Whispers in the Bottle

At the insistence of Kraft, Lucius went out and brought back two bird-beak masks, along with several bags emitting various scents.

It must be said that this item was very much to Kraft's aesthetic taste. A brass-crafted beak connected to a leather hood, with two pieces of impure-colored glass for eyes—some unknown chemical composition had given the lenses a reddish tint.

The breathing vent was located in the beak section; the design logic was likely for the airflow to be filtered through the stuffing before being inhaled by the human body.

Now, let him put his invincible memory to use and recall the DIY gas mask tutorials he watched when he was bored in the past.

Oh, he remembered now: one had to add activated carbon inside. Then the next problem arose: how was activated carbon produced?

This question was completely beyond Kraft's level of knowledge, hitting a blind spot; no matter how powerful his memory was, he couldn't conjure something out of nothing. It seemed he would have to make do with the methods of this era.

He watched as Lucius stuffed the beak like he was filling a scallion bun.

First came crushed, dried plant tubers, laid down in a layer and covered with linen, followed by a second layer of fibers that looked a bit like dried daylilies. This was repeated until the contents of all the bags had been used, filling the entire beak from the tip to the base.

It was hard to say how effective it would be, but the quantity of filter material was certainly sincere.

Kraft took the prepared hood, sniffed it with his nose, and was met with an extremely intense, mixed odor.

It was a scent bordering on incense, mixed with a hint of peppermint's cooling aura, along with a spicy, pungent component comparable to chili seeds; the other, less obvious scents were impossible to distinguish.

"Lucius, have you used this before?" Kraft pulled it over his head, assuming the classic black-robed, black-hooded plague doctor image.

The soul's otherworldly side quite liked this mysterious persona, though unfortunately, such crafts were always prohibitively expensive online, and there was never an occasion for him to wear one for cosplay. Today, it was an unexpected dream come true.

The wearing experience was much as he had imagined; breathing through a mask filled with so much filter material was extremely laborious, feeling as stifling and uncomfortable as wearing several layers of masks.

During a plague, doctors would wear such masks to continue their work. No one had ever tallied the actual effectiveness of the layers of spices and herbs, but at the very least, it provided a considerable amount of psychological comfort.

However, the death that followed them like a shadow also caused people to associate it with crows and misfortune. The doctors did not bother to correct such misunderstandings, perhaps out of disdain, or perhaps because the prejudice born from the fear of death was deep-rooted and unshakable.

In Kraft's memory, the most recent plague was the one his grandfather had told him about, which had occurred over a dozen years ago; the only place bird-beak masks still existed was in the Medical School's storage room.

Lucius replied while stuffing his own mask, "No, my mentor taught me everything. He is quite attached to this; these two masks are also from his collection."

"Be a little careful; these two masks have a special significance to my mentor. He said he used these very two masks during the plague over a dozen years ago." Seeing Kraft pacing around the room in the mask, nearly poking the wall, he offered a reminder.

"Ah, sorry." Kraft reached out to cover the beak and steadied himself against the wall. The two red glass lenses for the eyes were of poor quality, uneven in thickness, and contained granular impurities. Coupled with the restricted breathing, it made one feel somewhat dizzy, and his sense of direction was greatly diminished.

"It's fine. This thing is so well-maintained that no one would guess it's been around for years." Lucius also put on his mask, adjusted the beak to the correct position, and picked up the box. "So, shall we head to the laboratory now? It's safest to keep it stored there."

"Let's get two more pairs of leather gloves."

With some lingering anxiety about the mask's effectiveness, Kraft followed Lucius to the so-called "secret" laboratory.

The journey there involved a winding, convoluted path. The two turned back from the professor's third-floor workspace into a deserted storage room deep on the first floor.

Unused bookshelves and broken tables and chairs sat here, quietly gathering mold and dust. Some designer with a screw loose had placed the entrance to the cellar in this very room.

Much like the cellar in the Wood family manor, once a wooden board with an iron ring was lifted, a flight of stairs led downward, straight into the pitch-black underground space.

Lucius, walking in front, handed the box to Kraft and held up a candelabra to lead the way. He kept a hand on the wall, carefully stepping down the uneven stairs.

This cellar was no more than two meters deep, and the dozen or so steps were all within the reach of the candlelight. Lucius stopped at the last step and extended the candelabra into the cellar, illuminating the aged wooden barrels and crates inside.

After waiting a moment and seeing that the candlelight remained bright, he waved to Kraft, who was still adjusting the position of his eye lenses, signaling that it was safe to come down.

After moving several empty wooden crates away from the wall, a locked wooden door was revealed to the two of them.

It seemed the secret laboratory wasn't all that secret; it was just that, under normal circumstances, no one would ever come here. Even if an idler were to visit, they would be unlikely to notice the drag marks of crates in this abandoned cellar.

With a "click," Lucius opened the lock hanging on the door, took the lock and key down, and put them into his pocket. Kraft stepped back two paces; in case of any unexpected situation, he could serve as a backup.

As the wooden door—which appeared to Kraft like a ferocious beast—swung open, this mysterious laboratory was revealed to them without reservation.

It was about ten square meters in size, with a ceiling lower than the cellar; one could touch the top just by reaching up. Yet, in this space the size of a storage closet, two tables, a wooden rack, and several small iron cages were crammed in. If the stools under the tables were pulled out, there would be no room for a person to move, and items could only be stored in the wall cabinets.

Kraft stood at the doorway, holding the door frame, ready to hold his breath and pull the person out at any moment.

Lucius placed the candelabra on the table and opened the cabinet with his thick, leather-gloved hands. The cabinet, carved into the stone bricks, had a three-tiered structure from top to bottom; the bottom two layers were already filled with pottery jars, wooden boxes, metal containers, and various small tools.

The third layer, left empty, held only a small glass bottle; through the red lenses, its color was indistinguishable. The cylindrical bottle body was regular and clear, and the mouth was sealed with a wooden stopper.

The light from the candelabra passed through the relatively transparent bottle, casting clean light and shadows onto the wall and Kraft's face; the quality of this glass bottle was clearly much better than the lenses of the masks.

At the bottom of the bottle was indeed a shallow layer of opaque black liquid, with a somewhat viscous and heavy texture.

Lucius held it up to his eyes to observe it carefully for a while, then picked up the candelabra again, tilting it slightly to let the melted wax drip onto the bottle mouth, rotating the bottle to let it solidify into a ring.

He turned around and held the bottle mouth toward Kraft, demonstrating its excellent seal.

"There, it's absolutely fine now." He brought the bottle up to the metal beak and made a sniffing gesture. "See? There's no need to worry so much."

It did indeed look like there was no problem. Kraft walked into the room, placed the box on the table, took the bottle from his hand, and brought it up to his lenses.

The liquid flowed slowly as the bottle tilted, possessing an oily feel. The surface of the liquid was slightly convex and did not cling to the glass; when tilted, it formed small droplets, resembling black mercury, much like the ferrofluid toys the otherworldly soul had bought in the past.

Kraft was certain he had never seen anything like this, and he had no idea how Professor Calman's mentor had extracted such a substance from the human body. It couldn't possibly be that he had been refining oil from corpses, could it?

Watching the flowing liquid, curiosity welled up within him. He felt a desire to study it, to find a few mice or any other experimental animal to test it on.

He wanted to see what effect it would have after they came into contact with the black liquid, and he wanted to know what other manifestations the "suppression" the professor spoke of might have.

It was not merely a shallow substance, but the future of medicine—a black starry sky, a deep-sea trench that no one had ever explored—stirring the primitive human desire to explore, to know what it was, and why.

These black liquids gave one the feeling that they shouldn't be kept in a bottle, but rather used in large quantities and brought into contact with biological tissue, so that one might learn more about them.

He felt a sense of urgency and understood why Lucius was so excited to continue the experiments, because he now shared that same mood—a desire to immediately draft a plan and get to work.

He wanted to skip the animal testing phase entirely and verify the mechanism of how it functioned within the human body. He possessed more detailed and advanced examination methods; he could do better than the professor and his team, rather than being limited to merely counting the heartbeats and breaths of the subjects after they fell into a stupor.

He even wanted to drink it himself, just like Professor Calman and Lucius, even if it were only a tiny drop, to personally experience that sensation.

That would surely be more direct and effective than any experiment, and it would better satisfy his increasingly urgent desire for inquiry—that desire to touch it, to understand it...

"Hmm?"

Kraft let out a sound of confusion; he could not for the life of him understand why he would think such a thing. Years of safety training had never faded from his mind, and countless cautionary tales remained vivid in his memory.

Why would he actually want to take a sip? Even if it were diluted, and even with Lucius and the professor having tried it first, he shouldn't be tempted to test this unknown liquid that came from who-knows-where inside a human body.

Quickly recalling how this thought had emerged, Kraft soon found its root—that curiosity had appeared abruptly the moment he took the bottle, grew gradually as he observed it closely, and then transformed into the desire to use it on animals.

Following this line of development, in just a short while, the impulse to drink the liquid himself had been born.

It was persuading him—the most active part of his consciousness had reached a conclusion, naturally shoving the answer into Kraft's brain without any complex logical processing, giving him no choice and not bothering to tell him where the answer came from.

It was like a baffling science problem from high school, where a "trivially proven" was boldly displayed at the bottom, skipping straight to the final data. And his subconscious, upon knowing an answer he had never thought of before, took it for granted and understood everything.

A chill of fear crept up from his tailbone, crawling along his spine and spreading throughout his entire body; he didn't know if it came from the eerie answer itself, or from the fear of where that answer had originated. Perhaps it was both.

It was persuading him? Inside his own mind, using his own voice to disguise itself as his own thoughts. What was it... a living thing?