[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"origin-notes-on-kraft-anomalous-studies":3,"chapter-notes-on-kraft-anomalous-studies-notes-on-kraft-anomalous-studies-chapter-3":6},{"origin":4,"title":5},"chinese","Notes on Kraft Anomalous Studies",{"chapter":7,"nextChapterSlug":19,"prevChapterSlug":20,"totalChapters":21,"novelImage":22},{"id":8,"novel_id":9,"title":10,"slug":11,"index":12,"content":13,"wordcount":14,"created_at":15,"updated_at":15,"volume":16,"translator":17,"content_hash":18},2283481,4467,"Chapter 3: It","notes-on-kraft-anomalous-studies-chapter-3",3,"\u003Cp>Kraft’s grandfather, the first noble of this family, was named Mark Wood, or could be called Old Wood.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Of course, when Old Wood was as young as Kraft is now, he didn’t yet have this surname—he was just a strong country lad whose main job was smashing skulls on the battlefield.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Thanks to his extraordinary talent, Old Wood, despite having no formal training, still demonstrated exceptional skill; while others struggled to crack one skull, he could smash four or five without even blinking.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Due to such outstanding performance, he gradually progressed from fighting in just trousers to wearing leather armor, and eventually earned the honor of donning full plate armor and wielding a two-handed sword to smash skulls. Whenever recalling these glorious days, Old Wood would excitedly slap his knees.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>As in most stories, after decades of military service, Old Wood gained the favor of a powerful figure, receiving the title of baron and a modest estate in his hometown.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Having achieved fame and fortune, yet plagued by recurring knee injuries, he chose to return to Wood Village and adopted the village’s name as his family surname, beginning construction of his family’s castle on the small hill behind the town.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>It seemed as if Old Wood’s first half-life had exhausted the family’s entire fortune: within thirty years of the castle’s gradual construction, his wife succumbed to plague despite the priest’s prayers; then his son, Young Wood, died in battle, and Kraft’s mother perished in childbirth.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The entire direct lineage was reduced to Old Wood himself and his grandson, Kraft Wood; the newly built castle was shrouded in invisible gloom, its walls permeated by a cursed, icy atmosphere.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Perhaps even the Church’s so-called God deemed such fate too cruel for Old Wood—Kraft did not suffer the same misfortunes.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>On the contrary, he grew up healthy within the castle’s stone walls until age ten, never exposed to danger—not even his physical education swords were sharpened (this was already Old Wood’s maximum safety measure).\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>With his hair now completely white, Old Wood sighed deeply and resolved to teach his grandson skills beyond swinging two-handed swords—something more than just skull-smashing.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Thus, the scholar Anderson was personally summoned by Old Wood from Winden Harbor Academy to teach Kraft reading and writing in the local language, along with calligraphy, poetry, and other subjects Old Wood deemed more “refined.”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>It proved to be a wise choice: Kraft transformed from a boy obsessed with replicating his grandfather’s glory days into one who could sit quietly in the study—at least after Old Wood employed some traditional, effective persuasion.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>After finding a new direction for Kraft, Old Wood could finally relax and devote himself to his personal interests, enjoying his retirement.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>This hobby was quite unusual—it only began to emerge after the wars ended, growing from an extremely niche pursuit to a still-limited subculture, popular mainly among young, educated nobles and some scholars.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Formerly called occultism, now known as anomalous phenomena; the Church branded it heresy, while materialist scholars generally regarded it as undiscovered natural principles.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Simply put, it encompassed all sorts of strange, uncommon, unexplainable things—including, but not limited to, hands bursting into flame or glowing.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Logically, this hobby’s audience should have had zero overlap with Old Wood, a semi-literate veteran skull-smasher.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>But while others merely heard rumors, Old Wood had experienced it firsthand: one night, a group of black-robed mystics with fire and light in their hands and painted faces suddenly appeared, coating their weapons with flame and radiance; Old Wood’s skull-smashing team suffered heavy casualties before finally defeating them, and he himself was injured on the knee.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>According to his own account, he was kicked in the knee by one of them, and the entire knee guard twisted and shattered like a kicked private part, embedding a small metal shard deep inside.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>As a pragmatist, Old Wood didn’t buy the chaplain’s explanation that these were mere pagan tricks. Though he burned the corpses and belongings as the chaplain instructed, his curiosity and longing could not be burned away.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>From collecting charms in his youth to filling the entire castle with strange artifacts, Old Wood’s fascination with unknown forces never waned; after losing so many family members, he plunged headlong into collecting them, perhaps as a form of escapism.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>As for Teacher Anderson, he was an even more dedicated enthusiast of anomalous phenomena—he had been a well-known researcher of such matters at Winden Harbor Academy, but suffered from a lack of like-minded companions due to the field’s obscurity.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>He and Old Wood hit it off instantly—using the terminology of the other world, it was like Bo Ya meeting Zhong Ziqi, a soulful connection of mountain and stream; they forged a friendship transcending age, education, and social status.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>With Anderson’s help, Old Wood’s collection expanded from artifacts to forbidden and ancient books; the secret library’s holdings likely surpassed ordinary heretical levels, reaching a point where even the Church’s Inquisition would take notice.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>But neither Wood Village nor Winden Harbor could be called anything but rural; the Church’s control over this entire region was limited to Winden Harbor’s chapel and the seagull-infested square out front—keeping the bird droppings cleaned up was already considered diligent by local standards.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>As long as no one showed up preaching about flying octopus-faced deities, even heretics feeding seagulls on the square went unchallenged. The previous Flame-Handed Man likely came here for precisely this reason.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Considering there was no church in town, Old Wood could freely carry two stone-carved eyeball charms as fidget objects, and people would even praise their bold design, declaring them worthy of Lord Wood’s use.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Upon hearing that a legendary “spellcaster” had arrived in Winden Harbor, Kraft—who had been planning a trip there anyway—was given a long list of cryptic instructions and set off on the fastest horse in town, utterly bewildered.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Such things had happened before, ever since childhood; Kraft, always eager to please his grandfather, wandered leisurely along the way, and upon learning the Flame-Handed Man’s performance had ended in disaster, he felt unexpected delight—it would save him trouble.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>But as the saying goes, since he’d come this far, he ought to bring back something for his grandfather. After visiting a former colleague of Anderson’s, he learned a village had unearthed “heretical artifacts”; eager to find something to bring back, the two set off through a blizzard—too late, and the villagers might have handed the object over to the Church for “purification.”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Unfortunately, upon arrival, they realized things weren’t as they’d imagined: the object now lay in an abandoned wheat field outside the village, with the exposed portion standing a full person’s height—a dark, patterned stone obelisk.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>It was certainly strange, but clearly too large to carry in hand, and far beyond what two men and two horses could manage. Helplessly, Kraft decided to send his cousin back with a letter, hoping he could arrange a freight cart from Winden Harbor on the way.\u003C\u002Fp>",1154,"2026-06-20T02:15:55.761Z",1,"Qwen3-Next 80B","6b592d46d259be3a7f9e4478564c014df692875c7bc13ed328c3c1d6f16161cf","notes-on-kraft-anomalous-studies-chapter-4","notes-on-kraft-anomalous-studies-chapter-2",406,"https:\u002F\u002Fnovelzhen.com\u002Fimages\u002Fcovers\u002Fnotes-on-kraft-anomalous-studies-cover.jpg"]