Chapter 299

The surgery continued, the surgeon's psyche undergoing a sustained collapse.

The earthquake caused little tangible damage, but it worsened the already precarious sterile environment; no matter how hard he strained his imagination across two lifetimes, he could never have anticipated an earthquake mid-surgery or a celestial source of contamination.

Though he had promptly blocked falling dust with gauze, invisible particles now surely filled the air—he had no idea what concentration they had reached.

Now he could only pray to the Father, hoping He, seeing His faithful injured on His own ground, might lend a hand to lower the infection risk.

The tearless Kraft redoubled his speed, trying to resolve the problem faster.

But reality proved some things cannot be altered by will alone. Chiseling bone could not be sped beyond its limit—he still took slightly longer than planned to chisel a circle into the bone.

Then came the task of applying even pressure, like lifting the lid off a pressure cooker, to open this section and release internal pressure.

A gelatinous substance, vividly red in places and dull in others, swelled from the newly opened gap; its volume gave it the texture of egg whites barely setting in a pot, subtly undulating with pressure changes.

Kraft gently clamped a relatively firmer portion with a small rounded forceps, lifted it, and placed it on gauze in a tray—against the white background, the blood-streaked clot resembled a red parasitic organism with cilia.

Dai Wei finally broke. He turned his head away, unable to bear the sight any longer—he feared he might vomit. Choosing not to become a surgeon all those years ago had been right.

Though lacking a suction device, the cleanup proceeded no slower than using a spoon and chopsticks to clear a bowl of soup that had been overwatered, except one must avoid touching the bowl's bottom as much as possible.

One had to be grateful this was another case of epidural hemorrhage; otherwise, they would have had to cut open the dura mater, clear the hematoma, then suture the membrane back. It reminded him of the importance of preparing absorbable sutures for cases where suture removal was impossible.

After confirming no active bleeding, Kraft began closing the wound. After hesitation, he left in place a small silver tube, angled into the incision, secured with two extra loops of suture around the scalp.

It was meant to be part of new experimental equipment, replacing fragile glass tubes in areas where transparency wasn't required—but Kraft accidentally discovered that, aside from being too stiff, the tube was surprisingly suitable as a drain.

With such a large wound, oozing and leakage were inevitable; to prevent accumulation, a tube was necessary to guide the fluid out.

Normally, drains were made of rubber or some polymer material, connected to a negative-pressure bag—but under these conditions, they had to make do.

The result looked bizarre: the patient's head now resembled a baseball with a silver straw stuck into it.

Finally, he wrapped the patient's head in several layers of bandages—tight enough to hold, loose enough not to crush—and the tumultuous surgery finally ended.

The matter was far from over. The patient would lie in the clinic's isolated ward under special care for at least half a month. Cost-efficiency didn't matter—his survival was the only return worth counting.

Before pushing him out of the operating room, Kraft flipped open the patient's eyelids one last time: vertical nystagmus still flickered intermittently; his consciousness still drifted on the edge of an eternal sea of death, stirred by deep tides.

"What now?"

"Let him lie still, don't let him move around. Collect the fluid draining from the tube in a small bottle—I need to know the daily volume." Kraft knew all he could do here was done; the patient's fate now rested with himself and probability.

One had to admit doctors dabbled in mysticism—medicine had not yet exhausted the mysteries of life, and clinical experience always swung between "Can this even work?" and "Why won't this work?"

After placing the patient in his ward, he walked among the remaining unconscious patients. Those with possible concussion or mild cerebral contusion had begun to stir, gazing at unfamiliar ceilings, pondering the three great philosophical questions—they still had a long way to recover.

Those who had opted for conservative treatment due to smaller intracranial hematomas showed no deterioration, but neither did they improve.

If only he had antibiotics. At this moment, he longed desperately for antibiotics priced like ice pops—even an oral version, not intravenous, would do; then he could adopt a more aggressive approach.

Daydreaming was fine. Kraft immersed himself for a while in the fantasy of a moldy orange suddenly producing vast quantities of antimicrobial drugs, then reluctantly left the ward, escorting Brother Vatin upstairs.

In a relatively secure environment, they could finally discuss their observations on the current situation.

"This isn't an ordinary earthquake."

"Are you certain?" Merely entertaining the thought made the hairs on Vatin's neck stand up, as if the cold air from beneath the earth could slip through his collar, "Some unnatural force triggered the quake—but that's too…."

Too extravagant.

People could accept evil manifesting locally—haunting houses, blighting fields, polluting water, even invading churches—that was already extraordinary.

To reach the scale of shaking an entire city, triggering mass panic—this was unheard of, unseen. Especially since this city was Dunling, the kingdom's spiritual center.

"And why today? Why precisely on the day we left the city?"

Though it sounded like excessive self-importance, the timing was too perfect: all those who knew of the recent anomalies were outside the city, and an earthquake struck within.

Could it be that they were so significant that the force capable of shaking the earth took notice—waiting until these insignificant creatures, less than insects to it, had departed before acting?

"Not necessarily." Kraft had entertained that thought too, but quickly found another explanation: "Our departure time wasn't ours to choose."

"What do you mean?" The monk reviewed every decision from dawn, when the sky cleared, to inviting Kraft to leave—he was certain every choice had been entirely voluntary, with no external influence on his will.

"The weather decided it. We had long wanted to visit Green, so we would leave the moment the weather cleared—this wasn't random."

Green's earlier description of heavy rain on the other side of the dream had provided insight. From the perspective of anomalous studies, weather shifts in the surface world should also reflect in the depths, prompting deep entities to act. This loose logic held.

"Then why would rain cause an earthquake?" That was another question.

"Groundwater levels?"

Elsewhere, surface water might take time to seep underground. But in Dunling, where the land was crisscrossed by dense drainage systems, the lag between rainfall and groundwater fluctuation was drastically reduced.

Considering the sewers were directional, the resulting water-level changes likely weren't uniform—they were sharp, localized surges in groundwater, stimulating entities dependent on water.

"I need to return to that hall as soon as possible."

The matter wasn't without direction. If anywhere held the answer, it was surely that buried hall, beneath the hexagonal well that swallowed rivers.