Chapter 30: Nothing Happens Today

Over the next few days, Lu Xiusi felt as though he had returned to his favorite student life.

Every morning, when the thin, slightly salty mist hung in the air and the college bell tower chimed six times nearby, he would slowly climb out of bed.

He would take up his two-handed sword and perform some morning exercises in the inn's backyard, unsuitable for idlers to approach, to maintain his physical fitness. Although his future direction was far from bashing heads, maintaining good health was still necessary, at least to prevent sudden death.

After breaking a light sweat, about half an hour would have passed; at this point, he could go to the counter on the first floor of the inn to order a grilled fish, paired with bread, to complete today's breakfast.

As a young man with considerable physical exertion, Lu Xiusi generally had to consume double portions to fill himself. Such a good appetite was something souls from other worlds usually only had when eating buffets.

After finishing breakfast, he needed to return to his room to change into the college's black robe, cover his sword with the hem, pin the lecturer's badge on the left collar, check the lesson plans he had organized the night before, tuck them into his books, and head to the college to teach the students.

At this time, he would always miss the convenience of PPTs. Souls from other worlds were born in an era of rapid electronic product development; when they were young, they could still see large areas of blackboard handwriting, but as they grew slightly older, it was replaced by electronic whiteboards, and by university lectures, only PPTs remained.

Including himself, most people had long lost the ability to write on vertical walls. He never expected that now he would have to hold a piece of lime and write on a painted wooden board.

Fortunately, someone who had practiced swordsmanship since childhood had good arm strength; otherwise, the task of drawing and explaining diagrams on the blackboard every day would be nearly impossible.

Even so, after a large morning lecture, he would feel a dull pain on the outer side of his elbow joint. That was a common symptom among teachers in his other world, especially math teachers who liked to write proofs on the blackboard; they would write on several blackboards within a single class.

Thinking about it now, it was probably lateral epicondylitis, commonly known as tennis elbow. Under long-term strain on the elbow joint, if he wasn't careful, inheriting this tradition was only a matter of time.

Unlike lecturers in other colleges who rarely used their hands, Lu Xiusi could not adapt to explanations without diagrams. Amidst the rustling, falling lime dust, accompanied by coughs and sneezes, he reproduced diagram after diagram of anatomy onto the painted boards.

To mark key points for identification, he needed to smash and sharpen the lime blocks before class to write fine, clear characters.

Part of the soul from another world found this endlessly enjoyable; here, he had rediscovered his sense of purpose.

With the changing of eras, he had lost the modern medicines that once occupied half the bookshelves; his means were reduced to a few techniques for reduction, physical examinations, and as for anesthesia, hemostasis, and sterility required for surgery, those were out of the question.

The complex biochemical mechanisms he had memorized all night long were like a clown here, and he was like a phone with no battery; even with a thousand skills, without the support of modern society, he could only be used as a brick.

Instead, it was the medical students who encouraged him.

Lu Xiusi's carefully prepared lectures were greatly welcomed by the students. The classroom, packed to capacity, was filled with people in black robes who had come to listen out of admiration, some even wearing badges on their collars.

On the second day, someone voluntarily brought several new painted boards, hoping that after Lu Xiusi filled them, he would simply replace them with new ones without erasing and rewriting, giving students who couldn't attend a chance to learn.

It was a somewhat short student who, along with his friend, carried the painted boards to the classroom and made the request in a rather embarrassed tone.

This was the first time Lu Xiusi intuitively realized the value of everything he was doing, feeling that he might truly have a chance to push the medical profession forward a step within the shackles of this era.

He readily accepted this request and announced to the entire class that any questions or suggestions could be raised at any time.

Thus, Lu Xiusi added a Q&A session after his classes. The students quickly got along with this knowledgeable and easygoing lecturer.

In close contact, Lu Xiusi found that few were close to his own age; most were two or three years older than him, some even nearly thirty, and most were unmarried.

The majority came from families of small merchants or scholars, with a few from declining urban minor noble families, and none were the eldest sons.

Within the college, limited by the current medical level, the medical school could be categorized as an option that was not very well regarded. Those with better conditions tended to choose theology or law as their direction, with history and literature colleges as the second choice.

In this day and age, there was no such thing as graduation rates or employment rates. Forget about scraping by at the final exam; whether there even was a final exam was questionable.

The courses were simply characterized by their casualness; the only exam was the bachelor's final assessment. If you failed, you continued studying until you passed. Many students with less talent might spend most of their youth in the college.

Given that the gender ratio in all current schools was hard to describe, the association of the term "bachelor" with bachelors was indeed not without reason; sweet campus romance didn't even exist in dreams.

Oh, speaking of which, Lu Xiusi suddenly remembered that he himself had no romantic experience and was completely unqualified to sympathize with them.

After finishing teaching, everyone happily went to the tavern next to the college to solve lunch, which was still the classic grilled fish, paired with some lettuce, onions, and beans.

Professor Kalman's words were true; this tavern was extremely popular among students. The only drawback was that students from other colleges were also present, so they couldn't talk freely about academic issues that might cause misunderstandings.

After lunch dispersed, Lu Xiusi would go to the professor's room for a nap. Lecturers did not have dedicated offices in the college, but Lu Xiusi was happy to temporarily open up the professor's domain to him, while also performing a simple check-up for Lu Xiusi there every day.

The result was naturally nothing abnormal. After being far away from the Black Liquid and related items, Lu Xiusi's interest in conducting experiments seemed to have decreased; he no longer mentioned the Black Liquid frequently, though he didn't know if that was an illusion.

After his nap, Lu Xiusi would begin his daily transcription work.

The main content was professional knowledge that was currently utterly useless. After consideration, Lu Xiusi still decided to record everything he had learned onto paper and seal it away.

Even if he never saw that day in his lifetime, he could donate it to a university or some other institution capable of preservation, waiting quietly for the technical level to develop enough to use it.

He could write many copies; at least some would be preserved in history. By then, the medical development of this world could avoid many detours and sacrifice fewer lives.

For this, he diverted some of the money his grandfather had used to buy property for him to purchase higher-quality paper and ink at his own expense.

Lu Xiusi abandoned his favorite cursive and Gothic styles, discarded all embellishments and ligatures, and began copying word by word in the most rigid, clear font.

This was not an easy task. Although he could clearly recall every textbook he had studied, the localization work of translation still made his progress speed worrying.

The purpose of this work was to transmit information as precisely as possible to people many years later; one could not use some semantically ambiguous vocabulary of the current era unchanged, transliteration was not allowed to be excessive, and new words had to be created based on local vocabulary and affixes.

All proper nouns had to be explained upon their first appearance, but the explanations contained other proper nouns, which in turn pulled out more concepts and citations. This was also a huge torment for a brain-upgraded person with photographic memory.

However, Lu Xiusi's proficiency in the Norse language was not high; he had to ask Lu Xiusi to borrow professional dictionaries from the College of History and Literature, teaching himself word formation rules and eliminating spelling duplicates.

Then he discovered that this dictionary, which had been borrowed after much trouble and claimed to be the most complete, itself contained contradictory errors.

Various factors combined directly caused Lu Xiusi's progress to be less than one-tenth of what he had expected when he first started writing; to this day, he was still stuck in the first few chapters of the freshman "Systematic Anatomy" and "Regional Anatomy," unable to extricate himself.

This was only because his lesson preparation content overlapped with the transcription content, saving a lot of time; otherwise, he estimated he would still be flipping through dictionaries.

Thinking further ahead, with hundreds of millions of words of books waiting for him to translate and illustrate word by word, this sense of collapse successfully crushed the man who hadn't even defeated the Anomalies.

When the bell chimed at two in the afternoon, Lu Xiusi climbed up from the desk, took out paper and pen, and began today's transcription.

The manuscript filled with handwriting lay open beside him to dry the ink; sunlight streamed through the window, sprinkling over the table full of papers, while the shadow of the ink bottle shifted and lengthened with time, and occasionally the sounds of students' conversations came from outside.

He was immersed in his own world; in a trance, it seemed the transmigration had never happened, and a soul devoted solely to his studies was sitting in the afternoon demonstration classroom, with freshly made notes before him that would blur into a mess if accidentally smudged by hand.

Writing gave him a sense of self-forgetfulness until the light dimmed; waking up from this state, the bell tower had already completed its sixth chime of the afternoon.

Lu Xiusi stood up, packed his things, neatly stacked the day's achievements, returned to the inn alone with his books under his arm, enjoyed a codfish soup and bread alone, and then returned to his room alone to light a candle.

He unfolded the brittle paper of not very good quality, paper used for less important daily records, pressed from rough fibers; if left too long, it would snap with a "crack" like seaweed snacks.

But it was perfect for this. Before he fell asleep, he needed to write the lesson plan for tomorrow's class and sketch the diagrams to be drawn on the brittle paper.

After the final bell rang at night, to ensure energy for tomorrow, Lu Xiusi blew out the candle, ending his repetitive yet fulfilling day.

This was good enough. Lu Xiusi lay in bed, feeling a long-lost peace in the darkness. He was willing to spend his life just like that, from lecturer to professor, and if possible, become famous far and wide, passing his books down to future generations.

As for the Black Liquid or the Anomalies, it was best never, ever to touch them. When Professor Kalman returned, admonishing him to stay far away from that thing and coming to help him compile books would be quite good.