Free Web NovelChapter 313: Genius Big-Brain Scholar
The moment she saw the Third Captain agree to Andrew’s request, he knew his plan to lure both of the New World’s greatest scholarly geniuses here had succeeded.
After all, despite the fact that these two siblings constantly acted like they couldn’t stand the sight of each other, whenever one of them made a sincere request, the other almost always caved.
Exceptions were practically nonexistent.
But before Andrew could even begin to feel pleased about it, the Third Captain abruptly shifted gears:
"That said — neither he nor I are specialists in vaccine research. Even with everyone else in the institute pitching in to help, the research timeline might end up running... a little long."
"You should mentally prepare yourself."
Andrew had just allowed himself a small smile upon hearing her agree — and then those words hit him, and his heart sank straight through the floor.
Braced as he was for the possibility that things might run over schedule, he couldn’t stop himself from pressing her:
"When you say ’a little long’... how long exactly?"
Because if it was too long...
At his question, the Third Captain tilted her head down and mulled it over for a moment, while Andrew’s heart continued its slow descent — until she finally spoke:
"Even with that guy’s help factored in, it would take... roughly five full days."
Five full days, huh...
Good thing Belle gave me Eous to prevent exactly this kind of situation, so I can...
Wait.
The words she’d just said looped back through his mind, and only then did it finally click — belatedly, completely.
The next moment, he repeated it back with barely-concealed disbelief:
"Five days? Not fifteen — just five?!"
From the way the Third Captain had been building up to it, he’d instinctively assumed successful development would take at minimum ten days — maybe half a month. Possibly even longer.
After all, this was a cross-world viral mutation they were dealing with. And based on his experience from his first life, vaccine development had never, ever been a simple undertaking.
But he had underestimated this world’s level of technology — and he had underestimated the two genius Dragonkin scholars standing before him.
Even after living here for over a decade, he still kept forgetting.
The everyday rhythms of life here, the mundane quality of daily necessities, the clothing and aesthetic of it all — everything conspired to make a person forget that this was, at its core, a world of staggeringly advanced science and technology.
He’d let it slip his mind again, just like that.
But honestly, even setting everything else aside, a single Jet Great Sword was proof enough of this world’s technological muscle — to say nothing of all the even more absurdly equipped gear beyond that.
Staring up at the faintly teasing smile that had crept onto the Third Captain’s face, Andrew knew immediately that he’d just been played.
Even so — even with the surprise of delight still buzzing in his chest — he couldn’t help but seek one more confirmation:
"Five days — that’s really doable?"
"Of course."
Utterly unbothered by his repeated checking, the Third Captain gave a calm, assured nod.
"Naturally. The degree of mutation in this virus is still within a manageable range."
"At its core, what we’re looking at is the virus undergoing adaptive evolution in response to a high-concentration novel energy environment — but fundamentally, its core structure hasn’t changed because of that."
"So as long as we have the original vaccine formula, plus samples of the mutation-causing influence source, we can derive a compatible solution fairly quickly."
She then pointed at the samples and crystallized specimens laid out on the table.
"The viral material samples you brought are exceptionally well-timed — high vitality, excellent sample quality. And the energy samples from the influence source are purer than I expected."
"With all of this on hand, we can skip the verification stage on quite a few steps entirely, which cuts the timeline significantly."
At that, a confident smile spread across the Third Captain’s face.
"Don’t worry — when I said five days, I was already being conservative."
"Give him and me five days, and we’ll have a finished vaccine ready for you — along with a mass-production formula detailed down to every single step."
Hearing that, Andrew finally let out the breath he’d been holding.
The Third Captain, her mood considerably improved now that she’d gotten a little payback for being outmaneuvered by Andrew earlier, immediately plucked a sheet of paper from the pile of books beside her, picked up a pen, and began to write.
Watching her spring into action without missing a beat, Andrew — his objective now achieved — found that he simply couldn’t hold back the curiosity that had been gnawing at him all along.
Taking in the scene that could only be described as a battlefield of collapsed bodies, he spoke up:
"By the way, Third Captain — there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask."
He met her gaze as she lifted her eyes from the letter she was drafting, and voiced the question that had been nagging at him.
"The Elder and the others — what exactly... happened here? As far as I can remember, they’ve never been heavy drinkers. Not once."
"So how did they end up this plastered, out of nowhere?"
He gazed out at the Dragonkin scholars sprawled in every direction across the platforms below, his voice tinged with equal parts bewilderment and helplessness.
At his question, the Third Captain lowered her head again and continued writing, letting out a slightly exasperated shrug.
She didn’t rush to answer.
In just a few quick strokes she set her pen down, folded the finished letter neatly, sealed it into a cylindrical canister, and secured it into the harness of a messenger wyvern. She watched the creature soar away into the distance, then pushed up the glasses on the bridge of her nose, and let a half-smile settle at the corner of her mouth.
"Your understanding of them hasn’t changed one bit, I see."
She glanced up at Andrew and said:
"Funnily enough — the root cause of all this is actually you."
"Me???"
That left Andrew genuinely baffled. He stared at her with a puzzled frown.
"How does any of this have anything to do with me? I only just got back, didn’t I?"
But rather than taking his bait, the Third Captain shook her head and calmly began recounting what had transpired the previous evening.
Her tone was perfectly matter-of-fact as she said:
"Last night, a major research project at the institute was finally completed. Following their usual tradition, they held a small celebratory banquet here at the institute."
"As you know, everyone here is normally buried in their work with very little time to unwind — these banquets exist precisely to force everyone to decompress together so nobody snaps from the pressure."
"But there’ve been plenty of these banquets before," Andrew said, scratching his head. "And I’ve never seen any of them get this wrecked at any of them."
"You’re not wrong."
The Third Captain’s tone paused for just a fraction of a second, and something subtle flickered through her eyes.
"If it had been ordinary alcohol, it would never have come to this — but the problem is that what they were drinking last night was a bit... peculiar."
Andrew’s brow furrowed instantly.
"Peculiar? What kind of drink?"
But the Third Captain, rather than answering directly, turned the question back on him:
"Do you remember — before you left for the Forbidden Lands — you once told them about a practice from your hometown? Specifically, a kind of medicinal brew made by submerging whole lizards in strong liquor, and another method of adding snake venom directly into spirits?"
"You even said the resulting concoctions could treat gout and had powerful restorative properties?"
At the Third Captain’s reminder, memories long buried in the back of his mind began to resurface.
Come to think of it — when he’d taken on one of the scholars’ material-gathering commissions up in the Coral Highlands — he had, probably, maybe, possibly... mentioned it offhandedly?
At the time, he’d brought it up while chatting with the Elder and the others about regional drinking cultures from different parts of the world — a throwaway comment, just spreading a bit of trivia from his first life for fun. Surely nobody had taken it seriously.
But even as that thought crossed his mind, Andrew quickly caught himself and pushed back:
"But even so, that doesn’t add up — snakes and lizards are species from my homeland, aren’t they? I’m pretty sure neither of them exist in the New World. Where would they have even gotten any?"
"Besides, the gap between two completely different worlds — even if something shares the same name, there’s no way it’s actually the same creature, right?"
But in just an instant — drawing on his intimate and extensive knowledge of these scholars’ utterly boundless appetite for reckless experimentation — Andrew’s mind leapt to a very specific possibility.
"Hold on."
His expression shifted into something complicated and uneasy as he looked at the Third Captain and asked, hesitantly: freewebnovёl.ƈom
"Third Captain... you’re not about to tell me that..."
His tentative guess was met with the Third Captain’s wordless, affirming nod.
"You’re correct that the baijiu you brought is long gone — it was completely finished off at a banquet a full month ago."
"But that didn’t stop certain people from getting greedy. They suddenly remembered that method you’d mentioned — the whole lizard and the snake venom soaked in liquor — and figured that if your hometown’s plain spirits already packed that kind of punch, then a proper medicinal brew made their way must be something else entirely."
At that, even the Third Captain couldn’t hold back a note of exasperation.
Truthfully, she hadn’t expected this crowd of self-destructive drunkards to unleash quite this level of creative ingenuity in the absence of good alcohol.
She pressed on:
"But as you said — the New World doesn’t have those two creatures. So they went looking for monsters that most closely resembled what you’d described, either in appearance or in effect."
Smack.
Andrew couldn’t stop himself — his hand shot up and covered his face.
He’d guessed the truth on the very first try, and somehow that only made it worse. He could not find it in himself to be even slightly pleased about it. frёewebηovel.cѳm
He asked, voice strained:
"So... what exactly did the Elder and the others end up using for the brew?"
"The venom extracted from a Paralysis Dragon’s fangs," the Third Captain said, pausing to let that land, "and one whole Paralysis Jagras."
"..."
Andrew’s expression locked up entirely.
Beside him, Miyabi stood listening quietly, her fox ears giving the tiniest of twitches.
She wasn’t familiar with the names ’Paralysis Dragon’ or ’Paralysis Jagras,’ but from the way Andrew’s expression had just collapsed, it was abundantly clear that this was not, by any stretch of the imagination, normal behavior.
"A Paralysis Jagras... brewed into liquor?"
The words left Andrew’s mouth as though the last scrap of his will to speak had been wrung out of him. One final ember of hope prompted him to confirm:
"Whole?"
"Whole," the Third Captain confirmed, her tone as calm and clinical as if she were reading off a report.
"They started preparing well in advance for this banquet so they could have something special to drink."
"But since the baijiu was long gone, someone suggested just using whatever alcohol they had on hand. And since the homebrew they’d made themselves wasn’t enough in quantity, they had a flash of inspiration and simply tossed both ingredients into a single crock together."
"In their words, it was apparently a... ’bestmatch’?"
Sure, ’bestmatch,’ you absolute geniuses. You’re brilliant scientists — what, are you angling to become some kind of legendary Energy Flask boys?
Aren’t you worried about throwing your backs out?!
But almost immediately, Andrew caught the other crucial detail buried in the Third Captain’s words.
"They brewed their own liquor?!"
"Yes," the Third Captain said, adjusting her glasses.
"The alcohol content of that homebrew... was roughly half of what the stuff you originally brewed had."
She walked over to the desk nearby, slid open a drawer, and produced a transparent bottle, which she set down gently in front of Andrew.
The liquid inside was a deeply unsettling shade of dark violet. In the candlelight, it shimmered with a dim, murky gleam — one glance was all it took to know that this was absolutely not anything resembling a normal beverage.
And they drank this thing?
Andrew drew a long, slow breath.
He had a fairly good idea now of what had happened.
"So," he began carefully,
"because they weren’t using high-proof baijiu — because the alcohol content wasn’t high enough — the toxin proteins in the Paralysis Dragon’s venom never fully denatured?"
"Precisely."
Andrew looked down at the scholars slumped below, and genuine worry crept onto his face.
He knew full well that the paralytic toxins responsible for inducing the Paralysis status effect functioned much like anesthetic agents in modern medicine — and both the Paralysis Dragon and the Paralysis Jagras carried neurotoxic venom as their defining trait.
If they’d ingested too high a dose, it could, in a worst case, actually kill someone.
Andrew stared at the unconscious scholars and asked:
"How much did they... drink??"
"Incalculable," the Third Captain said flatly.
She glanced at the bottle in front of him and gave a small shrug.
"What I can tell you with certainty is that the crock was completely full to begin with. What you’re holding now is the very last of it."
Her matter-of-fact tone was saturated with barely-contained exasperation at their recklessness — but when she caught the worried look on Andrew’s face and immediately understood what he was afraid of, she followed up with a reassurance:
"You can relax — I’ve checked every single one of them. Nobody is in any danger of dying."
"The alcohol content was half of yours, but it still just barely scraped the edge of what you’d call strong liquor. So under the influence of the ethanol, the majority of the toxin proteins have already denatured. Whatever residual activity made it into their bodies along with the alcohol will only produce a moderate paralytic effect at worst."
As she said that, she reached into the nearby pile of books and extracted a printed test results sheet.
"Clouded consciousness, muscle relaxation, inability to move voluntarily — the symptoms are highly similar to a deep state of intoxication, but the underlying mechanism is completely different."
"Based on the rate at which the toxins will metabolize..." the Third Captain calculated,
"It’s been sixteen hours since last night. They should be waking up in approximately another eight. Though the muscle aches and fatigue may persist for a day or two afterward."
"..."
Andrew held his silence for a full five seconds.
Then he buried his face in his hands.
"These old men," he muttered.
His voice seeped out through the gaps between his fingers, heavy with a bottomless, weary helplessness.
"I said it as a passing comment — just a throwaway remark. Who told them to actually try it? And a whole one at that?! They didn’t even scrape off the scales?"
"As far as I know, they did scrape off the scales."
"That’s not the point!!"
Miyabi stood quietly to one side.
Watching Andrew’s expression — that perfect cocktail of ’I can’t even be mad’ and ’why is this my life’ — the very corner of her lips curved upward, just barely, by the tiniest fraction.
Her face still looked as composed as ever, but the amusement in her eyes was impossible to fully suppress.
It wasn’t the sight of the scholars collapsed from poisoning that amused her — it was Andrew’s expression itself. That particular face — caught somewhere between wanting to scold someone and being unable to stop himself from finding it a little funny — was one she had never seen on him before.
In New Eridu, Andrew had always given her the impression of someone reliable, steady, and occasionally warm when he smiled.
But right now, he looked exactly like a young man dealing with a group of impossibly tiresome elders — exasperated, and yet unmistakably fond.
This feeling was... surprisingly novel.
And yet there was something curiously familiar about it, too — like looking at herself back home, facing her own father, who was just a little too prone to going off-script.
____
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