Krafft's Anomaly Notes

Chapter 44 John Snow's Map

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

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

"Be 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 frozen atmosphere.

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

In this fishy and chaotic place, all experiences stimulated his senses to the greatest extent, such as disgusting smells, strange-shaped buildings, and wet and greasy touches on all surfaces.Only the sound is taken away, lost in the senses.

Lucius also quickly realized the incongruity. This kind of silence reminded him of walking out of the anatomy classroom late at night, and the empty corridor was full of silence, and everything fell into a stillness.

But now is not the late night when everyone is already asleep, but the bright and sunny morning.

He walked briskly to the nearest door and knocked hard, the hollow knock echoing through the frozen silence with no response.

"Is anyone there?" Kraft called out to the hollow that was probably the window. He could even vaguely see the person sleeping on the floor in the dark and narrow space, still asleep, unaware of the sounds from the outside world.

The two started from the red algae well, and gradually went outward, knocking on doors from house to house.

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

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

The more the investigation went on, the more he realized the seriousness of the matter. After half an hour, they had already photographed the doors of dozens of households, but so far no one had woken up.

The sleeping people seem to be separated by invisible walls, and when they walk through the transparent maze, they can only hear their own voices and hallucinatory echoes.

Morbid sleep has a frighteningly high incidence rate, and no one is spared in the affected area, and they haven't touched its boundaries yet, so they can't estimate how many people are affected.

Lucius couldn't see the map in Kraft's mind, and he couldn't tell where he was going, and he didn't even realize that the route was gradually moving away from the red algae well.Mechanically followed Kraft to repeat the actions of knocking on the door and calling, and the anxiety grew over time.

He was completely in a state of confusion, unable to understand what factors caused such a large-scale disease.

"It doesn't make sense, it doesn't make sense at all, it's obviously so similar to the effect of black liquid, but there are so many people, what 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, and at least there should be a response after walking for so long.

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

Ten minutes later, Kraft encountered the first wave of waking people they saw in the area.

A few men and women who were dressed in rough linen clothes like the skinny man before, glanced in surprise at the black-robed man who appeared from the corner, and then went on with their own business.

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

The number of closed huts quickly diminished, replaced by scenes of open doors to dump dirt and carry water home.

Kraft called to a woman carrying a bucket.

"I'm the doctor of the academy, may I ask if you and your family are waking up later and later?"

"College? Doctor?" The woman looked puzzled at Kraft's strange attire. "I think I understand what you mean, but our family doesn't."

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?" Carat heard the messy sounds of life and collisions. For the first time, he felt that these sounds relieved him. "Your neighbors?"

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

After asking several people in a row, Kraft found that even the progress of the disease had changed.

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

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 border area, the two types of people live together without affecting each other, and the water is as distinct as the oil.Only the case density is changing, not the severity of the disease.

This is... weird.

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

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

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

Hired workers do account for the majority of the residents here. They get up early and go to the pier to find work. In the evening, they take the wages settled for the day, and most of them are replaced with bread and cheap seafood. A small part is saved or turned into other small items.

Women stay at home and do some manual work to subsidize the family. They also need to take care of housework and take care of young children.

Heavy work and poor living environment will bring continuous damage to their health and leave them no time to think about other things, because just maintaining the current life has exhausted their energy.

And as long as there is an accident that breaks the balance in this kind of life, such as sudden illness, such as... After Kraft glanced at it, such as the people in this silent zone.

These accidents can drag down a whole family in less than a month.

He found a clean place to lean on and sighed.

During this period of time, he sighed more and more frequently, mostly because he was pushed away by various messy things, half of which were business affairs, half of which were private affairs, and he sighed for disrupted plans while he was busy.

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

He pieced together the route he had just walked in his mind, and the strips full of cases were gradually thinning out until they disappeared.

In any case, there is one factor whose influence develops on a scale from strong to weak, so what would that factor be?

And for this factor, there seems to be little difference between isolation and non-isolation, and it has nothing to do with them living next to each other.

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

The pages of the book are turned in my mind, and once I have a little thought, I can turn out any relevant things in my memory.

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

Lucius saw Kraft spring up from the plank against which he was leaning, calling his name.

If he was lucky enough to live in a different world, he would probably think of a certain elementary school student who died wherever he went. Like Kraft, the wide lenses shone brightly.

Although he didn't understand the situation as always, he still tried his best to recall, "Hmm...probably so? I can't remember."

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

In the nineteenth century on the side of the otherworldly souls, a famous disease was rife in London.It spread rapidly for a while, with countless patients and tens of thousands of deaths.

Once one person in a family is infected with the disease, the rest of the family is not far away from the same infection.

What's even weirder is that no matter how you isolate the patient, it can't have the same effect as other diseases in the past. It seems that there is a weird ghost resident in that area.

In this terrible epidemic, two names are forever remembered - "cholera", and "John Snow", the father of epidemiology.

John Snow registered every person who died of illness on a map, and soon this famous cholera map showed an obvious trend. The patients were distributed around a certain center and began to become sparse outward.

But in Kraft, this phenomenon is even more obvious.

"Water, Lucius, it's water."

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

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

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

The water that a family can drink every day is uniformly fetched from buckets at the water intake point, which explains why there is a significant family clustering in the salt tide area.

In places that are gradually far 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 becomes sparse until the distance is so far that no one goes there.

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

Once again a clear path appeared in front of him, and Kraft gave up the seat of the backrest to Lucius, walking back and forth excitedly.

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

(End of this chapter)