.

"Carter," the squad leader called out to her, panting heavily.

"Are you okay?"

Edith's hands had already stopped shaking.

As she stood up, her knee scraped the muddy ground, leaving a large patch of wet dirt on her pant leg.

"I'm fine."

While Fischer was assisting with the evacuation in Row C, he was shoved to the ground by a panicked refugee.

The refugee, a burly middle-aged man, was on the verge of a mental breakdown when he was pushed out of his tent.

Seeing Fischer blocking the aisle, he rammed into him with his shoulder without a word.

The back of Fischer's head struck the bolt of a cast-iron pipeline joint.

The injury wasn't fatal; the bolt had scraped his scalp and drawn a fair amount of blood. It looked frightening, but his skull was intact.

Volunteers helped him to the temporary first-aid station behind the warehouse.

Clutching the back of his head as he sat on a long bench, his expression showed more helplessness than pain.

But the most chilling sight of the entire ordeal happened to the refugees who had been completely "caught" by the drowned victims.

Their lips turned purple, and their complexions gradually shifted from a normal hue to a sickly, grayish-blue.

Their chests heaved violently, their breaths becoming shallower and more rapid.

Then, the first person began to retch, and a massive amount of muddy, salty water surged out of his mouth.

He lay on his side in the mud, water continuously spilling from the corners of his mouth and his nostrils as his body convulsed incessantly.

Although the muddy ground beneath their feet was damp, it was far from deep enough to drown anyone.

Yet water continued to pour out from inside his body; he was drowning out of thin air.

The others soon exhibited the exact same symptoms.

There wasn't a single extra drop of water around them, but murky, salty water bubbled out of their mouths.

Eventually, some of them didn't even have the strength left to retch.

With their mouths agape, the water slowly overflowed, spilling past their lips and trickling down their cheeks into the mud.