I Had a Feeling Something Wasn't Right

"What are these?" Kraft frowned. This scene was downright unfriendly to anyone with obsessive-compulsive tendencies.

You couldn't say he hadn't tidied up at all, because he had. But you couldn't say he'd tidied up, either, because it looked almost the same as before. The mess covering the table reminded Kraft of the loose pages his grandfather had bought—an experience that could deal a massive blow to anyone's mental well-being if the pages weren't numbered.

"Oh, speaking of that, you're just in time. These are more than ten days' worth of experiment records, but they got mixed up, so I've been sorting them out." Lucius picked up a page from the pile and handed it to Kraft. "Professor Calman is a good mentor. He'd be even better if he didn't leave things lying around."

Kraft took the sheet from him. On closer inspection, the handwriting really did look a lot like the letter's. The writer's habit of joining letters together and the angle of the slant were both clearly evident here, as were several decorative strokes added even in the middle of a hurried experiment.

The handwriting was clear. The content was not.

The page was a fragment, with no beginning or end, and contained a few lines of incomprehensible notes. All Kraft could tell was that they corresponded to feeding several mice water from different cups. There were only numbers, with no details. Scattered abbreviated words had been added beneath each line. Kraft guessed they probably described what had happened to the mice.

Kraft didn't know the professor's shorthand, and couldn't guess which words had been shortened and cobbled together—or whether the professor had just invented new terms on the spot.

He turned the page over, but found no explanations, experiment date, or number. All he could do was hand it back to Lucius and ask, "What do these words mean? I'm not very familiar with the professor's handwriting."

"Unfortunately, that's the problem. I don't recognize them either, which is why I wanted you to help." Lucius glanced at the page, then tossed it onto the neatly stacked pile. Apparently, this pile hadn't been sorted out at all; they'd simply given up because they couldn't understand it. This mess looked far worse than Kraft had expected.

"I mean, is it possible that Professor Calman is your mentor, not mine?" Kraft picked up another sheet from the table and took a look. It seemed to show part of an animal's skeleton and muscles. He didn't know much about that subject, but he could at least tell it wasn't human.

Taking the previous page into account, if the two were connected, then this might be a diagram of a mouse's anatomy. He had no idea where the professor had found mice to experiment on. People didn't seem to keep the familiar little white lab mice around here, so the professor's notes must have meant ordinary mice. Kraft wondered whether they'd been washed after being caught.

If they hadn't, he'd better wash his hands after handling these records.

"It wasn't like this before. Recently, my mentor has been too engrossed in his research on the Black Fluid to care whether I, the person sorting his notes, can understand them." Lucius was clearly resentful about it. "And I didn't take part in all of these experiments. I can't even remember when most of them were done. My mentor rushed off to Dunling before he had a chance to explain everything."

"Hold on. You mean these are the experiment records for the Black Fluid?" Kraft's hand trembled as words like heavy metals and neurotoxicity, which he'd been speculating about earlier, played on repeat in his mind. The two of them had handled it without any protective equipment, and the notes they'd written afterward were now right in his hands.

"Yeah." Lucius looked completely unbothered, and even seemed surprised Kraft had only just realized.

"And you just brought these experiment records here without hiding them at all? Aren't you worried someone might come in and see them?"

Kraft was feeling numb. When he'd first seen the letter, he'd imagined high-level experiments involving some mysterious substance. In the Otherworld Soul's stereotypical view of things, experiments like this should have been performed by a team in hazmat suits and masks, inside a high-tech lab like the Umbrella Corporation's.

Then the files on something so dangerous and precise should have been locked away in a safe nobody could find. To get them out, you'd have to go through at least three massive steel doors, descend at least three floors underground, and press some mysterious little button in a secret room.

That was an exaggeration, sure, but even with limited resources, they didn't have to bring classified files straight into the office to sort through them, did they? What if some clueless person came in and took a look? Had they really never considered that possibility?

"That seems unlikely... Nobody usually comes in here. Everyone knows the professor left to take care of something." Lucius gathered the rest of the papers strewn across the table. His complete lack of concern raised Kraft's suspicion of neurotoxicity by another notch.

"If you can't make sense of them, put them away for now. Lock them somewhere nobody could possibly find them." Kraft placed the drawing in his hand on top of the stack, feeling as if he'd accidentally gotten himself into a mess. Since the professor had made such a hash of cleaning up after himself, someone had to deal with it.

The most urgent thing now was to find somewhere to hide this huge pile of records that shouldn't have been here in the first place. The secret lab the professor had mentioned in his letter would do—though it wasn't all that secret, it was still much better than leaving them spread out here.

All they could do was hope the place wasn't too conspicuous. And they should add another lock.

The fact that he couldn't understand the records had turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Even if someone did see them, they probably wouldn't figure out what kind of experiment the professor was conducting.

"Also, you said that lab is in the Medical School? And the samples are kept there too?" Watching Lucius put the experiment records into an ordinary wooden crate, Kraft realized that the other things probably weren't being stored any better. "How exactly are the samples being stored?"

"In glass bottles, wasn't that what I just said?" Lucius put the lid on and whacked the protruding edges twice to knock it firmly into place.

The gesture reminded Kraft of how he'd dealt with the old television at home as a child: beating an object with a few rough but effective blows until it gave in and started working properly.

"Yikes..." Someone sucked in a sharp breath. "That's not what I meant. I meant, apart from the glass bottles, do you have any other precautions for storing them?" He should have thought of this sooner. That lab wasn't safe at all. Something of unknown volatility, potent enough to work in tiny doses, was being kept in a poorly ventilated basement?!

Kraft's mind raced. This didn't seem like a simple case of inadequate safety awareness anymore.

One or two lapses, he could explain away by imagining that science in this world was so underdeveloped that they had no systematic experimental protocols. But ever since he'd stepped into this office, odd little details had kept piling up. By now, there were too many to ignore.

The professor shouldn't have been like this. When Kraft had first arrived at the Academy, the professor had asked rather discreetly about dissecting a human body, even though it was practically a foregone conclusion. The day before, he'd even given Kraft Human Anatomy to prepare him. Calman was a scholar, and it was true that he wasn't very guarded around fellow scholars, but he was by no means clueless about social customs or basic precautions.

Could a man like that really have left for Dunling without explaining things properly? Could he have forgotten to tell Lucius to hide his notes, and also forgotten to explain his newly invented abbreviations?

All right, Kraft could give him the benefit of the doubt. For now, he'd believe that Professor Calman had been blinded by overwhelming excitement. The professor was no longer young, and to see an academic problem that had baffled the field for decades finally solved within his lifetime could have gone to his head. It wasn't impossible to force that explanation.

Then there was Lucius. He was outgoing, and sometimes a little slow on the uptake, but he wasn't an idiot.

Even without the professor telling him to, leaving so many original experiment records in a room where anyone could walk in at any moment was utterly absurd.

Yes, there was an explanation: it would be hard to figure out what the notes meant, and objectively speaking, there wasn't much wrong with what he'd done. The Medical School was Professor Calman and Lucius's own territory, so it wasn't unreasonable.

Then there was their near-reckless approach to the experiments. Before they'd figured out the Black Fluid's properties—or even confirmed that it was actually "Black Fluid"—the two of them had risked drinking diluted samples.

That brave man who swallowed Helicobacter pylori did so because nobody believed him, and the worst he could expect afterward was chronic gastritis or a stomach ulcer. What reason did the professor and Lucius have? Did they really just assume that one sip of a heavily diluted sample would be harmless?

They'd taken turns drinking it, taken turns falling unconscious for a day, and then simply attributed the whole thing to the Humoral Theory.

Fair enough. Lucius had then used the Humoral Theory to justify the idea that a small amount of Black Fluid wouldn't disrupt the body's balance over the long term.

It was too strange. If he picked at each detail, there seemed to be an explanation for all of it, but Kraft instinctively felt something had gone awry. The light wasn't poor, yet a chilling, eerie atmosphere that only he could sense had filled the room, unfamiliar but tinged with a subtle sense of recognition.

"Put out that little stove you were using to heat the water." Kraft snatched the crate from Lucius, who stared at him in astonishment, then lifted the lid again and took out the papers one by one, spreading them across the table.

The mass of notes soon covered the tabletop. Kraft shoved the two barley tea cups into Lucius's hands to hold, clearing more space on the table.

Once he'd spread the pages out without overlapping them, there still wasn't enough room for all of them. He laid the rest flat on the floor, extending the line of papers all the way to the wall. Then he hurried to the window and pushed it wide open, letting more sunlight into the room so he could inspect them properly.

Only after they were fully spread out did he realize just how many records there were. When piled haphazardly on the table, the experiment notes had fit inside less than half the crate. But spread out, they covered nearly three times the area of the tabletop, taking up almost every spot in the room that sunlight could reach directly.

"Can I help with anything?" Lucius stood to the side, holding two cups of tea like a poor student who'd just finished class only to be told it was running long. By then, Kraft was too focused to pay him any attention.

Kraft circled the papers on the floor several times. The notes, which had looked completely patternless when crammed together, revealed clues once spread out. From his familiarity with the way this handwriting was written, he could tell that even without page numbers or dates, the records could still be roughly divided into several groups.