An Unexpected Visitor

Kraft met the visitor, who had come alone and didn't seem to be feeling unwell.

He was probably the person Liston had described as "living in a place like the Salt Tide District." His clothes were made of cheap hemp, with patches and loose threads visible from several steps away. Up close, he smelled of fish.

The student who had brought the message hadn't led him to an empty room. Instead, he'd left him standing in the Medical School's Great Hall, where people in black robes passed by and occasionally cast strange looks his way. The surroundings seemed to silently reject this unusual intruder.

A dockworker, Kraft decided.

The student who'd brought him the message led Kraft to the Great Hall and said quietly, "I didn't want to disturb you, but he insisted that he only wanted to see you, and wouldn't tell me why. I thought there might be some special circumstances."

"Thank you, Matt. Please do the same next time." Kraft addressed him by name and nodded his thanks. The student left, flattered by the attention.

After seeing the student off, Kraft approached the visitor, studying him as he went. The man kept his eyes on the ground. His trouser legs and shoes were wet, as if he'd just hurried over from somewhere damp—probably seawater. Once the places he'd stepped dried, they'd be left with a layer of salt.

That was probably why the student hadn't led him farther inside.

"Hello, I'm Kraft. Is there anything I can help you with?" Kraft stopped in front of him and offered a practiced greeting.

"Ah, hello. Yes, that's me." The man shuddered, seemingly startled, and shifted his gaze to Kraft's black robe. "I heard you can treat some illnesses that other people can't..."

He paused, then asked uncertainly, "And you only charge five silver coins?"

Well, here was another person who'd come after hearing some version of the rumors. It seemed they'd already spread to include treating all kinds of difficult and unusual illnesses.

He'd encountered a few patients like this over the past few days. The outlandish rumors had led people with ailments entirely unrelated to stomachaches to the Medical School, where they made all sorts of requests. It had given Kraft quite a headache.

Still, his professional instincts forced him to take the man seriously and follow the standard procedure.

"Actually, there are some differences, but if you're not feeling well, we can find somewhere to sit and talk." Kraft wasn't just being polite. He wasn't used to this kind of conversation, and perhaps he ought to request a dedicated consultation room.

"No, no need. We can talk here. It really is only five silver coins?" The visitor held out his hand. Only then did Kraft notice the five blackened silver coins he'd been clutching all along.

To put it bluntly, those coins were filthy. It wasn't the extra alloy added during illegal minting that was to blame; they'd been stored so poorly that they'd lost a grade of value.

"Come with me, please. Let's find somewhere quieter to talk. Think of it as a chat—my time doesn't cost anything."

As the saying went, he'd come all this way, so Kraft couldn't just turn him away. He found an empty room nearby, brought in two chairs, and invited the man to sit down and talk.

Once they'd changed rooms, the visitor seemed to relax a little. He began to explain his problem haltingly. "I don't know when it started, but I seem to be sleeping longer and longer. I know it sounds strange, but my situation is different."

"I work as a laborer down by the Dock. I have to go there every day to look for work, so I usually get up very early. At first, I didn't notice anything wrong. But one day, I didn't wake up until the sun was shining in my face."

"After that, I started noticing that I was waking up later and later. I asked my wife to wake me in the morning, but it turned out the same thing was happening to her."

"Have you been overworking yourself lately?" Kraft rubbed his eyes. Talking about the subject was making him sleepy, too. He hadn't been sleeping well lately, and his lunch breaks had been cut short as well. His work hours were becoming increasingly inhuman.

"No, no, I'm absolutely sure that's not it. Since then, I've been waking up later and later, and I get sleepy more easily at night. Now I sleep through half the morning before I wake up."

"I went to a few clinics, but they all thought I wasn't sick at all. The medicine they gave me didn't help, either."

His words were full of anxious confusion at not being understood. He looked at Kraft, hoping to find some sign that he believed him.

"Have you noticed anything else unusual? A cough, a fever, anything like that?" Kraft adjusted his posture and leaned forward, adopting the pose of an attentive listener. He didn't actually think it was anything serious; he'd just shifted because his back was sore from sitting too long.

It sounded like some change in their lifestyle had disrupted the visitor and his wife's usual body clocks. Everyone had experienced something like that, but Kraft didn't have much expertise in that area and couldn't think of any particularly good advice.

If he knew how to wake up early naturally, would he ever have been late to a morning lecture at university?

Seeing that Kraft wasn't showing the impatience everyone else had, the visitor continued. "I tried asking my neighbors to wake me, but the same thing was happening to them. In the end, I could only ask a friend I'm close to. He goes to the Dock in the morning, so he could wake me along the way."

"The neighbors, too?"

"Yes. They'd noticed that they were sleeping longer and longer, too. And my friend said it was very hard to wake me. He said he had to shout my name loudly in my ear and slap my face before I'd wake up." The confusion on his face deepened as he described the strangest part.

"But... but I have no memory of it at all. Surely you'd feel something when you were half-awake, wouldn't you?"

"So it's as if you only have two states: sound asleep and fully awake? You said your wife was the same. Have you tried this with her?" Kraft pushed himself up using the armrests.

"Yes, my wife is like that, too. She's hard to wake, and she doesn't remember what happened. That's why I believed my friend." His arms, wrapped in coarse hemp clothing, trembled slightly. "I really think I'm sick. If I get there too late, I can only work half a day. I can't live like that."

"What about your neighbors? Are they hard to wake, too?"

"I didn't ask them that. That's all I know." He fell silent and looked at Kraft expectantly, hoping for a different answer.

If he wasn't lying or leaving anything out, Kraft really couldn't think of anything that matched the symptoms. What would you even call it? "Progressive sleep prolongation"?

Puzzling cases like this weren't unheard of. Every strange complaint had some explanation behind it: either the patient had gotten something wrong, or some key information had been left out.

For example, someone might wake up with blood in their urine, get tested for kidney disease with no results, and then it turned out they'd eaten half a box of red-fleshed dragon fruit the night before.

Or take the famous advertising slogan: "If your child keeps being sick, they're probably faking it. Give them a beating..."

In any case, the patient couldn't be wrong. If anything, it was your fault for failing to ask the right questions; the responsibility was yours, not theirs. Even if the patient was faking, you still had to figure that out.

"All right, I understand what you mean. I'm going to ask you some more detailed questions now. They might not seem related to your illness, but they're important." Kraft dipped his pen in ink and spread out a sheet of paper. "First, can you tell me your name and where you live?"

"My name is Gary. I live in the Salt Tide District."

"Where exactly?" Kraft wrote down his name and made a space beside it for the address.

"I... I can't explain it clearly. Is that important?" Gary couldn't answer the question. "It's in the part of the Salt Tide District near the Church. There's a place where they make salted fish nearby, and there's a tree by the entrance."

Kraft covered his forehead, deeply understanding Liston's pain. He knew of the Salt Tide District, of course, but he'd never gone in and had never considered doing so.

The place was effectively Wenden Port's slums. Its buildings followed no plan whatsoever, a remnant of the city's early, unregulated growth.

It had earned its name because the land was low-lying. The tide sometimes flooded the area, leaving behind wet mudflats and pools of brackish water. When they dried, they left tiny grains of salt everywhere, along with the stench of dead sea creatures.

People who couldn't afford to live elsewhere in Wenden Port were forced onto this foul land. They built all kinds of shacks and shelters, and as the city grew, the district grew with it, becoming a gray area the city refused to acknowledge.

There were no proper streets inside, only narrow alleys winding between crooked, shoddy houses, crossing each other at random and growing every year as more people arrived. The unmanaged piles of refuse had grown so bad they could never be cleared. The farther in you went, the worse it got.

In the past, when Kraft had been a young noble who came to Wenden Port looking for fun, there was no way he'd have gone inside. At most, he'd pass by the outskirts, catch a strange smell, and steer clear.

The city's administrators couldn't be bothered to send anyone in, leaving the Salt Tide District to become a lawless area where chaos and disorder flourished.

Wenden Port's infamous seawater prison was also in the part of the Salt Tide District by the sea. Anything that didn't belong in the clean parts of the city was thrown into that salty, damp garbage heap.

There was no way he could go there for a follow-up visit.

"Damn." Kraft sighed and wrote down "Salt Tide District, northwest" as the vague address, adding the landmarks Gary had mentioned beside it.

"That's fine. It won't make much difference. Do you and your neighbors usually close the windows to keep warm in your rooms?"

"No. Firewood gets damp easily and goes moldy."

Kraft came up empty.

Every aspect of Gary's life was a problem, from his monotonous diet and vitamin deficiency to his long-term exposure to damp conditions and his physically demanding labor.

There was nothing he could single out to explain the symptoms Gary's family was experiencing. Since the neighbors were affected, too, the cause was probably something in the surrounding environment. There would be no answer without visiting the place and taking a look.

Even then, he might not find anything.

"I'm sorry, I don't have any leads for now. This is the first time I've encountered a case like this," Kraft said, shaking his head. "If you can, come back in two days. I'll try to make time to go with you and look for the cause."

"No, no need." Gary lowered his head and said nothing more. Perhaps he'd understood Kraft's words as a polite way of turning him down.

He stood from his chair and opened the door himself. He wasn't in pain or angry; he simply left in silence. A gray mood enveloped him, coating him from head to toe so plainly that he didn't need to say a word. Anyone could see the weight of his despair.

Before stepping outside, he turned back to face Kraft and offered one last word before leaving. "Thank you. You're the only one who was willing to hear me out. May the Lord keep you healthy."