The surgery continued, while the lead surgeon's mental state underwent a sustained collapse.
The earthquake had caused little actual damage, but it had made an already worrying sterile environment even worse. Even with the greatest stretch of his imagination across two lifetimes, he could never have predicted an earthquake in the middle of surgery, or a contamination source dropping from the sky.
Though he had reacted quickly enough to block the falling dust with cotton cloth, there were surely invisible particles everywhere in the air now. Heaven only knew what their concentration had reached.
All he could do now was count on the Heavenly Father. Hopefully, seeing one of his followers injured on his own turf would move the old man to do something and lower the odds of infection.
Kraft, close to tears, sped up his hands once more, trying to resolve the problem faster.
But as it turned out, some things weren't swayed by subjective will. This was already the fastest way to crack bone with a chisel, and even so, it took him a little longer than expected to knock a circle into it.
Then he had to apply force as evenly as possible and open the piece like lifting the lid of a pressure cooker, releasing the pressure inside.
A glaring red, slightly dull gelatinous substance bulged through the newly opened gap. There was a large amount of it, and it looked like egg mixture on the verge of setting in a pot, shifting subtly as the pressure changed.
Kraft gently gripped a more solid piece with small, rounded forceps and lifted it onto the cotton cloth in the tray. Against the white background, the clot, streaked with blood, looked like some kind of red parasite with cilia sprouting from it.
David finally couldn't take it