Just Once, Just This Once

"What?" Kraft hadn't followed Lucius's train of thought. His mind was still stuck on how fast the surgery needed to be, and he hadn't snapped out of it yet.

"I'm saying Lecturer Romolo is wrong. He knows a lot about the theory of the four humors and pharmacology, but that's already a thing of the past."

Lucius glanced at the door again. He didn't want to say it out loud, but this explanation should be enough for Kraft to understand what he meant.

Yes, in the traditional theory of the four humors, one must exhaust the Red Fluid or the White Fluid to make a person lose consciousness; that was certainly correct. But didn't they still have a type of fluid that had never been identified?

He raised his hand and placed it in front of Kraft. A few days ago, this hand had several red spots—the remnants of a reckless experiment.

"You mean the Black Fluid?" Kraft suddenly snapped to attention, his gaze focusing on Lucius's face. "I thought I had made myself clear enough: we shouldn't touch that stuff."

"Why?" Lucius met Kraft's gaze without hesitation, as if trying to dig out the reason for his fear of the Black Fluid from his eyes.

Kraft felt Professor Calman's experiments were unreasonable, and Lucius felt Kraft's excessive caution was equally baseless.

In his view, the Black Fluid perfectly met their current needs. It only took a tiny amount of the diluted solution to make someone lose consciousness for an entire day, unable to be awakened even by needle pricks, with no memory of what happened afterward.

"Because it's... not safe." Kraft was momentarily at a loss for words; this explanation couldn't even convince himself. "We haven't even confirmed it's actually 'Black Fluid,' right? We're just calling it that, aren't we?"

He couldn't explain to Lucius what his intuition and inspiration were telling him. Was he supposed to say that he had discovered a tiny bit of liquid related to something incomprehensible to humans, something that could lure living beings into touching it? It was better to keep such things to himself; saying them out loud would only make him seem even less credible.

"We can't rule out the possibility that it might have some terrible long-term effects that only manifest later. Professor Calman also said it must be kept absolutely secret, didn't he?" Kraft added.

He instinctively felt there was a deeper reason for its external manifestations, and he dared not touch it further until he had a chance to figure it out. To that end, he didn't hesitate to use Professor Calman to shut Lucius up.

Lucius strongly disagreed with this line of reasoning. He pointed to his own nose. "Only the living have the luxury of worrying about long-term effects. If I'm not an anomaly, then we won't even be discussing this issue for at least a dozen days."

"I know this isn't the time for this great discovery to see the light of day, but wasn't the original intention behind discovering it for the advancement of medicine? Are we just going to hide it away and never use it for the sake of secrecy?"

Lucius spoke with some agitation. He had misunderstood Kraft, thinking Kraft disagreed with his suggestion more because of the professor's requirements rather than an inexplicable dread of the Black Fluid.

"No, that's certainly not what I meant..." Subconsciously, Kraft had never intended to take the Black Fluid out of the basement again.

When considering the anesthesia problem just now, he had only thought about which anesthetics he knew could be made on the spot, or what plants could serve as natural anesthetics; he hadn't even considered anything labeled "unknown" or "dangerous."

Thinking about it now, Lucius's argument actually made a lot of sense.

It provided long-lasting, effective anesthesia that couldn't be broken by pain, and there was no intraoperative awareness. In the dozen days since Lucius had ingested it, he hadn't shown any aftereffects at all.

With this stuff, the success rate of the surgery would skyrocket, moving from nearly impossible to having a decent chance of success.

As for what aftereffects might occur later? That could be dealt with "later." The worst case was death, which was no worse than dying on the operating table today. The best case was that the dosage hadn't reached the threshold to trigger any special effects, and based on Kraft's observations of Lucius, that was entirely possible.

Lucius watched as Kraft's expression gradually softened, his brows unfurrowing as he shifted from tension to contemplation.

"Once. Just this once," Kraft said, addressing Lucius, and perhaps himself as well.

He remembered the night a few days ago when he had firmly written in his notebook: "Keep distance, keep sealed; do not touch unless necessary." He hadn't expected the time for it to be "necessary" to come so soon.

Kraft sighed. After this was over, there would likely be a pile of messes to clean up. "How are we going to explain its origin? No one is going to be incurious about something like this."

"Just say it's a family secret medicine?" Lucius suggested off the cuff. "A unique item passed down from some unknown generation, the formula lost, only this one dose remaining."

A familiar line—the inspiration likely came from Kraft's own "family medical arts"—but this excuse was truly terrible. A family heirloom-level secret medicine from an aristocratic house, with the last drop used on a tavern owner's daughter—it felt like an insult to everyone's intelligence.

"I suggest you think of another one," Kraft said, rubbing his forehead. "But that can wait until after we're done. For now, let's go prepare the diluted solution."

"Together?"

"As soon as possible. After we're done, we still have to prepare other things, which might not be any simpler than this."

Wearing the bird-beak masks from last time, the two returned to the secret laboratory. Upon entering, Kraft first opened the wall cabinet to check the liquid level in the bottle against the scratch mark; it hadn't changed.

Lucius took an egg-shaped ceramic cup from the lower shelf; this was the same type of cup they had used to mix the diluted solution before.

The cup, with its large body and small mouth, was difficult to clean, but it wasn't easy to spill the liquid inside. There was also a small triangular spout-like structure at the rim, making it convenient for transferring liquid.

Filling the cup four-fifths full with water and gently shaking it to ensure it wouldn't splash during stirring, the next step was to use a small metal rod to dip a bit of the Black Fluid into the water.

"Just take this. A dip is enough; don't let a drop hang off the rod," Lucius handed the small rod to Kraft. "Should we use a little more? After all, we only tested it with needle pricks before."

"No, a child is not a miniature adult, especially one who is only three years old. Not reducing the dose is already pushing it."

Kraft peeled away the wax seal from the bottle, pulled out the wooden stopper, and extended the thin rod into the small glass bottle, carefully approaching the surface of the liquid.

Looking down from the bottle's mouth, in the blurred field of vision, the liquid at the bottom was silent and waveless, the candlelight passing through the glass swallowed by its surface. The smoothness of the liquid surface wasn't apparent; in its place was a lightless, profound black.

It carved an abrupt, stubborn void into his field of vision, weakly and persistently sending out an invitation to touch to anyone who gazed upon it.

From this perspective, Kraft began to feel it was a deep, dark hole, with muffled, indistinct sounds coming from the other side. He gripped the thin rod tightly, feeling as if it would fall into this entrance and drop into another world the moment he let go.

The tip of the rod pressed against the liquid, shattering the dark surface and sending out a fleeting, tiny ripple. A lack of controlled force caused it to tap against the bottom of the bottle, emitting a startling, crisp sound.

"Be careful. I don't think it's that sturdy." Lucius moved the ceramic cup to the table in front of Kraft; he had almost thought Kraft had poked through the glass bottle.

"Sorry, my hand slipped." Kraft lifted the thin rod, shook off the excess Black Fluid inside the bottle, and inserted the rod—now coated with an extremely thin layer of liquid—into the ceramic cup. He then re-plugged the glass bottle with the wooden stopper and sealed the gap with wax.

"So, just stir it?" The metal rod swirled a few times in the ceramic cup, and the trace amount of Black Fluid dissolved completely into the water. Now, it was exactly what they wanted.

"Yes, this stuff dissolves easily in water."

Under the candlelight, the water in the cup remained clear, without any change in color. It was absolutely impossible to distinguish with the naked eye, and it no longer had that original, luring sensation; it was just a cup of unremarkable, clear water.

But it had indeed become the core of the world's first anesthetic surgery. Lucius would pour a small mouthful's worth into the prepared "family heirloom" vial, letting Lis drink it all in one go, leaving no evidence behind.

This small copper bottle was a contribution from the collection of Lucius, its body less than half a palm in size and inlaid with a turquoise-like ornament. As an "ancient family heirloom," no one in Wenden Port would be idle enough to bother authenticating it.

"What was this bottle originally used for?" Kraft habitually reached up to stroke his chin in contemplation, only to find himself touching the bird-beak of his mask instead.

"I bought it to carry spices, but I never found the right ones, so it's been empty ever since." Lucius tilted his ceramic cup, transferring what he considered a "single mouthful" into the copper bottle. "I think it's half an antique; I'll use it from now on."

"From now on? There won't be a 'from now on,' Lucius. Just this once. I swear if I ever do something this stupid again, I'll go to the tavern and drink three cups while standing on my head."

"Which one are you referring to? Agreeing to take in Lis, or the Black Fluid?" Lucius pressed the small cap onto the copper bottle, finishing his work.

"Hard to say." Logically speaking, he shouldn't have touched either of these things—neither accepting a patient who could only be treated with special methods, nor breaking his previous resolution to never touch the Black Fluid.

Kraft placed the glass bottle and the capped ceramic cup back into the wall cabinet, shut the door, and sighed. He had sighed more in half a day than he usually did in half a month, and he had a feeling there would be plenty more to come.

Things in this world always followed a certain rule: zero times or infinite times. Saying "just this once" was fine for Lucius to hear, but he couldn't fool himself.

There were never any coincidences, either; everything that happened had an inherent cause. Without Lis, without Lucius, he would have eventually encountered another patient in need of surgery one day, and then he would have thought of this application for the Black Fluid.

"I swear to do my utmost to relieve the suffering of mankind."

"Hm?" Lucius heard Kraft muttering to himself, his voice as faint as a mosquito, the pronunciation and tone unlike the Norse language.

"It's nothing, just a vow I made a long time ago." Kraft seemed to have regained some of his resolve. "Don't worry about me, go prepare the other things now. If there is a god of medicine or any other deity, you'd better pray for me now while there's still time."