Chapter 44: John Snow's Map

"That's right, it's getting late. At this hour, we should usually be attending our first morning class."

Lu Xiusi straightened up, holding the beak of his mask to adjust it, "Have you decided where to start? If we return early, we can still make lunch. Griss asked me last time why you don't come around as often."

"Quiet down. I truly don't understand how you can still talk about food in this environment." Kraft raised his hand, making a gesture to pause.

The only two voices faded, and silence quickly enveloped them, like quicksand filling a gap, wrapping people into a solidified atmosphere.

Kraft was generally a person who enjoyed quiet, but the quiet he liked was the sense of seclusion where distant sounds occasionally drifted in, not that unnatural silence of being thrown into a soundproof room.

In this salty and chaotic place, every experience stimulated his senses to the maximum: nauseating smells, bizarre architecture, the wet and slick texture of every surface. Only sound was stolen, missing from his senses.

Lu Xiusi quickly realized the strangeness; this silence reminded him of walking out of the dissection classroom late at night, the empty corridor utterly silent, everything frozen in stillness.

But this was not the late night when everyone had already fallen asleep; it was a bright and sunny morning.

He walked quickly to the nearest door and knocked forcefully. The hollow tapping echoed in the solidified silence, with no response.

"Is anyone there?" Kraft called out to a hollow that was likely a window. He could even vaguely see people sleeping on the floor inside the dim, narrow space, still fast asleep, completely unaware of the outside sounds.

Starting from the Red Algae Well, the two moved outward step by step, knocking on door after door.

There was no need to ask anymore; any door locked from the inside that no one opened meant the occupant was still asleep.

Kraft pushed his memory to its limit, trying to carve the location of every household into his mind, matching it with the spatial structure he remembered to form a flat map.

The more the investigation proceeded, the more he realized the severity of the situation. Half an hour had passed; they had knocked on dozens of doors, yet they had not found a single person who had woken up.

The sleeping people seemed separated by invisible walls, while they walked through a transparent maze, hearing only the sounds they made and echoes that felt like hallucinations.

The rate of illness caused by this pathological sleep was terrifyingly high; no one within the touched area had escaped, and they had not yet reached its boundary, unable to estimate how many people were affected.

Lu Xiusi could not see the map in Kraft's mind, nor could he distinguish which places they had walked, and he didn't even notice that their route was gradually moving away from the Red Algae Well. Mechanically following Kraft, he repeated the actions of knocking and calling, his anxiety growing with time.

He was completely lost in confusion, unable to understand what factor could have caused such a large-scale disease.

"It makes no sense. This makes absolutely no sense. It looks exactly like the effect of Black Liquid, yet so many people... what is it?"

Kraft could not answer his question; he felt his hypothesis was wrong again. If the influencing factor weakened from the inside out, the distribution of patients they encountered should have shown a distinction in severity. After walking for so long, there should have been at least one response.

With this confusion, the investigation continued. He felt he was approaching the boundary of this area; faint voices could be heard in the distance.

Ten minutes later, Kraft encountered the first group of awake people they had seen in this area.

Several people, dressed in the same coarse linen clothes as the emaciated man from before, both men and women, glanced in surprise at the black-robed figure appearing from the corner, then continued with their own tasks.

As they moved forward, they saw more and more people, transitioning from the territory of slumber to the normal area.

The wooden houses with closed doors and no answers rapidly decreased, replaced by scenes of open doors where people dumped waste and carried water home.

Kraft stopped a woman carrying a bucket of water.

"I am a doctor from the Academy. May I ask if you and your family have been waking up later and later recently?"

"The Academy? A doctor?" The woman looked at Kraft's strange attire with confusion. "I think I understand what you mean, but my family hasn't."

She put down the bucket in her hand and pointed behind Kraft. "There are plenty over there, but you'll have to wait until noon to see them get up."

"What about others?" Kraft listened to the chaotic sounds of life and collisions, feeling relieved by these noises for the first time. "Your neighbors, for instance?"

"Their family is indeed like what you described. I don't know which devil placed a curse on them; now they can only work half a day. How are they supposed to get by?"

After asking several people in a row, Kraft discovered that even the progression of the illness had changed.

Based on Gary and Brad's descriptions, he had expected to encounter patients with varying degrees of extended sleep time.

But in reality, there were only two types of people here—those who slept until noon and those completely unaffected—and it was basically consistent for the whole family: either they all couldn't wake up, or they all continued as usual.

In this border area, the two types of people lived together, unaffected by each other, as distinct as oil and water. Only the density of cases was changing, not the severity of the illness.

This was... strange.

"So what is happening now?" Lu Xiusi also started adjusting his bird beak like Kraft, using this action to help himself calm down and think.

Unfortunately, it seemed to have no effect; whatever he couldn't figure out remained unfathomable.

In just this short while, three women carrying buckets had passed by; adult men seemed to be fewer in number.

Laborers indeed made up the majority of the residents here, getting up early to find work at the docks, then returning in the evening with their daily wages, most of which were exchanged for bread and cheap seafood, while a small portion was saved or turned into other small items.

Women stayed at home doing handicrafts to supplement the family income, while also responsible for housework and caring for young children.

Heavy work and poor living conditions would bring continuous harm to their health and leave them no time to think about anything else, because merely maintaining their current lives exhausted all their energy.

And if an accident that broke the balance appeared in such a life, such as a sudden illness, or... Kraft glanced behind him, such as the people in this silent zone.

Such accidents would bring down an entire family in less than a month.

He found a relatively clean spot to lean against and sighed.

Lately, the frequency of his sighs had been increasing, mostly because he was being pushed along by various messy matters, half official business and half personal, sighing over plans disrupted by busyness.

But there were also times like now, occasionally, sighing over his own limited abilities.

He pieced together the route he had just walked in his mind: the strip of area filled with cases was gradually thinning out until it disappeared.

Regardless, there was indeed a factor whose influence developed from strong to weak within the range. So what could this factor be?

And for this factor, whether there was isolation or not seemed to make little difference; they lived side by side yet were completely unrelated.

He must have seen a similar map somewhere before, also judging based on the location of cases without needing to consider other problems.

Pages turned in his mind; once he had a slight idea, he could retrieve anything relevant from his memory.

"Lu Xiusi! The women carrying buckets just now all came from the same direction, right?"

Lu Xiusi saw Kraft suddenly spring up from the wooden board he was leaning against, calling his name.

If he had been lucky enough to live in another world, he might have thought of a certain elementary school student who died wherever he went, and like Kraft, his wide lenses flashed with a bright light.

Although he still didn't understand the situation as usual, he tried to recall, "Hmm... probably? I can't remember clearly."

"Yes, that's right. They all came from the opposite direction to us." Kraft had figured out the problem. Speaking solely of the phenomena within the Salt Tide Zone, it was a complete replica of a classic case.

In the nineteenth century of the otherworld's souls, a famous disease spread in London. In a short time, it spread rapidly; the number of patients was countless, and the dead numbered in the tens of thousands.

In a family, once one person contracted this disease, their family members were not far from being infected as well.

Even more bizarrely, no matter how the patients were isolated, it could not achieve the same effect as with other diseases in the past; it seemed as if a strange ghost had taken up permanent residence in that area.

In this terrifying epidemic, two names were forever remembered—"Cholera," and the father of epidemiology, "John Snow."

John Snow recorded every person who fell ill and died on a map; soon, this famous cholera map revealed a clear trend: patients were distributed around a certain center, becoming sparse outward.

And here with Kraft, this phenomenon was even more obvious.

"Water, Lu Xiusi, it is water."

Compared to the situation in London, the water sources in the Salt Tide District were so scarce they were almost hair-raising.

Its low-lying coastal position determined that drinkable underground fresh water was extremely difficult to exist; most of the time, the result of digging a well was a useless brackish well like the Red Algae Well, a futile effort.

Therefore, the influence radiating range of a stable water source would far exceed other areas, and a large number of residents would fetch water at the same location.

Every day, the water a family drank was uniformly fetched from the water point with buckets; this also explained why the Salt Tide District showed significant household clustering of cases.

In places gradually moving away from that water source, residents' willingness to fetch water there gradually weakened, turning to other wells instead, so the distribution of cases began to thin out, until the distance was so far that no one went.

The people carrying buckets they had just seen, not a single one had walked from the direction of the case concentration area, further corroborating his reasoning from the side.

A clear path appeared before them once again; Kraft gave the backrest position to Lu Xiusi and paced back and forth excitedly himself.

"Wait, wait until noon when they wake up, there is a contaminated water source here; I must find it."