They dragged the corpse into a school classroom.
Ois deftly smashed open a section of wall roughly as tall as Rocco.
Through the exposed side of the broken wall, they could still see rotting corpses inside.
Long, white worms writhed in the corpses' decaying flesh. Perhaps they had survived because the wall had cracks invisible to ordinary eyes, allowing air to seep through.
Or perhaps they fell outside the bounds of ordinary biology, monsters of the Instance World that defied common sense.
Yin Chao silently took two steps back.
Seeing this, Ois briskly poured sand and earth out of one of the bags piled nearby.
Before getting to work, he took off his black robe and draped it over Yin Chao. Underneath, he wore only a white, high-collared shirt, its rolled-up sleeves exposing wrists laced with bulging veins.
He had a kind of allure somewhere between a boy's and a grown man's.
After sealing Rocco into the wall, Ois washed his hands nearby.
He took the black robe from Yin Chao and carefully picked him up, hunching over to conceal him beneath it.
"I, I used to... often, often do... things like this..."
Ois kept his head down as he walked toward the basement, quietly confiding in Yin Chao.
"Even if... someone like Rocco... disappeared one day, for no reason... no, no one would look for him. Maybe... maybe I... will end up like that too..."
His voice carried an endless loneliness.
It was as though he were describing his own eventual fate.
Yin Chao held him a little tighter, trying to give him some warmth to draw on.
For the next two days, they lived peacefully in the basement.
Apart from the Church's mandatory morning assembly each day, Ois stayed tucked away in the basement, listening to Yin Chao's