Tianjin people will never lose SAN

Chapter 598 Cat and Mouse Game (4k+)

In the dark belly of the beast, at the edge of a strange village, a figure poked its head out from behind an abandoned house.

He first observed the situation around him, and after making sure that no one was watching him, he jumped out from behind the house at an extremely fast speed, a speed that exceeded the limit of human running.

The little girl Catarina squatted nervously at the edge of the village, with a small cloth bag hanging around her neck. She held a small basket in one hand and a small hoe in the other, pretending to dig fungi.

At some point, the figure had silently appeared behind her, stretching out his right hand towards Katarina's slender neck.

"No one suspicious, right?"

Katarina was startled, turned her head and looked at the man behind her and breathed a sigh of relief:

"Mr. Kogan, please don't show up so quietly next time. You scared me to death."

Kogan put on the ancient relic gloves and took off the backpack from his shoulders, which was filled with food taken from the ship. Liu Yonglu recently asked Gonzalo to replace Charlie, and the trial of the "sinners" was deliberately simplified by him.

The excuse was very simple. The gods had to purify the land polluted by Charlie recently and had no time to identify the ordinary villagers who had been bewitched. The task of arresting the "sinners" could be temporarily handed over to the messengers of God.

Although the "criminals" were no longer arrested, the village's food could not be openly given to the excluded elderly and children.

With such a drastic move, these selfish villagers will definitely rebel. For now, Gonzalo cannot be kicked down by the villagers.

Liu Yonglu asked Kougan to take some food from the boat every day to support the dozen children and the elderly. At the same time, Catalina would also bring a letter to Kougan to facilitate the sharing of intelligence between the two teams.

There was enough food on the ship, thanks to Kogan's careful budgeting.

The reason why he chose Catalina to do this job was that after spending a few days with her, Liu Yonglu found that this little girl not only had a strong sense of justice but also had courage and decisiveness that were not commensurate with her age.

After a few attempts, Catalina gladly took on this dangerous mission.

"Mr. Feng's progress is going smoothly. He has narrowed down the suspects of the preacher on the ground. The details are all in the letter. Mr. Kogan, I'll see you tomorrow."

The little girl took out a small cylinder from under the basket for digging wild vegetables and gave it to Kou Gang. Inside was the letter written by Mr. Feng. Kou Gang also gave the little girl a piece of cylinder, which contained a reply letter written by Millie Tang to Liu Yonglu.

After Kougan left, the little girl dragged the backpack of food Kougan brought with him into the shabby house.

There were old cloth bags in the shabby house that she had prepared in advance. Catalina took out the food and stuffed them into the bags according to categories.

There were some broken furniture in the house. The little girl moved the low cabinet in the corner of the hall and moved the old cloth bag behind the cabinet.

It was too conspicuous to carry a big bag into the village alone during the day, so at night, several familiar children would take the food from the bag in three batches.

After doing all this, the girl wiped the sweat from her forehead. She hid Kogan's backpack in a broken water tank outside the house and pressed a few stones on it. Mr. Kogan would take it away himself tomorrow.

After collecting the mushrooms in the basket, Katarina headed towards the village.

After walking for just five minutes, Catalina felt someone coming out of a house on the side of the road and following her.

That’s not right… I’ve walked this road many times, and the houses around here are all vacant. How could someone still be living in them?

Catalina was alert in her heart. She squatted down as if nothing had happened and took out a handkerchief to clean the mud on her shoes, but in fact she did so to let the person behind her go first. She always felt uneasy about having a stranger following her.

After waiting for more than ten seconds, Katarina felt the person behind her stop in front of her.

A pair of eyes were examining her from top to bottom. The pressure brought by the gaze made Katarina feel a slight chill on the back of her neck. Oh no, the other party was coming for her!
She didn't get anxious, but lowered her head, closed her eyes, took a few deep breaths to calm herself down. At the same time, her mind was working fast, and she repeated the words she had prepared in advance.

"Sir, you're blocking me."

The little girl stood up and said timidly.

"Sinner, you are a sinner. The devil lurking in the village has brought curses and misfortunes through you, and you still have the nerve to live."

Standing in front of her was a middle-aged man of medium height and square face. They were so close that Catalina could even see the rough pores on his skin.

The middle-aged man had big bags under his eyes and his small eyes were full of ferocity. He expressed his disgust and ferocity without any scruples. Along with his curses, the unpleasant saliva sprayed onto Catalina's hair.

Even though the little girl had prepared herself mentally, she was still frightened by the curses that came her way.

"Why are you sneaking around the village? Has your master assigned you some unspeakable mission?

Do you know how people like you are treated in the outside world?
You will be treated as a witch, stripped naked and tied to a wooden rack, and people will light torches and roast you alive in the square.

When you die, crows and maggots will eat your body."

Every time the middle-aged man spoke, he would push Catalina back. The girl was frail to begin with, and with the added threat of words, she stumbled and fell to the ground after just a few pushes.

The most important thing is that the small cloth bag around her neck was also snatched away.

The middle-aged man opened the cloth bag with a grim smile, and found a letter inside as he expected.

"I will expose your crimes to the world, you vile and dirty witch."

As he spoke, the middle-aged man opened the letter, but the smile on his face froze when he saw the contents of the note.

On it was a crayon drawing of a group of children having a picnic and playing on the grass. There were also doodles and signatures of seven or eight children underneath the crayon drawing.

"Sir, could you please give me this painting back?"

Catalina, with a broken leg, begged for crayons while she carefully arranged the basket of mushrooms in which Kogan's reply to her letter was hidden.

As for the cloth bag around her neck, it was a sleight of hand that Catalina had prepared in advance to confuse the enemy's sight at the critical moment. The enemy was indeed attracted by the cloth bag.

"Damn witch."

The middle-aged man viciously tore the crayon drawing into pieces and threw them aside, and spat at Katarina.

After the other person walked away, Catalina stood up from the ground with a breath of cold air. She patted the dirt on her skirt and told herself that she had to tell Mr. Feng the news quickly. The stranger who had just stopped her might be the preacher on earth as he mentioned!

……

On the other side, Kou Gang also returned to Shi Weitian's camp with Liu Yonglu's information. Shi Weitian had been working in three shifts recently, taking turns to rest. The little genius brother and sister were in one group, Kou Gang and Marquette were in one group, and Millie Tang and the walking chicken were in another group.

When one group is on duty, the others return to the ship to sleep, but every morning, Shi Weitian's people will appear in the temporary camp to analyze the battle situation and make subsequent preparations.

"Miss Millie Tang, the captain has replied."

Back at the camp, Kogan quickly took off his gloves and pulled the letter out of the brass tube.

"Just watch it first, and then tell me what happened."

Millie Tang was lying on the bank, carefully filling a bottle with water using a test tube. She was preparing a forbidden spell.

Ricky is now looking for the Virgin Mary's preacher in the village. Millie Tang can't help in this regard, so Millie Tang came up with two more feasible exploration plans based on the existing information.

First, we need to find out what is behind the bronze gate. It would be unsafe if our own people go in. Milly Tang thought of a forbidden spell called "Eyes of the Stranger" or "Vision Stealing".

The caster can share the vision of the recipient for a short period of time. Millie Tang plans to let Ricky find a suitable candidate for her and go in to explore the way with this forbidden spell.

The second is to find a way to get in touch with the fleet other than the sea monster. Although this idea sounds reasonable, it is difficult to implement. Milly Tang is now trying this.

"show me."

Marquette chuckled and asked Kogan for some writing paper.

Don't be fooled by Millie Tang's calmness now. On the morning of the next day after the fire, when Kogan brought back Ricky's reply, Millie Tang almost ran and snatched the copper pipe from Kogan's hand.

“Ricky said that he has figured out a way to force the preachers out of the village, so we don’t have to worry about that.

However, he suspected that the state of the preachers on earth at this time should be very similar to that in the Holy See. More than a dozen people were scattered in different places, asking us to pay attention.

At the same time, he also told us to be alert to the monsters in the water. He had asked some villagers in the past two days and they said that the monsters in the water might have nothing to do with the Virgin Mary. "

Millie Tang left the shore, took the test tube and walked thoughtfully to the prepared spell materials for the next processing.

She was an eyewitness to the great battle in the Holy See. The Virgin Mary's preachers on earth could occupy the bodies of flesh and blood creatures. There were more than a dozen preachers on earth...where would they be scattered now?

And behind Millie Tang was the place where she had just fetched water.

A female face slowly floated up from beneath the dark water. Her movements were very light and slow, and even though her body underwater was unusually large, she did not make much noise.

The face had the features of a human, but the texture of the skin and the outline of the bones were completely beyond the scope of a human.

Pale, swollen, and puffy, the woman's face seemed to be covered by a soft shell frame. The woman's eyes would not move, and it seemed that she did not have any visual organs such as eyeballs.

Her body swayed at a certain frequency underwater, supporting her body to slowly float up.

But just when she was about to rise completely out of the water, some kind of restraint under the water seemed to hold her back again, and the ripples on the water surface continued to grow denser and larger as the woman struggled.

But in the end, she was pulled down by the underwater force.

"Millie Tang, how long will it take for you to prepare the forbidden spell to spy on the bronze gate?
We'd better take action in the next two days. If Ricky and his men make a big noise in the village and with the preachers on the ground, it might alert the existence behind the bronze gate."

It was pitch black inside the beast's belly. Although Shi Weitian's men took down kerosene lamps from the boat, they only dared to light one, for fear of alarming the people in the village.

Marquette vaguely felt that there was movement in the water behind Milly Tang, but when he walked closer to observe, he could only see the dark water surface and circles of faint spreading ripples.

……

"Shani, you stay here for a while. I'm going to go downstairs and smoke a cigarette."

Lin Brown handed the monocular telescope in his hand to Shani, and then he tiptoed down the ladder behind the house.

The two were in the area where the fire had broken out a few days ago. At this time, the villagers had built a two-story wooden building on the charred land.

Although it only has two floors, it is the tallest building in the village.

Why build this building? It was also Liu Yonglu's idea. It was nominally to commemorate the first defeat of the evil minions and to mourn the donkey who died in the battle.

Yes, that's right. The headless body of the donkey is still on the first floor of the small building. Liu Yonglu asked the village carpenter to make a coffin for him and bury the body in it. Now, the villagers' meetings are held at the donkey's grave every day to express their gratitude and respect to him.

There was a broken copper basin on the second floor of the small building. In theory, the basin was used to warn the whole village. If there was another fire or a monster appeared in the water, someone could quickly climb up and knock on the basin to warn them.

At first, Liu Yonglu's idea was to make a big bell, but according to the current production level of the village, he was unable to do so, and eventually this plan was replaced by a copper basin.

In fact, Liu Yonglu built the small building in order to deal with the Virgin Mary's preachers on earth.

After the fire that night, Liu Yonglu, Xia Ni and Lin Bei discussed it and concluded that the Virgin Mary's preacher must have disguised himself as an ordinary villager and mixed in with the group. He and Lin Bei both saw him on the day of the fire, but they slipped away too quickly and were not caught.

The Virgin Mary's earthly preachers...what are their characteristics? Hey, Liu Yonglu thought of the scene when the Holy See was fighting before. These earthly preachers seemed to have a small head on the back of their necks.

This is the enemy's characteristic, but... calling everyone in the village together and checking their necks one by one? The enemy is not stupid, and they must have a way to deal with such a blatant inspection.

Liu Yonglu really had an idea. At this time, there was a small table under the two-story building. Two people were sitting in front of the table, one was Liu Yonglu and the other was the messenger Gonzalo.

Gonzalo kept holding the bottle of wine in his hand and took a sip every once in a while. He didn't care. As long as he had wine to drink, he didn't care about anything else.

As for Liu Yonglu...he found a bunch of materials and placed them on the table, along with a small wooden barrel with a lot of sticks in it.

A small board painted with white paint and a charcoal pencil next to it.

On the roof, Lin Brown came back from smoking. He and Shani hid behind a protruding eaves on the second-floor roof. This house was originally designed according to Lin Brown's requirements. Hiding here, it is difficult for people below to see them.

There were two torches stuck on the left and right sides of Liu Yonglu's small table. Under the orange light, every detail was clearly visible.

At this time, a villager had bent over and was leaning over a low table, drawing something.

From this angle, you can just see the back of the other person's neck.

(End of this chapter)