The moment you enter the cellar, a damp musty smell mixed with the smell of rust hits your face.
The tip of Lin Ze's wand lit up with fluorescent light, illuminating the small basement under the steps.
Several long-extinguished kerosene lamps hung on the brick wall, with a thick layer of dust on the lampshades.
The ground is made of compacted soil, but it is full of ruts, as if someone has been pushing a cart back and forth here all year round.
Mia was half a step behind Lin Ze. She swept around with her wand and confirmed that there were no traps before speaking, "It seems that someone has lived here for a long time."
Lin Ze nodded.
There was a long wooden table placed against the wall of the basement, with several stacks of parchment and several empty glass bottles scattered on the table.
The residue in the bottle has dried up and turned into a dark brown powder.
He walked over and picked up a piece of parchment with his wand. The writing on the paper was scrawled and the ink was smeared in several places, but he could barely read a piece of the record.
"The seventh time, a rejection reaction occurred three hours after the injection. The subject's body temperature dropped sharply and the pupils turned completely white... Same as the last time, it cannot be reversed."
Lin Ze Turn to the next page.
"The thirteenth time, the plasma purchased from the Burke Family was replaced. The survival time of the subject was extended to nine hours, but the transformation was still unsuccessful."
"Burke." Lin Ze murmured.
Mia stood on the other side, holding a stack of cards tied with fine linen rope in his hand, "Come over and take a look at this."
Lin Ze walked over.
The stack of cards is thicker than those collected by Carl, and each one is densely written.
The top of the card is marked with a number in red ink, from one to forty-seven.
"This is the number of the experimental subject." Mia said.
"Forty-seven in total?"
"At least forty-seven."
Lin Ze turned to card No. 47, and there were only a few lines of words on it:
"Blood matching failed, the subject died in the second hour, the quota for this month has been exhausted, waiting for the next batch of supply of Mr. Burke."
It's Mr. Burke again.
Lin Ze turned the card over and scrawled a line of small words in pencil on the back, as if keeping accounts:
"On August 17, we received twelve pieces of goods from Charles Street and eight pieces from Whitechapel."
Are there any connections between these places?
"Mia."
"Huh?"
"Do you think people from the 16th century could survive to this day?"
Mia squatted down and used the tip of the wand to pick up a loose mud brick on the ground. Underneath was a small patch of dark red stain, which had seeped into the soil and had been dried and wet, wet and dried again, forming layers upon layers, like growth rings on a tree stump.
"Not if he were an ordinary wizard."
Mia stood up, "But if you are a person studying vampires... it may not be impossible."
Lin Ze took the pile of cards and continued flipping through them.
From number 1 to number 47, the handwriting on the card changed into three types.
The first few pages were written neatly, like official laboratory records.
By the tenth day, the handwriting began to be scrawled, and there were traces of repeated smearing on the corners.
"Where did these experimental subjects come from?" Mia asked.
Charles Street is shipped in twelve pieces, and Whitechapel is shipped in eight pieces.
He tapped the card with his wand and whispered, "These goods may be the so-called experimental subjects."
"They're all Muggle?"
"Not necessarily, maybe it's wizards. Vampires can't transform wizards. Their blood is poison to wizards. Maybe these people want to strip the vampires of their immortality."
"They... want to live forever..." Lin Ze said in a heavy tone.
"It seems that the only wizard we know of who is close to immortality is Nicolas Flamel?"
"It seems so."
"Then why don't these people make Philosopher's Stone like Nico did?" Mia asked.
"Although everyone wants to live forever, not everyone is Nicolas Flamel."
"If Burke Family had been doing these things since the 16th century, and there was an interval of more than three hundred years, even if their experiments had never been successful, the forty-seven experimental subjects would have been dead long ago. But the ink marks on these cards, the top few were obviously written recently."
He picked up the one numbered 47 and held it up to the fluorescent light.
The edges of the paper have not yet completely yellowed, and the ink on some of the writing is still very new.
"You mean, this cellar is still in use recently?" Mia asked.
"Still using it for at least a year."
Mia's eyes moved from the card to the ruts on the ground.
The ruts were very shallow, but the two parallel dents extended from the direction of the steps to the bottom of the table without any intersections or turns in between.
"The route of the carts coming in is fixed." Lin Ze followed her gaze and said, "Every time, things are pushed in from outside, unloaded and then pushed out again. There is never a need to turn around inside the house."
Mia tapped the wand deep into the rut.
A ray of light cyan light swept across the ground and stopped at the corner of the wall.
There is a secret door less than half a foot high, sealed with a movable mud brick. There is almost no difference between it and other places on the brick surface.
When the secret door was pried open, a putrid smell stronger than that of the cellar came out.
Lin Ze covered his mouth and nose with his cuffs, put the wand in and waved it around.
Fluorescent light illuminated an extremely narrow passage, with rough brick walls on both sides and an arched top, barely large enough for a person to bend down and pass through.
Deep in the passage, something is reflecting light.
"I'll go first." Lin Ze got in sideways.
The passage is not long, and we reached the end after walking about ten steps.
At the end is a dark room smaller than the cellar, only about three steps square.
Several peeled animal skins were nailed to the wall with iron nails, which had become hard and black.
There was a stone basin in the corner, with a thick layer of dark brown powder on the bottom.
Looking inside, Lin Ze's pupils couldn't help but shrink.
A coffin.
A sarcophagus.
The coffin was marked with the number "49" Runes.
The sarcophagus was not big, more than half smaller than the one he saw underground at Brighton Pier. The surface was densely engraved with Runes, and every rune seemed to have been deliberately deepened. You could feel the subtle depressions when you touched it with your fingertips.
"Number Forty-Nine." Mia stood behind him, his voice echoing in the cellar.
Lin Ze didn't answer, he walked around the sarcophagus.
The coffin lid was not sealed, and there were two shallow marks on one side, as if it had been opened and closed frequently.
"Do you want to open it?"
"It's all here."
Lin Ze used the magic wand to open the coffin lid.
The coffin lid was pushed to one side, revealing the contents inside.
A corpse.
To be precise, it is a corpse that has not been completely transformed.
The thing was curled up at the bottom of the sarcophagus, its limbs twisted in an extremely unnatural posture. The fingers on its right hand turned completely gray-white, and its nails were sharp and slender, like the claws of some animal.
The left hand still looks like a human being, with sallow skin and thick knuckles, like a middle-aged man who is used to doing rough work.
The body is covered with a thin layer of gray hair, which is especially dense on the scalp.
But the face is a human face, with deep-set eye sockets, high cheekbones, and a half-open mouth, revealing two fangs that have not yet fully grown.