With five fingers that were pale at the joints coldly and painfully gripping his wrist, Klein instantly felt his hair stand on end, and he subconsciously pulled his hand back, frantically wanting to retreat.
A heavy sensation came, and Klein pulled his forearm with all his strength.
Plop!
That pale, naked corpse was pulled askew and fell from the long table to the floor.
However, those cold, pale fingers still tightly gripped Klein's wrist.
Klein lost the ability to think for a moment, and his mind was filled with the idea of drawing his gun and bang bang bang.
But because his dominant hand couldn't be pulled back, he dropped his black cane and tried several times, but couldn't successfully take out his revolver from the underarm holster.
Just then, the eyelids of the corpse suddenly lifted, revealing a pair of unfocused blue eyes.
His mouth moved, and he murmured:
"Hornachis... Hornachis... Hornachis..."
After three murmurs, Klein, who was flustered, felt the fingers gripping his wrist start to loosen, and then they hung down weakly.
The eyes of the tailcoat clown closed tightly again, as if nothing had happened just now.
If the pale corpse weren't lying on the stone floor, Klein might have thought he had encountered an illusion.
He staggered back a few steps, feeling multiple parts of his body spasming due to excessive shock and fear.
Huff... huff... Klein breathed heavily, slowly regaining his ability to think, and looked at the corpse on the ground warily and fearfully.
He took out the revolver, cautiously stepped out of the room, and only after confirming that the corpse had no more movements did he glance at his own wrist that held the gun.
There were five deep, dark red fingerprints, silently telling of the previous encounter.
Klein calmed down a lot, and a curse word echoed in his mind:
Fuck, scared me to death!
After panting for a dozen seconds, he began to sketch an item in his mind to quickly calm himself.
Recalling carefully, Klein 'replayed' the previous encounter frame by frame.
Although he still didn't understand the reason for the tailcoat clown's 'corpse transformation', he keenly grasped the key point, which was the repeated murmur of 'Hornachis'!
"Hornachis again..." Klein frowned. "The notes of the Antigonus family recorded the Night Country of the Hornachis Mountains. When I heard sounds I shouldn't hear during meditation and spirit vision, there was also the term 'Hornachis'. Now this dead person, in a strange way, has once again emphasized Hornachis in my ear... Could it be that the answers to many questions lie in the Hornachis Mountains... Perhaps, perhaps there is still great danger hidden there, like some evil god sealed within the mountains, seeking escape through similar 'temptations'."
Amidst a myriad of thoughts, Klein carefully entered the room, touched the corpse a few times, and confirmed that it was completely dead.
He thought that he shouldn't let 'Corpse Collector' Fry see that he had made a mess here, so he summoned up courage and, pulling and carrying, moved the corpse back to the long table.
Throughout the process, Klein not only was on tenterhooks, with his nerves on the verge of snapping at the slightest movement, but also felt extremely disgusted by the cold contact between the corpse and his own skin.
After completing this task with difficulty, he remembered why he had approached the corpse earlier, so he again focused his gaze on the tailcoat clown's wrist, looking at that strange brand.
That brand had somehow fallen off, condensing into a ball of blood with a hint of blue.
The blood ball was only the size of a thumb, quietly floating in mid-air in a manner that defied the rules of physics.
"What is this?" Klein muttered, not daring to touch it rashly again.
He never thought of keeping this strange blood ball, first because he had no idea whether it was good or bad, and second because he believed that Fry, who had carefully examined the corpse, must have long discovered the brand on the wrist, and might even know what the strange blood ball was.
And even if Fry didn't know, handing it over to the captain and letting the entire Nighthawks team explore and study it would obviously be much better than me trying randomly... Klein thought.
Being within an organization, one must know how to make the best use of the organization's power.
Klein waited tensely for a few minutes, and then saw Fry, with black hair, blue eyes, and thin lips, return to the room.
His gaze was immediately attracted by the strange blood ball, and he asked the same question Klein had asked himself earlier:
"What is this?"
"I don't know." Klein shook his head honestly and described the event without any concealment.
"The brand fell off into a blood ball..." Fry nodded as if thinking. "The corpses of extraordinary beings always have some strange changes..."
He raised his head and looked at Klein:
"You go get the captain and tell him what the corpse murmured."
"Okay." Klein had long wanted to leave this place.
"You don't need to come with the captain." Fry added, "I think you definitely wouldn't like to see the following scene."
As he spoke, he picked up the silver-white scalpel beside him.
Klein nodded with lingering fear:
"That's exactly what I hope."
He picked up his cane, put on his hat, and went around to the Chanis Gate, where he saw Captain Dunn in the duty room, no longer listless.
Dunn listened calmly to his account and nodded almost imperceptibly:
"I will report this matter to the higher-ups and let the Church handle it. Perhaps they will send someone to check the main peak of the Hornachis Mountains."