Shiller showed the diary to the others, and their thoughts were much like his, unanimously believing it possible that the diary's owner was also dead somewhere.
Moreover, a very important piece of information from the diary was the loss of a family's goat, which seemed to be the start of all the abnormalities.
The goat had always been synonymous with Demons, not just because of their odd appearance and square pupils but also because black goats standing upright indeed looked very much like demons.
According to the diary entries, a goat had gone missing and then was found, but it most likely hadn't been found alive, so the family made a soup from this goat.
As a result, everyone who drank soup made from this goat went mad.
Could the arrival of the Wanderer be related to this goat? Or was it because the Wanderer had come that the goat had gone missing, and those people had eaten the contaminated goat, which caused them to go mad?
There wasn't enough evidence at the moment, nor could anyone speculate what exactly had happened, but Shiller still said, "The diary may contain not only main clues but may also be hinting at something to us."
"Are you suggesting we leave quickly?" asked Primary Universe Batman.
Shiller shook his head, "Animals, don't forget the diary's owner went fishing and found no fish, which means the Wanderer could possibly affect animals."
"We cannot trust any animal," Greed interjected. "Be it cats or dogs, even insects and snakes, they could all be related to the Wanderer."
"What exactly is this thing?" The Pale Knight standing still murmured with a frown, "Are they really hard to deal with?"
"Not necessarily," said Shiller. "This is just a remote village. There's no true professional here. The tragedy could be due to their own ignorance and weakness, not because of the Wanderer's strength."
The Pale Knight merely nodded slightly without any indication of what he was thinking, which seemed perfectly normal compared to the Joker squatting on the ground studying the carpet patterns.
Finally, the kitchen door was opened, and as soon as the door was ajar, Shiller smelled an extremely foul, fishy stench, immediately covering his nose, and everyone else stepped back a few paces.
Standing at the forefront, Night Owl and Primary Universe Batman were very cautious not to be directly exposed in front of the door, instead standing to the left and right behind the wall, peering inside.
They saw a fish, a large red fish with 24 ribs.
Primary Universe Batman turned his head towards Shiller in an instant, and Bruce turned his head even faster.
At that moment, Shiller had not yet seen the scene inside the room, because the foul smell made him dizzy. Normally, he would not react this way, but possibly due to the restrictions of the game, his attributes had been weakened.
Shiller stepped forward a few paces and saw the large fish hanging in the center of the kitchen.
It was an extremely strong man close to two meters tall, currently hanging upside down in the center of the kitchen, but he had lost both legs and arms, his whole body resembled a fish that was wider in the middle and narrower at both ends, his eyes wide open, his expression cold and eerily emotionless.
His body was bloody, mainly around the disappeared feet and arms, probably due to the loss of limbs, but apart from that, there were no very obvious external injuries, seeming as though he had died from excessive blood loss.
But obviously, something was very off because the rotten smell was not the smell of human decomposition.
Shiller noticed that the body's belly was unusually large.
Worried about triggering another fight, it was still Primary Universe Batman and Night Owl who went in front, with Primary Universe Batman poking the body gently with a Shotgun, but there was no reaction, it seemed that this person was truly dead.
Shiller walked over to the side, picked up a kitchen knife, and before he started, spoke in his mind to the Transcendent, "I'm not out to dissect, I'm just going to cut open his belly. And don't tell me this requires rolling the dice."
The Transcendent didn't respond, but seemed to implicitly consent not to roll the dice. Shiller made a cut, and countless rotten fish corpses flowed out from the man's belly, filling the air with a choking stench.
Now the others couldn't stand it either, aside from Batman and Night Owl, who were twitching, everyone else started to retch violently.
Shiller's face wasn't looking very good either; the smell of rotting fish was a torment, far more lethal than that of human decay.
But Shiller still endured the foul smell, using the sharp kitchen knife to sort through the heap of fish corpses.
He found several human toe bones.
Then he found more bone fragments and stood up, staring at the pile of rot and said, "He ate his own limbs."
"What?" asked Greed.
"I mean, the missing hands and feet are in his stomach."
"Gross!" Greed retched again.
Shiller felt around the wooden handle of the kitchen knife, standing thoughtfully. He moved to the back of the body and noticed clear signs of abrasion on the back of the body, wet and dirty, stained with some unidentified grass clippings.
Shiller took one relatively intact piece of grass and immediately realized it was not ordinary grass but likely reed leaves.
Had the body been to the water's edge?
But why were the abrasions on the back?
Shiller looked up again at the body's vanished feet, and at this moment Batman spoke up, "None of them used their feet to walk."
Of course, Shiller had noticed the connection between the two bodies: the first one had come walking upside down; the second had no feet at all. Both bodies had moved a long distance before death, but neither had used their feet.
Was this a habit of the Wanderer?
Shiller was more inclined to believe that it wasn't that the Wanderer couldn't fully control the human bodies, but that he could only move in this way—he couldn't use his feet. But why?
Shiller raised his question, and the others discussed it. Bruce was the first to say, "Could it be that his form is different from humans, and in his view, the feet are not meant for moving?"
The Pale Knight seemed to agree with the speculation, adding, "The usage habits of these peculiar creatures for their bodies are definitely different from humans; he might not understand the concept of walking at all."
"No," said Primary Universe Batman. "If he didn't know how to walk, then the first body wouldn't have walked over backward."
The silence that fell over the group was due to Batman's correct assessment; the first corpse had merely been flipped over. However, the wear on its scalp indicated that the creature could walk on two legs, or at least had managed to move in the snow to this location with such a posture.
As for the second corpse, the friction marks on its back suggested that it might have been dragged here from somewhere by the water while lying on the ground.
Could it be that different monsters were controlling the two of them?
Unable to find answers now, they naturally each went to search for more clues. The door from the kitchen to the neighboring staircase wasn't locked, but no one dared to go upstairs recklessly. Pretty much everyone was searching for clues in the kitchen, enduring the stench.
Shiller saw a fishing basket in the corner of the room and found the same reed debris inside, meaning that the deceased had indeed come from the riverbank and might have gone fishing.
This body was probably the owner of the diary, Shiller thought.
Shiller found some handmade lures in a drawer, roughly crafted but perhaps very effective. He wasn't skilled in lure fishing, so he had Joker take the lures.
Bruce found some footprints between the kitchen and the stairway, clearly those of a living person.
This wasn't too surprising, primarily because if there wasn't a third person, the second corpse couldn't have been hung from the beam; after all, with neither arms nor legs, how could it hang itself?
"Clue found," the Transcendent announced.
"I need to take a closer look," said Shiller as he walked over, and a dice appeared before him.
"Wisdom check of 20."
The dice arced through the air and landed on a 12. Adding Shiller's wisdom attribute of 10, the check of 22 was passed.
Finally, a success, Shiller sighed with relief.
Immediately, some information appeared in his mind. From the pattern of the shoes, he deduced that these were the footprints of a lady, overweight, with a slight unevenness in her walk due to her shoulders being unequally high. And she had been in a hurry, running fast.
Shiller relayed this information, and the group immediately looked upstairs, knowing that the house had only this one staircase. If there were only footprints going up and none coming down, it indicated the person might still be upstairs, though dead or alive was another matter.
"Ahhh!!!!!!"
A sharp scream tore through the quiet of the room. Without any hesitation, the group dashed upstairs.
Finding a living person was the best news of all.
Primary Universe Batman led the charge, rushing straight to the second-floor corridor.
Bang!
A gunshot sounded, but nobody in the group had fired their weapon, followed immediately by the sound of breaking glass.
With the noises being too conspicuous, Primary Universe Batman charged into the room at the far end of the second floor. Upon opening the door, they saw a middle-aged white woman, a little overweight, with a scarf around her head, holding a revolver pointed straight at the window.
"It's here! It's here!!!" the woman shouted frantically, even turning the gun barrel towards Batman.
Batman had no choice but to dodge back out of the room, to avoid the line of fire.
"Where's the psychiatrist?!" Primary Universe Batman yelled down the corridor, "Come quickly, there's a patient here who needs calming down!"
The third to arrive, Greed, turned back and called out, "Psychiatrist, where are you?!"
Following him, Bruce called out as well, "Psychiatrist, where are you?!"
Seeing this, Shiller looked on with indifference.
It took a moment for Bruce to realize, "Oh, wait, I am the psychiatrist. Here, the psychiatrist is right here!"
He hurried into the room, saw the gaping barrel of the gun, and stopped short, turning to say to Primary Universe Batman outside the door, "You didn't mention she had a gun!"
"If she didn't have a gun, why would I need you?!" retorted Batman.
Stifled, Bruce hastily raised his hands and said, "Calm down, miss, you're safe now. We're here to protect you. I think you can put the gun down, and we can talk..."
Bang!
Another gunshot was her response. The woman seemed to have lost her mind, firing at the curtain.
"You can't even talk to her for a second," Bruce turned back and gestured to Primary Universe Batman, "You better handle this."
Primary Universe Batman then aimed his shotgun at the woman's head, but she was still bewildered, muttering something about "It's coming, it's coming," with no other reaction.
"Do you know how to use psychoanalysis?" Greed asked, oddly enough addressing Bruce.
Bruce nodded and replied, "Yes, I've studied it a bit."
Shiller silently added, "Whether he learned it well is another matter."
"With her in this mental state, it's impossible to get anything from her. You analyze it," Greed pointed at the woman and said.
"Um..." dragging the sound out, Bruce replied, "I'm not very skilled, it might... alright, I'll give it a try."
Bruce attempted to use his skill, but to no avail. He called out to the Transcendent twice in his mind, and the Transcendent frustratingly replied, "Basic skills are just the theoretical knowledge in your head, you have to do the analysis yourself."
"What?!"
Bruce looked up to see Shiller leaning against the doorframe with a face that read, "I really want to hear what you can come up with."