Chương 78: Disguised and Infiltration (2)

Following his self-hypnosis, Nathan became remarkably calmer. He donned his mask and stepped through the doorway on the left. Less than five minutes later, he emerged with another masked individual. Fortunately, I possessed my left eye's x-ray vision; otherwise, I would have struggled to tell them apart. I deployed my reliable technique once again—a sharp chop to the nape of the neck.

"Great job," I praised Nathan as I stripped the gear off our second unlucky victim. He simply shrugged.

"I knew I'd pull it off. It wasn't that hard." This sudden surge of confidence, contrasting sharply with his initial paralyzing fear, made me seriously consider asking him to manipulate my own psyche to grant me the same bravado. However, seeing that Nathan's mana had dwindled to 26, I had to conserve it for the impending infiltration. We both put on our masks. The stench wafting from the interior of the headpiece was truly putrid.

For the first thirty seconds, I felt as though I was going to die from suffocation, but my senses gradually grew numb to it. We began moving inward. The passage on the left led to a different holding block, but this time, the figures behind the iron bars were living humans. They were shackled by their wrists and ankles, their breathing so faint it seemed poised to snap at any moment. This cell block featured doorways on all four sides.

According to my observations, the two lateral doorways led to the living quarters, including a few makeshift barracks and a kitchen. Pressing straight ahead revealed a flight of stairs descending into an even deeper level, and that was our destination. Through the Halunar's Eye, I could see that the concentration of Miasma in the sub-cellar below was significantly denser than up here. Despite wearing the mask, a wave of anxiety washed over me.

The layout of the subterranean laboratory gradually came into view, and it looked indistinguishable from a brutal medieval torture chamber. There were eighteen people down here in total: thirteen masked cultists, and five others whose arms were chained to the ceiling, suspending them overhead. Surrounding them were several small cauldrons bubbling with bizarre, multi-colored liquids, along with heaps of various herbs, raw organs, and a multitude of ingredients I couldn't identify.

Nearby stood several shelves lined with small glass vials containing differently hued solutions. Behind them was a plumbing system that funneled water from a barrel through a massive glass sphere packed with dense, dark-purple gas before draining into another sealed vat. This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version. Even without using my left eye, I recognized that the glass sphere contained Miasma far more concentrated than the atmosphere of the Black Forest.

Two of the cauldrons were boiling over, spilling a nearly pitch-black liquid onto the floor before someone noticed and turned down the flames. The stone floor here was ancient and riddled with fractures; those liquids could easily seep through the cracks and escape outside. I suppose I now knew exactly why the water supply was contaminated. In a far corner of the room, several human corpses were piled haphazardly on top of one another.

The corpses exhibited deathly pale skin, severely distended blood vessels, and missing limbs. During my first isekai run, I had encountered plenty of terrifying sights. But this was definitively the most grotesque thing I had ever witnessed in my life. Nathan's eyesight wasn't as sharp as mine, so he might not have noticed the details in that far corner yet. Alternatively, he had successfully forced his own mind to override any panic by using skills, allowing him to maintain an incredibly serene composure.

A robed cultist noticed the two of us entering, grabbed a nearby stack of parchment, scribbled something down, and handed it to us.

"You two took entirely too long. Is there an issue upstairs?" It appeared this was their method of communication while wearing masks. The man held out the parchment, expecting us to pen a reply. But fearing he would detect a discrepancy in the handwriting, I simply shook my head and gestured with my hands that everything was fine. The man didn't suspect a thing. He scribbled further:"Number 9, resume testing the current specimens. Number 3, come over here and assist me. We move the moment the rain stops."

Just as I began to panic, unsure of who was Number 9 and who was Number 3, Nathan moved to follow the man. That meant I was Number 9. I observed the others. Each suspended prisoner seemed to have a dedicated masked handler assigned to them. One handler was currently forcing his "specimen" to drink one of those strange liquids, while others were meticulously recording data. I walked over to the only prisoner currently left unattended and picked up the ledger resting beside the station to examine it.

Inside were log entries spanning the past three days, documenting the reactions of the shackled prisoner when administered different chemical solutions. If a vial produced no notable reaction, they crossed out the name of that solution. Conversely, if the prisoner exhibited violent reactions—such as immediate lucidity or heightened aggression—the name of the mixture was logged with detailed annotations appended beneath. Reading through the logs, the nature of their experiment clicked.

Ordinarily, the conversion rate of a Miasma-infected individual turning into a ghoul was a mere one in ten. This faction was clearly engineering a method to force that ratio higher. They wanted to manufacture as many ghouls as possible. So, this truly was the heretical cult that would orchestrate the massive raid on Yathen a few months from now.

If I allowed events to play out unchallenged like this, a significant portion of the one thousand ghouls slated to butcher Yathen would undoubtedly be the former citizens of Grasiva. Had I remained ignorant of this, perhaps I would have restricted my objectives to safely escorting the Hero Candidates out of here, just like my first loop.

But if I willfully turned a blind eye to a thousand innocent civilians being engineered into undead monsters down here, I would likely be haunted by the guilt for the rest of my days.