Krafft's Notes on Anomalies

Chapter 44 John Snow’s Map

"That's right, it's getting late. We should be having our first morning class at this time."

Lucius straightened up, holding the bird's beak to straighten the mask, "Have you figured out where to start? If you go back early, you can catch lunch. Gris asked me last time why you don't go there more often."

"Quiet, I really don't understand how you can still talk about food in this environment." Kraft raised his hand and made a pause gesture.

The only two voices disappeared, and silence quickly surrounded them, filling the gaps like quicksand, wrapping people into a solid atmosphere.

Kraft is usually a person who likes quiet, but the quiet he likes is the sense of escape from the occasional distant sound, not the unnatural quiet of being thrown into a soundproof room.

In this salty and chaotic place, all experiences stimulated his senses to the greatest extent, including the disgusting smell, the strange-shaped buildings, and the wet and greasy touch on all surfaces. Only the sound is taken away, missing from the senses.

Lucius also quickly realized the violation. This kind of silence reminded him of walking out of the anatomy classroom late at night. The deserted corridor was completely silent, and everything fell into a stillness.

But now it is not late at night when everyone has fallen asleep, but bright and sunny morning.

He walked quickly to the nearest door and knocked hard. The hollow knocking sound echoed in the frozen silence, but there was no response.

"Is anyone there?" Kraft called as he walked to the hole that was probably the window. He could even vaguely see the person sleeping on the floor in the dark and small space, still sleeping soundly and unaware of the sounds from the outside world.

The two started from the red algae well and gradually moved outward, knocking on the door from door to door.

There is no need to ask. As long as it is locked from the inside and no one opens the door, it must be still asleep.

Kraft used his memory to the maximum, engraved the location of each household in his mind as much as possible, and matched it with the spatial structure he remembered to form a floor plan.

The more the investigation progressed, the more he realized the seriousness of the matter. Half an hour later, they had patted the doors of dozens of households, but so far no one had been found awake.

The sleeping people seemed to be separated by invisible walls, and as they walked through the transparent maze, they could only hear their own voices and hallucinatory echoes.

The incidence rate of morbid sleep is frighteningly high, and no one in the affected area is spared. However, they have not yet touched its boundaries and cannot estimate how many people are affected.

Lucius couldn't see the map in Kraft's mind, and he couldn't tell where he had gone. He didn't even realize that the route was gradually getting away from the red algae well. Mechanically following Kraft, he repeatedly knocked on the door and called, and his anxiety grew as time went by.

He was completely confused and did not understand what factors caused such a large-scale disease.

"It doesn't make sense, it doesn't make sense at all. It's obviously like the effect of black liquid, but there are so many people, what on earth is it?"

Kraft couldn't answer his question, and he felt that his guess was wrong again. If the influencing factors are constantly weakening from the inside out, then there should be a difference in the severity of the disease in the distribution of patients they encounter. After walking for so long, there should at least be a response.

With such confusion, the investigation continued. He felt that he was approaching the boundary of this area, and there was a vague voice in the distance.

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

Several people, both men and women, wearing rough linen clothes like the skinny men before, glanced at the man in black robes who appeared from the corner in surprise, and then continued to do their own thing.

As they continued to move forward, they saw more and more people, transitioning from the sleeping territory to the normal area.

The number of closed wooden houses quickly decreased, replaced by the scene of people dumping dirt and carrying water home with their doors open.

Craft stopped a woman carrying a bucket.

"I am a doctor at the college. Are you and your family waking up later and later lately?"

"College? Doctor?" The woman looked at Kraft's strange attire in confusion, "I think I roughly understand what you mean, but we don't have one at home."

She put down the bucket in her hand and pointed behind Kraft, "There are plenty over there, but you won't see them get up until noon."

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

"Their family is exactly what you said. I don't know which devil has cast a curse on them. Now they can only work for half a day. How should they live?"

After questioning several people in succession, Kraft discovered that even the progression of his condition had changed.

Originally, according to Gary and Brad's description, he expected to encounter patients with different degrees of prolonged sleep time.

But in fact there are only two kinds of people here - those who sleep until noon, and those who are not affected at all, and basically the whole family agrees, either they can't wake up, or everything goes on as usual.

In this junction area, the two types of people live together without affecting each other. Water and oil are as distinct as each other. Only the density of cases is changing, not the severity of the disease.

This is... weird.

"So why now?" Lucius also began to imitate Kraft and stroke the bird's beak, using this action to help him calm down and think.

It's a pity that it doesn't seem to have any effect. I still can't think of what I should be thinking of.

Just for a while, three women carrying buckets passed by, and there seemed to be fewer adult men.

The hired workers do make up the majority of the residents here. They get up early in the morning and go to the dock to find work. Then in the evening, they take the wages settled that day. Most of them are exchanged for bread and cheap seafood, and a small part is saved or turned into other small items.

Women, on the other hand, stay at home and do manual work to supplement the family income. They also need to be responsible for housework and taking care of young children.

Heavy work and poor living environment will cause continuous damage to their health and leave them no time to think about other things, because they have exhausted their energy just to maintain their current life.

And as long as there is an accident that breaks the balance in such a life, such as a sudden illness, such as... Kraft glanced behind him, such as the people in this silent zone.

These accidents can bring down an entire family in less than a month.

He found a relatively clean place to lean on and sighed.

During this period of time, he sighed more and more often, mostly because he was pushed away by all kinds of messy things, half business, half private, sighing for disrupted plans while busy.

But there are also people like now who occasionally sigh for their limited abilities.

He pieced together the route he had just taken in his mind. The strips filled with cases were gradually thinning out until they disappeared.

No matter what, there is indeed a factor whose influence develops from strong to weak in a range, so what could this factor be?

And for this factor, there seems to be little difference whether they are isolated or not, but it has nothing to do with them living next to each other.

He must have seen a similar picture somewhere, and he also judged it based on the location of the case, without considering other issues.

The pages of the book are turning in my mind. Once I have an idea, I can find anything relevant in my memory.

"Lucius! Those women carrying buckets just now came from the same direction, right?"

Lucius saw Kraft jump up from the wooden board he was leaning against, calling his name.

If he was lucky enough to have lived in another world, he would probably think of a certain elementary school student who died wherever he went. Like Kraft, his wide lenses shone with sparkling light.

Although he didn't understand the situation as always, he still tried to recall it, "Well... I guess so? I can't remember clearly."

"Yes, that's right, they all came from the opposite direction to us." Kraft figured out the problem. Just talking about the phenomenon in the salt tide area is a complete replica of the classic case.

In the 19th century, a famous disease became prevalent in London. It spread rapidly, with countless patients and tens of thousands of deaths.

Once one person in a family is infected with the disease, their family members are not far away from being similarly infected.

What's even weirder is that no matter how the patient is isolated, it cannot have the same effect as other diseases in the past. There seems to be a weird ghost resident in that area.

In this horrific epidemic, two names will be forever remembered - "Cholera" and "John Snow", the father of epidemiology.

John Snow registered everyone who died from the disease on a map. Soon the famous cholera map showed a clear trend, with patients distributed around a certain center and starting to become sparse outwards.

In Kraft's case, this phenomenon is even more obvious.

"Water, Lucius, it's water."

Compared with the situation in London, water access in the salt tide area is appallingly scarce.

The low-lying location near the sea makes it extremely difficult to have drinkable underground fresh water. Most of the time, the results of drilling wells are useless salt water wells like red algae wells, which is a futile effort.

Therefore, the influence of a stable water source will reach far beyond other areas, and a large number of residents will draw water from the same location.

The water that a family drinks every day is brought in buckets from the water collection point, which explains why there are significant family clusters in saline tide areas.

In places that are gradually farther away from that water source, residents' willingness to go there to fetch water gradually weakens, and they turn to other wells to fetch water, so the distribution of cases begins to become sparse, until the distance is so great that no one goes there.

None of the people carrying buckets they saw just now were coming from the direction of the case concentration area, which confirmed his reasoning from the side.

The clear road appeared in front of him again. Kraft gave up the backrest position to Lucius and walked back and forth excitedly.

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