Krafft's Notes on Anomalies

"What's wrong?"

In the room lit only by an oil lamp, a gloomy figure repeated words that ordinary people rarely heard.

A little flame accumulated between the folds of clothing, floating and dispersing with the writing movements, and scattering in the acrid and smelly air.

It can be called writing, but it is more like dragging aimlessly, drawing some shapeless circles and dots, so that the consciousness can follow the tip of the pen to point to the key words one by one and ponder every detail.

Memory faithfully repeated what it had repeated countless times:

"Extraction, hydrolysis, oxidation..."

In this spiritual palace that seems to stand forever, even the fading of fonts caused by printing and the boring black strokes are still vivid.

But something was missing.

At first he thought that his life had been going too smoothly recently and his tolerance for negative situations had decreased, which made him unable to accept failure caused by uncontrollable random factors.

But after two days of continuous experiments and review, he had to admit that something might have gone wrong.

There is no single point in the entire process that needs to be strictly controlled. You can extract more, acidify more, and oxidize more drop by drop. There is absolutely no reason to go wrong.

However, after repeated debugging, the results were still unsatisfactory. The only few times when precipitation was suspected to have occurred, the output was very small, so small that it was difficult to separate it from impurities.

He re-examined the page from beginning to end until he was sure that there was no place on it for an undiscovered remark, but that only made the spaces between the lines look suspicious.

The intuition kept chattering in the consciousness - something was hidden, in a blind spot under the nose.

It feels like loose and falling metal parts rolling around in your head, making an irritating, harsh, clanking sound when shaken.

He had to find that part. His will was supported by a paranoid thought, from day to night. However, the distance did not seem to shorten, and it was always like a carrot hanging in front of the horse's head, driving his thinking to continue in a typical "just one step away" way.

Rather than asking “what is it”, the question we should ask is “how is it going on?” What’s wrong with my memory that it becomes disordered for no apparent reason?

So this is what happened. Seeing that the deadline for the clinic to open was approaching, Kraft decided to make things harder for Raymond and locked himself in the laboratory to dwell on the issue.

Time, precious time, did bring some progress that was difficult for outsiders to understand. He could feel that he was very close to his goal, only a piece of paper away, and could feel its vague outline. This was also the reason why he was willing to sit here late at night.

The willow bark in the extract sank and floated, awaiting further processing, but there was no time to pay attention to it at this moment.

Following the operating steps, the pen tip moves all the way down and then returns to the starting point, and the trajectory forms an elliptical circle on the paper, one circle after another.

The lines gradually shorten, shrinking and nesting inward until they come to a standstill in the center, breaking through the saturated paper fibers.

My eyes are dry and hazy, but they are focused on a certain point, attracted by the dense spiral formed by the ink lines.

Kraft frowned and leaned over to look inside. He could no longer make out anything in the messy strokes. But his intuition was stronger than ever before. Something was there that touched his senses.

According to my memory, this position is the record of alcohol dosage in the extraction step, and there is nothing special about it.

"Um?"

As I confirmed the content, the feeling disappeared. To be more precise, it disappeared from its original position.

It jumped to the end of the page, where a whole strip had been torn out, and now only the raw edges and the tall letter heads were left.

This was not a difficult task, and he didn't even have to look in the wastebasket. The next second he remembered what he had left here. The idea of ​​heating time and temperature control was completely abandoned because there were too many variations and he might need to make a homemade thermometer.

Without waiting for further thought, the words in my memory lost their appeal again.

It's like a poetic poem that has lost its rhyme, or a smooth speech that has been inserted with inappropriate words. Something has been taken away from it, and the same words have become dry and tasteless.

That feeling did not disappear, but somehow reappeared in a new place, in...

【Outside the room】

Kraft silently left his seat, walked around the long table with bottles and jars scattered around, drew his sword with his backhand, and stuck it to the door panel.

In the corridors far from the patrol route, you could hear a pin drop, and there was not even a mouse.

The scene at the location that my intuition pointed me to was clearly visible. It was the arched top of the corridor, which had just been cleaned when I moved in a few days ago. The cobwebs and dust on the front and back of the arches were swept away, revealing the faded religious paintings.

The feeling flows in the cloud-like painted lace. I don’t know if the old paint is originally like this or because it has been there for too long and looks grayish white. The lines outlined with crimson purple strokes are not very natural.

The texture is not there for the purpose of reflecting clouds, but rather the cloud pattern is there because of the need for texture.

Once the angle changes, the pattern flips and becomes deliberately hidden text.

[As the man was watching, he was taken up…]

The strokes follow the undulations of the brick and stone surface, and the hidden text patterns are embedded in stone patterns that are invisible to the naked eye. The pieces are closely linked, squeezed and curled, winding among the clouds, forming a seemingly unintentional long ridgeline.

That feeling, along the material and non-material path in the graphic strokes, meanders towards the depths of darkness.

To the intuition it is like the shadow of a flying bird coated with phosphorus; to the senses there is no moving thing where it passes.

The bolt was lifted, Kraft slipped out of the door and quickly chased after him.

The uneven stone steps and the winding roads were like flat ground under my feet, and were thrown from the front to the back of my ears. Instinctively, I even found a strange sense of pleasure in the pursuit.

Even faster.

With this in mind, my steps became quicker and steadier, as if I had eyes to find the most suitable point of force.

By the time he reacted, he had already stepped on the window frame, hooked the protruding gargoyle and climbed into the upper windowsill, intercepting it in front of the mural of the Baptism of Jeremiah.

However, that thing had no intention of following the normal laws of motion. It jumped a distance in the opposite direction and continued to move.

This unreasonable pursuit has attracted attention. The patrol team can be heard approaching this side. They are running around in the huge and complex corridors, blindly searching for a way outside the wall.

Kraft had no time to care about these things. The sword blade accurately passed through the narrow gap in the middle and split the wooden bolt on the back of the door, and then his body crashed into the space behind the door.

It was dark and vast, and he couldn't remember where he was for a moment. The thing was wandering in front of him, like a drop of water merging into a lake, spreading rapidly, expanding from a tiny amount to a size that was about to fill the space.

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

When the consciousness realizes what it is doing, it is already impossible to stop it.

The light coming from behind illuminated a corner of the hall. Amidst the flying scraps of paper, the hardwood bookshelf slid down with a bang, tilting the mountains of corrupt pages onto the floor.

"Uh, Mr. Kraft?" The monk who came here didn't quite understand what was going on here, but he felt a cold and alienated feeling flowing through his body with his breath, freezing his feet in place, "You are..."

"It seems a snake got in and I didn't catch it."

The master of the monastery stood in the center of the darkness, turned around and blocked the cut surface of the damaged bookshelf.

Uh, I've been very busy with work lately and I'm still writing my graduation thesis, so I'm in a pretty low mood.

(っ*□`)っ