Chapter 75: Dull Records

Kup, excessive sleepiness for 2 months, progressively heavier with abnormal dreams for 2 days.

Over the past 2 months, the patient developed progressively heavier excessive sleepiness after drinking contaminated well water, with no dizziness, headache, vertigo, nausea, convulsions, sensory abnormalities, or limb weakness; symptoms improved slightly after stopping. He reports that symptoms worsened a few days after resuming drinking, and abnormal dreams appeared in the last 2 days.

Conscious, spirits acceptable, good appetite...

"Mr. Kraft, I have a question." A voice rose, interrupting the faint scratching sound of the pen tip on paper. Kup finally could not hold back, broke the silence, and spoke the words he had wanted to say at dinner.

In the room with the windows shut tight, the sky could not be seen, only the candlelight, but the sky outside must have already darkened; Kup also felt a touch of fatigue.

Under normal circumstances, it probably would not be so early, but today's experience was overly tense, unconsciously consuming energy, and with a sumptuous dinner, sleepiness came on without notice.

Lying in bed, he turned his head to look at Mr. Kraft, who had set down the pen behind the desk, and asked, "Is my illness..."

He did not finish the second half of the sentence; the fear of death stemmed from the instinct of life and the influence of religion. Kup felt he was not someone who could go to heaven, and his soul falling into the hands of evil spirits or into hell meant long, indefinite torment, leaving him no choice but to be tense.

Even if Mr. Kraft would say some cloud-and-mountain, fog-and-mist threats like those priests, a sumptuous dinner would not lie; something more serious than he imagined was happening.

"I think I have already said it; your condition is very serious. That evil spirit has latched onto you." Interlacing his fingers, forming an arch in front of him, Mr. Kraft earnestly reiterated to Kup the words he had spoken during the day.

Kup hesitated, tightened his grip on the double-winged ring wooden carving in his hand, and believed that from now on he would have a deeper understanding of when not to slack off.

"Can you pray? Say something, anything; God should protect you."

Silence. The double-winged ring was moved to his chest. Kup's lips trembled a few times, but nothing came out; finding a sufficient reason for God to protect him was not easy. He did not look like someone who went to church often.

Considering the current situation where the Heavenly Father was too far and the evil spirit too close, Kup turned instead to this person who had promised to help him for psychological comfort: "You said you would help me, right?"

"Yes, I guarantee it to you." Mr. Kraft sat up straight, his eyes gleaming under the candlelight. "I will sit here and not leave, and figure out how it found you."

"I won't say empty words about fighting it to the death for your life or death; at least I will do my best to help you when possible, more than a priest can do."

This blunt, not-so-pleasant truth actually made Kup feel a bit better. Compared to deities he had never seen and religious personnel who rarely cast their gaze toward the Salt Tide District, a concrete, ordinary promise from someone right beside him felt more real.

He closed his eyes, hugged the wooden carving, and waited for sleep to come. The writing sound beside him did not rise again; Mr. Kraft had probably really stopped his paperwork and was watching him from behind the desk.

Drowsiness, fatigue, a silence without even the sound of breathing; Kup quickly felt his consciousness begin to blur, falling into sleep within the darkness.

Mr. Kraft was indeed watching him. He left the chair, used an inkwell to press down the major medical record he had just started, replaced it with a new sheet of paper with a grid drawn on it, and walked slowly to the bedside, blocking the candlelight.

The tension did not affect the speed at which the patient fell asleep; shortly after closing his eyes, before the count even reached one hundred, it could be observed that the chest rising and falling became calm and regular, and the expression on his face relaxed.

A nail was held in his hand; the dulled tip lightly prodded Kup's forearm, receiving no reaction. He had entered a sleep that could not be disturbed; barring the unexpected, he would not wake before noon tomorrow.

Mr. Kraft flipped open Kup's eyelids and shone light on them; the pupils reacted normally to light. He covered the middle and shone light on the opposite eye; both pupils constricted simultaneously, and the indirect light reflex was also normal.

Based on previous speculation, Kup was currently in the stage of deep spiritual contact, causing a lack of response to external stimuli.

Regarding this phenomenon, he had always been curious whether there was a corresponding pathological basis; his preliminary guess was widespread central inhibition, but currently, the area of the midbrain responsible for the light reflex was unaffected.

The brain, temporarily still safely preserved within the skull, did not seem to be the cause of all this; whether the existence of "spirit" or "soul" had a material basis was difficult to discuss.

The unbelieving Mr. Kraft completed the entire physical examination; this habitual operation did not yield anything for him, neurology also failed to provide sufficient help, and he generated the suspicion that "attempting to apply known logic at a deep level" might itself be illogical.

The simplest method was naturally to use spiritual senses to observe. But in the long night, the time available to use spiritual senses was but a drop in the bucket; one also had to reserve strength to prevent accidents, which was itself a contradiction.

So only intermittent monitoring could be adopted, using intermittent time points to try to glimpse the whole picture; the downside was that he would most likely not be able to catch the moment when key changes occurred in time.

A brand-new small candle was inserted into the candlestick; by Mr. Kraft's own intuition, the time for this candle to burn out was about fifteen minutes, fitting his recovery interval for short-term use of spiritual senses.

"Alright, alright, tomorrow I'll have a headache for quite a while. I don't expect repayment, just hope you remember to listen to the doctor well in the future." Mr. Kraft muttered while connecting his spiritual senses. "If there is a future."

Under the spiritual shroud, Kup's body was presented to Mr. Kraft completely from the inside out. He instinctively focused on inspecting the overall structure first, comparing it with the memory from the spiritual vision during the day.

Nothing different, except for a pile of food paste added; some fragments were not chewed sufficiently, most remained in the stomach, repeatedly mixed with the stomach's peristalsis, and a small amount of liquid overflowed from the cardia at the top of the stomach.

Maybe some gastric emptying disorder, plus gastroesophageal reflux and the like; he needed to remind him to improve bad eating habits. Mr. Kraft noted this point incidentally.

No change in structure, but subtle changes had still occurred in Kup.

A certain immaterial existence had faded; this was something Mr. Kraft had not observed at all during the day.

It floated naturally within Kup's body, illusory yet truly existing; it was a mist-like thing, but far more ethereal than that, nearly half concentrated within the skull, the rest existing in other parts of the body, distributed very unevenly.

This familiar head-heavy, foot-light distribution recalled the projection of various body parts on the cerebral cortex; similarly, the more precise and complex the part, the richer the existence.

【A bit scientific, yet completely unscientific】

Tiny, yet sufficiently distinguishable, extremely small "fading" created a difference with the surrounding environment, distinguished by the spiritual senses. He guessed this was the initial contact with the deep-level spiritual body or soul.

Strangely, Mr. Kraft had never observed the same thing on himself, whether in the deep level or during the process of shuttling via a medium; the spiritual senses had not detected any similar thing in his own existence.

Time did not allow further lingering; after clearly recording this degree of fading, he quickly cut off the spiritual senses.

About ten seconds; the narrow, cramped feeling brought by this time lasted only a few breaths. Mr. Kraft sat at the desk, lit the small candle, and began the first timing.

During this time, he was not idle; dipping the pen tip in ink, he deliberated for a moment, then placed an ink dot on the grid paper at a small grid height corresponding to the first position, as a reference standard.

"Hmm, let's temporarily call it a standard depth; from now on, we'll rely on this for comparison."

While the candle had only just burned a small section, and since being idle was being idle, the rest of the major medical record could be perfected incidentally. Mr. Kraft pulled back the paper under the inkwell, wrote furiously, and reached the personal history before it burned out.

When the last segment of the small candle burned out, "denial of promiscuous history" was just punctuated with a period, and the second spiritual sense exploration began.

No particularly large changes; the degree of fading of the spiritual body increased by a small amount on the original basis; only by comparing it with precise memory could one conclude that it had changed.

At the second recording position, he raised it half a small grid and placed a recording dot. Compared to the environmental fading when entering the deep level before, the estimated critical point approaching the deep level was above fifty-two, but below fifty-five.

Mr. Kraft was not too sure about the numerical value, because that boundary was blurred, not very clear when approaching, and only became clear regarding his position at the moment of arrival.

The second small candle was lit; this time he wrote until he reached the specialist physical examination before stopping, mainly because Kup had neither marriage nor children, and he did not know about his family elders, so these two parts were skipped, fast-forwarding to the physical examination record.

Mr. Kraft used the spiritual senses for the third time, quickly recorded the state of the spiritual body, skillfully shut it off, skillfully endured the discomfort, and recorded it on paper. This time the change was about one-third of a grid.

At this rate, Kup would need to sleep a whole day to approach the deep level.

Several times in a row, the speed of increase in the immersion depth of the spiritual body hovered between nearly one-half and one-third of a grid, stable and slow.

If statistical tools were used to fit it, a linear relationship between time and depth could roughly be obtained, very gentle.

However, the recorder's own state was not so good. Mr. Kraft found he had overestimated his tolerance, or rather, underestimated the pressure of continuous use.

Even with a few seconds of use spaced out by more than ten minutes, after the discomfort dissipated, the mental load was accumulating, small but not negligible.

After the tenth measurement, he had to decide to change the interval to the burning out of two small candles, to last until noon tomorrow.

The record extended; Mr. Kraft had long finished writing the major medical record and was considering whether to write the course of the illness as well, to buy time for catching up on sleep tomorrow.

The candle extinguished; the eighteenth recording; the spiritual senses swept over as usual; Mr. Kraft placed a new dot on the paper.

Two grids.

Shaking his head violently to shake off the dizziness, Kraft compared it once more with the previous time; the steady series of points now showed a trend of accelerating upward.