I Have a Feeling I Arrived Too Late

"This is truly... unexpected."

Kraft finished reading the letter in his hand and casually passed it to the curious Lucius.

They were sitting in Professor Calman's room, the same one where the three of them had enjoyed barley tea and biscuits during Kraft's first visit. While Kraft was reviewing the letter, Lucius had boiled a pot of water on the small stove and added two fresh cups of barley tea to the table, though he couldn't find the professor's honey jar.

After lingering at the manor for a month, Kraft had finally been sent back by his grandfather to officially take up his post. After arriving and resting for a night at an inn, he had prepared to come to the Medical School the next day to inquire about the details before considering long-term housing.

He hadn't been inside the Medical School for long when he was stopped by a student he didn't recognize, who claimed to be a friend of Lucius. Seven days prior, Lucius had instructed them to notify him if they saw Lecturer Kraft.

Kraft followed the student through the winding corridors of the Medical School, climbed the spiral stairs, passed through several archways, and finally found Lucius in the professor's private room, where he was fretting over a desk full of papers.

It had to be said that this Medical School building was quite complex. It wasn't his first time here, but perhaps due to the excessive number of meaningless decorative pillars and partitions, combined with the varying spatial layouts on each floor, it felt like the path he took was different every time.

After bringing Kraft to the room, the student took his leave. Lucius set down the papers he had been organizing, pulled a formal letter sealed with wax from the inner pocket of his black robe, and handed it to the bewildered Kraft with the excitement of someone who had been waiting a long time.

"Professor Calman trusts your talent and passion in this area." Lucius's impatience was written all over his face. "Since there are two of us now, we can follow the professor's arrangements and continue to perfect the research on the Black Fluid before he returns."

"I appreciate Professor Calman's trust, but I still have some doubts." Kraft reached into the bottom of the envelope and felt a copper key; it seemed he wouldn't need to worry about housing for the time being.

Although they hadn't known each other long, Professor Calman seemed to think highly of him, willing to share such important things and even entrusting him with precious samples and experimental results. Kraft was quite moved by this; it was only reasonable that he should do his best to help out.

According to the description in the letter, he found it hard to imagine what this substance, which had been tentatively identified as "Black Fluid," actually corresponded to within his own knowledge system.

White Fluid could be considered cerebrospinal fluid; Yellow Fluid undoubtedly corresponded to bile; Red Fluid was, naturally, blood. But this Black Fluid—what on earth it was left him completely baffled. Furthermore, judging by the letter, they had likely extracted it from some tissue within the human body, and it could be stored for long periods while retaining its properties after extraction.

Even more absurdly, he didn't know if the container was incredibly robust or if the substance was stable to an outrageous degree, but someone had actually carried it in their pocket all the way from Dunling to Wenden Port? This so-called "inhibitory" property left Kraft with a head full of question marks; he figured he would have to see the detailed experimental records to understand.

"So, according to the letter, this thing we are tentatively calling 'Black Fluid' was indeed extracted from a human body."

This scenario made it hard for Kraft to imagine what "extracting" meant in this context. Here, the term was generally used for liquids like medicinal decoctions or alcohol, obtained through heating, distillation, or settling. The latter half of Humoral Theory favored the term, but it was always used for medicinal juices or decoctions where certain components were taken to be ingested to "regulate humoral balance."

In any case, it felt wrong.

"I remember the professor saying that the Church over there is very strict, so there wouldn't be much opportunity to do this kind of thing," Kraft said. The professor had previously complained to him that anatomy in Dunling was at a dead end, all due to the immense influence of the Church there.

"I'm not sure either." Lucius didn't seem to care; after all, he had been studying in Wenden Port the whole time under Professor Calman, and finding a corpse for secret dissection was no issue at all. "The professor's mentor—I mean Professor Morrison—is no ordinary person at Dunling University; he must have some connections. The professor hasn't been back to Dunling in a long time; perhaps they've found a way over the years."

Kraft used his powerful memory to ponder it again, but he still couldn't figure out how such a liquid could be produced from a human body.

He strongly suspected it was an issue with the equipment, leading them to inadvertently create some kind of toxic liquid. Perhaps the raw materials for the glass instruments contained heavy metals that mixed in during the heating process. Then, Professor Morrison, lacking any sense of experimental safety, had fed the sample to animals or simply tasted it himself with a fearless spirit.

That explained it: heavy metals or some other neurotoxic substance were downed in one gulp, and the central nervous system inhibition followed. It could be a series of symptoms like dizziness or weakness, which quickly manifested in both animals and humans.

There it was—wasn't that a strong inhibitory effect?

"Uh, Lucius, before we go look at the actual thing, I want to ask how much of it there is and what it's stored in?" Kraft carefully observed Lucius's face, assessing his mental state. Aside from being a bit overexcited, there didn't seem to be any problems.

Lucius used his thumb and forefinger to gesture the size: "Just a round glass bottle like this, brown, with only enough to cover the bottom. When the professor experiments, he uses a small stick to dip a little out and dissolve it in water."

"Why don't I just take you to see it? The sample is in the school basement. We dissolved a tiny bit in a cup of water, and anyone who drinks a small sip falls into a very deep sleep."

"You actually let other people drink it?!" Kraft was shocked. The most reckless operation he knew of was the act of swallowing Helicobacter pylori, but compared to this, that was child's play.

"No, it was just the professor and me taking turns trying it. Absolutely no one else here knows of its existence." Lucius's focus was clearly completely different from Kraft's. He excitedly held out his hand to show Kraft the red marks on it. "It's truly miraculous. Just that tiny amount, and after drinking it, one immediately falls into a deep slumber. Even the heartbeat and breathing slow down, and you can't be woken up even if pricked with a needle. You only wake up about a day later, with no idea what happened during that time."

"Huh?!" This kind of operation was completely beyond Kraft's imagination. The bravest thing he had done in his two lives combined was, at most, sniffing a gas his group had produced in a high school chemistry class out of curiosity.

Tasting an unknown liquid that makes you sleep for a day, and taking turns doing it—this behavior was on the same level as playing Russian roulette, or perhaps even worse. If he had done this, he could brag to Meng Po before drinking the soup at the bridge, and even the devils in hell would look on with admiration.

"Sit down, quickly." Kraft pressed Lucius into a chair. "I'm going to examine you, don't ask why."

While poking and prodding Lucius here and there, he subjected him to a rigorous interrogation: "How long ago did you drink it? How many times? After losing consciousness, were there any changes other than slowed heartbeat and breathing? Did you feel any discomfort after waking up? How has your mental state been lately? Has your appetite changed? Are you sleeping well? Have there been any abnormalities in your bowel or bladder movements?"

"No, everything is normal." Lucius was startled by his sudden seriousness. "According to Humoral Theory, as long as there is no trend of a large amount of body fluid turning into Black Fluid, a small, temporary increase in Black Fluid is just a fleeting change. The professor is fine, so how could someone younger like me have any problems?"

"Nonsense!" Kraft performed a physical examination from head to toe, but there seemed to be no obvious abnormalities. The simple check didn't put his mind at ease; instead, it made him even more vigilant.

A tiny amount, rapid onset after oral ingestion, one day of unconsciousness, inability to be woken by pain. Being a bit suspicious, he even began to wonder if Lucius's current excitement was anticipation for continuing the experiment, or a sign of mild personality change and mental abnormality.

Kraft took two steps back and re-examined Lucius, his gaze sweeping from head to toe. From his brown hair and slightly pale face to the hands with the red marks, he finally looked at the papers Lucius had been organizing when he entered.

Pale yellow paper covered most of the desktop; the handwriting on it was mostly somewhat sloppy yet not lacking in aesthetic, and the layout was quite casual. The font size varied across different sheets, suggesting they hadn't been written all at once. Some had already been stacked together, while the rest were scattered chaotically around, leaving the barley tea cup to stay on the edge.

"What are these?"