"No, I don't think that's possible." Lucius stepped back and looked away. "Professor is one of the best doctors I know, both in skill and character. This is absolutely not something he would do."
This wasn't a matter of logic. For Lucius, admitting it was far more complicated than that. Without direct evidence, he would firmly stand against the accusation.
"Even though he's clearly acting strange?"
"It's also possible that the Black Fluid was stolen after he took it away. We're only guessing that the Black Fluid caused the problem, aren't we?" Fortunately, Kraft held a fairly high position in Lucius's eyes and was currently the head of the Medical School, so Lucius was willing to discuss it with him.
If anyone else had openly accused Professor of poisoning people in front of Lucius, Lucius would have gone over and punched him twice—even if he was carrying a sword.
"Someone stole a tiny amount of a liquid with unknown effects, brought it to the least cared-for part of the city, and poured it into the water to cause a mass poisoning?" Kraft folded his arms, trying to seem less confrontational. "Which of those explanations do you think is more likely?"
Emotionally, he didn't want it to be true either. But for now, Professor was undoubtedly the prime suspect.
As one of only three people in Wenden Port who knew the Black Fluid existed, and given his highly unusual behavior, Professor made Kraft want to rush straight to Dunling and confront him.
Still, this theory was missing one crucial piece. If Professor really had done it, why? Without answering that question, Kraft would never convince Lucius—and couldn't fully convince himself, either.
Whether it was Professor or someone else, there had to be a motive.
Even a madman acted for a reason. Bringing the Black Fluid to the Salt Tide District and putting it in the water supply had clearly been a considered decision, not something done on a whim.
Kraft had reason to suspect that the culprit had foreseen this result and understood the special effect produced when those exposed gathered together. That was why they had done it.
The Salt Tide District had a relatively dense population, fewer water sources, and, most importantly, no one looking after it. These factors could maximize the positive feedback loop, in which the scope and the number of people affected reinforced each other.
A tiny amount of Black Fluid had been enough to cause conditions across a wide area to keep deteriorating. The meticulous planning and sheer malice behind it were almost unimaginable.
"Now isn't the time to discuss this. We can figure out who did it later, when we have time. We have to stop this trend."
Thinking about suspects wouldn't help right now. Kraft wanted to contain this damned large-scale Anomaly.
This Anomaly "domain" was making the condition of everyone exposed within it steadily worsen. At first, they'd just gotten up a little later than usual. Now they couldn't get up until after noon. Next would come the afternoon, evening, and then night.
Eventually, everyone here would be dragged into eternal sleep, forced to keep company with the lurking malevolent presence. Kraft didn't know what it wanted, but it wouldn't be anything good.
"If the problem is the water, what if they switched to another source?" Now that they'd found the source, Lucius thought it wouldn't be hard to fix. "We can tell them the water is poisoned. They can walk a little farther to fetch it, and things should be fine after a while."
"Hmm... It's an option, though it'd be a real hassle. But I don't think it'll be that simple." Kraft closed his eyes, sensing the strange atmosphere all around them. He needed to find another way to explain what he was feeling to Lucius.
"Lucius, do you think the Black Fluid Professor took could really cause so many people's conditions to deteriorate over such a long period, just by pouring it into the well?"
"That's why I'm not sure the Black Fluid caused it. Why are you suddenly backing the theory that it makes people sick?" Lucius didn't understand Kraft's concern. If the Black Fluid was simply a poison, then stopping people from drinking water contaminated with it would surely work.
Kraft explained what he had in mind. "I think we should get them to leave this area for a while. The more spread out they are, the better. Ideally, they'd leave Wenden Port."
Lucius immediately criticized the idea. After working with Liston for some time, he'd come to understand one thing: in the Salt Tide District, poverty made any major changes unfeasible.
"They have nowhere else to go, and they can't stop working. They'd die even faster than if nothing changed."
"Sigh..." Kraft picked up the bucket. His sigh count for the week had gone up by one. Social and economic factors were such a pain. "Let's leave it at that. We'll take the bucket back to the Academy first and find some animals to test it on. Then we'll come back tomorrow morning and keep watch. We'll tell them the water is the problem."
"Oh, I almost forgot about this." Before leaving, he took two silver coins from his wallet and dropped them into the crack in the broken wall. That should be enough for the family to repair their house. "Remind me to stop by Blade's place on the way back. We'll ask him to stay somewhere else for a while and test both ideas at once."
Kraft returned to the inn exhausted. He didn't even order his favorite grilled fish, making do with a few slices of bread for dinner instead. Back in his room, he lit a candle.
A full day of investigation had left him mentally and physically drained. The thought of all the work still ahead—and how it might not even help—made the future seem especially bleak.
Someone had created a massive, man-made Anomaly "domain" in Wenden Port, and Kraft still hadn't figured out the culprit's motive.
The many glaring suspicions surrounding Professor made Kraft particularly uneasy. A knowledgeable person with evil intentions could do far more damage than an ordinary person.
He couldn't keep discussing it with Lucius, so he had to think it through on his own. If it was Professor, what reason could have driven him to do something so insane?
By the time Calman had reached his age, he no longer had much desire for worldly things. The usual motives behind ordinary people's crimes—money and power—meant nothing to an old professor like him.
He was well-off and effectively ran the entire Wenden Port Medical School, yet had never shown any enthusiasm for either. His material life was no different from that of an ordinary student.
If there was anything he cared about, it was academic progress. Calman and Kraft were both determined to advance medical technology in this hellish society. They'd come to Wenden Port for that reason, and had spent half their lives here.
So what did Calman hope to gain from this? The location was so perfect that it seemed he must have known how this positive-feedback "domain" formed when he designed it.
Given Professor's level of expertise, he probably wasn't doing this just to watch a group of people suffer the already known effect of falling into a deep sleep. So...
[There would be new changes]
Kraft understood then: the steadily lengthening sleep was a quantitative change. Professor was probably waiting for a qualitative change, and had enough time to wait until he returned from Dunling and check the results.
Of course, this theory depended on Professor really being the one behind it.
Kraft took off his black robe and dropped onto the bed, pressing his fingers to his temples. His whole head was starting to hurt.
When he was overworked and irritable, these headaches struck often. The pain ran from his temples to his eyes and even his jaw, affecting one entire side of his face. The body of the Otherworld Soul in his former life, and his body in this world, had both suffered from this kind of headache.
He closed his eyes and stopped thinking, letting his mind go blank for a while. By his own diagnosis, it was probably trigeminal neuralgia. This kind of minor ailment was a real nuisance: its cause was complicated, it kept recurring, and all he could do was rest and wait for it to ease on its own.
Given how stressful and busy things had been lately, it was inevitable that the headaches would keep him company.
In the darkness, he didn't know how much time passed. The pain gradually eased, and his mind drifted in a rare moment of relief as sleep crept over him.
At the last moment before he fell asleep, Kraft stopped himself. It was still early. He had to do something before bed—at least finish the Human Anatomy lesson plan, then give it to Liston tomorrow so he could teach the class. Otherwise, he'd have to make up the missed lessons himself later.
The pressure of having twice as much work to do in the future forced his eyes open, bringing him back to the headache-inducing reality.
It felt as if he'd only been lying down for a little while, but the candle on the table had already gone out, leaving the room in darkness. A sliver of moonlight spilled through the gap in the window, pale and gentle.
Some pain remained. What had covered half his skull had shrunk to three points. With every pulse of his blood vessels, he felt pressure on his eyeball. His left temple felt as if someone were tapping the joint between his skull bones from the inside with a small hammer, in time with the dull ache in his back molar.
His mind grew muddled through the long torment, and he could barely make out the furniture in the dim room.
Kraft sat on the edge of the bed and fished a flat black rectangle out of his pocket. He pressed the bump on its side. The light came on abruptly, and the glare made him narrow his eyes to a slit.
He turned its glowing face toward the room, barely lighting up the area two steps away. Once he stood, it illuminated only a small patch at his feet. It wasn't much help.
His mind was still hazy, as if it hadn't woken from its resting state. Kraft felt his way through the darkness for a few steps. His eyes hadn't adjusted from the light yet, and the shapes of things were blurred.
He lost patience, gripped the object in his hand, and walked toward the window, intending to open it and let the moonlight in.
His hand moved by habit over the wooden frame, searching for the Wooden Plug that kept the window shut, but he failed to find it three times in a row.
The hard object in his other hand reminded him that he had something he could use for light. He pressed the bump on the flat, square object again, and White Light shone in front of him.
Kraft stared at the square patch of light, a white light source, and felt it shouldn't be so simple. He carefully ran a finger across it, waiting for a response. He even forgot that he'd meant to open the window.
The white light source didn't respond at all.
His irritation grew. Instinct told him something was wrong. The object in his hand had to give him information—information his life couldn't do without.
The Otherworld part of his soul sank into inexplicable agitation, while the native part began to reason. He felt an inexplicable sense of dissonance.
It was like admiring the sunrise at a window when a stubborn black speck appeared in his field of vision, like a fly on a painting, crawling across it as though clinging to a flat surface. Once he noticed it, he realized that the view before him was truly only a flat surface.
[A lifelike painting]
More of his attention shifted to the flat, glowing white object in his hand. It seemed familiar, yet it lacked the finer details of its usual functions. That mismatch was what had made him sense something was wrong.
Kraft was jolted into sudden alarm.
Sitting bolt upright on his deathbed, he was so short and weak that he could only manage one more chapter (;д;)
Before you continue