Something Feels Off

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

If you said he hadn't tidied up, he had at least organized a little; if you said he had, it was no different from having not tidied up at all. The chaotic state of the desk reminded him of the loose pages his grandfather used to buy; without page numbers, they could deal a massive mental blow to anyone.

"Oh, speaking of which, you've come at just the right time. These are experimental records from over ten days, but they've been shuffled, and I'm in the middle of sorting them." Lucius picked up a sheet from the pile and handed it to Kraft. "Professor Calman is a good mentor, if only he didn't leave his things everywhere."

Kraft took the paper from his hand. The handwriting, upon closer inspection, did indeed look quite similar to the letters. The writer's habitual cursive ligatures and the angle of the slant were well-represented here, and even in the haste of the experiments, he hadn't forgotten to add a few decorative strokes.

The font was clear, but the content was vague.

This record, which lacked both a beginning and an end, contained a few lines of nonsensical text. All that could be gleaned was that several mice had been fed water from different cups, and there were only numbers, no specific details. Beneath each line were scattered abbreviations, which Kraft guessed were likely the outcomes for the mice.

Kraft was unfamiliar with the professor's shorthand habits and couldn't guess what words they were derived from, or perhaps they were new terms the professor had just coined.

He flipped the paper over, found no corresponding explanation, nor any experimental dates or serial numbers, so he had to hand it back to Lucius and asked, "What do these words mean? I'm not very familiar with the professor's writing style."

"Unfortunately, that's the problem. I don't know either, which is why I wanted your help." Lucius glanced at it and tossed the paper onto the neatly stacked pile—which, as it turned out, wasn't organized at all, but rather a pile that had been abandoned because it was completely indecipherable. This mess looked far worse than Kraft had estimated.

"I mean, is there a possibility that Professor Calman is your mentor, not mine?" Kraft took the initiative to pick up another sheet from the table and glanced at it; it seemed to depict a portion of an animal's skeleton and muscles. He didn't know much about this field, at most being able to tell it wasn't human.

Combining it with the previous sheet, if there was a connection between the two, perhaps it was the structure of a mouse? He didn't know where the professor had found mice for his experiments. Nowadays, it seemed no one kept the kind of lab mice he was familiar with; the professor's writing likely referred to common mice, and he didn't know if they had been cleaned before being caught.

If not, he had better wash his hands after touching these experimental records.

"It wasn't like this before. Recently, the mentor has been too obsessed with the research on the Black Fluid, and he doesn't care if I, the one organizing it, can understand it anymore." Lucius also held some resentment toward this. "Besides, I didn't participate in all of these. I can't remember when most of them were done, and the mentor rushed off to Dunling before he could explain things clearly."

"Hold on, you mean these are the experimental records regarding the Black Fluid?" Kraft's hand trembled. The words he had previously guessed—heavy metals, neurotoxicity, and the like—scrolled through his mind. The things written by these two fools after unprotected contact were now in his hands.

"Yeah." Lucius looked as if it were a matter of course, even surprised that Kraft had only just realized it.

"And you just brought these experimental records here without any cover? Aren't you afraid someone might walk in and see them?"

Kraft felt a bit numb. When he first saw the letter, he thought it was a high-end experiment on some mysterious substance. In the stereotypes of his otherworldly soul, such experiments should involve a group of people wearing hazmat suits and masks, operating in a high-end laboratory like the Umbrella Corporation.

And for something this dangerous and precise, the relevant data should be locked in a safe that was impossible to find, requiring at least three heavy iron doors to be passed, at least three levels underground, and the pressing of a mysterious little button in a secret room before it could be retrieved.

That was an exaggeration, but even with limited conditions, they shouldn't just bring classified documents to an office to organize them, right? What if someone ignorant wandered in and took a look? Did you guys really not consider that possibility, or what?

"It shouldn't be an issue... No one usually comes here; everyone knows the professor has left to take care of business." Lucius gathered the remaining papers scattered on the table. His completely indifferent expression caused Kraft's suspicion regarding neurotoxicity to rise to another level.

"Since you can't figure it out, put them away first. Put them somewhere where it's absolutely impossible for anyone else to find them, and lock them up." Kraft folded the drawing he was holding and placed it on top, feeling as if he had inadvertently boarded a pirate ship. Since the professor's cleanup work was a total mess, someone had to clean up his mess.

The urgent task now was to find a place to hide this pile of records that shouldn't be here, like that secret laboratory the professor mentioned in his letter—although it wasn't that secret, it was still better than leaving them spread out here.

He could only hope that place wasn't too conspicuous, and that it had a lock.

Being unable to read the records had now become a blessing in disguise. Even if someone did see these things, it was unlikely they would easily realize what kind of experiment the professor was conducting.

"Also, you said earlier that the laboratory is in the Medical School? And the samples are kept there too?" Watching Lucius put the experimental records into an ordinary wooden crate, Kraft realized the storage conditions for other things couldn't be much better. "How exactly is that sample preserved?"

"In a glass bottle, didn't I just say that?" Lucius closed the lid and gave the protruding edges two solid thumps to seal it tight.

The action was more like how Kraft dealt with the old television at home when he was a child, using some rough and effective methods to beat something until it yielded and functioned properly.

"Hiss~" Kraft drew a sharp breath. "I don't mean that. I mean, besides the glass bottle, do you have any other preservation measures?" He should have thought of this earlier; that laboratory was not a safe place at all. Something that might be volatile, effective in extremely small doses, and kept in a basement with poor ventilation?!

Kraft's brain spun rapidly. This didn't seem like a simple lack of safety awareness anymore.

If it were one or two lapses, he could still rationalize it as the world's scientific development level being too low, lacking a systematic set of experimental protocols. But as he stepped into this office, strange details began to accumulate, reaching a level by now that he couldn't ignore.

The professor shouldn't be this kind of person. When he first arrived at the academy, the professor had inquired about something as sensitive as human dissection quite obliquely, and the day before, he had even given him Human Anatomy as a primer. Calman was a scholar and indeed not very guarded against fellow academics—that was a fact—but he was by no means ignorant of social nuances and caution.

Could a person like that really leave for Dunling without explaining things clearly? Could he forget to tell someone to hide his notes, and also forget to explain his newly coined abbreviations to Lucius?

Fine, Kraft could take a step back and tentatively believe that Professor Calman had been blinded by a massive breakthrough. The professor wasn't young, and seeing a hurdle that had plagued the academic world for decades broken in his lifetime could have clouded his judgment; that wasn't impossible to explain.

Then let's talk about Lucius. He was a relatively extroverted person, sometimes a bit dim, but he wasn't a fool.

Even if the professor hadn't instructed him, it was too unreasonable for him to leave so many original experimental records in a room where anyone could push the door open at any time.

Yes, it could be explained that it was difficult to tell what these contents meant, and objectively speaking, one couldn't find much fault with it. The Medical School was the home base for Professor Calman and Lucius, so doing this wasn't entirely unjustifiable.

Then there was the almost reckless experimental method. The two of them, without fully clarifying the properties of the Black Fluid and without fundamentally confirming it was "Black Fluid," had ventured to drink the diluted sample.

One had to know that the tough guy who swallowed Helicobacter pylori only did so because no one believed him, and after swallowing it, he would at most get chronic gastritis or a stomach ulcer. What gave the professor and Lucius the right to do this? Just because they were sure a mouthful of this highly diluted sample would be fine?

They drank it in turns, fell into a coma in turns for a day, and then directly attributed it to the Humoral Theory.

It was very reasonable; Lucius had even found a claim based on the Humoral Theory that a small amount of Black Fluid would not permanently affect the body's balance.

It was too strange. Everything seemed to have an explanation when scrutinized, but Kraft instinctively felt that something was wrong. Even though the light wasn't bad, a cold, eerie atmosphere that only he could perceive had already filled the room, carrying a subtle sense of familiarity within the strangeness.

"Go and extinguish that little stove for boiling water." Kraft reached out and snatched the crate from Lucius's hands, and amidst the other's astonishment, he reopened the lid and took the papers out one by one, spreading them across the table.

A large number of records soon covered the table. Kraft shoved two barley tea cups into Lucius's hands, telling him to hold them to clear more space on the table.

After being spread out without overlapping, the table could no longer accommodate so many papers. More records were laid flat on the floor, stretching all the way to the base of the wall. He walked quickly to the window and pushed it open completely, letting more sunlight into the room so he could thoroughly examine them.

Only after they were fully spread out did he realize there were far more records than he had imagined. The experimental records that had only filled half a wooden crate could be placed on the table when piled up messily, but in reality, they could cover an area nearly three times the size of the tabletop, basically occupying every spot in the room that could be reached by direct sunlight.

"Is there anything I can help with?" Lucius stood to the side, holding the two tea cups like a poor student who had just been told the class was being extended, while Kraft was already past the point of paying him any mind.

Kraft circled the floor full of papers several times. The records, which had shown no pattern when bunched together, revealed clues once spread out. Relying on his understanding of this type of handwriting, even without page numbers or dates, these records could still be roughly categorized.