A few minutes later, Shaun met Mr Hoffman in the curator's office on the first floor of the museum. This was a well-dressed old man, with gleaming eyes, a carefully trimmed beard, and a yet-to-be-lit pipe in his right hand.
Seeing Shaun walk into the office, Mr Hoffman was not polite and directly closed the office door behind him before speaking to Shaun: "Mr Shaun, is something wrong with Izzy?"
Shaun nodded his head gently: "Izzy was killed about an hour ago, by the same person who killed Father Giovanni. You are in danger now as well Mr Hoffman."
Mr Hoffman listened in silence for a moment, lit his pipe and took a couple of puffs, opening the window of his office, which looked out onto the inner courtyard of the museum, very quiet, with a few trees planted.
"I know you, Mr Shaun, Izzy told me about you. Of course, I've dealt with the organisation you belong to before, you know, that Monet fake." Mr Hoffman turned to Shaun.
Shaun nodded and waited for Mr Hoffman to continue.
"Father Giovanni and I are old friends, we met at an international symposium on medieval history over twenty years ago, and have stayed in touch ever since, often engaging in scholarly discussions." Mr Hoffman began his narrative.
"When the short sword was unearthed, I also went to the site to see that it was a fifth-century site all right, and that the short sword was most likely St Ursula's saber. At the same time that the Church contacted the Vatican, I also contacted Fr Giovanni and told him the news. He was thrilled to hear it and volunteered to apply with the Vatican to come and do this identification."
"He succeeded, but also came closer to death." Here Mr Hoffman shook his head regretfully.
"On the second day of his research on the shortsword, he called me out of the blue and told me that he felt spied on and that it seemed that someone was waiting for the results of the appraisal. He said that if something happened to him, he had hidden the short sword in 'ruins wrapped in modern starlight'."
"In the ruins wrapped in modern starlight?" Shaun repeated.
"Yes, Mr Shaun." Mr Hoffman barred his pipe, the scent of fine tobacco swiping past Shaun's nose and wafting out the window.
"On the third day, I received another text message from Father Giovanni, the same thing I told Izzy. Izzy was also a friend of mine and we often discussed medieval Arabic art together. After receiving the text message, I was afraid to contact anyone on the Church side and thought of Izzy. Through Izzy's account, I was quite impressed with your work in Cologne a year ago. I trusted Izzy to pass the message on to you. I didn't realise that this decision had harmed him." A slight hint of sadness passed through Mr Hoffman's eyes as he said this.
"No, Mr Hoffman, analysing the timing, Izzy was killed because I was being followed." Shaun didn't want to burden the old man with unnecessary psychological baggage. "It seems that the murderer's objective was the short sword, Mr Hoffman, from your professional point of view, why would someone want to get their hands on the short sword?"
"For what it's worth, I got Izzy involved in this as well. As for why someone would want the short sword, you need to get the short sword in the first place to analyse it further." Hoffman said as he sucked on his pipe.
"Why do you use the word 'wrapped' when it's a ruin wrapped in modern starlight? Where would that be in your opinion?" Shaun asked.
"As one of the oldest cities in Germany, Cologne has so many ruins that seem to fit the bill that I need to analyse them one by one." Hoffman analysed, "I do have a question, does your organisation have a way to contact Father Giovanni's spirit directly to inquire?"
"The reason why the spirits of the Spiritual Realm are able to remain in the Spiritual Realm is because they still have a relatively large influence in the real world, and there are a lot of people in the real world who are worshipping, studying, glorifying them, and even praying to them, and these constant worshippings, prayers, and studies generate the numinous power that retains the souls of the cured spirits, allowing them to stay in the Spiritual Realm. " Shaun replied, these belonged to the basics of the spirit world of theSpirit World, which he had learnt about off and on from the Gatekeeper.
"Father Giovanni was not one of those characters, his death was a normal death, dust to dust, earth to earth, the soul could not be retained."
Mr Hoffman nodded and asked again, "And here's another interesting question, is the soul of Jesus also in the Spirit World?"
Embarrassed, Shaun replied, "I'm not so sure, some beings transcend the rules of the spirit world. Your question would have been punishable as heresy in medieval Europe."
Mr Hoffman nodded: "I'm not going to discuss this with the church."
Shaun smiled sardonically and suddenly saw, at an angle unseen by Mr Hoffman, Toren appear in a corner of the room, scowling at him and pointing desperately out of the window at the trees.
Shaun froze and turned his head to look out the window at the tree closest to the window in the inner court, only to see that between the shadows of the trees, there seemed to be a person's form vaguely hidden in the foliage.
The first thing Shaun did was to hold Mr Hoffman down on the floor, while he himself stood up and jumped onto the window ledge, built up his legs, stomped hard, and cannonballed into the canopy of the trees, roughly five metres away from the window.
With the man in the air, Shaun had already raised his fist and slammed it into the humanoid if there was one.
The last time Shaun had a fight with someone on a mission was two years ago, and it was the most dangerous of the first class missions he had ever taken on, which was supposed to be an antiquities mission to help a parish in Poland look for a lost holy relic, but in the end, it turned out that it was sent to be stolen by a local gangster to be used as an amulet for himself. And the local police simply couldn't do anything about it.
"Quite a gangster with faith." Shaun said emotionally at the time as he looked at the gangsters who were knocked down to the ground. The gangster's henchmen moved to shoot at Shaun, but the speed of their aim couldn't keep up with the speed of Shaun's movement. Nonetheless, a bullet grazed Shaun's shoulder at that time.
Shaun's fist struck at the figure hidden in the tree, but it struck a blank, the figure showed itself to appear on the ground under the tree, a guy wearing a long trench coat with a hat, his face hidden in the hat.
This person's trench coat seems to have the function of mimicking the colour of the environment, after this person landed on the ground, the trench coat changed into a colour close to the ground, but it can't be completely invisible, if you are prepared in advance, you can see the hidden human form.
Shaun stood on the branch of the tree to build up his strength again, just about to leap down from the heights to attack the guy, only to see that the man suddenly stretched out a hand towards Shaun, making a gesture of grasping first and then twisting.
Shaun suddenly had a sharp pain in his heart, and lost all his mobility for a moment, all of a sudden he fell down from the tree and fell on the ground, the pain in his heart gradually intensified, and it felt like his heart was about to leave his body and fly away. Shaun opened his mouth wide and let out a ho-ho-ho sound, saliva and tears flowed out uncontrollably, veins on his forehead and neck puckered up, and his hands grasped his heart part of his body and curled up into a ball.
At this moment a few branches from the tree next to him suddenly exploded in length, binding the man in the long trench coat at once, and then not stopping, the tips of the branches darted into the man's ears and nostrils, and then grew explosively out of the man's eyes and mouth.
The sharp pain in Shaun's heart disappeared at once and he lay on the ground breathing heavily, sweat dripping down his forehead like a stream.
A few branches held Lola up as she moved from the window of Mr Hoffman's office to the ground and walked over to the man bound by the branches, who was actually still alive and shaking one at a time, not sure if it was an attempt to break free of the branches or a nervous reaction.
"Who sent you? Why are you looking for that short sword?" Lola asked the man.
As Lola asked the question, the branch in the man's mouth shuddered and drew back into the man, emptying his mouth.
"Heh heh heh," the man's bloodied mouth made a sound that sounded like a laugh, and then said, "I am a magician who picks up things from the air, and you, all of you, are my master's playthings."
Lola asked, "Who is your master?"
The man stopped answering and looked to the sky with eyes that had been burst by branches, mouthing words in an unintelligible language.
Lola frowned as more branches grew rapidly from the nearby trees, wrapping the man tightly in layer upon layer, resembling a large cocoon made of branches.
Only a muffled sound was heard from the cocoon. That person blew himself up in the large cocoon wrapped in branches, and after a while there was blood flowing out from the cracks of the cocoon.
"I take back what I said about questioning your attack power." Shaun, who had just been able to sit up, said to Lola under his breath.
"Hurry up and get stronger or you'll die easily." Lola said as she dialled the phone and asked Father Schwartz to notify the police to come and clean up the mess. Except for the big cocoon, the other branches had already returned to their trees, and it was impossible to tell that those trees had ever delivered a fatal attack, except for the broken leaves and stumps all over the ground.
Shaun looked over to Mr Hoffman, who was pale at the first floor window, and nodded at him. "Gotta hurry up and decipher where the shortsword is hidden, or there's no guarantee that no one will come back to force Mr Hoffman to confess." Shaun thought to himself.
The two men returned to Mr Hoffman's office until someone from the special branch of the police came to put Mr Hoffman under protection.
"Mr Hoffman, if you decipher that clue, please call or text me first." Before leaving Shaun left his phone number with Mr Hoffman, after thinking about it Shaun whispered another instruction to Mr Hoffman: "In case, and I mean in case, someone pushes you to ask for that sentence, don't keep it a secret, there's no need to take a chance on your life and tell the other person that sentence."
Leaving the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Shaun said to Lola in shock, "Come on, I'll buy you dinner and thank you for saving my life."
Keeping her usual cold expression Lola said, "It's not worth mentioning, if you do a lot of compound missions and work with other agents in the future, it's not uncommon to be saved and save others."
After a pause Lola added: "But dinner tonight is still on you."