A Serious Student Who Only Takes Nine Potions a Day

He did not dwell on it and turned back to the docks to keep hauling sacks.

In the end, Evan worked an hour longer than the other laborers.

When the great clock at the docks struck eleven, he finally set down the last sack of cargo and straightened up.

Parker stood waiting for him at the warehouse entrance, several coins clutched in his hand.

"Four hours of effective work time. Thirty-two cents."

The foreman handed over the money. Evan caught it, and the coins clinked in his palm.

Thirty-two cents was not much, but he had earned it with his own strength. Every cent felt solid and real.

After handing over the money, Parker did not leave right away.

With a pipe clenched between his teeth, he looked the young man up and down, open confusion in his eyes.

The Evan who had walked in four hours ago had been thin as a bamboo pole, pale-faced, and unsteady even with a forty-pound sack of tobacco on his shoulder.

But the Evan standing before him now was drenched in rank sweat, his face glowing with health.

His shoulders stretched the seams of his canvas shirt, and the lines of muscle were faintly visible along his forearms.

"Good lad, why do you look a whole lot stronger than when you came in? Your complexion's gotten much better too."

Evan laughed. "Life lies in movement, Uncle Parker."

Parker curled his lip, took the pipe from his mouth, and tapped the ash against the sole of his boot.

"Then I'm sure to live a long time."

He waved a hand. "Watch yourself on the way home. Don't catch a chill."

Evan threw on his jacket, pulled his collar tight, and pushed open the warehouse's side door into the night.

In the dead of night in early November, the temperature had already fallen to around four degrees Celsius.

His sweat-soaked canvas shirt and denim overalls clung to his body. When the cold wind blew, they stiffened like he was wearing a layer of icy sheet metal.

With every step, the rigid fabric scraped against his skin, cold and rough.

Fortunately, the Blood Wine enhancement from the Blood Potion was still in effect.

Evan broke into a run, his boots thudding against the cobblestone road.

In less than a minute, heat began radiating from his body. He warmed up, and a thin new layer of sweat even formed on his back.

After nightfall, Hain Street and Gooding Street lay beneath the dim yellow glow of streetlamps. Dark buildings stood along both sides of the empty stone roads like two rows of tombstones.

But these tombstones were not quiet.

Drunken howls drifted intermittently from behind one window, sounding like singing and crying at once.

Gang members bellowed deep in an alley, mixed with the sound of shattering glass.

A stray dog crouched beside a pile of rubbish and barked madly into the darkness, its cries sharp and hysterical.

From a third-floor window in one building, a woman cursed her child in English with an Irish accent, then suddenly began to cry halfway through.

This was the nocturne of Gooding Street.

It played on schedule every night, never absent.

Evan walked briskly, humming a tuneless little tune.

When he returned to his apartment building, he collected his repaired leather shoes from Old Tom's shop. At last, both heels were the same height.

He tucked the shoes under his arm, went upstairs, and took out his key to open the door.

The moment he pushed it open a crack, a smell rushed at him.

It was not just Mary's cheap perfume anymore. There was also a thicker, fouler stench, accompanied by lingering smoke.

Strange moans and a man's slurred curses came from Mary's room, their rhythm chaotic, broken by dull thumps of a bedframe hitting the wall.

Evan's brows drew into a knot, and cold disgust flashed through his eyes.

"Soon, you filthy bitch."

He swallowed the words and said nothing.

He took off his sweat-soaked, stiff work clothes and draped them over the back of a chair to dry.

Once the sweat on his body had faded somewhat, he took an old towel and entered the washroom.

There were no water heaters in this day and age.

Having a private bathroom for every household in this building was already rare. Most apartment buildings only had public bathhouses downstairs, with endless queues.

He turned on the tap. The pipes coughed twice, then spat out a stream of icy water.

The cold water poured over his skin, yet he did not feel cold at all.

The Blood Potion was still at work.

It was as if an eternal furnace of charcoal burned inside him.

"Blood Potion really is good stuff."

Beyonder Characteristic: Sanguine

Evan watched the water wash away the sweat stains and dust on his arms, a blazing light burning in his eyes.

"Only four left in total... No, I need to find a way to get more."

"Potion girl, how am I supposed to live without you?"

He knew perfectly well that, given his current social standing, Pulis was his only channel for connecting with the Beyonder world.

There was no doubt that man had ill intentions toward him.

Anyone who used students as disposable test subjects for experimental drugs was absolutely no good person.

But this was also Evan's only chance.

A person about to drown in the sea would not care whether the plank floating over had nails in it.

First grab it. First survive. Everything else could wait.

After washing away the sweat, he then took a large, satisfying dump.

For the past two months since he began testing drugs, Evan's stools had either been tiny like goat droppings or completely shapeless.

But now, it was a normal, whole, satisfying banana-shaped stool.

"Taking a satisfying shit feels amazing!"

Evan dried himself and returned to his room.

He picked up the Phenobarbital bottle from the table and poured out two pale yellow tablets.

Then he poured two grayish-white pills from the Mercury Pill bottle, tossed all four into his mouth, and washed them down with a gulp of water.

Then he climbed onto the iron-framed bed, pulled over the old blanket covered in lint balls, dropped his head onto the pillow, and sank into darkness within three seconds.

He slept deeply.

So deeply that he did not notice something approaching outside the window.

About twenty minutes after Evan fell asleep, a shadow appeared outside the tightly shut window.

It did not push open the window or pick the lock.

It passed straight through the glass.

Like a spill of ink seeping through rice paper, the shadow silently seeped through the gaps in the window and condensed into a human shape inside the room.

In the darkness, a pair of dark red eyes lit up.

Those eyes had no pupils—or rather, their entire irises were pupils.

They were a deep, congealed dark red, like two rubies soaked in formaldehyde.

He was lean and tall, and every movement carried an innate elegance.

Like a gentleman accustomed to private opera boxes, except he now stood in a shabby apartment plastered with old newspapers.

Those dark red eyes swept swiftly across the room, from the newspapers on the walls to the extinguished kerosene lamp on the table, from the wet clothes drying on the chair back to the frail figure curled up on the bed.

When his gaze fell on the disorderly pile of medicine bottles beneath the bed, his brow furrowed slightly.

That expression carried a trace of displeasure.

Like a researcher discovering that his test subject had been taking unplanned medication without permission.

He did not hesitate.

He took a glass syringe from inside his trench coat, its needle flashing with cold light in the darkness.

He bent down and gently pulled back Evan's blanket, exposing a thin arm.

The needle pierced a vein at the crook of the elbow. His movements were precise and gentle, and Evan did not even frown in his sleep.

Dark red blood slowly rose through the syringe, filling it.

He withdrew the needle, pressed his thumb over the puncture wound, and paused for two seconds.

Then he put away the syringe and straightened up.

The next moment, his body seemed to lose its substance. Starting from his feet, he liquefied into a pool of flowing shadow and silently seeped out through the gaps in the window frame.

The room returned to silence.

Only Evan's even breathing remained, along with the faint scraping of a rat digging at the base of the wall.

A few minutes later, another shadow appeared.

This time, the visitor did not seep in through the window gaps. She climbed in from outside the window.

She did not possess that eerie ability to pass through objects. She seemed more like an ordinary person who had received strict training.

Her hands precisely gripped the edges of the window frame, the way she exerted force matching some special technique.

It allowed the old window, which normally creaked loudly at the slightest touch, to open without making a sound.

It was as if the hinges had been smeared with invisible grease.

She flipped into the room. When she landed, both feet touched down almost at once, and the sound of her boot soles against the floorboards was as light as a falling leaf.

Two swords were slung diagonally across her back, their hilts protruding from either side of her shoulders. Wrapped in black cloth, they showed only two vague outlines in the darkness.

Under the moonlight, her silver-white hair was quite conspicuous.

After steadying herself, her nostrils flared slightly.

"The stink of a Sanguine."

Her voice was extremely low, as fine as a mosquito's buzz, almost blending into her breathing.

"Looks like the rumors are true."

Her gaze swept across the room in the darkness before likewise settling on the pile of medicine bottles beneath the bed.

She crouched down, picked up a bottle, and brought it to her nose to sniff.

In the darkness, a pair of golden vertical pupils suddenly widened.

They were not human eyes.

The irises were pure gold, and the pupils were narrow vertical slits, like a cat's or a snake's. Even in a room without any light source, they could still focus clearly.

"Two diluted potions?"

She picked up another bottle, removed the stopper, and sniffed it. Her brow furrowed tighter and tighter.

"A new kind of potion, not recorded in the Potion Codex. It must be something newly invented by the Sanguine here."

She gently set the bottle back where it had been and turned her gaze toward the sleeping Evan.

She bent down until she was nearly pressed against Evan's face, lingering by his breath for several seconds.

Those golden vertical pupils narrowed slightly, as if she were deciphering information in the air that ordinary people could not perceive.

Then her expression changed.

"Master above. Two kinds... five kinds? Five drug components? And two potions?"