Chapter 350: Thoughts of Sin

"What is wrong?"

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

A faint flame gathered in the folds of his clothes, drifting and dispersing with the motion of writing, scattering in the acrid, foul air.

Calling it writing was an overstatement; it was more like aimless dragging, drawing shapeless circles and dots, allowing his consciousness to follow the pen tip and touch each keyword, pondering every detail.

Memory faithfully recited the content once again, a content repeated countless times:

"Extraction, hydrolysis, oxidation..."

In the spiritual hall that seemed capable of standing eternally, even the faded fonts caused by printing and the boringly blackened strokes were vividly clear.

But something was indeed missing.

At first, he thought it was because life had been too smooth recently, lowering his tolerance for negative situations, causing him to be unable to accept failure caused by uncontrollable random factors.

However, after two days of continuous experiments and reviews, he had to admit that something might indeed be wrong.

The entire operation process from start to finish had not a single point requiring strict control. Extraction could be prolonged, acidification could be intensified, oxidation could be done drop by drop; there was absolutely no reason to find an error.

Yet after repeated adjustments, the results remained unsatisfactory; the only few times precipitation seemed to appear, the yield was so small it was hard to separate from the impurities.

He re-examined that page from start to finish until he was certain it had no place to hide an undiscovered note, yet that very fact made the gaps between every line seem suspicious.

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

This feeling was like a loose, detached metal part rolling in his brain, making a grating, irritating clashing sound whenever he shook.

He had to find that part. A nearly paranoid thought sustained his will from day into night. Yet the distance did not seem to shorten; it remained a carrot dangling before a horse's head, driving thought to continue operating in the typical "just one step away" manner.

Compared to "what is it," the question that should be asked is "what is happening." What happened to the memory that it would suddenly become chaotic without cause?

Out of habitual vigilance, he walked around the surroundings, but the world was smoother than new paper that had been ironed and waxed; he found no suspicious influence from any deeper level.

This result left him awkwardly alone for a while, feeling like a sore loser who blamed the uneven table after getting a question wrong.

Fortunately, he hadn't mentioned it to anyone beforehand, or he would have lost face terribly.

Thus the situation became this: with the deadline for the clinic's opening approaching, Kraft decided to make Lei Mengde suffer a bit more, locking himself in the laboratory to obsess over a dead end.

Time, precious time, had indeed brought some progress that was hard to explain to outsiders. He could feel he was very close to the goal, separated only by the distance of a sheet of paper, able to feel its vague outline. This was also the reason he was willing to sit here in the middle of the night.

Willow bark floated and sank in the leaching solution, waiting for further processing, but there was no time to attend to it now.

Following the operational steps, the pen tip moved all the way down, then returned to the starting point, the trajectory forming an elongated ring on the paper surface, circle after circle.

The lines gradually shortened, contracting and nesting inward, until they stalled at the center, piercing through the soaked paper fibers.

His eyes were dry and hazy, yet focusing on a certain point, attracted by the dense spiral formed by the ink lines.

Kraft frowned and leaned forward, looking into it; amidst the chaotic strokes, nothing could be identified. But his intuition was stronger than ever before; something that touched perception was right there.

Comparing it with memory, this position was the record of the alcohol dosage in the extraction step, with nothing special about it.

"Hmm?"

At the very moment of confirming the content, that feeling vanished. To be precise, it vanished from its original position.

It jumped to the end of the page, a spot where a strip had been torn off entirely; now only ragged edges and the tops of tall letters remained there.

This was no difficult task; he didn't even need to rummage through the wastebasket. The next second, he remembered what he had left there: thoughts on heating duration and temperature control, ideas that had been completely abandoned because there were too many variables and a homemade thermometer might be needed.

Before he could think further, the text in his memory lost its attraction again.

Like a poem rich in imagery losing its rhyme, or a smooth speech inserting inappropriate words, something had been pulled out from within; the same words became dry, tasting like chewing wax.

That feeling did not vanish; instead, it appeared in a new location through some channel, appearing at...

【Outside the room】

Kraft silently left his chair, bypassed the long tables and jars arranged in a tangle, drew his sword with a backward motion, and pressed it against the door panel.

In the corridor far from the patrol route, not a pin could be heard falling; there wasn't even a single rat.

The scene at the position pointed to by his intuition was nowhere to hide. It was the arched ceiling of the corridor, which had just been cleaned when they moved in a few days ago; the spiderwebs and dust before and after the arches had been swept away, revealing faded religious paintings.

That feeling flowed within the cloud-like painted borders; the old paint was either originally like this or appeared white with a gray tint due to the passage of time, with patterns outlined in crimson-purple strokes that looked unnatural.

It was not that the patterns existed to embody clouds; rather, the cloud patterns existed because there had to be patterns.

Once the angle changed, the pattern immediately flipped, becoming deliberately hidden text.

【When that person looked, he was caught up and taken up...】

The strokes followed the uneven surface of the bricks, with invisible stone textures embedded in the hidden text patterns; piece by piece, they fit tightly together, pressing and rolling, winding through the clouds to form a long ridge that looked unintentional.

That feeling, along a path within the graphic strokes that seemed material yet not material, wound toward the depths of darkness.

In his intuition, it was like the shadow of a bird smeared with phosphorus powder; in his senses, there was no moving thing where it was or where it passed.

The door latch was lifted; Kraft slipped out of the room in a flash, and hurriedly chased after it.

Stone steps of varying heights and winding, twisting roads lay flat beneath his feet, left behind from the front to his ears. Instinct even found a strange sense of pleasure in the chase.

It could be faster.

Thinking this, his steps became even swifter and steadier, like having eyes that found the most suitable points of contact.

By the time he realized it, he was already stepping on the window frame, hooking a protruding gargoyle to flip into the upper window ledge, intercepting it before the mural of Yelia's baptism.

However, that thing had no intention of following normal laws of motion; it jumped a distance in the opposite direction and continued moving.

This groundless chase had already attracted attention; he could hear the patrol squad moving toward this side, scrambling blindly in the vast, complex tunnels, searching for a path just beyond a wall.

Kraft had no time to deal with these; the sword blade precisely pierced the central slit, splitting the wooden bolt on the back of the door, and immediately his body crashed into the space behind the door.

Darkness, vastness; for a moment, he could not recall where this was. That thing was wandering ahead, like a drop of water merging into a lake, rapidly spreading out, expanding from a tiny speck to a size about to fill the space.

The surging instinct detected the threat, raised its limbs high, touched the pain wrapped in layers, and released it.

By the time consciousness realized what it was doing, everything could no longer be stopped.

The lights of those rushing behind illuminated a corner of the hall; amidst flying scraps of paper, a hard-wood bookshelf crashed down, tilting a mountain of rotting pages onto the floor.

"Uh, Mr. Kraft?" The cultivator who arrived did not quite understand what had happened here, but a cold sense of alienation flowed through his body with his breath, freezing his feet in place. "You are..."

"It seems a snake broke in; I didn't catch it."

The master of the monastery stood in the heart of the darkness, turning to block the jagged edge where the bookshelf had been damaged.

"Uh-ah, I've been quite busy lately, still writing my graduation thesis, and my state of mind has been rather low."

(っ*′□`)っ

(End of this chapter)