Chapter 317: The Dark Side

No warning, no sense of danger, as if turbulence surged into a pool of still water, the "fingertip" touched an approaching wave.

As before, using a void-like substance as a medium, the speed appeared gentle and slow yet arrived in an instant, invading the range of perception within the time it took for a single-threaded thought process to complete one cycle.

That wave also spread through contact into the mental senses, diffusing unimpeded through the undifferentiated medium.

He felt as though he held a twisting tuning fork, waves flowing endlessly from it, spreading through the imagined limbs and rapidly approaching the physical body.

It was a wave, an order, a spell cast forth.

The mental organ recoiled as if struck by electricity, curling away. This was not enough; Kraft dragged his body and ran again, turning at the next fork to increase the distance from Green.

This move was correct; the contact was severed.

The incoming wave did not immediately subside; like true water ripples, it spread through the mental form, its remaining force closing to within less than two arm's lengths, almost brushing his back.

Kraft rushed past another intersection, braked sharply, lightened his steps to turn back, slipped under the rock wall behind the corner, hid his body in an irregular depression, and pressed tight against the smooth, damp, cold surface.

A sound like galloping horses approached, shot straight through the fork, quickly grew faint, and vanished.

The mental senses remained curled; consciousness counted the passing time in the darkness.

【One thousand and one, one thousand and two, one thousand and three...】

By silently counting four-digit numbers, he could keep the rhythm at a fairly uniform half-second, more reliable than counting via a racing heart and rapid breathing.

At the thirty-fifth count, the sound of bony hooves striking rock rang out without warning, lingered nearby, then faded and vanished again.

Kraft slowly exhaled the breath he had been holding, relieved he had taken precautions and avoided this return strike.

That thing was as intelligent as imagined; possessing wisdom, it clearly also exhibited anthropomorphic thought.

"I didn't know deep-sea creatures even had brain tissue." He had some guesses but could not confirm them yet. "Best if it isn't so."

Only the gurgling sound of liquid flowing remained in the mist, like a severed artery pumping blood under the squeeze of a giant heart; a faint metallic rust scent seemed permanently stuck around his mouth and nose, lingering without dispersing.

His hand rested on the pommel of the sword; the rounded, solid touch provided false stability, but he soon realized it was merely an illusion.

There was no chance to enter the range where the weapon in his hand could be effective.

The much-hoped-for "Sword in the Stone" also required a clear target location to have meaning, and now a brief mental contact could be fatal, making it completely impossible to locate the opponent's body.

It was like holding an unmatched sharp dagger, groping in the darkness for an enemy, but the opponent was a blue-ringed octopus; the moment one touched its tentacles, death could follow.

Thoughts spun uselessly in a contradictory dead loop, with no solution at hand. A deeper understanding and more clever application had created a massive technological gap; in the face of such disparity, the mental form had become a medium for transmitting fatal attacks.

Kraft froze in place for a while, like a student encountering a knowledge blind spot in an exam, making a desperate struggle, hoping that prolonging thought would create some inspirational miracle. But the result would mostly prove that this had no meaning other than wasting time and self-anesthetizing.

Physical strength did not recover with the cessation of movement; instead, it was replaced by the damp cold gradually seeping in, the body pleading for a heat source.

Lighting an open flame was not a good idea; that thing might still be nearby.

【I knew I would regret this.】

Useless thoughts turning to regret was an inevitable outcome; lamenting the one step not taken back then, which led to the current predicament. Perhaps if the research had been more radical, what could be done now would be completely different.

He knew too little about this wave; aside from knowing it was the code used by Moon Corpse to control biological tissue, there was no further research, let alone finding a method to counter it.

The only thing truly recorded was the wave, temporarily named "Pacemaker," induced in samples using digitalis.

What was needed now was not experimental data or rough understanding, but applied transformation.

The price of insufficiently radical research was that he needed to use some radical means to solve real-world problems.

Consciousness jumped between various possibilities; he even considered paying the price of sustaining some damage to rush into a range capable of tearing the opponent's layers, but theoretical knowledge told him that was impossible.

That was not something subjective will could achieve by overcoming pain. Even if only a part of the body was lightly brushed, the out-of-control osteogenic effect would deplete blood calcium in a short time; the lack of key substances would completely strip the muscles of their ability to move.

He needed a means similar to the opponent's: projecting an unexpected wave through mental contact directly onto its physical body.

Did he have such a thing?

It seemed not; after all, when the extraordinary human tissue manipulation abilities of deep-sea creatures were discovered, the first reaction of any rational person should have been their medical value, not their use as lethal force.

After all, destruction was like a child knocking over building blocks; there were a thousand or ten thousand simple ways. Repair was far more difficult and far more precious.

He had indeed never imagined using his research in the opposite field, which caused the current predicament.

But when his rapidly spinning mind was directed this way, it sensitively found a small breakthrough previously undiscovered and issued a challenge.

【Is there really none?】

The herb that saved the heart was once a vivid poison before being properly compounded.

And did the program used to counteract digitalis overdose have another side?

An extremely vicious and deadly other side.

While the mind was still spinning, the knowledge in his brain that never faded burst forth from that gap, illuminating areas previously avoided intentionally or unintentionally, exposing dark and twisted things without concealment.

The mechanism of digitalis is to inhibit the sodium-potassium pump on myocardial cell membranes; intracellular sodium concentration increases, then more calcium is introduced into the cell via the sodium-calcium exchanger, ultimately enhancing myocardial contraction, and in overdose causing rapid and disordered contraction, i. e., ventricular fibrillation.

The wave temporarily named "Pacemaker" could quickly relieve the ventricular fibrillation caused by digitalis, which meant it could precisely break one link in this chain of interlocking rings.

Either enhance the activity of the sodium-potassium pump or block the sodium-calcium exchange. It must have rapidly altered the distribution of electrolytes inside and outside the cells through some channel—in a direction exactly opposite to digitalis.

The sodium-potassium pump and sodium-calcium exchange exist widely in various tissues including myocardium, vascular smooth muscle, the nervous system, and renal tubules, governing not only the heart muscle but also blood pressure, water-electrolyte balance, and neuroelectrophysiology.

If this power were unleashed without restriction, pushing electrolytes to another chaotic extreme, could the "Pacemaker" used to relieve digitalis poisoning also become a deadly curse no less lethal?

"Let us try..."