kscans

Chapter 132 - Chapter 3. Securing Air Superiority Over a Petri Dish

On the lab bench in the director's office, flames flickered from two sources, a gourd shaped glass bottle and a thick candle. A circular area was marked around the flames. On one side lay instruments like test tubes and petri dishes, and on the other, the culture media.

I moved my arms between the two flames, tense with concentration.

Clink.

I almost dropped the glass lid outside the sterile zone and hastily stopped my right hand. The next instant, my left hand bumped into an empty petri dish.

"Vinder, aren't you a bit too clumsy?"

"I know. I'm a failure as a merchant who deals in food."

A complaint flew from behind me. The honey we handle doesn't spoil that easily. Its preservation qualities are outstanding.

"Hmph, the pipette I made for you must be weeping," came a grumble from across the table.

"Ah, I'm disturbing the ai—mmph!"

I hurriedly covered my mouth.

"""Sigh..."""

Plurala, Rilka, and Noel all sighed in unison. For the record, Plurala was preparing distilled water, while Rilka and Vinaldira were helping with the washing. In a situation where it was difficult to hire people due to confidentiality, their help was a true blessing.

I felt bad asking the daughters of future Gold Member companies to do such menial tasks, but the other day, the Central Garden members saw Alfina washing test tubes behind me while I worked at the petri dishes, and they began helping voluntarily without me saying a word.

No, I get it. I know... it's all the Empire's fault.

Over the past week, I had come to fully appreciate just how troublesome invisible organisms were. Of the two culture plates I first prepared, one I did nothing to remained completely unchanged after two days. The other, which I had opened for just a few minutes, grew four bacteria like colonies and two spots of mold.

So far, everything was as expected. The fact that the unopened petri dish was fine told me that simply heating things met the minimum requirements. The gradually growing colonies on the opened dish showed that the culture medium was viable.

However, the very existence of these microorganisms was causing me problems. It was difficult to eliminate the unwanted guests, or what you'd call contaminants.

The biggest conceivable source of contamination was my hands. Next was the air. All the cloths were sterilized by boiling, and I had them distill the distilled spirits even further to create a high concentration alcohol. I diluted that slightly for hand sanitation. The undiluted solution was used to make an alcohol lamp. I was worried that with just a candle flame, impurities might get in when evaporating the alcohol used to sterilize the instruments.

By thoroughly sterilizing my hands and tools, and by using the updraft created by the flames to prevent mold and bacteria from falling from above, I finally reduced the probability of something growing on an opened plate to one in ten.

The infiltration from above was the most troublesome part. Air superiority wasn't just important in modern warfare. Conversely, as long as I secured air superiority, attacks from the sides weren't a major issue. Assuming my hands were clean, that is.

This was probably the best I could do. After all, just getting this far was draining the budget provided by the Chancellor's Office at an incredible rate. I stared at the alcohol lamp's flame with a cursed look in my eyes. Time was literally money.

This was a different world from my past life, where you could easily buy alcohol at a pharmacy and get all sorts of pre sterilized, packaged goods. I was tempted to invent some kind of enclosed chamber to work in.

I wanted to believe things would get a little better once the oven in Fulsy's lab was finished. Compared to alcohol, firewood was practically free.

In any case, over this past week, I had managed to reduce the probability of contamination to an acceptable level. Today was finally the day to determine the dilution factor for the bacterial solution. Of course, this was a test using soil taken from the base of a tree in the academy's backyard, not from the Red Forest.

I held the pipette at the ready. I prepared three glass test tubes, each about the size of my pinky finger.

Using a spoon, I took some soil from the jar, placed it in a petri dish, and poured water over it. I twisted the screw on the pipette to set the measurement to 19, then poured 19 units of water into each of the three test tubes. Then, setting the pipette to 1, I drew up 1 unit of the supernatant from the dissolved soil.

For reference, 1 unit was about 0.05 cc. I feel like I used to measure in 0.001 cc increments in my past life, but by this world's standards, this was precision work. What's more, it could be sterilized by heating and was unaffected by acids or alkalis. In other words, it wouldn't have any strange chemical reactions with the sample. All hail Sorcery Gold.

I added the 1 unit to the first test tube. With 1 part bacterial solution to 19 parts water, it was a twenty fold dilution. I mixed the diluted test tube, drew up 1 unit from it, and did the same thing again. That made it a four hundred fold dilution. Since I had no idea what the concentration of the original solution was, I had to vary the conditions like this.

I took the three gelatin culture petri dishes I had prepared and added 1 unit of the solution from each respective test tube, then spread it using a small spreader Noel had made for me. This too was made of Sorcery Gold. Using the wrong kind of metal could kill the bacteria. In my past life, I would have bent a glass rod to make one, but I couldn't expect that kind of precision from the glass rods in this world.

"So what is it you're doing, anyway?" asked Vinaldira, who was helping with the washing.

"To put it simply, it's the process of isolating the tiny Mucus creatures in the soil, one by one."

"Let's say this initial 1 unit of muddy water contains two thousand tiny Mucus creatures. In the first bottle, the test tube, diluting it twenty fold brings it down to one hundred creatures in 1 unit. Diluting that by another twenty fold in the second test tube brings it down to five."

"That's true in theory. But ye can't see them, so ye don't really know, do ye?" said Fulsy, who had appeared behind me at some point.

"Not at this stage, but the Mucus that have now been spread on the petri dishes will absorb nutrients from the medium and multiply. One will become two, two will become four, and so on. If that repeats ten times, you'll have about one thousand. Repeat it another ten times, and you'll have a million. At that point, you can see them as a group. A pure group of descendants that grew from a single original is called a colony. Look, here's one," I explained.

I showed them a failed petri dish. On it were three yellowish, fingertip sized colonies. And one spot of mold was also visible. I see, so this is how Fleming discovered penicillin. Unfortunately, it didn't seem to be a blue mold, and it looked like it was losing to the bacteria.

"These too were originally three tiny Mucus creatures and one mold spore that fell from the air and then multiplied. The mold that grows on bread forms in patches, right?"

"Hmm, so even if they are tiny one by one, they become visible when gathered. The same as that monster, ye mean?" Fulsy said. That's right. Though these don't move around so actively.

"With this, if we get colonies, groups of Mucus, for each dilution factor, then the preliminary experiment will finally be complete."

In reality, there would be species that are numerous and those that are not. Depending on the size of the colonies needed for the assay, a single petri dish could probably hold two or three hundred colonies at most.

To begin with, even if there were 100 bacteria, it's possible that only 10 could be cultured under these conditions. And even if 100 could be cultured, it was possible we'd get the disappointing result of 99 identical colonies, meaning we'd only found two types of bacteria.

Well, I have a little trick in mind for that.

"I understand what ye're sayin'. But ye haven't gotten to the most important part. How do ye know ye'll find somethin' related to magic in there?"

"The hypothesis is that among the minuscule Mucus that have survived exposure to the miasma of the Red Forest, there must be species that have evolved... or changed, to take in and utilize that miasma, species that try to get the leftovers from them, or species that have developed methods to counter such miasma enhanced Mucus."

Where there's a flow of gold, companies are born. Lifeforms can be understood as companies, organized collections of molecules, that form in response to a flow of energy.

And the discovery of penicillin, a substance from mold that kills bacteria, in my previous life wasn't a complete coincidence. It happened against the backdrop of a competitive relationship between fungi and bacteria. Just like in the human world, the world of bacteria must be built on a complex combination of cooperation and competition.

Of course, even if such bacteria existed, there was no guarantee they would be a species that could be easily cultured. But in fact, that was all part of the screening process. Even if we found a bacteria that produced a wonderful magic catalyst, it would be useless if it grew too slowly or could only be cultured in a special medium.

Furthermore, if there was a huge variety of bacteria, it was a gamble that there would be a species that was both easy to culture and produced a substance that reacts to magic. Considering the change in the color of the soil in the Red Forest, I wanted to believe the odds weren't that bad.

Besides, I had taken samples from several locations. Even if it was a lottery with a one in ten thousand chance of winning, if you bought ten sets of ten thousand tickets, you were almost guaranteed to win.

The problem was establishing the assay system to pick the winning ticket from those million lottery tickets. Thanks to Noel, the procedure had been made more efficient than I could have imagined, and for the assay itself, we had Fulsy.

"...To be frank, it's an incredible story. The most incredible I've heard from ye yet. Something about it is unnervingly incredible. I can't just turn a blind eye to this. How much longer 'til it's my turn?"

"I don't know. I didn't expect the sterile procedure alone to take this long. It's a race against time."

In the west, Craig was somehow managing to establish a siege of Cazelle. The Empire, likely wary of the pollen, wasn't attacking their position.

However, a separate unit sent to take Morante in order to isolate Cazelle was apparently scattered by a force of Horse-Dragons. It seemed casualties were light because their numbers were small and they had maintained a wide formation rather than a dense one.

And as for the crucial Imperial army in the east, after solidifying the passage from Kurtheite to the great northern river, there had apparently been no movement for now. They were probably on guard after the annihilation of the Horse-Dragon unit, but there was no guarantee they would remain quiet forever.