Chapter 319: Professor

Kraft leapt swiftly from his hiding place and rushed toward the spot where the heavy body had fallen.

It was impossible to know what effect the "incantation" had produced, but it was certain that retaliation would not be a concern for at least a short while.

He breached that spirit's domain and felt it plunged into utter chaos, flailing blindly like a drowning creature, a flock without a shepherd, held together only by collective unconsciousness.

Though it remained vast enough to inspire dread—an invisible leviathan of void—the malevolent will that controlled it had vanished, shattered by the disorder of its physical form.

Even so, it could not yet be rashly declared dead.

This was the most dangerous opponent Kraft had ever known; until he saw its true form and inflicted an absolutely fatal macroscopic wound, his heart could never rest.

Clearly, he was not the only one thinking so—the clanging of metal followed immediately, advancing without hesitation in the same direction, their heavy and coarse breaths of survival audible through the wall.

Finally, at the far end of a corridor, they saw each other again—and saw that "thing."

……

……

Consciousness was rising—or sinking; in truth, you could no longer tell the difference.

Previous concepts of direction had long since flattened and cramped, like flattened memories of the past, gradually fading. These concepts still lingered in the mind, but among the mountain of new papers, a single fluttering old draft was hardly noticed.

New senses brought new directions, like a slug crawling through mud discovering a climbing pea vine.

Though consciousness could not yet fully comprehend that dimension, body and spirit had already begun moving along that nonexistent direction—movement unbound by limb flexion.

You temporarily called it "floating up" and "sinking down," knowing it had nothing to do with up or down; it was merely the crude, natural inadequacy of lower senses, lacking proper referents, forcing you to use this crude method to explain to them.

The difficulty, needless to say, was like making a blind man discern colors or a deaf man understand music—information twisted and warped beyond recognition in transmission, more formless than the rotting corpse of the worst novice's dissection.

Fortunately, you no longer had to be troubled by this problem, allowing you to devote more energy to more important matters.

Academic research.

From some point in memory, inspiration surged uncontrollably—the towering, infinitely tall and wide wall that had blocked generations of scholars collapsed with a single push.

Before you, clarity burst forth; moonlight pierced the mist of ignorance, illuminating sights never before seen.

You looked down upon the riddles that had haunted half your life as if gazing at a flat blueprint. Those religious folk loved to sanctify them, calling them the greatest masterpiece of the Heavenly Father, perfect and flawless.

But you knew their crude design caused countless bizarre malfunctions during operation, frequently triggering irreversible cascading errors that cut short its intended decades-long runtime.

A shabby cage imprisoned souls in narrow cells, subjecting them to terrible torment.

This torment would continue endlessly, replayed across generation after generation of the pitiful race, until, after countless millennia, someone finally cracked the bottomless riddle called life—or never would.

The more you understood, the more clearly you realized this could not be solved by the childish academic games of the past. A child could disassemble a beetle a hundred or a thousand times, yet never grasp how it truly functioned.

Individual life spans meant nothing before this riddle, let alone those religious folk who always obstructed great endeavors.

Yes, those people were smarter than you imagined—they took some time to uncover your feigned death. Not surprising; you never expected those hastily acquired corpses to deceive them for long. Thanks to the Church's ban, even sourcing bodies was hard enough, let alone finding ones matching exact size and gender.

What surprised you slightly was their subsequent sharpness. But only slightly—perhaps Karlman had done something. Your long-separated disciple had ultimately worn away his former resolve in some remote place, losing the will to risk himself for the greater good.

When he drew that short blade, carved from black stone, to stop you, you were genuinely surprised. But clearly, he could not understand why you could see what lay behind him.

Since he would do that, it was natural he had held other thoughts earlier; fortunately, there would be no second thought between you now.

You had no choice but to discard some unimportant people, sending them to distract the trackers following your trail. After all, those fools who glimpsed only superficial surface and became arrogant were worse than Karlman—at least he understood what your true cause was.

Cause.

You chewed on the word, savoring its flavor, deeper and more complex than mere depth. It had threaded through the life of an ordinary man—from babbling infancy to shouldering the academy's burden, to finally halting before that same towering wall, unable to advance a step further, like every predecessor before you.

Now, you had taken the first step in the correct direction—the first step toward erasing the very concept of disease.

Of course, one person's strength was far from enough—even adding Karlman, all your followers, and every pioneer on this path was still insufficient.

More was needed—countless individuals, united as one—to breach that boundary, return to the source of this power, return to its side, the ever-lingering, ever-yearned-for…

【Moonlight】

You didn't know why you suddenly thought so much—consciousness felt tossed into a vast gallery, browsing a solo exhibition centered on yourself, each later painting stranger and more surreal, painted in mesmerizing, hallucinatory hues.

Disciples, colleagues, apprentices, followers, and several unfamiliar faces walked beside you, heads bowed in silence.

They shouldn't have been here—you instinctively felt this space belonged solely to you—but somehow, nothing felt wrong. With every step you took, they matched it exactly, moving in impossible harmony, as if puppets pulled by the same thread.

You continued forward, astonished to feel the distinct feedback of each person's shoes pressing into the thick carpet—your vision shifting between your own feet and theirs, staring at frayed threads and tea stains.

The endless corridor abruptly ended ahead, a blank canvas hanging dead center on the far wall.

Consciousness reached out to touch it—but failed. You tried to recall how you arrived here, yet memory slipped away like a key fallen into a crack in the wooden floor, vanished.

Rapid footsteps approached. Someone was running—not just one, but many—the sound of hard boot soles striking gravel, not the quiet, sound-absorbing carpet of this place.

You tried to turn your head in confusion, but your body did not respond to your mind's command; your vision remained fixed on the blank canvas before you.

In the moment your attention wavered, the blank space had already been filled with color, outlining an image that might be described as perfect to the point of grotesqueness.

Pale skin, eight staggered lower limbs each with four joints, supported by intricate muscle groups for control, and feet composed of three sets of keratinous toes enabling stable, rapid movement across any surface.

Two interwoven circulatory networks—arterial and venous—supplied this locomotion system, ensuring continued function even if one was blocked or damaged, via collateral pathways and the other. Major branches were protected beneath thick muscle bundles.

It possessed a human upper torso, four upper limbs unbound by shoulder joints, freely rotating to the back—or rather, it had no true back at all.

Dozens of slender, flexible fingers fully exploited the space extended by the metacarpals, each showing at least two structures identifiable as "thumbs," enabling effortless grasping in both forward and reverse orientations.

Its skull bore a crown of crystalline, clustered protrusions of stone, while its gem-like, encircling eyes—perhaps originating from the faceless visage on its chest and abdomen—merged together, elevating a frozen expression of ecstasy to a surreal peak.

Two crude weapons shattered this painting. One pierced through an eye, driving into the upper cranial cavity, densely packed with visual pathways—yet counterintuitively, lacking many vital structures.

The truly lethal one sliced open the face on the chest, slipped through the narrow gap between rib plates, pierced the two paused hearts, then, under the weight of its body, drove laterally through the intervertebral discs, angling precisely into the overgrown spinal cord, designed to regulate this complex body.

Sluggish thoughts analyzed those faces—they were familiar, names hovering on the tip of your tongue.

No more time remained. The exhibition was over. Opaque black curtains fell, blotting out all light.

You witnessed the finale of a remarkable work. Though imperfect, the theme suited it well—no life could escape this ending.

【Death】

……

……

"Is it dead?"

"Probably so." Kraft stepped back to observe for a while, sensing that the creature's spiritual form was rapidly withering, completely vanishing from his perception within just a few breaths.

He returned to the corpse, struggled to pull out the long sword bitten by the plate-like aberrant ribs, changed the angle, and thrust it in again, ensuring the structure hidden in the chest cavity, suspected to be a new central system, was thoroughly severed.

Logically speaking, he did not believe the creature had even the slightest chance of counterattacking.

Overactivation of the myocardial sodium-potassium pump should lead to high intracellular potassium and low sodium, triggering a series of thorny situations that would make the electrocardiogram department and cardiology pull out their hair, such as loss of excitability, ectopic pacing, conduction block, atrial fibrillation, and ventricular fibrillation.

And if it were calcium disorder, the situation would be even worse; it was hard to imagine any muscle could function under abnormal calcium concentrations. The result would be the same: a standstill.

The dual circulation system was fundamentally invalidated, let alone the problems that might arise in other tissues.

However, emotionally, no matter how refined the theoretical analysis, nothing was more reassuring than stabbing a few more times.

He could not wait to cut off his spiritual senses, allowing the world, pressing and crowding in, to swallow his consciousness.