Krafft's Anomaly Notes

Chapter 42 Multiple Pathogenic Factors
"Boom boom boom, boom boom boom."

In the early morning, there was a loud and unhurried knock on the door.

"Hello, is Mr. Brad at home?"

"Wait a minute, I'll be here right away." The young woman wearing a blackened apron put down the half-cut bread, wiped her hands with the apron, walked to the door and opened it, "You are..."

"My Lord! What's going on?!"

The sight outside the door terrified her.

In the faintly bright sky, two bird-headed men in black robes were standing at the door of her house carrying a wooden box.The metallic luster of the bird's beak and the red mirror reflect the penetrating light.

She subconsciously wanted to close the door, but a black glove stretched out quickly and pressed against the door, "Please don't do this, ma'am, we are doctors! Don't close the door."

It was quite strange, when the light and darkness alternated early in the morning, two guys whose image was very similar to the legendary devil came to the door, uttered words, and claimed that they were doctors who came to see a doctor.

Realizing that he had been misunderstood, Kraft hurriedly explained his purpose, "We are here to find Mr. Brad, the baker. Before he came to the clinic and said that he had slept too long, we made a return visit."

Seeing the expression on the woman's face turn from horror to suspicion, Kraft withdrew his hand from the door and pointed to the badge on his collar.

"My name is Kraft, and I'm a lecturer at Port Wendeng College. Don't worry about this stupid headgear, I don't like it either." He automatically squeezed out a polite smile, but it was a pity that it was blocked by the mask, and he didn't take advantage of his young and handsome face.

"Huh?" The woman was still wary.The bird-headed man called out her husband's name, knew his occupation, and had an unfamiliar badge pinned to his collar. This was no reason for her to let them in easily.

Especially when the husband is still awake.

What a difficult scene, Kraft stretched out his hand and scratched his head, hitting the red lens.He restructured his words to try to impress the lady.

"Are you Mr. Brad's wife? That's right. We think it's a serious matter that he can't wake up in the morning and interfere with his normal work. You don't want your husband to be so distressed, do you?"

The woman's expression was a little shaken, and Kraft retreated, "We are very busy with work, and if we miss today, we have to wait another half a month. Can you tell Mr. Brad to make an appointment in half a month?"

"Oh, that's not what I meant, please come in. It's just that my husband is still sleeping and I have to wait a while, and it's getting harder and harder to wake him up." She opened the door to let Kraft and Lucius Enter the house.

"Thank you, Mrs. Brad is so lucky." Kraft complimented him politely. This friendly attitude made Mrs. Brad relax a bit.

It went smoothly, but this dialogue and scene always gave Kraft a subtle sense of déjà vu, as if he had seen it before.

With this sense of déjà vu, he and Lucius stepped into Brad's house, and Mrs. Brad took them to the table.

"I'm so sorry, my husband hasn't woken up yet, he's been getting up late lately, you guys have to wait a while before seeing him."

"It doesn't matter, just let us see if it's the problem of the house first." Kraft observed the room, seeing nothing under the light red filter, and the air filtered by the bird's beak couldn't smell the original smell .

"Ma'am, you got up really early, haven't you been influenced by your husband?"

"Why do you say that?" She cut two thin slices from the bread and put them on a wooden tray. "Drowsiness is not contagious. We have always woken up early before, but Brad has been waking up late recently."

Lucius and Kraft looked at each other and shook their heads. They didn't expect their guess to be shattered from the very beginning.

If it is an epidemic, the wife who has the most contact with Brad is enough to be infected several times in such a long time, it doesn't make sense and there is no sign at all.

The theory of the cause of the living environment has also been shaken. It does not make sense for two people to live together and there is no difference in basic necessities of life.

"Then do you know anyone nearby who has had a similar situation recently?" Kraft continued to ask.

Mrs. Brad stopped the knife in her hand and recalled for a moment, "No, at least I haven't heard of this street. You can ask Brad, he knows more people than me."

"Thank you. It's presumptuous to say, can we try to wake him up?"

As for "difficult to wake up", Kraft was very curious about the extent to which a patient would make such an expression.

"It's better to say that this really helped me a lot. It's not easy to wake him up every day. It's in the room over there."

Mrs. Brad pointed to the door on one side with her knife.

Kraft and Lucius pushed the door open, and a fat man was sleeping soundly on the bed.

He held the fat hand protruding from under the quilt, and exerted a little force, "Mr. Brad, wake up."

"You can't wake him up like this." Mrs. Brad's voice came from outside the door. "Be louder and harder, but don't pinch him purple."

Kraft gradually increased the strength in his hand, grabbed Brad's hand with his powerful palm, and shook it hard.

This level of intensity would cause obvious pain to most unprepared people, but Brad was still asleep, without any reaction, his chest rose and fell regularly, without any change.

Kraft put his hand on the side of his neck. Without a timer, he could barely estimate that the carotid pulse was around fifty beats per minute, which was within the normal range.

The beak mask did not allow Kraft to yell in his ear, so he could only shake Brad's body vigorously. However, in such a violent shaking, he only paused his snoring, and did not intend to wake up. .

"It's really not easy to wake up. I have an idea, but I don't know if it will work." Lucius watched Kraft fiddle with it for a while, then took out Brad's other hand.

"what?"

"I don't think a hairy guy would mind losing one?" He grabbed one of Brad's arm hairs and gave it a hard tug.

"Don't!" Kraft wanted to stop him, but it was too late.

"Hiss." The effect was immediate, even being pricked by a needle may not cause such pain, Brad made a slight inhalation sound in his sleep, showing signs of waking up.

Kraft took the opportunity to shake him more violently, and Brad finally opened his eyes under the torment of the wake-up package.

"Who are you?!" He sat up and backed away desperately, pushing against the wall.

"Relax, we are doctors." Kraft spread his hands to show harmlessness, "Dr. Liston said that you are not easy to wake up, so we decided to come and have a look."

When he woke up and found two bird-headed men at home, this wave of great shock made Brad fully awake as soon as he woke up. He clutched his chest and tried to calm his beating heart, put on his clothes and sat down at the table.

"Thank you, but let my wife wake me up next time." Brad was terrified.

"I'm very sorry, this is also to intuitively feel what it means to be 'not easy to be awakened'. To be honest, I don't think this is normal." Kraft took the wooden tray containing the bread and placed it in front of Brad, "No If you mind, we can eat and chat."

"Do you want some?" Chatting with the bird-headed man while eating breakfast obviously has no positive effect on appetite.

"No, it doesn't have this function yet." The knuckles tapped the mask lightly, making a bang bang sound.

The eyes behind the red lenses looked at Brad carefully. After waking up, Brad's mental state was very normal, and it could even be said that he was in better state than Kraft recently, and he didn't even hit Hache.

Regardless of the gradual deterioration, this kind of sleep quality is still very enviable.

"Did you sleep well recently? Did you have any dreams?"

"I did sleep well, but it was a little too good to wake up." Brad tore off a piece of bread and stuffed it into his mouth, "Dream... I didn't have a dream, or maybe I don't remember it. I have an impression the moment I wake up."

He touched his arm, always feeling a little tingling lingering, "It's strange to say, I slept so well, and I never had a dream."

"It's like the whole time of sleeping has been erased, with no idea what happened during that time?" Lucius interjected.

"Ah, yes, that's the feeling." Brian agreed with this metaphor, "It's different from falling asleep before."

Kraft wrote this down on a piece of paper and glanced at Lucius. "I don't know what's going on during this period of time", these are the exact words that Lucius described to him when he drank the diluent.

He only needed a little active memory to recall the excited expression on Lucius' face and excited tone.

Lucius' face couldn't be seen under the mask, so his face must not be much better.

"Then have you heard of similar situations in the nearby people? Waking up later and later, unable to wake up, both or one of them."

"No, I know half a block here, and they have never mentioned such a thing." Brad stuffed the last piece of bread into his mouth, swallowed it, and continued, "It's not a big deal, right? After getting used to it I also think it would be nice to get more sleep."

……

……

"It doesn't make sense, it doesn't make sense at all."

Kraft and Lucius walked out the door and back into the street.

"I still think it has something to do with clarity. Even if it doesn't make sense logically, I still have to reserve my point of view." Lucius was a little annoyed by the contradiction between intuition and reality.

He thinks this is the problem caused by the diluent, but according to the current feedback, only this one patient has this symptom after drinking the clarifying potion, but Kraft has at least two cases in his hands who have not been exposed to the diluent .

"Actually, I feel the same way, Lucius." Kraft stopped and touched the metal beak. He didn't have a beard for him to stroke, so he could only use the beak as a temporary substitute when thinking.

"If there is a conflict between the hypothesis and the reality, it is definitely not the reality that is wrong. One possibility is that our observations of the phenomenon are missing, and the other is that our theory is not perfect."

"What do you mean?" Lucius asked puzzled.

"I think it's the latter. This assumption is too simple. There may be more than one risk factor for the disease. Clarifying medicine is just one of them."

Kraft recalled yesterday's map and compared it with his walking on Elm Street today, "If my sense of distance is not too outrageous, Liston's drawing scale is also correct. The dotted line I drew yesterday..."

He roughly calculated, "If you walk in a straight line, it will only take five to 10 minutes."

"I also want to go back to my original guess. There is a factor that can affect a certain range. It may not be an infectious disease, but it is much larger than the first few houses I thought."

Kraft spread his arms and made a big circle.

"Its center is not here, and the influence here is already very weak, so it will only manifest itself under the double effect of another dangerous factor, that is, clarity."

"In that case, to find it..." Lucius thought thoughtfully.

"Salt tide area." Kraft lifted the wooden box, "We have to go to the salt tide area."

(End of this chapter)