What Mulan had left behind was an "impression." The various traces that occasionally appeared over those dozen or so days served to deepen it. That impression would take root and grow in the priest's heart until it became strong enough for Mulan to interfere with it directly.
By the time prayers ended, Mulan had already left. The priest made his customary inspection of every corner of the Holy Temple's hall, leaving only after finding nothing on the chairs or floor. He had been doing this lately, coming to look even when he was not the one leading prayers.
After leaving the hall, the priest returned to his quarters, a single room where his only personal belongings were clothes and books. Several books already lay open in disarray on the desk.
The priest closed the door and sat down at his desk, then took a locked Iron Box from a drawer. He unlocked and opened it. Inside were seven sheets of paper, all flattened out, bearing words and pictures.
Frowning, the priest spread all the sheets across the desk. Apart from the first, which contained only text, the other six all had pictures: someone standing beneath the holy light, holding a Gospel and seizing a snake; someone kneeling on black earth, covering their face with both hands and weeping bitterly; someone standing in the light with a Gospel in their hands; someone looking up at the light in the sky; someone with venomous snakes coiled around their body; and someone standing on the earth, looking up at the sky while their Gospel lay on the ground.
The last picture was the strangest. Holy light seemed to be pouring down, but something enormous clearly blocked it in the sky, casting a vast shadow over the ground. Within that shadow stood a blurry,