John Snow's Map

"That's right, it's not early. Usually, we should be in our first morning lecture by now."

Lucius straightened up and adjusted his bird-beak mask. "Have you decided where to start? If we go back early, we might still make it for lunch. Gris was asking me why you haven't been going as often lately."

"Quiet for a moment. I really don't understand how you can talk about food in this environment." Kraft raised a hand in a gesture for silence.

The only two voices faded away, and silence quickly enveloped them, filling the gaps like quicksand and wrapping them in a solidified atmosphere.

Kraft was usually a person who enjoyed quiet, but the quiet he liked was a sense of escapism with occasional distant sounds, not this unnatural silence as if they had been thrown into a soundproof room.

In this fishy, chaotic place, every experience stimulated his senses to the maximum: the disgusting smell, the alien architecture, and the moist, greasy touch on every surface. Only sound had been snatched away, leaving a void in his sensory input.

Lucius also quickly realized the incongruity. This kind of silence reminded him of walking out of the anatomy classroom late at night, where the empty corridors were deathly still, and everything had fallen into a state of stasis.

But this was not the dead of night when everyone was asleep; it was a bright, sunny morning.

He walked quickly to the nearest door and knocked hard. The hollow thud echoed in the solidified silence, but there was no response.

"Is anyone there?" Kraft walked to what appeared to be a window opening and called out. He could even faintly see people sleeping on the floor in the dim, cramped space, still fast asleep and completely unaware of the sounds from the outside.

Starting from the Red Algae Well, the two of them moved outward, knocking on doors house by house.

There was no need to ask anymore; if the door was locked from the inside and no one answered, they were definitely still in their dreams.

Kraft pushed his memory to its limit, engraving the location of every household into his mind as much as possible, matching it with the spatial structure he had memorized to form a floor plan.

The further the investigation went, the more he realized the severity of the situation. Half an hour had passed, and they had knocked on dozens of doors, but they had yet to find a single person who was awake.

The sleeping people seemed to be separated by invisible walls, and they were walking through a transparent maze, hearing only their own voices and echoes that felt like hallucinations.

The morbidity rate of this pathological sleep was terrifyingly high; no one in the area they had touched was spared, and they had yet to reach its boundaries, making it impossible to estimate how many people were affected.

Lucius could not see the map in Kraft's mind, nor could he distinguish which places they had walked, or even notice that the route was gradually moving away from the Red Algae Well. He followed Kraft mechanically, repeating the actions of knocking and calling, his anxiety growing with time.

He was completely lost in confusion, unable to understand what factor could have caused such a large-scale illness.

"It makes no sense, it makes absolutely no sense. It's so similar to the effects of the Black Fluid, but there are so many people—what exactly is it?"

Kraft could not answer his question; he felt his hypothesis was wrong again. If the influencing factor weakened from the inside out, the distribution of patients they encountered should show a difference in severity. After walking for so long, at least someone should have responded.

With this confusion, the investigation continued. He felt he was approaching the boundary of this area, and faint human voices could be heard in the distance.

Ten minutes later, Kraft encountered the first group of awake people they had seen in this area.

Several people, men and women, dressed in coarse linen clothes like the thin man from before, glanced in surprise at the black-robed figures appearing from the corner, then continued with their own business.

As they moved further ahead, they saw more and more people, transitioning from the territory of deep sleep to the normal area.

The wooden houses that remained shut and silent decreased rapidly, replaced by scenes of people opening doors to dump waste or carrying water home.

Kraft stopped a woman carrying a water bucket.

"I am a doctor from the academy. May I ask if you and your family have been waking up later and later recently?"

"Academy? A doctor?" The woman looked at Kraft's strange attire with confusion. "I think I understand what you mean, but my family hasn't."

She put down the bucket in her hand and pointed behind Kraft. "There are plenty over there, but you'll have to wait until noon to see them get up."

"What about the others?" Kraft listened to the chaotic human voices and clattering sounds, feeling for the first time that these noises were a relief. "Your neighbors, for example?"

"That family is just as you described. I don't know which devil cursed them, but now they can only work half a day. How are they supposed to get by?"

After asking several people in a row, Kraft discovered that even the progression of the illness had changed.

Originally, according to the descriptions from Gary and Blade, he had expected to encounter patients with varying degrees of extended sleep time.

But in reality, there were only two types of people here: those who slept until noon, and those who were completely unaffected. Furthermore, it was basically consistent for the whole family—either they couldn't wake up, or everything was normal.

In this boundary area, the two types of people lived together without affecting each other, as distinct as oil and water. Only the density of cases was changing, not the severity of the illness.

This was... getting strange.

"So, what is the reason for this now?" Lucius also began to imitate Kraft by stroking his bird beak, using the action to help himself calm down and think.

Unfortunately, it didn't seem to work; he still couldn't figure it out.

In just this short while, three women carrying buckets had passed by; adult men seemed to be fewer in number.

Hired laborers indeed made up the majority of the residents here, going to the docks early to find work, then returning in the evening with the day's wages, most of which were exchanged for bread and cheap seafood, with a small portion saved or turned into other small items.

The women stayed home to do manual labor to supplement the family income, while also being responsible for housework and looking after young children.

Heavy work and poor living conditions caused continuous damage to their health and left them no time to think about anything else, as just maintaining their current life exhausted all their energy.

And as soon as an accident that broke the balance appeared in such a life, such as a sudden illness, or... Kraft looked behind him, such as the people in this silent zone.

These accidents would drag down an entire family in less than a month.

He found a relatively clean spot to lean against and sighed.

The frequency of his sighing had been increasing lately, mostly because he was being pushed along by all sorts of messy matters—half official, half private—sighing in the midst of his busyness at the disrupted plans.

But there were also times like this, occasional moments where he sighed at his own limited abilities.

He pieced together the route he had just walked in his mind: the strip of land filled with cases was gradually thinning out until it disappeared.

Regardless, there was indeed a factor whose influence developed from strong to weak within the area. So, what could this factor be?

Moreover, regarding this factor, isolation or the lack thereof seemed to make little difference; they lived as neighbors yet remained completely unrelated.

He must have seen a similar map somewhere before, one that also relied on the locations of cases to make a judgment, without needing to consider other issues.

Pages flipped through his mind; once he had a train of thought, he could dredge up anything relevant from his memory.

"Lucius! Those women carrying buckets just now all came from the same direction, right?"

Lucius saw Kraft spring up suddenly from the wooden board he had been leaning against, calling out his name.

If he had been fortunate enough to live in another world, he might have thought of a certain elementary school student who brought death wherever he went, just like Kraft, with his wide lenses flashing a brilliant light.

Although he didn't understand the situation as usual, he still tried his best to recall, "Hmm... I suppose so? I can't remember clearly."

"Yes, that's right, they all came from the opposite direction to us." Kraft had figured out the problem; looking solely at the phenomenon within the Salt Tide District, it was a complete carbon copy of a classic case.

In the world of his otherworldly soul, back in the nineteenth century, a famous disease broke out in London. It spread rapidly in no time, with countless patients and tens of thousands of deaths.

In a family, once one person was infected with this disease, the other family members were not far from being infected as well.

What was even more bizarre was that no matter how the patients were isolated, it could not achieve the same effect as with other diseases in the past; it seemed as if a strange ghost was permanently stationed in that area.

In this terrifying epidemic, two names were remembered forever—"Cholera," and the father of epidemiology, John Snow.

John Snow registered every person who died from the disease on a map, and soon this famous cholera map showed an obvious trend: patients were distributed around a certain center, becoming sparser as they moved outward.

And here, for Kraft, this phenomenon was even more obvious.

"Water, Lucius, it's the water."

Compared to the situation in London, the number of water sources in the Salt Tide District was so scarce it was outrageous.

Its low-lying position by the sea made it extremely difficult for drinkable groundwater to exist; most of the time, the result of digging a well was a useless saltwater well like the Red Algae Well, all in vain.

Therefore, the radius of influence of a stable water source would far exceed that of other areas, and a large number of residents would draw water from the same location.

The water a family drank every day was uniformly drawn from the water source in buckets, which explained why there was such a significant clustering of cases within families in the Salt Tide District.

As they gradually moved away from that water source, the residents' willingness to go there to draw water weakened, and they turned to other wells instead, so the distribution of cases began to thin out until the distance was so great that no one went there anymore.

None of the people they had just seen carrying buckets had come from the direction of the area where the cases were concentrated, which further confirmed his reasoning.

A clear path appeared before him once again; Kraft gave up his leaning spot to Lucius and paced back and forth in excitement.

"Wait, when they wake up at noon, there is a contaminated water source here, and I must find it."