Chapter 27: Chapter Twenty-Five: Whispers in the Bottle

At Kraft's insistence, Lu Xiusi went out and brought back two bird-beak masks and several bags of substances emitting different odors.

I have to admit this thing perfectly matches Craft's aesthetic: a beak made of brass connected to a leather hood, with two impure-colored glass lenses at the eyes, their reddish tint caused by some unknown chemical composition.

The breathing aperture is located in the beak, designed so that air passes through a packed filter before being inhaled by the wearer.

Now, let's tap into my invincible memory to recall those homemade gas mask tutorials I watched out of boredom in the past.

Oh, I remember now; activated charcoal needs to be added inside. But that raises another question: how is activated charcoal produced?

This question completely exceeds Craft's knowledge level, hitting a blind spot where even the strongest memory cannot conjure something from nothing, so we'll likely have to make do with methods from this era.

He watched Lucius stuffing the beak as if he were making scallion buns.

First came crushed, dried plant tubers, covered with a layer of burlap, followed by a second layer of fibers resembling dried daylilies; repeating this process, he filled the entire beak from tip to base using the contents of several bags.

It's hard to say how effective it will be, but the sheer volume of filtering material certainly shows sincerity.

Craft took the prepared hood and sniffed it, greeted by an extremely intense, mixed aroma.

It was nearly like incense, blended with a hint of minty coolness and a spicy, irritating component comparable to chili seeds, while the other less distinct scents were unidentifiable.

"Lucius, have you used this before?" Craft pulled it over his head, completing the classic image of a plague doctor in a black robe and beaked mask.

The soul's otherworldly side loved this mysterious image; unfortunately, such crafts are always prohibitively expensive online, and there was never an occasion to wear one out for cosplay, so today was an unexpected dream come true.

The wearing experience was much as imagined: breathing inside the mask packed with so much filter material was extremely laborious, like wearing several layers of masks, feeling stuffy and uncomfortable.

During plagues, doctors would continue their work wearing such masks; while no one ever statistically verified the actual efficacy of the layered barriers of spices and herbs, they at least provided considerable psychological comfort.

However, the ever-present shadow of death also led people to associate them with crows and misfortune; doctors did not correct this misunderstanding, perhaps out of disdain, or perhaps because the prejudice born of the fear of death was too deeply rooted to be shaken.

In Craft's memory, the most recent plague was one his grandfather had told him about over a decade ago, and the only place the beaked masks still existed was in the medical school's storage room.

While stuffing his own mask, Lucius replied, "No, the mentor taught me everything; he took this quite seriously, and these two masks are part of his collection."

"Be a little careful; these masks hold special significance for the mentor, who said he used these exact two during the plague over a decade ago." Seeing Craft wandering around the room in the mask and nearly bumping into the wall, he offered a reminder.

"Ah, sorry." Craft covered the beak with his hand and steadied himself against the wall; the two red glass lenses at the eyes were of poor quality, uneven in thickness, and contained granular impurities, which, combined with the difficulty in breathing, caused dizziness and severely impaired his sense of direction.

"It's fine; since this thing is so well-maintained, no one would guess it's quite old." Lucius also put on his mask, adjusted the beak to the correct position, and picked up the box. "Shall we head to the lab now? For safety, it's best kept there."

"Let's get two more pairs of leather gloves."

……

……

Carrying some anxiety about the mask's effectiveness, Craft followed Lucius to the so-called "secret" laboratory.

The journey involved another winding, convoluted route; the two went from the professor's workroom on the third floor, back down to a long-abandoned storage room deep on the first floor.

Unused bookshelves and tables and chairs missing legs and arms lay quietly molding and gathering dust here, and it was unclear which designer with a brain defect had placed the cellar entrance in this room.

Much like the cellar in the Wood family castle, lifting a wooden board with an iron ring revealed a set of downward steps leading straight into a pitch-black underground space.

Lucius, walking ahead, handed the box to Craft and held a candelabra himself, carefully descending the uneven steps while holding the wall for support.

The cellar was only a little over two meters deep, with the entire flight of over a dozen steps visible within the candlelight; Lucius stopped at the last step, extending the candelabra into the cellar to illuminate the old wooden barrels and crates inside.

After waiting a moment to see that the candlelight remained bright, he waved to Craft, who was still adjusting the position of the eye lenses, signaling that he could come down.

After moving several empty wooden crates against the wall, a locked wooden door was revealed before the two of them.

It seemed the secret laboratory wasn't very secret; normally, no one would come here, and even if a leisurely visitor did, it would be hard to notice the drag marks of crates in this abandoned cellar.

With a "click," Lucius unlocked the padlock on the door, removed the chain and key, and put them in his pocket; Craft stepped back two paces, ready to act as a safety measure should anything unexpected happen.

As that wooden door, which looked like a flood or a fierce beast in Craft's eyes, opened, the mysterious laboratory was revealed to them without reservation.

It was probably only about ten square meters in size, with a ceiling even lower than the cellar, reachable by simply raising a hand; yet, in this storage-room-sized space, two tables, a wooden rack, and several small iron cages were crammed in, leaving no room for movement if the stools under the tables were pulled out, forcing everything to be stored in wall niches.

Craft held the doorframe at the entrance, ready at any moment to hold his breath and rush in to pull someone out.

Lucius placed the candelabra on the table and, with his hands covered in thick leather gloves, opened the wall niche; the niche, carved out between stone bricks, had three levels, with the bottom two already filled with ceramic jars, wooden boxes, metal containers, and various small tools.

The third level, left empty on its own, held only a small glass bottle, its color indistinguishable through the red lenses; the cylindrical body was neat and transparent, sealed with a wooden stopper.

The candlelight passed through the highly transparent bottle, casting clean light and shadow onto the walls and Craft's face, indicating that the quality of this glass bottle was clearly far superior to the mask's lenses.

Indeed, a shallow layer of opaque black liquid sat at the bottom, with a viscous and heavy texture.

Lucius held it up to his eyes for a careful observation, then picked up the candelabra again, tilting it slightly to let melted wax drip onto the bottle's mouth, rotating the bottle until it solidified into a ring.

He turned around, presenting the sealed mouth of the bottle toward Craft to demonstrate the excellent airtightness.

"This way, it's absolutely safe." He brought the bottle under the metal beak and made a sniffing gesture. "You see, there's no need to worry so much."

It did indeed seem to have no problems; Craft walked into the room, placed the box on the table, took the bottle from Lucius, and held it up to the lenses.

The liquid flowed slowly as the bottle swayed, giving an oily sensation; the surface was slightly convex without clinging to the walls, and when tilted, it formed small droplets resembling black mercury, quite similar to the ferrofluid toys the otherworldly soul had bought before.

Craft was certain he had never seen such a substance and didn't know how Professor Kalman's mentor had extracted it from the human body; surely they hadn't refined oil from corpses?

Watching the flowing liquid, curiosity arose, and he felt a desire to study it, wanting to find a few mice or any other experimental animals to test.

He wanted to see what effects contact with the black liquid would have and to understand what other manifestations the professor's term "inhibition" might entail.

It was not a shallow substance but the future of medicine, a black starry sky, an unexplored trench in the deep sea, stirring humanity's primal desire to explore and to know what it is and why.

These black liquids felt as though they shouldn't be confined in a bottle but should be used in large quantities, brought into contact with biological tissues, so that people could learn more about them.

He felt a sense of urgency, understanding why Lucius was so excited about continuing the experiments, because he now shared that same feeling and wanted to immediately formulate a plan to begin work.

He wanted to skip the experimental animal phase entirely and verify the mechanism of its action within the human body; he possessed more detailed and advanced examination methods and could do better than the professor and others, rather than being limited to counting the heartbeats and respiration of subjects after they fell asleep.

He even wanted to drink it directly, just like Professor Kalman and Lucius, taking just a tiny amount to experience the sensation personally.

That would surely be more direct and effective than any experiment, better satisfying the increasingly urgent desire to explore, the urge to touch it and understand it...

"Hmm?"

Craft made a sound of confusion, completely unable to understand how he could think such things; years of safety education had never faded from his mind, and countless typical negative examples were still vivid before his eyes.

Why did he really want to take a sip? Even if diluted, with Lucius and the professor having tried it first, he shouldn't have wanted to test this unknown liquid from some unknown part of the human body.

Quickly recalling how this thought had emerged, Craft soon found its root: that curiosity had appeared abruptly when he took the bottle, gradually grew during the careful observation, and then transformed into a desire to use it on animals.

Following this line of thought, within a short while, the notion of drinking the liquid himself was born.

It was persuading itself—the most active part of consciousness had reached a conclusion, bypassing complex logical thought, naturally shoving the answer into Kraft's brain without giving him a choice, and too disdainful to tell him where the answer came from.

Like an incomprehensible science problem from high school, with a "easy to prove" written boldly underneath, leaping in one step to the final data. And after the subconscious knew an answer it had never considered before, it naturally understood everything.

A chilling fear rose from the tailbone, crawling up the spine and spreading over the whole body, whether from the eerie answer or from fear of where the answer came from. Perhaps both.

It was persuading itself? In its own mind, using its own voice to disguise itself as One's own idea. What was it... a living thing?