Chapter 333: Undercurrents

"Mr. Kraft, do you have time?"

The cold light in the church gradually dyed orange-red; dinner time was approaching.

Brother Lei Mengde, already visually fatigued, left clutching a small stack of book lists, and Yvon had also been lured away by the aroma drifting from the open-air campfire in the courtyard.

Kup struggled until the very end, then called out to the professor, who was still lost in his books.

"Anytime."

A natural answer. In fact, as long as he wasn't disturbed during a rescue, he would basically give a similar reply.

Kraft's schedule was like an ideal church: although people came and went, seemingly busy to the point of being impenetrable, if you needed something, you could always find an empty seat to sit and receive some attention.

Yet he was not truly endowed with a thousand ears and a thousand mouths, all-knowing and all-seeing like an angel. As his influence and titles grew day by day, the time that could be allocated to any specific individual was visibly diluted, though his attitude remained consistent.

Regardless of status, it did not affect their receiving the same patience.

Perhaps this was why the professor got along quite well with the lower-ranking monks; Kup had once heard someone in the group discussing the topic, claiming to see a certain "holiness" within it—an impartial and universal love that disregarded high or low status, eliminating the particularity of secular relationships, even surpassing the norms of human nature.

And as the one closest to the person involved here, Kup found the source of what felt wrong within himself—a sense of detachment.

He had not failed to witness those strange and inexplicable things; of course, he knew very well that Kraft had mastered some techniques derived from them, and even Yvon used powers of dubious origin, sometimes unconsciously displaying them in daily life.

But the strangeness the former brought him was far more intense than the latter; it was as if a towering, colossal statue looked down upon the mortal world, its perspective detached from the crowd, transcending mundane values, and thus unbound by distinctions of status.

"Have you recently felt that kind of, I mean, abnormal sensation?"

Kraft looked at him in surprise, seeming somewhat startled yet not too shocked, akin to discovering a student had solved a slightly beyond-syllabus small problem.

The expression interaction, rich in subtle natural changes, pulled the image back into the normal realm, making one feel everything was perfectly fine, and that all previous concerns were merely illusions born of over-sensitivity.

"Oh, how did you know? I thought I hadn't shown anything special." Kraft readily admitted the issue.

Apart from a fleeting hint of fatigue, he looked as energetic as usual. "Yes, it's a side effect from the Dunling Sewers, like having a migraine that strikes more frequently; once you get used to it, it's not a big deal."

"It can even be said to be lighter than expected; as long as you don't focus on it, it hardly interferes with daily activities. Don't worry too much."

"That's great." Kup relaxed his subconscious holding of breath and was choked into a fit of coughing by the omnipresent dust.

"By the way, besides physical discomfort, do you feel anything else is wrong?"

The assistant and squire took the water skin handed to him, gulped down several mouthfuls to suppress the churning discomfort in his throat, "For instance, doing things you wouldn't normally do."

"Uh, no?"

After honestly reviewing his deeds over the past half-year, Kraft found nothing abnormal; he merely did some practical medical research within his capabilities and cleaned up some things that shouldn't be causing trouble in the present world; his work content remained consistent.

"Well, actually, a bit; my use of those 'techniques' has indeed increased recently, but there was no other way."

"You know, intracranial hemorrhage requires examining the volume and range; before artificial pneumothorax, one must assess pleural adhesions; for complex fractures, experience alone cannot achieve accurate localization; manual reduction of cervical dislocation carries great risk; blindly enlarging incisions during surgery increases the probability of infection..."

"It is worth it; a single breath's time can bring huge improvements in prognosis, consuming less than one-tenth of a 'spell,' and several patients can be treated together."

"It's not always that convenient; when encountering emergencies, one can only use them individually. You seem to sometimes maintain a special state during surgery." No one knew better than the assistant certain procedures that made veteran surgeons from the medical school, who were merely observing, break out in cold sweat; behind them lay things that could not be explained by experience or technique.

"Then what should be done? Could we just watch people die?"

Kraft's subtext could not be refuted, especially since the primary beneficiary had no standing to advise reducing the frequency of use. If even clinical applications had to be conserved, the cost of pulling people back from the Deep Ones was simply incalculable.

Stumped by this question for a moment, Kup discovered something that only he might have realized.

Since they had met, it seemed he had never observed the Deep Ones fundamentally altering Kraft's personality tendencies; they merely made his original traits more pronounced.

This was extremely contrary to reason; logically, as the one who had gone the furthest, his mindset and concepts should have undergone a transformation like a butterfly breaking from its cocoon, profound enough to completely change his behavioral patterns and make him unrecognizable.

Unless...

"Mr. Kraft, when did you start dedicating yourself to the medical profession?"

"About a year and a half ago; back then, I was quite naive."

Field pulled the reins of the mule, trying to avoid a large mud pit on the mountain road. The carriage behind carried freshly purchased vegetables and fruits, husked wheat, daily necessities, and Dominic, who was busy keeping accounts.

"I always felt my future was bright and limitless; becoming a priest after graduation was inevitable. Later, I learned I first had to serve as an attendant for a year or two, a reader for three years, and an acolyte for many years."

"Wait for a vacancy to compete for the deacon position; perform well and gain someone's appreciation to rise to sub-priest, then priest; only above that is a priest."

The carriage jolted violently up and down; the person sitting in the rear bed hurriedly hugged his paper and pen, grabbed onto a fixed object, and at the same time braced his foot against a rolling old pumpkin.

"Steady! Going too fast risks overturning the carriage." Dominic angrily noticed his booklet and the clothes on his chest were stained black, with half a page of writing missing.

"Let me think; what was written here?"

The Priyer fief had not organized a market of sufficient scale; they spent the entire day visiting over a dozen farm households and the only craftsmen there, piecing together half the items needed, and returned in the last light of dusk.

Night chased behind, driving the carriage into the mountain's shadow; the livestock emitted instinctive, uneasy neighs.

Dominic had to press his nose to the paper to barely make out the words he had written.

His portable booklet was normally used for copying assignments and occasionally as a memo pad; it was cheap paper made from pressed fibers, requiring a thin board underneath while writing. Once ink touched it, several pages were instantly soaked through.

Complaining about his companion's poor driving skills, the monk hurriedly tried to reconstruct the destroyed content while his memory was still fresh.

The day's accounts were fine; looking at the numbers at the beginning and end, he could recall the general idea, but things further back were hard to find; various casual notes were interwoven, along with corrections, so he could only roughly sketch a few strokes based on intuition and write them quickly in a clean spot at the end.

The light was dim, the handwriting messy, and both his mind and hands were in a tangle; sometimes he didn't even know what he was seeing or writing.

When he tried to quickly flip to the next page, his finger suddenly paused and flipped back to the original spot. He seemed to have seen something that caught his subconscious attention.

It was like sitting in his own bathtub, sensing something cold and smooth sliding past his skin, like a mischievous friend secretly pouring in cold water, or some creature wrapped in wet, slimy mucus.

His startled hand remained frozen in place for a long time, stiffly waiting for that feeling to come again.

But there was nothing else there, only ink darker than the night, soaking a few lines of descriptive short poems he had personally copied for their beautiful wording.

【It is no longer there】