Chapter 350: Karmic Thought

What’s wrong?

In a room lit only by a single oil lamp, the shadowy figure repeated words rarely heard by ordinary people.

Faint flames gathered in the folds of clothing, drifting and coalescing with each writing motion, scattering through the acrid, foul air.

What he called writing was closer to aimless dragging—sketching irregular circles and dots, just to make his consciousness follow the pen tip, touching each keyword, scrutinizing every detail.

Memory faithfully recounted once again the content he had repeated countless times:

“Extraction, hydrolysis, oxidation…”

In the eternal, standing temple of his spirit, even the fading of printed fonts and the dull, mindless blackening of strokes stood vividly clear.

But something was missing.

At first he thought it was because recent days had been too smooth, lowering his tolerance for negative conditions, making him unable to accept failures caused by uncontrollable randomness.

But after two days of continuous experiments and reviews, he had to admit: something might truly be wrong.

The entire procedure had no single step requiring strict control. Extraction could be prolonged, acidification could be intensified, oxidation could be dripped drop by drop—there was no conceivable error.

Yet after repeated adjustments, the results remained unsatisfactory; the few times a precipitate seemed to appear, the yield was minuscule—too little to distinguish from impurities.

He re-examined the page from start to finish until certain no hidden note could be concealed anywhere—yet this only made every gap between lines seem suspicious.

Intuition chattered incessantly in his mind—something was hidden, right beneath his nose, in a blind spot.

The feeling was like a loose metal part rolling inside his skull, rattling with irritating, jarring clangs every time it shifted.

He had to find that part. An almost obsessive thought sustained his will, carrying him from day into night. Yet the distance hadn’t shortened—it remained a carrot dangling before a horse’s head, driving his thoughts forward with the classic “just one step away” illusion.

More than asking “what,” he should ask “how.” What had happened to his memory, that it would suddenly malfunction?

Out of habitual caution, he circled the room—but the world was as smooth and flawless as waxed, ironed paper; he found no trace of deeper, suspicious influence.

The result left him awkwardly alone for a while, feeling like someone who’d solved the wrong problem and blamed the table for being uneven.

Fortunately, he hadn’t mentioned it to anyone else—otherwise he’d have lost face completely.

So the situation stood: as the clinic’s opening deadline neared, Kraft decided to burden Raymond further, locking himself in the lab to obsess over the problem.

Time—precious time—had yielded some progress too obscure to explain to outsiders. He could feel he was very close, separated from his goal by only a sheet of paper; he could trace its blurred outline. That was why he still sat here past midnight.

The willow bark in the soaking solution floated and sank, awaiting further processing—but now he had no attention to spare.

Following the steps of the procedure, the pen tip traced downward, then returned to the start, forming an elongated loop on the paper, again and again.

The path gradually shortened, contracting inward, until it halted at the center, piercing through the saturated paper fibers.

His eyes were dry and blurred, yet focused on a single point, drawn by the dense spiral of ink lines.

Kraft frowned, leaning forward to look—within the chaotic strokes, nothing was recognizable. But his intuition had never been stronger: something that stirred his perception was right there.

Compared with his memory, this spot was where he’d recorded the alcohol dosage during extraction—nothing special.

“Hmm?”

As he confirmed the content, the feeling vanished. Precisely put—it disappeared from its original location.

It had jumped to the page’s bottom, to a section torn clean away—now only rough edges and the tops of tall letters remained.

It wasn’t hard—he didn’t need to rummage through the trash; the next second he remembered what he’d left there: ideas about heating duration and temperature control, abandoned entirely due to too many variables and the need for a homemade thermometer.

Before he could think further, the words in his memory lost their appeal again.

Like a poetic verse stripped of its rhyme, or a fluent speech marred by misplaced words—something had been extracted. The same words now felt dry, tasteless, like chewing wax.

The feeling hadn’t vanished—it had reappeared elsewhere, through some unseen path…

【Outside the room】

Kraft silently rose from his chair, sidestepping the cluttered tables and bottles, drew his sword, and pressed it against the door.

The corridor, far from patrol routes, was so silent not even a falling pin could be heard—no rat stirred.

The scene pointed to by intuition lay bare: the corridor’s arched ceiling, recently cleaned when he moved in, its spiderwebs and dust swept away, revealing faded religious murals.

The feeling flowed through the cloud-like decorative borders; the old paint, whether originally so or faded by time, appeared grayish-white, with crimson-purple lines drawn unnaturally.

The lines weren’t meant to depict clouds—they were clouds only because the lines had to exist.

As the viewing angle shifted, the pattern flipped instantly, revealing hidden text.

【As he looked, he was lifted upward…】

The strokes followed the uneven surface of the bricks, embedding invisible stone veins within the hidden text—each fragment tightly interlocked, compressed and curled, winding through the clouds into a long, seemingly accidental ridge.

The feeling, along the path of the drawing—substance yet not substance—wound deeper into darkness.

In intuition, it resembled a phosphorescent bird’s fleeting shadow; in sensation, nothing moved where it passed.

The door latch lifted; Kraft slipped out, sprinting after it.

Uneven stone steps, winding paths—beneath his feet they felt flat, left behind in an instant. Even his instinct found a strange exhilaration in the chase.

He could go faster.

Thinking this, his steps grew swifter and surer, as if his feet had eyes, finding the perfect points of contact.

Before he realized it, he stood on the window frame, hooked onto a gargoyle, and flipped into the upper sill, intercepting it before the fresco of Yelia’s baptism.

But the thing showed no intention of obeying normal motion—it leaped in the opposite direction and continued moving.

The senseless chase had drawn attention; he heard patrol teams approaching, scrambling through the labyrinthine corridors, blindly searching just beyond the wall.

Kraft had no time for them—he drove his blade precisely through the central crack, splitting the wooden bolt, then slammed into the room beyond.

Darkness, vastness—he couldn’t recall where he was. The thing drifted ahead, like a drop merging into a lake, rapidly spreading, swelling from a speck into something vast enough to fill the space.

The surging instinct sensed danger, raised its limbs, triggered the pain wrapped in layers, and released it.

By the time his consciousness realized what he was doing, it was already too late to stop.

The lights arriving from behind illuminated one corner of the hall—floating paper shreds, as heavy wooden bookshelves crashed down, spilling mountains of rotting pages onto the floor.

“Uh, Mr. Kraft?” The arriving monk didn’t understand what had happened, but a cold detachment flowed through his breath, freezing his feet in place, “What… are you…?”

“Seems a snake got in. I didn’t catch it.”

The abbot stood in the center of darkness, turning to block the view of the ruined bookshelf.

?? Ugh, lately I’ve been busy with work and writing my thesis, feeling pretty drained.

?(っ*′□`)っ

?(End of Chapter)