Chapter 1078: The Pseudo-Forensics Team of Two
That's it for the attack? Seems too casual, doesn't it?
"Although the speed has been increased, rest assured that no essential information has been omitted," the voice explained one last time. As one of the farmhouses in the distance faintly lit up, complete silence descended.
That particular farmhouse was where someone had died. Bohemia and the Descartes Spirit hastened to approach the farmhouse door. The era in which this impoverished village existed was probably in the Middle Ages. A few rough wooden planks were nailed together to form a door, with gaps large enough to accommodate a fist. This was their door.
Summoning a light-producing fish, Bohemia pushed the door open. A blend of the smell of livestock and cabbage hit them in the face. The interior of the farmhouse was narrow and crowded, with no floor to speak of. Stepping inside, mud clung to their shoes. The pigsty was right next to the living area, and you could faintly hear the pigs grunting in the backyard. In the dim light, a dog suddenly stood up and was about to bark. Before it could make a sound, she grabbed its mouth and tossed it out the window. Probably knocked out, there was only a muffled thud once it landed outside.
"You're quite merciful to dogs," the Descartes Spirit followed in and commented.
Next to the lingering warmth left by the dog, there was a large stack of straw covered by a dirty cloth. It could be considered a 'bedsheet.' Two fish swam through the air, and their light illuminated the lifeless body on the straw bed.
A nearly middle-aged farmer with a greenish-white complexion, motionless, and collapsed on the rag sheet. There was fatigue, haggardness, and roughness engraved on his face, at a glance, it is clear that it is the traces left behind by a laborious life.
"A peaceful expression," said the Descartes Spirit, coming up to take a look, not resisting a quick remark, "in which case, even if something did happen to your friend, she would at least have gone very—"
The second half of the sentence suddenly stopped as Bohemia reached up at that moment and flipped the peasant over.
The back half—perhaps this quantifier shouldn't be used for people, but she didn't really know what word to use for a moment—the back half of the farmer's entire body, from the back of his head, his back, his buttocks, all the way down to his calves and heels, was all gone.
As she did so, the shattered dress couldn't wrap around the body, and the broken bones, flesh, and entrails fell out with a crash—the cloth sheet had long since been soaked to the bone, but both the human and Pocket Dimension immediately noticed that something was wrong.
"This, there's so little blood," Bohemia, her hand scrunching the rag, let go of the rag and put it back on the body, rubbing her hands vigorously on her skirt, "Half of the body's gone, how come the blood coming out didn't even completely soak this rag?"
"Suggesting that one of the creature's habits is to feed on human blood?" The Descartes Spirit guessed, "Look, the clothes and skin on the back are shredded, but they're at least still there, only they're all crumpled up and mixed together and piled up on one side again. The amount of meat and internal organs are also about the same as a normal adult... The only thing missing is the blood."
Bohemia fought back the stomach juices that welled up, turned her face to take a deep breath, and asked, "Criminologist?"
"No, interest."
Pressing back the nausea and taking a closer look, she realized the mass of mosaic was right. The sheet of cloth was torn and sparse and worm-infested, and most of the flesh, guts, and bones that had crumbled off the farmer's back had leaked down through the holes in the torn cloth; at first glance, it looked like half of the body was missing, but in reality, it was just half of it that had been scattered into the straw after being pinched halfway through by whatever it was.
The only thing that was massively reduced was the blood - which perhaps explained why it wasn't the first thing she smelled as soon as she walked through the door.
"I'll check the time first," Bohemia said as she pulled out a leaf and glanced at the slight aura from the window. Time seemed to flow a little slower in the figurative 'question' than it actually did, and it had only been a minute since both she and the Descartes Spirit had examined the body.
"Don't you have a normal watch?"
She collected the leaf with deaf ears and returned her gaze to the dead body. "Come on, let's go check out the other ones."
The remaining four dead were of varying ages, male and female, but the deaths were identical; they had all collapsed on beds of straw, and a great deal of blood had disappeared from the shattered back half of their bodies. Some had dogs that were still in the house guarding their masters, others had empty homes, and it was not known whether the dogs had long since run away.
"That's a simple one," grunted the Descartes Spirit, "and your friend is stupid to have taken so long to figure it out. They all died without a sound in their beds, and lost the back half of their bodies, which means that the thing that attacked them must have done it from the back... of their backs. These shabby farmhouses are full of dirt floors, and the thing that attacked the people, eighty percent of the time, burrowed in through the ground."
"Cut the nonsense," Bohemia retorted without reservation. "The real question is, just from this point, can you deduce the creature's physical characteristics and habits?"
"Let's dig up the ground!" the Descartes Spirit, eager to try it out, said, "This creature leaves traces as it tunnels through the soil, and I'll know once I see them!"
While the Descartes Spirit found the idea light-hearted, Bohemia ended up sweating heavily from executing it. Knowing that time was short, she looked at the leaf and frantically dug the soil. It felt as if she were a groundhog that only started panicking when winter arrived. After digging through the surface layer of the soil, the Descartes Spirit floated over to inspect for a while but then looked unhappy.
"Stop squeezing me," it said, squashed into a ball by her Higher Consciousness. "I... I didn't see any signs of burrows or tunnels underground."
"What do you mean? Weren't you the one who said that thing burrowed out of the ground?"
"I... I originally thought it might be mutant earthworms or something, but there are no burrows or tunnels..."
Bohemia threw it out of the window like a dog, and within seconds, it floated back in quietly. "Could it be that the area you dug up wasn't big enough? You only dug up a small piece of soil beneath the body—"
"Then you do it," she curtly interrupted. To save time, she merely moved the straw beneath the corpse; after all, if there were something in the ground, it should have been coming in and out from there. Since the problem was not underground, how were these farmers and their spouses being attacked?
Bohemia didn't dare linger and waste time in one place. She got up, dusted off her hands, and headed to the next house.
"Speaking of which, the people in the past lived worse than during the apocalypse," she said while wrapping the female corpse in the tattered bedsheet. She dragged the woman off the straw bed in one go. "This sheet must not have been washed for a long time; it's all stiff from the dirt and stinks of sweat, giving me a headache. No wonder they had to sleep on straw; at least it has a relatively fresh scent."
"This bed is bigger than the previous one," the Descartes Spirit remarked, barely acknowledging her comments, floating in mid-air.
"Pay attention," a voice from the outside unexpectedly said, "this household consists of a husband and wife. The husband saw his wife not getting up in the morning, and upon pushing her, he discovered she had been dead for a while."
Does that mean the creature can only feed on one person's blood at a time?