The Dissection Assessment

As the pain receded, Gordon felt refreshed and clearheaded. The entire night's grogginess and mental strain vanished without a trace.

This was source substance.

Winslow had said that source substance might be related to things spilling out of the Realm of Truth, and could have a tremendous effect on reality. If a human fused with it, they might gain a chance to ascend to the Realm of Truth. At the time, Gordon had only memorized that for the exam. He had never imagined it would one day happen to him.

Unbroken Strings! Gordon moved his body around.

Sure enough, it felt as though a thread were controlling his entire body, freeing him from the delays of nerve and muscle responses.

He rotated his wrists, raised and lowered his hands, took a couple of steps... His movements were supple and fluid, as smooth as could be.

An ability that let him control every muscle and every nerve with precision, pushing that precision to its absolute limit.

Good. Very good. Gordon fought to keep the corners of his mouth down.

He looked back at the dissection table.

The Spider Aberration's corpse still lay there, its eight legs sprawled loosely.

After Gordon's work, its abdominal cavity had been opened even further, much of the necrotic nerve tissue had been cut away, and there was a conspicuous gap behind the ganglion.

If Peter saw it, he would pat Gordon on the shoulder and say, "Not bad, junior."

Winslow would be a different matter.

He would not know that source substance had once been hidden here, but he would notice that someone had deliberately searched the area.

What should I do? Gordon thought for a moment.

Destroy it? Hide it?

The main problem was that he did not have enough time. He could already hear birds chirping outside.

It was far too late in the morning for that sort of thing. He had no desire to run smack into someone with a spider in his arms.

Wait...

An idea came to Gordon.

If the evidence disappeared, everyone would wonder where it had gone. Better to take the opposite approach.

For the first time, he deliberately activated the new thing in his head.

It lay among his cranial nerves, as though a master switch for remotely controlling Gordon’s body had been installed inside his head.

He flicked it.

[Unbroken Strings: Synchronized Transmission]

The next instant, his fingers steadied.

That morning, Professor Winslow pushed the door open and entered with a stack of newspapers in his hand.

His expression was as foul as the weather. There was no particular reason for it; he simply did not feel like being pleasant to his students.

Winslow had already made his name and no longer had to worry about food or clothing. He was also at the age when he ought to take up hobbies and tend flowers. But he still had clear goals.

First, find someone talented enough to inherit his ideas.

Second, keep idiots from inheriting anything.

Peter followed behind him, carrying an iron cage in each hand, both packed with White Rat Monsters. They were the unlucky creatures the students would practice on in today's dissection class.

Winslow had only just set down his newspapers when he spotted a familiar thick white cloth in the room.

He walked over and whipped it off. His expression changed despite himself.

Wasn't this... the Spider Aberration?

He recognized the creature.

Yesterday's public lecture had been a great success. He remembered every structure and organ of the Spider Aberration, along with every technical term the students had pretended to remember.

Now it had been sewn back together, so well that it looked as though it had never died.

Winslow examined it with his hands.

The stitching was excellent, he had to admit. It was as though someone had followed his dissection process in reverse, putting everything he had cut open back into place with flawless precision.

Who would have the time for this?

"Peter," Winslow said, "your skills have improved lately."

"Give me a break, Professor. Gordon's the only one with this much time on his hands." Peter set down the two large cages of White Rat Monsters. "He said he wanted to study your approach to dissection, so I sold it to him. Eighteen silver pounds. No idea where he got the money."

"He's your junior, and all he wanted was to learn. You charged him for it?" Winslow was displeased.

"Professor, I respect both scholarship and the laws of the market," Peter said. "We paid to import it, too."

Winslow stopped paying attention to Peter and turned toward the wooden table.

"Gordon?"

Gordon sprang up like a shot.

Hmm? Winslow studied him closely.

He was still the same person.

But Gordon sat up swiftly and steadily, without the flustered confusion of an ordinary person being woken up. It was as though he had sensed Winslow's presence long ago and had merely been waiting to hear his name.

"Good morning, Professor." Gordon was perfectly composed.

"Your work? Why did you restore this spider?" Winslow asked curiously.

"Well, Professor, it's a long story," Gordon said. "When I watched you dissect it, I thought I really understood the Spider Aberration's anatomy. It was only when I actually put it back together piece by piece that I realized how much I was lacking."

That was a very tactful answer. Winslow's urge to get to the bottom of things had barely surfaced before retreating again.

"You stayed up all night?" Only now did Peter have time to inspect the Spider Aberration closely. "...That's some excellent stitching. Must have taken ages."

Peter had studied under Professor Winslow for six years, while Gordon was only a second-year university student. Back in his own second year, Peter had still been locked in a bitter struggle with White Rat Monsters, with no better than even odds of winning.

"Yes, yes." Gordon nodded. "I was very careful."

That was true. The stitching had taken only twenty minutes. He had spent the rest of the time very carefully destroying the traces left by extracting the source substance. Fortunately, his roommates were exceptionally good at keeping secrets. They never said a word.

"Then you'll go first in today's dissection assessment," Winslow said. "With skills like that, you can set an example for the other students."

"Um... can I refuse?"

"No." Winslow turned and left. "Such is the greatness of higher education."

Gordon glanced down at the White Rat Monsters in the iron cages.

The White Rat Monsters looked up at him, too.

Neither side was pleased.

Gordon sighed, casually picked up the professor's newspaper, and flipped through it out of boredom.

In the local news section, Gordon caught sight of the headline "Montfort Family's Former Residence Sealed Off Overnight."

Montfort.

Gordon's gaze sharpened.

That was Charlotte's home. How could something have happened there?

Gordon was about to read more closely when Peter lifted one of the iron cages and set it at his feet, jolting the White Rat Monsters inside into a chorus of squeaks.

"All right, the newspaper won't teach you how to render White Rat Monsters harmless and hand them out to forty university students," Peter urged. "Get to work."

"Understood."

Gordon put down the newspaper, turned, pulled on his gloves, and picked up a Dissection Knife.

The moment he gripped the handle, he flicked the silver thread in his mind. Immediately, that fluid, lucid sense of control, as though a god had possessed him, surged through his entire body again.

With the power of source substance, Gordon's control over his body reached unprecedented heights.

In this state, wherever he wanted the tip of the blade to stop, it stopped. It would neither stray in the slightest nor tremble for no reason.

If he wanted just enough force to peel away fascia, his fingers exerted exactly that much, no more and no less.

It was hard not to be satisfied.

The lecture hall of the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the Royal Academy of Natural Sciences University.

The classroom was semicircular. Generations of students had carved knife marks, obscenities, and couples' initials into the curved desktops. Forty students sat stiffly upright, and tension filled the room.

This was the dreaded practical assessment.

During a public lecture, everyone could muddle through by looking solemn, making it seem as though they all understood.

Dissecting a White Rat Monster was another matter. A blade was brutally honest; it would not become more obedient just because someone's family had donated a building to the university.

Each student had a White Rat Monster in front of them. The assessment required them to remove the tremor gland at the back of its neck while preserving as many of the ragged surrounding nerve bundles as possible. The more they preserved, the higher their score.

"If you cannot even dissect a White Rat Monster, there is no need for you to waste your time at this university."

Winslow stood at the front of the classroom, his tone level.

"The so-called tremor gland is a growth formed when an ordinary white rat undergoes a low-grade source substance reaction and becomes an Aberrant. It has some research value. Do not use brute force when separating it, do not crush it, and above all, do not have the gall to tell me, 'It was like that to begin with,' after crushing it with your forceps."

A few chuckles rose in the classroom.

Winslow swept his gaze over the students, and the laughter went no further.

"Gordon Vick, come up," Winslow ordered.

Gordon stood with his White Rat Monster, and his classmates looked over. He usually barely registered in class.

Most of them reacted with, Oh-so his name is Gordon.

His grades were good, but his family was poor. He was good-looking, but he slept in the dissection room. With all those factors at play, people could only refer to him as "this classmate of mine in the medical department..." Or "the guy who always sits next to Miss Montfort."

"Gordon..."

Charlotte unconsciously sat up straighter.

Gordon brought his White Rat Monster to the workbench at the front and began the procedure facing the entire class.

The White Rat Monster lay on its back. He turned it over. The fur at the back of its neck had already been shaved clean, and the tremor gland lay just beneath the skin.

[White Rat Monster. Do not forget what you did to it.]

Don't worry. I haven't forgotten.

Gordon picked up the scalpel.

The first incision was shallow, just deep enough to open the skin.

The second followed the edge of the fascia. The tips of his forceps slipped in, gripped, separated, and released. Every movement was so steady it was almost boring. There was no showmanship involved; he simply exposed the tremor gland little by little.

Yet it was precisely this dullness that made it seem so difficult to replicate.

The students waited for him to make a mistake.

It was not malice. Whenever a classmate went up to the front, the most basic of hopes arose in everyone's hearts: if he failed, the rest of them would be safe.

"Done."

Gordon took a step back.

Winslow stepped forward to inspect his work.