The Record of Unusual Creatures

Everyone else was talking about wizards, mysterious realms, magic and ghosts. No one noticed what Lily was doing: the others knew that it was normal for the husky maiden to run around like a curious bunny. No one would blink an eye even if she suddenly decided to dig a hole and bury herself in it. Lily was now standing beside the stage, wide-eyed as she listened to the sounds of the other dimension. She did so until the sound slowly became distorted, as though there was radio interference. This caused her to snap out from her stupor.

Lily’s ears flickered as she tried to listen to the voices again. But it vanished and the faint shadows before her eyes were fading like water ripples. She lifted her Frostfire Claws in the air trying to catch them, but it turned out they were mere phantoms.

Hao Ren noticed her. He asked from afar, “Lily, what are you doing?”

“I just heard someone talking!” Lily immediately darted towards Hao Ren and told them what she had heard and seen.

Nangong Sanba’s brows pulled together. “Message from the ghosts?”

“Didn’t you say the spirits here are very weak, and they have jumbled as much that they couldn’t be separated from each other?” Hao Ren slid Nangong Sanba a glance. “What’s the matter?”

Nangong Sanba looked at Lily curiously and sprinkled some powder into the air. “The spirits here is indeed very weak; you can see it for yourself—”

Before his voice trailed off, the powder that he had just sprinkled was suspended in the air by magic and spreading like a mist around them in a faint fluorescent glow. Under the illumination of the glowing powder, some faint shadows gradually emerged, but disappeared after a few seconds.

“Those are the spirits that are entrenched in the town,” Nangong Sanba said, arching the corner of his mouth. “As you can see, there are so vague.”

“I don’t know you,” Lily’s ears shook a little and said, “but cold see them pretty clearly.”

Hao Ren looked at the husky maiden in surprise, thinking what a special ability she got there! She could even see faint ghosts that the demon hunters could not. Nangong Wuyue was no less awed. She asked Vivian, “Does werewolf has wraith-perceiving ability?”

“No, they don’t,” Vivian replied. Her expression looked strange as if she was in some kind of deep thought. “But it’s true that the dogs ward off evil spirits. Doesn’t the Chinese says pets have supernatural vision; they could see spirits?”

Everyone: “…..”

Vivian was dead serious when she said that. Lily did not know how to refute it. Next to her, Turcan had wanted say “that’s not scientific” but he bit back. His sudden self-awareness told him that as a fantasy creature, he was neither more scientific.

Hao Ren motioned with his hands to brush this conversation aside as he was looking thoughtfully at the empty little square. “It seems ghosts might be in town. I have also heard some voices when I first got here but not as clearly as Lily did. So why not you keep an eye on the spirits, Lily? Tell me if you hear or see anything. Maybe those spirits could tell us something about the town.”

“You got it!” Lily replied, holding her head high. “Just now I heard they were talking something about the seigneur. This town should have been a land of some seigneur. Is this information useful?”

“Land of the seigneur?” Vivian frowned. “It doesn’t reveal much. In that era, almost all the land belonged to the seigneurs.”

Lily snorted regretfully and turned to walk in front of them. Her eyes was emanating a golden glow as she kept seeing the invisible shadows roaming and disappeared again in the lost town. In the visions of other people, the path in the town was shrouded in a layer of grey mist, but Lily could see translucent shadows were flashing across her eyes from occasionally.

It was a pity that most of the shadows are very, very thin. They were not even wraith, just an echo of dying souls reverberating in the air, but the real souls had already left.

Hao Ren took out the MDT, which was showing some readings of the spirits. This gadget was not specifically used to detect the wraiths; he could not rely on its radar alone to communicate with the ghosts, so he tucked away the MDT.

They came before an abandoned house. Nangong Sanba checked the street sign in front of the house. “Domir… Was there such a town in history?”

“No,” Turcan replied. “We have checked; neither the name ‘Domir’ nor record of any human towns in this area exist. It’s not sure whether it was because of magic or simply the length of time, this place has been completely wiped off from history.”

Vivian thought for a while and said, “Probably it was time. Only people like Odin and Zeus were capable of casting spell that could tamper with history on a large scale in Mythology Period. I don’t think a human wizard had such ability. Europe was in turbulence hundreds of years ago. It wasn’t unusual for remote, small town like this being buried in history. Moreover, it has completely disappeared from the map, there’s no way to investigate.”

Nangong Wuyue was crawling at the back of the team. She felt something strange, rolled her tail up and checked what it was. “Do you guys notice there’s ashes everywhere in this town?”

“Ashes?” Hao Ren looked down at his feet and found himself stepping on a layer of greyish black powder. He did not really notice it before this. “This is…”

“Like the ashes of burned wood.” Nangong Wuyue picked up a little ashes and squeezed it with her fingers. “It’s everywhere, right from the entrance of the town until here.”

Hao Ren looked around thoughtfully. He did not see obvious signs of fire. So where did the ashes come from?

There was no record of Domir in history. No one could tell when and how it disappeared, and how it looked like before the destruction. Judging from the enclosed condition and the entrenched spirits here, the place should be intact until it was pulled into the dimension, and the ashes only appeared after the mysterious realm was locked away, Hao Ren so thought.

Unless the town had a custom of scattering ashes. Hao Ren pondered for a while and dismissed this theory, which was less probable.

Lily held her Flamejoy that doubled as a torch in front of the pack. She focused her vision and saw more spirits appearing in the air. There were so many of them that it looked so abnormal. It was so crowded together that they were overlapping, almost walked into and on top of each other. The little town could never accommodate such a large population. Lily became suspicious. She observed carefully, and finally discovered the secret: these ghosts were shadows of each other.”

She could not see them clearly but judging from the outlines and shapes, some of the wandering ghosts were actually one. They were generally walking along the same path and direction, the difference was just the timing. A group of seemingly different shadows would always walk into the same door, and that was a giveaway that they were actually one.

She told her puzzling findings to Nangong Sanba who then told the others. Suddenly, a thought across Vivian’s mind. “Perhaps these spirits are not of human at all.”

Hao Ren did not get it. “You mean…”

“Perhaps it is the memory of this town, or perhaps the resonance of a more powerful soul. In short, they are not ghosts, but something that is projected by another force, so that explains the repetition and their same trajectory and action,” Vivian said as she surrounded herself with a faint blood mist. “I was already suspicious just now. If all the residents of the town had become ghosts, there should be a wraith-energy field here. But there’s none except for a little change in temperature and the wandering spirits.”

Hao Ren was a little ignorant in this field. He asked Kasandra who later told him that when a large number of ghosts (or similar wraiths) gathered they would form an energy field. The more their number, the stronger the energy field. When the number of ghosts exceeded a hundred it was enough for humans to perceive the energy field. This energy field could cause hallucinations and even death.

At least wraiths of human were capable of doing this.

The MDT agreed with Kassandra. But its explanation was simpler: the superposition of electromagnetic field.

Hao Ren gave it a little more imagination. But that only gave him goose bumps.