Chapter 172: Drowned in Air

"Mr. Kraft, I have a request." Kup followed Kraft through the devastated camp, hesitating for a long time before breaking his usual silence to make the request himself, "I wish to study under you."

"Is it not so already?"

"Uh, I mean further, to learn your knowledge as a physician."

Kraft turned back, looking at him as if seeing a ghost, and waved a torch before his eyes. "This is quite rare; I thought you were not very interested in these things."

"I thought it over carefully and felt it necessary to learn a bit," Kup said, forcing himself to speak. It was not that he suddenly planned to change his career path, but rather that practical observation had inspired him, revealing that certain knowledge possessed practical value beyond its original intent.

Knowing the fragile parts of bones could be used to locate fractures; of course, they could also be used to create fractures. The power of knowledge was indeed considerable.

This had been best demonstrated by Kraft himself in the battle just now, with remarkable effect. It was the first time he realized that those profound things that seemed so far away were actually always nearby, applied in a straightforward and simple manner.

Medicine was originally so simple!

Seeing Kup's positive attitude toward progress, Kraft was quite pleased and readily agreed to the matter.

"I am glad you have made a correct decision. Knowledge is never too much, but we must take it step by step. Let us start by adding bone names to the new vocabulary you need to learn."

"Thank you for your generosity." It was foreseeable that the burden ahead would increase greatly, yet Kup felt he was not so opposed to the dull study of texts. He thought he could take a shallow taste, set a small goal, and finish the bone section to facilitate future actions.

Kraft nodded to settle the matter. The schedule would likely need to be rearranged, but that would all have to wait until the immediate problem was resolved.

Bending down to lift a corner of the fallen tent, he remembered glancing at a squire on the edge of a dust explosion who, in his stumbling and frantic rolling, had wrapped himself up in the canvas.

By the time it was time to clean up the aftermath, that squire had not been seen emerging again. Kraft pulled out the support pole, loosened the tightly wound bundle of cloth along its direction, and pulled it straight.

On the flattened ground, the bundle of cloth lay soft and spread out, with no human-shaped bulge visible.

"Where is the person?" Kraft tore the canvas open completely, folded it into a roll, and found nothing underneath but a broadsword that had slipped from someone's hand, likely dropped during the fall and struggle.

Looking toward the gathered survivors, their uncontrolled emotions had not yet subsided; on the contrary, they were worsening. Some were curling their bodies, hugging their knees and weeping.

There was no need for uniform attire at this moment; everyone dressed according to their own habits. Even without relying on faces, it was clear that the squire's figure was not among the crowd. Kraft felt a moment of regret for him—he had thought the man would survive.

The two began helping Martin handle the dead. Covering their faces with cloth, they lifted the bodies of the unfortunate from the dust and gathered them together. This required more care than when they were alive, to prevent stirring up the dust and causing secondary harm to the living.

The most difficult part of this work was separating the fungal-occupied shells from the entangled people. The contact surfaces were glued together indistinguishably; even without considering the residual dust of the fungal clumps, forcing a separation by brute force would only peel away the penetrated skin layers along with them.

After trying several times, Martin gave up the idea of peeling them off intact and instead set aside some of the felled firewood, piling it around the bodies deemed beyond saving.

Hearing footsteps approaching from behind, he said calmly, "At least most of those who fell can leave behind intact bodies; and these are not too bad either, at least someone is helping with the aftermath."

"Although it sounds too cruel, I must remind you that keeping the bodies intact is not a good idea. We do not know if they will turn into that." Those shells pierced into the ground, still reaching their arms out toward the living, needed no further explanation of their origin. "They might stand up again."

The fungus transforms the body into a breeding ground for growth, and then into something else. This process is unknown in duration, but leaving them behind is certainly not a good idea.

He hoped this transformation stage would last as long as possible. The situation at Westminster Castle was very worrying; he could only hope that sending someone back to report the alarm would be in time, or at least that it would not spread to Yin Feng.

Although rationally he knew he was out of reach and that anxiety was meaningless, Kraft could not help but feel irritable, and in a fit of misplaced anger, he crushed a conspicuous clump of fungal clumps at his feet.

"You are right, that will require more firewood... Sorry, wait a moment." The knight was about to stack the piece of wood in his hand onto the pile when he suddenly raised his hand to block the light, rubbed his eyes, and said, "It's done."

"Is something uncomfortable?" During the battle just now, everyone had come into contact, to varying degrees, with the dust spewed by the fungal clumps, and various minor symptoms needed to be watched for.

Martin lowered his hand, rolled his eyes left and right as if searching for something that had flashed by, then quickly turned back to the person he was talking to. "No, just a momentary blur. There is nothing to do here for the moment; Professor, you should go rest for a while."

"Wait a bit. I want to ask something. Did you see those things dragging the bodies away?"

"No, I didn't notice. Did you see them?"

"Neither did I, so this is strange." His gaze swept around the survivors and the gathered bodies, then included those just prepared for burning. Amidst the chaos, there was a problem no one was currently attending to. "The numbers don't add up."

"Missing... four people, I suppose?"

This included the squire who had been noticed. The forest floor showed no traces after the chaotic battle, and Kraft had not paid much attention until he circled around and confirmed that several people, whether dead or alive, were not within the camp boundaries.

He had just asked Kup the same question, and the answer was a denial.

The situation just now was too chaotic for anyone to determine their whereabouts. Whether they had unintentionally walked out of the camp and gotten lost in the forest, or were truly dragged away, could not be confirmed without eyewitness evidence.

"Let us consider them dead; we cannot go looking for them." It was quite normal for some missing persons to appear while cleaning the battlefield. There were many possible destinations, but here it basically equated to death.

Adding wood to the pyre and covering the dead's faces, the knight Martin, with rare piety as if closing a coffin lid, made a church gesture of drawing a virtual circle in the air. He drew half a circle then stopped midway, feeling this could not be distinguished from that damned heresy, and finally awkwardly switched to a hand-over-heart salute.

"May their souls remain whole." He turned toward the bonfire to call for helpers to join the work. Not many had recovered; most were still shouting unintelligible words and making instinctive cowering and dodging movements.

Kraft stood before the woodpile for a while, then stepped on that clump of fungal clumps again. There was no feedback of crumbling fragments, giving a sensation as if the force had been applied to nothing.

The color vision before his eyes was somewhat uncomfortable, as if overlapping with highly transparent colored spots. Yet these spots did not move with his field of view; instead, they overlapped with the positions of objects, like sticky, swollen alien soap bubbles clinging to surfaces, everywhere, as if the surroundings were crowding in.

Rubbing his eyes, those afterimages faded significantly and were barely noticeable if one was not paying attention.

He blinked to moisten his eyes, shifting his gaze near and far to adjust focus, trying to shake it off. When looking at the woodpile, he unexpectedly discovered a piece of wood covered in fungal spots. It was stuck in a conspicuous position, already grown with scale mushrooms, and definitely could not be burned.

How could such wood have been put in there? This one must be replaced. Kraft casually pulled it out intending to discard it, but upon touching it, he suddenly realized the texture was rough, not as wet and slippery as it looked.

There was a subtle conflict between vision and actual tactile sensation.

The throwing motion already in place stopped. His eyes re-examined the piece of wood, and those large colored spots grew denser again, taking on a hazy outline, soft and moist, filling the tactile sense.

In his hand, he vaguely held a piece of rotting wood with a mushroom cap bulging, while simultaneously holding a rough log of firewood.

Kraft let go, allowing it to fall freely. It struck the solid ground, yet this impact feedback in his direct sensation was not as concrete as it appeared visually, as if a layer of sticky, fuzzy padding had cushioned it.

He lifted his foot and stomped down again. As he moved, the ground remained solid as before, with only broken twigs and leaves beneath his feet.

【Hallucination?】

At the same time, he realized that the strange, fluctuating sensation that had been troubling him since entering the forest had vanished at some point. The change had vaguely occurred during the process of total physical and mental focus in the battle, excluding distractions. If the original sensation was like floating on water, constantly struck by tiny waves, now it was a state of tranquility.

And within this tranquility, he felt an omnipresent vitality.

He had been affected; he was not the only one. Kraft tensed his left arm; the muscle contraction was natural, and the strange sensation caused by the embedded stone shard had abnormally eased, a relaxation akin to returning home.

【Dust】

The fungal dust was first listed as a suspect. What it caused was not merely physiological damage; it might also serve as a medium, deepening the connection between the inhaler and the depths.

"Kup, do you feel any visual blurring?"

"Seems like a little?" Kup closed his eyes and shook his head uncertainly. Combining this with the environment, he immediately understood Kraft's implied meaning.

After a moment of panic, he calmed down, repeating something silently to himself as he moved closer to Kraft. Judging by his lip movements, it was probably "Do not act rashly."

Meanwhile, Kraft's reasoning fell into contradiction. He considered the possible destinations of the missing squire, and from this perspective, everything seemed to link together.

They fell, or perhaps were even dragged into the depths. But combining this with the inhalation of dust contained an unavoidable logical error.

【Why haven't more people who inhaled it disappeared?】

Those in the center of the dust, embraced by the fungus-possessed shells, lay quietly in the woodpile, waiting to turn to ash.

This is completely contrary to the hypothesis.

Kraft lowered the torch, leaning close to the deceased's face. Their mouth was forced open in a desperate attempt to breathe, lips cyanotic and even purplish, frozen in a grimace of struggle.

They had suffered violent, rapidly declining coughing and wheezing before losing consciousness and collapsing. Having inhaled only a small amount himself, he felt an itchy discomfort in his throat; that substance was likely an extremely irritating spore mist, causing airway spasms and constriction, resulting in ventilation obstruction akin to severe asthma.

Furthermore, once the spore dust entered the lungs, some mechanism caused diffuse damage, impairing the capacity for gas exchange.

A true acute respiratory distress syndrome; he had never seen one this acute. Inhaled during strenuous activity, it caused loss of motor function due to hypoxia within ten-odd seconds, completing the asphyxiation-to-death effect within a few minutes.

As a weapon, it is extremely tricky when carried by living fungus-possessed shells; as a medium, however...

【The dead cannot be pulled into the Deep】

This leads to a condition that is not easily met: one cannot inhale too much, or death will prevent the entity from pulling the person into the Deep via the mental body; nor can one inhale too little, or the effect will be insufficient.

However, upon closer thought, its rationality for them becomes apparent: relying on a simple concentration mechanism, it pulls a portion into the Deep while leaving the rest to die in the present world, their shells possessed and driven by the fungus. Astonishingly mature.