…

It was morning, also on the outskirts of Navaha, somewhere on a hill.

High on a hill, Dorothy, wearing a small nightgown, was sitting on the lawn on the hill, silently looking at the seemingly peaceful city ahead.

After what happened last night, Dorothy made up her mind to start investigating the secrets hidden beneath the city. At present, her best entry point is the mental hospitals on the outskirts of the city. There are so many mental patients suffering from narcolepsy in Navaha, and it is obvious that it is because of the secret structure hidden underground. The key clues may be found here.

Sitting on the hill, Dorothy controlled her small corpse puppet and infiltrated two mental hospitals. She conducted careful investigations inside, trying to find some clues. At this moment, this round of investigation has been going on for some time.

Just like the first time she investigated the mental hospital, Dorothy still did not find any substantial clues. In several hospitals, apart from the fact that the patients' symptoms were highly consistent, there was no other suspicious point. The hospital staff all looked normal, and no one behaved abnormally. There was no secret business in the mental hospital.

Controlling the small corpse puppet, Dorothy monitored the mental hospital for several hours, but no clues were found. Seeing this, Dorothy slightly changed her strategy and chose another method to conduct the investigation.

Dorothy Leigh, a small corpse doll, sneaked into the filing cabinet of the mental hospital, and began to secretly look through various file information one by one, and finally got some useful clues.

While checking the patient list, Dorothy discovered a phenomenon: among these patients, many of them had similar surnames, and quite a few of them were related by blood!

"Enrique Lesias... Diego Lesias... Raul Lesias... Diaz Castejon... Alfonso Castejon... Julio Castejon...

"Tsk... there are so many people with the same surname... does that mean that many of these patients are related by blood? Many of them are actually relatives? Could this so-called sleeping sickness be a genetic disease?"

Dorothy murmured seriously that she was very curious about the phenomenon of these mentally ill patients appearing in various circles of relatives, and she first thought of the possibility of genetic disease.

"If it is hereditary, then there is a way to investigate. If we investigate the family history of these people, we may be able to make some new discoveries."

Dorothy thought so in her heart, and then she immediately thought and did it. When she couldn't find out more information in the mental hospital, she changed the direction of the investigation and checked the families of these patients.

Dorothy returned to the district from the suburban hills, and then found a restaurant near the City Hall, ordered some snacks and started eating. While eating, she let her small corpse doll infiltrate the City Hall.

Soon, Dorothy found the Navaha population files and began to look through them.

After several hours of searching, Dorothy, who had efficient information processing capabilities, quickly found the family information of the hospitalized patients and learned the specific addresses of all members of these families in the city, regardless of whether they had been admitted to the hospital or not. In the process, she discovered another strange phenomenon.

When checking the family relationships in the population files, Dorothy discovered that among the patients originally living in the mental hospital, a large number of men and women who were originally thought to be relatives were actually husband and wife, but the wife took her husband's surname after marrying him. So Dorothy initially thought that they were blood relatives just by looking at their names, but in fact they were indeed husband and wife.

"Husband and wife... If so many of them are husband and wife, then the assumption that sleep dementia is a genetic disease needs to be reconsidered. In most cases, husband and wife are not related by blood, but genetic diseases cannot be transmitted between them. Moreover, judging from these files, many families with the disease seem to be related by marriage. One family was admitted to the hospital earlier than the other. It seems that this disease can be transmitted between families without blood ties, from the husband's family to the wife's family, and vice versa. It doesn't seem like a genetic disease..."

Dorothy thought so in her heart while sitting in the restaurant. After checking all the files, she slowly collected the small corpse dolls and then began to walk around the street again.

During this process, Dorothy's investigation entered the next stage. Based on the address information obtained from the city hall, Dorothy scattered small corpse dolls into the homes of those sleeping sickness patients, and began to try to find some useful clues in their homes.

Soon, Dorothy's various small corpse dolls sneaked into more than a dozen households in the whole city without any sound, and searched these households. During the search, Dorothy found that some of the patients' homes were completely empty and the houses were in a mess, while some were still lived alone by a few relatives. They all seemed to be listless and in poor spirits. Some of them sat directly in front of the windowsill in a daze, which felt like the early manifestations of sleeping sickness.

"As expected... Rather than saying that sleeping sickness is a genetic disease, it's more like a family-running infectious disease..."

After getting a preliminary understanding of the general situation of the dozen or so sick families, Dorothy manipulated the small corpse puppet to conduct a more in-depth investigation. Only half an hour later, her investigation yielded results.

It was a messy room that no longer had any residents. The whole room was covered with dust, the chairs were overturned, and the sheets were torn. From the configuration, it seemed that there had once been a family of three here, but now it was estimated that all the people in the family had suffered from sleeping sickness and had been sent away.

In this house that had not been lived in for who knows how long, Dorothy found a huge wardrobe that was locked tightly. Dorothy let a small mouse corpse bite through the wooden board and get into the wardrobe. With the light shining in through the gaps and holes, Dorothy saw this scene.

On the inner wooden board of the sealed wardrobe, there was a strange pattern painted with dark gray paint. Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be an abstract moth with its wings spread.

On its bloated and fat body, there are flat symbols segment by segment. On its spread and defective wings, there are clusters of dizzying spirals. Short tentacles grow from its head, bending towards each other to form two crescents.

Under this large moth print, on the bottom of the wardrobe, there are candles of different lengths. A small table is placed in the middle of the candles, facing some unknown powder. All these arrangements obviously contain some kind of mystical meaning.

"Is this arrangement... an altar? Is there a hidden altar in this closet? Was this family worshipping something before they got sick and were sent away?"

Looking at the scene in front of her, Dorothy thought to herself that she already had a lot of knowledge about the mysticism and knew very well that the arrangement in front of her was obviously a simple altar, and the appearance of an altar in a place must represent some kind of worship.

'Since this is an altar, it means that this family is worshiping something. Perhaps the cause of sleeping sickness is not due to the transmission of a certain disease, but this kind of mysterious worship?

"Because this worship is a secret belief, it can be secretly preached among relatives and friends, that is, the truth of familial spread through sleep degeneration?"

Dorothy thought so in her heart, and then she began to carefully observe the moth print that was the central subject of the altar. After observing it carefully for several times, she found several knife marks not far from the moth print.

The scratches spelled out an obscure Castilian phrase, and Dorothy tried to pronounce it and found that it went something like this.

"May Pan Moth bring me sweet dreams, and may sweet dreams comfort my heart."

…

Um, sorry. I was stuck on a writer's block and didn't get to write much from last night until this morning. Then I couldn't hold on any longer in the morning and fell asleep. I didn't wake up until the afternoon, and I've only just finished writing now.

As you can see, my schedule has messed up again, and I feel extremely tired now. So as usual, I will take a day off tomorrow to adjust my schedule. I will try to update around the afternoon the day after tomorrow. Please forgive me, as I have had very poor sleep recently.