Chapter 169 Surgery
Saul was polite, but his attitude was not to be denied.
Hayden agonized for half a day, but agreed.
Because Saul added another word at the door.
"Senior Hayden, do you know why apprentices who can't advance to the third level at the age of thirty are expelled from the Sorcerer's Tower?"
Hayden's hand clutched on the doorway suddenly shrunk, and he looked steadily at Saul's nameplate before finally opening the door.
"Come in then, I'm not used to going anywhere else."
Saul readily agreed and stepped into the second corpse room, which was barely open to outsiders.
Once inside Saul was shocked by the arrangement inside.
It was too neat and clean!
Unlike Saul's messy lab bench and stuffed cupboards, Hayden's corpse room was so neat and clean that it was like an ... exhibition hall?
The innermost walls were lined with display cases, from the floor all the way up to the ceiling.
Each display case was fitted with glass cabinet doors, allowing one to clearly see what was kept inside.
And these cabinets contained, in order from top to bottom, hair, eyes, noses ... and all the way down to the feet, parts of the limbs of human beings or other creatures.
And the color deepens a little from left to right.
Just Saul could tell at a glance that most of these limbs were not abnormal.
That is, they were all useless materials.
And Hayden's tool bench was unusually neat, even the conveyor belts connecting the left and right sides were clean, not a single bit of dirt could be seen.
"Hayden-senpai is really ... good at organizing it."
Hayden clasped his two hands together and pinched each other's tigers.
"I just like to do things."
Saul had never seen Hayden in a public class for first level apprentices, so I'm afraid the other man was expending all his energy in the corpse room.
"Saul, when you said you left the tower at thirty, wasn't it because the tower master felt that those who were not qualified enough would waste the tower's resources?"
"I'm not sure if there is a reason for that, but the most crucial reason is still ...," Saul dragged out his voice, but suddenly stopped when Hayden couldn't hide his heart and looked over.
Hayden waited for half a day, and when he saw that Saul didn't say anything, he instantly understood what he meant.
He stopped pursuing the matter and explored the business at hand.
"Saul you said you wanted to take something out of your eyes, can you describe its nature?"
Instead, Saul took out a few reagents from his arms.
"I've already thought of the surgical plan, and I've been carrying the materials needed with me. It's just that it's not very convenient to operate on my own eyes, which is why I came over to trouble Elder Hayden."
Hayden froze, it turned out that he was a tool man, "Okay, then what do you need me to do?"
Saul gave Hayden a careful rundown of the surgical procedure.
Hayden's mouth grew a little bit, his mind kept flying over, "That's even possible?" , "Really?" and other exclamations.
After explaining the procedure, Saul left Hayden, whose brain was overloaded, and began to prepare the potion.
He had long thought about taking out the cocoon of the Nightmare Butterfly, so he had also made a lot of preparations.
This time, Hayden would be in charge of taking out the cocoon, while Saul would be in charge of the last-minute grabbing and sealing.
Yes, although the person doing the surgery was Saul, he also had a very important task at the same time.
Both Saul's experience of getting the cocoon and having it inexplicably enter his eyes, and the ending of the story where the butterfly he saw flying away was caught by the wizard but still killed him at the end, made Saul realize that this butterfly was not a peaceful fellow.
The good news is that the Nightmare Butterfly is still just a cocoon, the future villain has yet to grow up, and the diary doesn't suggest that it will harm Saul.
Saul still has the option of either outright strangling it or re-conditioning it at this point.
Both options are risky, and for now it's better to remove the cocoon before he's continually affected by the nightmare.
Soon he mixed two test tubes of the potion.
One was a pure clear liquid with some consistency, but flowed with the problem of not hanging on the inner walls.
The other was a purple colored liquid with tiny bubbles.
"Elder Hayden, are you ready? The reagent begins to take effect within five minutes of swallowing, and the duration of the potency is also five minutes."
"Ready." Hayden took a deep breath, "It's my first time laying hands on a living person, if it hurts you ... would you like to take another dose of pain relief?"
Saul then tilted his head and took the purple potion into his mouth. Frowning as he swallowed the aftertaste in his mouth, Saul glanced at the hourglass clock.
"No need," he said as he had walked over and laid right down on the teleportation table where the body had originally been placed, "the pain potion will cloud my judgment."
Hayden, also knowing that Saul was a ruthless man, didn't try to persuade him any further, and walked over to the tool table, picked up a thin needle, and began to quickly sterilize it, as Saul had requested.
"Sterilize?" Hayden thought to himself, "Is this the difference between doing 'surgery' on the living and the dead?"
A surgery involving both the doctor and the patient began.
Because the doctor was still a novice when faced with a living body – this honest and low-key Hayden had never done a live experiment at all – the patient had to guide the doctor from time to time on how to go under the knife based on his own feelings.
The operation lasted a total of four minutes and thirty-five seconds.
Although there were panicked moments in between, the total length of the surgery did not exceed the potion's effective time.
In the last twenty-five seconds, Hayden finally used the smallest size of tweezers to pinch out the cocoon hiding in Saul's pupil.
He raised the forceps to see what had gotten mixed up in Saul's eye. But as soon as his eyes landed on the small silver ball, he was drawn to the beautiful blob.
It was nothing more than a silver orb the size of a grain of rice that quickly grew larger when exposed to the air.
The silver skin shone like the light of the stars, and the deep and quiet feeling made Hayden look up at the stars as if he were in the wilderness.
He was unconsciously immersed and held the tweezers a little closer to his eyes, as if he wanted to stick it right into his eyeballs.
Suddenly, a white bone hand appeared in front of Hayden's eyes.
The white bone rubbed across Hayden's cheek and snatched the small silver ball away from him.
"No!" Hayden was subconsciously about to lash out.
But when he saw Saul's appearance, his swollen brain was instantly doused with cool water.
Saul had sat up from the teleportation table, his left eye frame still clamped to the retainer responsible for holding his eyelid open.
A trickle of blood spilled from Saul's eyelid and trickled down to his jaw.
His originally black left eye had now turned a dull, dark gray.
This was still the effect of a simple treatment by Hayden.
But Saul didn't care at all about his currently blind left eye, he just quickly dropped the snatched cocoon into the clear liquid he had prepared, and then sealed the mouth of the bottle with a wooden cork again.
The clear liquid overflowed slightly, and the rest held up the entire test tube.
The silvery blob floated up and down in the reagent in a flurry, as if someone was constantly teasing it with a thin string.
Confirming that the sealing was complete, Saul then tossed the test tube to Hayden.
Hayden hastily reached out his hand to catch it, a heartbeat later.
"It was dangerous to observe that just now, now you can watch."
But this time Hayden only glanced at it and hurriedly returned the test tube to Saul.
"No, no, no, no, this thing is still dangerous to me even though it has been sealed by you, I won't look at it more than that, my sanity almost fell just now."
This time Hayden's stance lowered even more.
He was more and more certain in his mind that Saul had already far surpassed him in many areas.
Seeing that Hayden gave up on continuing to observe, Saul put the test tube away.
"This thing is very much a test of willpower." Saul thought of the little girl Penny, "But I presume that if one is pure of heart, they will not be easily affected."
Hayden's expression was somber, he couldn't reach either of these two points.
If he was strong-willed, he wouldn't be just a first level apprentice until now.
Saul took a roll of gauze from the tool table and wrapped it diagonally around his head, blocking his left eye.
Hayden stood quietly watching, wanting to say something.
Saul knew what he wanted to ask and answered the question he had left for Hayden before entering directly.
"When a sorcerer stays in a certain realm for a long time, he will attract unknown horrors. The longer they stay, the greater the possibility of contamination. The lower the strength, the faster the terror is attracted. In order to prevent the apprentices from all becoming contaminants, the Sorcerer Tower then regularly disperses apprentices who are too old."
"Compared to other forces that turn unqualified apprentices into experimental materials when they're due, the Sorcerer's Tower is considered gentle."
(End of chapter)