Chapter 389: The Cage of the Unimprisonable

【I saw it】

Silver needles and cotton threads wove through the flesh, chasing something.

Kraft felt he had indeed "seen" it, but not just with his eyes; he had to add the touch of his fingertips, the scent in his nostrils, and a touch of imagination and memory.

At times it was a splitting wound, at times a twitching muscle bundle, occasionally flowing and crawling across the skin's surface with bright red blood.

None of those were it; it was the part left behind after stripping away all material things until nothing more could be stripped, a pure and abstract thing that was not material yet could not fully detach from material existence.

A concept, a piece of living knowledge.

Weapons merely temporarily destroyed its material manifestation; memory only preserved its fragmented image.

But concepts ultimately have boundaries, and knowledge is ultimately understandable.

It would eventually encounter a consciousness, one close enough to it and one that would never forget.

It was a very strange feeling, akin to palpating a mass through thick skin and muscle, from shallow to deep, from light to heavy, gradually approaching its edge and outlining its contours clearly.

At first, the sensation felt like touching a ripple of water, then chains wrapped in silk, and then the edges grew sharp, with scale-like bumps and depressions appearing in the consciousness.

Every clash on the wound increased the consciousness's understanding of it by a fraction. For it, understanding was also the most direct contact, a binding gaze.

【I have caught it】

Kraft felt its texture, felt its struggle.

That feeling was contradictory. Perhaps it should be described as being stripped and extracted from its carrier, restored to its essence; or perhaps as being incorporated into one's own consciousness, solidified by cognition.

But the manifestation of these two was the same.

The wound closed, the blood dried; with one advance and one retreat, its range of movement was gradually compressed, and as fresh gauze re-wrapped every inch of skin, even its final traces of existence were erased.

Kup promptly withdrew the ether inhaler, returned it to its light-proof, shock-absorbing container, and casually used the remaining gauze to wipe the foam overflowing from the patient's mouth.

The liquid hanging in the tibia had been changed to the third bottle, with a little less than half remaining; the patient's face was as white as fresh winter snow, with only a wisp of fading blood color hanging at the corner of his mouth.

He had pulled through. Perhaps because he had spent years preaching in remote mountain areas, maintaining the church required him to do everything personally, so this aged body was far more tenacious than imagined.

The opportunity granted by the Heavenly Father was as fine as a spider's thread; no one could say whether the situation would suddenly take a turn for the worse.

But at least the doctor's skill had not betrayed Benny's blind faith, securing a sliver of hope; whether he could climb back up depended on himself.

"He survived?"

"He hasn't died yet, for now." Kraft plunged his hand into the water basin and rubbed vigorously, causing dark brown turbidity to rise in the lime water. "It's not up to me to decide; we must wait for the opinion above."

The incident happened suddenly; even with two extra pairs of hands, there wouldn't have been time for thorough disinfection. Plus, the wound area was extensive, so infection was not a matter of probability, but of time.

"The Heavenly Father will surely hold him up through your hand; evil spirits and disease cannot take his life." Clearly, Benny had a different understanding; in his cognition, the treatment ended here, and the rest was purely waiting time for recovery.

"Sigh..."

Only a sigh remained, but a sigh solved nothing and could not prevent the problems about to arrive.

Perhaps it was time to restart an experiment suspended due to technical issues and gamble on luck.

However, something more troublesome was waiting for him to solve right now, and that thing was nowhere else, but right here, closer than what was before his eyes.

Kraft instructed Kup to stay and look after the patient, then walked alone into the inner room and locked the door from the inside.

The latter, accustomed to it, began the cleanup work: organizing equipment, collecting trash, and cleaning the countertop. It had become routine for the doctor to need solitude and rest after performing major surgeries, and this was becoming more frequent, almost a tacit consensus.

He suddenly remembered something, looked at the two lead boxes on the table, and the empty one was no longer so glaring.

He vaguely remembered that something important should have been inside. As for where it went, it seemed to be...

【Taken away by Kraft?】

Yes, it should be so; Kup closed the box, affirming this conclusion, even though he lacked memory of the object itself and the process of its removal.

The related thoughts were fading, like snow melting under the sun, flowing away through some crack from the darkest dead corners at the very bottom of thought; the remaining water stains evaporated into ethereal clouds, soon scattered by other thoughts.

The eerie atmosphere in the room also faded with Kraft's departure; the smell of blood and alcohol was pungent and monotonous, but more reassuring, with no indescribable elements mixed in anymore.

The world returned to normal; something had left, leaving only the arm fixed with splints to remind him that he had once endured a fierce battle.

In this false tranquility, a sense of panic arose instead; who knew what had passed beneath the skin of the world?

He could only comfort himself that once Kraft walked out of the room, everything would be resolved.

Kraft felt things were not going well.

His state was akin to having completed an emergency surgery with massive bleeding without protection, only to be told the patient tested positive for Hepatitis B, Hepatitis C, and AIDS.

There was no way to know how this thing was transmitted—no eye contact, no information exchange; its existence need not follow any restrictions, and it was not even fully under its own will's control.

If the consciousness followed the cognition of it deep enough, the mind became the hands that could touch it, the carrier that could hold it.

When the wandering thing of blur and unknown truly arrived, it fell into the open soul; every counterattack made the concept clearer; every struggle made the understanding deeper.

The more one resisted understanding, the more one promoted understanding. Meticulous logic and solid memory, Thick and heavy like resin, clung to its contours, seeped into the gaps between scales, like amber encapsulating and solidifying.

The consciousness trapped it, or rather, it successfully invaded the consciousness.

However, language and text still could not share this thing's existence with others; although it was not a physical entity, it was not entirely a concept in the conventional sense, belonging to some kind of "unique" thing that could exist in only one place.

Kraft could not find a suitable way to describe its mode of existence; if he had to find a name for it, perhaps calling it "living knowledge" was just right.

Living knowledge cannot be fixed in paper and text for circulation.

Of course, this did not mean it was suitable to be fixed in the brain.

Using oneself as a sample bottle was obviously not a good idea, but how to kill a piece of knowledge, a concept, was a complex problem; no one had ever achieved it, and it might be impossible altogether.

He feared he would have to coexist with this uninvited guest for quite some time; it was best to figure out its origin, and also...

【What is its relationship with the thing in the sky】

?? I sincerely apologize here; I fell asleep immediately after work these past few days, thus delaying the update.