Chapter 30: Chapter Twenty-Eight: Nothing Today

In the following days, Kraft returned to the life he had loved as a student.

Every morning, as a faint salty mist drifted through the air, he dragged himself slowly out of bed when the academy’s bell tower chimed six times.

He performed morning exercises in the inn’s backyard with a two-handed sword—activities unsuitable for casual onlookers—to maintain his physical fitness. Though his future path diverged sharply from head-splitting, staying in good health remained necessary—at least to avoid sudden death.

After breaking a light sweat, roughly half an hour had passed; he could then go downstairs to the inn’s front desk and order a grilled fish, accompanied by bread, for breakfast.

As a young man with high physical activity, Kraft typically needed double the portion to feel full—a hunger only a soul from another world might experience at a buffet.

After breakfast, he returned to his room to don the academy’s black robe, covering his sword with the hem, pinning the instructor’s badge to the left collar, checking the lesson plan he had organized the night before, and slipping it between books to carry to class.

At such moments, he often missed the convenience of PowerPoint; the soul from another world had grown up in an era of rapid electronic development: as a child, he still saw vast blackboards covered in handwritten notes, but by adolescence, those had been replaced by whiteboards, and by university, only PowerPoint remained.

Most people, including himself, had long lost the ability to write on vertical surfaces. Now he had to pick up chalk and write on painted wooden boards.

Fortunately, his years of sword training had given him strong arm strength; otherwise, the daily task of drawing and explaining on the board would have been nearly impossible.

Even so, after a half-morning lecture, he felt a dull ache on the outer side of his elbow—the same symptom his teachers in the other world often suffered, especially math instructors who loved writing proofs on blackboards, filling several boards in a single class.

Now he realized it was probably lateral epicondylitis, commonly called tennis elbow. With prolonged joint strain, if he didn’t pay attention, inheriting this condition was inevitable.

Unlike lecturers in other academies who rarely moved, Kraft could not adapt to explanations without diagrams. Amidst the swirling chalk dust, accompanied by coughs and sneezes, he repeatedly reproduced anatomical drawings on the painted boards.

To mark key identification points, he had to break and sharpen his chalk before class to write fine, clear characters.

Part of the soul from another world delighted in this—he had rediscovered his purpose here.

With the passage of time, he had lost the modern drugs that once dominated half the textbooks; his methods now consisted only of a few manual reductions and physical examinations, while anesthesia, hemostasis, and sterility required for surgery were utterly out of reach.

The complex biochemical mechanisms he had memorized through all-night study now seemed like clownish nonsense, and he was like a dead phone—no matter how many skills he possessed, without modern societal support, he could only function as a brick.

Yet it was the medical students who inspired him.

Kraft’s meticulously prepared lectures were met with overwhelming enthusiasm. His classrooms were packed with black-robed listeners who had come specifically to hear him, some even wearing instructor badges on their collars.

The very next day, a student voluntarily brought several new painted boards, hoping Kraft would write on them fully before replacing them, rather than erasing and rewriting—so absent classmates might still have a chance to learn.

The student was somewhat short, and with his friend, they carried the board into the classroom, making the request with obvious embarrassment.

For the first time, Kraft directly perceived the value of his work; he felt he might truly have a chance to push medicine forward, even slightly, within the shackles of this era.

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

Thus, Kraft added a session of Q&A after each lecture. Students quickly grew comfortable with this knowledgeable and approachable instructor.

In close contact, Kraft found few of them were near his own age; most were two or three years older, some nearly thirty, and nearly all unmarried.

Most came from small merchant or scholarly families; a few from fallen urban noble households, and none were eldest sons.

Within the academy, constrained by current medical standards, the medical college was considered an unpopular choice. Those with better options tended to choose theology or law; the secondary preference was humanities.

There was no such thing as graduation or employment rates in this era. Forget about passing exams with ease—whether there even were final exams was questionable.

The curriculum was purely casual; examinations existed only as the final bachelor’s assessment. Fail, and you simply continued studying until you passed. Many students lacking talent might spend most of their youth here.

Given the abysmal gender ratio in all schools, and the term “bachelor” being linked to unmarried men, sweet campus romance was a dream even in sleep.

Oh, speaking of which, Kraft suddenly remembered he himself had no romantic experience—he had no right to pity them.

After class, everyone happily went to the tavern beside the academy for lunch—still the classic grilled fish, accompanied by lettuce, onions, and legumes.

Professor Karlman had not lied; this tavern was wildly popular among students. The only drawback was that students from other academies were also present, preventing open discussion of academic topics that might cause misunderstanding.

After lunch, Kraft would go to the professor’s room for a nap. Lecturers had no dedicated offices, but Lu Xiusi willingly lent him temporary use of the professor’s space, while Kraft performed a brief daily check-up on Lu Xiusi.

Naturally, there were no abnormalities. Far from the black fluid and related items, Lu Xiusi’s interest in experimentation seemed to have diminished; he no longer frequently mentioned the black fluid—perhaps it was just an illusion.

After his nap, Kraft began his daily copying work.

The main content consisted of professional knowledge that was currently useless. After consideration, Kraft decided to record everything he had learned on paper and seal it away.

Even if he never lived to see the day, he could donate it to a university or some other institution capable of preservation, waiting until technology advanced enough to use it.

He could write many copies; at least some would survive in history. Then, the medical development of this world could avoid countless detours and save many lives.

For this, he diverted part of the money his grandfather had set aside for buying property, spending his own funds to purchase higher-quality paper and ink.

Kraft abandoned his favorite cursive and Gothic scripts, discarded all embellishments and ligatures, and began copying word by word in the most rigid, clear handwriting.

This was no easy task. Though he could clearly recall every textbook he had studied, the localization process still made his progress painfully slow.

The goal of this work was to transmit information as accurately as possible to people many years in the future; he could not retain vague contemporary terms, allow excessive transliterations, or avoid creating new words based on local vocabulary and affixes.

Every proper noun, upon first appearance, had to be explained—but those explanations contained other proper nouns, which in turn introduced more concepts and references. For someone with a photographic memory, this was immense torment.

Yet Kraft’s proficiency in Nosian was poor; he had to ask Lu Xiusi to borrow a specialized dictionary from the Wenxue Academy, then teach himself word formation rules and eliminate spelling redundancies.

He soon discovered that this dictionary, painstakingly borrowed and touted as the most comprehensive, contained contradictions and errors of its own.

Combined with all these factors, Kraft’s progress was less than one-tenth of his initial estimate; to this day, he remained stuck in the first few chapters of his first-year textbooks: *Systematic Anatomy* and *Regional Anatomy*.

This was only because his lecture preparation overlapped with his copying work, saving him considerable time; otherwise, he suspected he’d still be flipping through dictionaries.

When he thought of the hundreds of thousands—or even millions—of characters awaiting translation and illustration, this crushing despair finally broke a man who had survived even anomalous phenomena.

At the sound of the bell at two in the afternoon, Kraft rose from his desk, took out paper and pen, and began today’s transcription.

Manuscripts filled with writing lay open nearby to dry; sunlight streamed through the window, illuminating the papers on his desk, the ink bottle’s shadow stretching longer as time passed, while occasional student voices drifted in from outside.

He was lost in his own world, momentarily forgetting his transmigration—as if his soul, devoted solely to study, sat in an afternoon demonstration room, facing freshly made notes that would smudge if touched by a careless hand.

Writing gave him a sense of absorption; only when the light dimmed did he snap back to reality—the bell tower had just chimed its sixth afternoon strike.

Kraft rose, gathered his things, neatly stacked his day’s work, and carried his books alone back to the inn, where he ate cod soup and bread alone, then returned to his room alone to light a candle.

He spread out brittle, low-quality paper—used for unimportant daily notes, pressed from coarse fibers, which, over time, would snap like nori with a crisp crack.

But it was perfect here. Before exhaustion overtook him, he wrote his lesson plan for tomorrow, sketching the diagrams he would draw on the brittle paper.

After the final evening bell, to ensure energy for tomorrow, Kraft blew out the candle, ending his repetitive yet fulfilling day.

This was good enough. Lying in bed, Kraft felt, for the first time in a long while, peace in the darkness. He was content to live this life—lecturer to professor, perhaps even renowned, leaving books for posterity.

As for the black fluid, the anomalous phenomena—he wished never to touch them again. When Professor Karlman returned, he could warn him to stay far from that thing—and help him compile books instead.