Krafft's Anomaly Notes

Chapter 323 Dark Side
There was no warning, no sense of danger, as if a turbulent current had surged into a pool of still water, and the "fingertips" had touched an approaching wave.

Just like before, with a void as the medium, the speed seems gentle and slow, but in fact it arrives in an instant, invading the perception range within the time it takes for the mind to complete a single-threaded operation.

The vibration also spread to the spiritual senses with the contact, diffusing unimpeded in the undifferentiated medium.

He felt as if he was holding a twisting tuning fork, and a steady stream of vibrations were coming from it, spreading through his imaginary limbs and rapidly approaching his real body.

It is a wave, an instruction, a cast of spells.

The mental organs were pulled back as if they were electrocuted, and they curled up and separated. This was not enough, Kraft dragged his body and ran again, turning at the next fork in the road, and distanced himself from Green.

The move was correct and the contact was broken.

The incoming wave did not subside immediately. It spread in the spiritual body like real water waves, and the remaining force reached less than two arms' distance, almost brushing the back.

Kraft rushed through another fork in the road, braked suddenly, turned back with light steps, moved under the rock wall behind the corner, hid his body in the irregular depression, and pressed against the smooth, wet and cold surface.

The sound of a galloping horse approached, rushed straight through the fork in the road, and quickly became smaller and disappeared.

The spiritual senses are still curled up, and the consciousness is counting the time passing in the darkness.

[One thousand and one, one thousand and two, one thousand and three...]

By counting to four digits silently, he could control his rhythm to a more even half-second, more reliably than by counting with a pounding heart and rapid breathing.

At the thirty-fifth count, the sound of bones and hooves hitting rocks sounded without warning, lingered not far away, and then weakened and disappeared again.

Kraft slowly exhaled the breath that had been pent up for a long time, and was glad that he had been prepared and avoided this sudden attack.

That thing was as smart as imagined. While it possessed intelligence, it also clearly had anthropomorphic thinking.

"I didn't know deep-seated creatures had brain tissue." He made some guesses, but couldn't confirm it yet. "It better not be the case."

The only sound left in the mist was the gurgling sound of liquid flowing, like a cut blood vessel pumping out blood under the pressure of a huge heart. The faint smell of rust seemed to always stick around the mouth and nose, lingering.

His hand rested on the weighted ball of the hilt, the round, thick touch providing a false sense of security, but he soon realized it was only an illusion.

There was no chance of getting within range to use the weapon in hand.

The highly anticipated "Sword in the Stone" also requires a clear target location to be meaningful, but now a brief mental contact can be fatal, and it is completely impossible to find the opponent's body.

It was like holding a sharp dagger in hand, groping in the dark for the enemy, but the enemy was a blue-ringed octopus, and the moment the tentacles touched it could be fatal.

The mind was spinning in an endless cycle of contradictions, with no solution for the time being. A deeper understanding and more clever application formed a huge technological gap. In the face of this gap, the spirit body became the medium for transmitting fatal attacks.

Kraft froze in place for a while, like a candidate who encountered a knowledge blind spot in the examination room and tried to make a last-ditch effort, hoping that prolonged thinking would create some miracle of inspiration. But the results would mostly prove that this was meaningless except for wasting time and self-anesthetizing.

Physical strength is not restored by stopping exercise, but is instead replaced by the dampness and coldness that gradually seeps in, and the body is expressing its need for a heat source.

It's not a good idea to light an open flame. That thing might still be nearby. [I knew I would regret it]

The inevitable result of useless thinking is regret, regretting the step that was taken less at that time, which brought us to the current predicament. Perhaps if the research was more radical, what we can do now would be completely different.

He knew too little about this fluctuation. Apart from knowing that it was a code for the lunar debris to control biological tissues, he did not conduct any further research, let alone find a way to counter it.

The only thing that was actually recorded was the fluctuations temporarily named "pacemaker" induced in the specimen by digitalis.

What is needed now is not experimental data or rough understanding, but application transformation.

The price of not being radical enough in research is that he needs to use some radical means to solve real problems.

His consciousness jumped between various possibilities, and he even thought of rushing into the range enough to hurt the opponent by tearing the plane at the cost of suffering some damage, but theoretical knowledge told him that it was impossible.

That is not something that can be achieved by subjective willpower to overcome pain. Even if a part of the body is only lightly touched, the uncontrolled bone formation effect will drain blood calcium in a short period of time, and the lack of key substances will completely deprive the muscles of their ability to move.

You have to have a similar method to the other party, projecting an unexpected wave during the contact between the spiritual body and directly reaching its physical body.

Does he have such a thing?
It seems not. After all, when discovering the extraordinary ability of deep creatures to manipulate human tissue, every rational person's first reaction should be its medical value rather than its use as a lethal force.

After all, destruction is like a child knocking over building blocks, there are a million and one simple ways to do it. Repair is much more difficult and precious.

He had indeed never imagined that his research would be used in the opposite field, which led to the current dilemma.

But when the high-speed thinking was directed in this direction, it sensitively found a small breakthrough that had not been discovered before and raised questions.

[Really? ]

The herb that saves the heart was once a bright poison until it was properly blended.

But is there another side to the program used to counteract the toxicity of digitalis overdose?
The other side is extremely vicious and deadly.

While the mind is still working, the never-fading knowledge in the mind bursts out from that gap, illuminating areas that were previously avoided unintentionally or intentionally, exposing the dark and twisted things.

The mechanism of action of digitalis is to inhibit the sodium-potassium pump on the myocardial cell membrane, increase the sodium concentration in the cell, and then introduce more calcium into the cell through the sodium-calcium exchanger, ultimately enhancing myocardial contraction and causing rapid and disordered contraction when excessive, namely ventricular fibrillation.

The fluctuations temporarily named "pacemaker" can quickly relieve ventricular fibrillation caused by digitalis, which means that it can accurately break a link in this interlocking chain.

Either it enhances the activity of the sodium-potassium pump or it blocks the sodium-calcium exchange. It must have rapidly changed the electrolyte distribution inside and outside the cell through some channel - in a direction exactly opposite to that of digitalis.

The sodium-potassium pump and sodium-calcium exchanger are widely present in various tissues including the myocardium, vascular smooth muscle, nervous system, and renal tubules, and they control far more than just the myocardium, but also blood pressure, water and electrolyte balance, and neuroelectrophysiology.

If this power is unchecked, pushing electrolytes to another extreme of disorder, could the "pacemaker" used to relieve digitalis poisoning become a curse that is just as deadly?

"Let's give it a try..."