Chapter 34: Just Once, Just This Once

"What?" Kraft couldn't follow Lu Xiusi's train of thought. His mind was still stuck on how fast the surgery needed to be, and he hadn't snapped out of it yet.

"I'm saying Instructor Luo Moluo is wrong. He knows a lot about the Four Humors theory and pharmacology, but that's already in the past."

Lu Xiusi glanced at the door again. He didn't want to say it out loud; this phrasing should be enough for Kraft to understand his meaning.

Yes, in the traditional Four Humors theory, to make someone lose consciousness, one must exhaust the red fluid or the white fluid—of course, that's correct. But didn't they have a type of fluid they had never found yet?

He raised his hand and held it in front of Kraft. A few days ago, this hand still had several red spots, traces left by a reckless experiment.

"You mean the black fluid?" Kraft suddenly snapped out of it, his gaze focusing on Lu Xiusi's face. "I thought I made it clear enough; we shouldn't touch that thing."

"Why?" Lu Xiusi met Kraft's gaze without any hesitation, as if trying to dig the reason for his fear of the black fluid out of his eyes.

Kraft felt Professor Kalman's experiment was unreasonable, and Lu Xiusi also felt Kraft's excessive caution made no sense.

In his view, the black fluid perfectly met the current needs. With just a tiny amount of diluent, it could make someone lose consciousness for a whole day; even the pain of a needle prick couldn't wake them, and afterward, they would know nothing about what happened.

"Because it... isn't safe." Kraft was momentarily speechless; this explanation couldn't even convince himself. "We haven't confirmed it's truly the 'black fluid,' have we? We just call it that, right?"

He couldn't explain to Lu Xiusi what his intuition and inspiration told him. Should he say he discovered a tiny bit of fluid related to something incomprehensible to humans, something that could lure creatures to contact it? Such words were better kept in his stomach; saying them out loud would only make him seem even more untrustworthy.

"We can't rule out that it might have some terrible effects that take longer to manifest. Didn't Professor Kalman say absolute secrecy was required?" Kraft added.

He instinctively felt there must be some deeper reason for its outward appearance, and until he had a chance to figure it out, he dared not contact it any further. For this, he was willing to bring up Professor Kalman to shut Lu Xiusi's mouth.

Lu Xiusi strongly disagreed with this statement. He pointed at his own nose. "Only the living have a chance to worry about long-term effects. If I'm not a special case, then we won't even be discussing this problem for at least ten-plus days."

"I know now isn't the time to let this great discovery see the light, but wasn't the original intention of discovering it for the development of medicine? Should we just hide it away and not use it for the sake of secrecy?"

Lu Xiusi spoke with some excitement. He misunderstood Kraft's meaning, thinking Kraft disagreed with his suggestion more because of the professor's requirements rather than some unexplained dread of the black fluid.

"No, I certainly don't mean that..." Subconsciously, Kraft hadn't even considered taking the black fluid out of the basement again.

When considering the anesthesia problem just now, he only thought about what anesthetics he knew could be made at the moment, or what plants could serve as natural anesthetics, completely not leaning toward something labeled "unknown" and "dangerous."

Now that he thought about it, Lu Xiusi's statement did indeed make a lot of sense.

Providing long-lasting effective anesthesia, where pain couldn't wake the patient and there would be no awareness during surgery; for the ten-plus days after Lu Xiusi drank it, he showed absolutely no aftereffects.

With this thing, the success rate of surgery would simply shoot straight up, from nearly impossible to having some degree of certainty.

As for what aftereffects might appear later? That could all be dealt with "later." The worst case was death; the bad case was dying on the operating table today. The best case was that this dosage didn't reach the threshold to trigger any special effects; judging by Kraft's observations of Lu Xiusi, that was entirely possible.

Lu Xiusi watched Kraft's expression gradually loosen, his eyebrows slowly relaxing, shifting from tension to contemplation.

"Once, and only once." Kraft said. To Lu Xiusi, and also to himself.

He remembered that night a few days ago when he had firmly written on his notes: "Keep distance, keep sealed; unless necessary, never contact." He hadn't expected it to reach the point of "necessary" so quickly.

Kraft sighed. After this was over, there might be another pile of messes needing cleanup. "How do we explain the origin? No one won't be curious about something like this."

"Just say it's a family secret medicine?" Lu Xiusi blurted it out immediately. "A unique item passed down from some unknown generation, the formula lost, only this one sip remaining."

A familiar phrasing; the inspiration probably came from Kraft's "family medical arts," but this excuse was truly terrible. A family heirloom-level secret medicine in a noble's house, and the last bit was used on an innkeeper's daughter; it felt like an insult to everyone's intelligence.

"I suggest you think of another one." Kraft held his forehead. "But we can think about that slowly after it's done. Now, let's go prepare the diluent."

"Together?"

"As soon as possible. After finishing, we still have to prepare other things, which might not be simpler than this thing."

Wearing the bird-beak mask used last time, the two returned to the secret laboratory. As soon as they entered, Kraft first opened the wall cabinet, checked the position of the liquid level relative to the scratch marks on the bottle, and found no change.

Lu Xiusi took an egg-shaped ceramic cup from the lower shelf; previously, they had used this kind of cup to mix the diluent.

The cup with a large body and small opening was very difficult to clean, but it wasn't easy to splash the liquid inside out. There was also a small triangular spout-like structure at the cup's rim, making it convenient to transfer the liquid.

Fill the cup with water to four-fifths, gently shake the ceramic cup to confirm it won't splash out during stirring. Next, use a small metal rod to dip a bit of black fluid and add it to the water.

"Just use this. A dip is enough; don't have an amount where liquid droplets hang on the rod." Lu Xiusi handed the small rod to Kraft. "Do we want a little more? After all, we only tried needle pricks before."

"No, children aren't just smaller versions of adults, especially when they are only three years old. Not reducing the dose is already overestimating."

Kraft removed the wax seal from the bottle's mouth, pulled out the cork, extended the thin rod into the small glass bottle, and carefully approached the liquid surface.

Looking down from the bottle's mouth, in the blurry vision, the liquid at the bottom of the bottle was silent and waveless. The candlelight through the glass was swallowed on its surface. The smoothness of the liquid surface wasn't expressed; instead, it was a lightless, profound black.

In his field of vision, it gouged out a conspicuous, stubborn defect, sending a weak but continuous invitation to touch to the person staring at it.

From this perspective, Kraft began to feel it was a deep, dark hole, with vague, unclear sounds coming from the other end. He tightened his grip on the thin rod in his hand, feeling it would fall into this entrance and drop into another world with just a momentary relaxation of his grip.

One end of the thin rod pressed against the liquid, shattering the dark surface, raising tiny ripples that flashed and vanished. The improperly controlled force made it strike the bottom of the bottle, emitting a frighteningly crisp sound.

"Be careful; I feel it isn't that sturdy." Lu Xiusi moved the ceramic cup to the table in front of Kraft. He almost thought Kraft had pierced through the glass bottle.

"Sorry, a momentary slip." Kraft lifted the thin rod, shook off the excess black fluid inside the bottle, and inserted the rod carrying the last layer of extremely thin liquid into the ceramic cup. He then re-corked the glass bottle tightly and sealed the gaps at the bottle's mouth with wax.

"So just stirring is enough?" The metal rod stirred a few times in the ceramic cup. The trace amount of black fluid completely dissolved in the water; now it was exactly what they wanted.

"Yes, this thing dissolves in water very easily."

Under the candlelight, the water in the cup still looked very clear, with no color change at all. It was absolutely impossible to distinguish by the naked eye, and it no longer had that original inducing feeling; it was just an ordinary cup of clear water.

But it had indeed become the core of the first anesthetic surgery in this world. Lu Xiusi would pour a small sip into the prepared "family heirloom" small bottle, let Lies drink it in one gulp, and leave no evidence.

This small copper bottle was a collection contributed by Lu Xiusi. The bottle body, less than half a palm in size, was inlaid with a decoration somewhat like turquoise. As an "ancient family heirloom," no one in Wendeng Port would be idle enough to appraise it.

"What was this bottle originally used for?" Kraft habitually wanted to stroke his chin in a contemplative pose, but ended up only touching the bird beak on the mask.

"Bought to carry spices on the person, but I never found a suitable one, so it stayed empty." Lu Xiusi tilted the ceramic cup, transferring the amount he considered "one sip" into the copper bottle. "I think it's half an antique; we'll use it from now on."

"From now on? There is no 'from now on,' Lu Xiusi. Just this once. I swear that if I do such a stupid thing again, I'll go to the tavern and drink three cups while standing on my head."

"Which one do you mean? Agreeing to take Lies in, or talking about the black fluid?" Lu Xiusi pressed the small cap onto the copper bottle, completing his work.

"Hard to say." Logically, neither of these two things should be touched: neither taking on this case that could only be solved by special methods, nor violating the previous decision to never touch the black fluid.

Kraft put the glass bottle and the lidded ceramic cup back into the wall cabinet, closed the cabinet door, and sighed. Today's half-day count of sighs could equal half a month's quota; he had a premonition there would be even more in the future.

Things in this world have always followed this rule: zero times or countless times. "Just this once" was fine to say to Lu Xiusi, but it couldn't fool oneself.

And there was never any such thing as coincidence; everything that happened necessarily had its internal reasons. Without Lies, without Lu Xiusi, he would sooner or later encounter another patient needing surgery on some future day, and then think of this effect of the black fluid.

"I resolve to devote myself to relieving human suffering."

"Hmm?" Lu Xiusi heard Kraft muttering to himself, his voice as faint as a mosquito's buzz, the pronunciation and tone unlike the North Tongue.

"Nothing, just an oath made long ago." Kraft seemed to grow a bit more resolute. "Do not worry about me; go prepare other things now. If there is a God of Healing or any other god, pray for me quickly while there is still time."