kscans

Chapter 135 - Chapter 6. A Losing Ticket

In the director’s office, now mostly empty after the move to the new laboratory, I held a single petri dish up to the light. On the table sat a stack of nine other inverted dishes.

The precious alcohol lamp was out. Through the candlelight, I could see colonies growing densely across the amber-colored medium. They were slightly yellowish and, to be honest, not very appealing. Their sizes varied, but on average, they were about one millimeter in diameter.

"Looks like a passing grade, doesn't it? Still, that getup of yours... Pfft."

"Shtap makin' funna me... Ugh, so annoying."

I ripped the cloth from my mouth and nose and glared at Vinaldira. She had given it to me for my dyeing work to avoid inhaling harmful fumes. Now, it served the opposite purpose, preventing my own germs from spreading. I felt like a bank robber from an old manga I read in my past life, but since it had drastically improved the success rate of my aseptic technique, I couldn't complain.

I had started with eleven plates, but only one had grown mold. I couldn't tell if it was from contamination or a spore already in the soil, so for my own peace of mind, I decided to believe my technique had been perfect.

"Still, I bet I could do a better job," Vinaldira said.

"I don't want anyone else doing this."

"I don't really get it. Is this about that 'source of disease' stuff you were talking about?"

"Yeah. If the worst happens, I'm the only one who can deal with it."

Of course, I can't actually deal with anything. But for people with no concept of pathogens, the true risk of what I was doing was incomprehensible. It was a burden I had to bear alone.

Then again, just being near them was a risk, so this was mostly for my own satisfaction.

"Well, it's unlikely there are any that are easily transmitted through the air. Anyway, time to count."

I dipped a horsehair brush into a watery, ink-like dye and drew a cross on the back of the petri dish. Vinaldira had brought me this special paint that would adhere to glass.

The rest was just tedious counting. Dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. I marked five colonies from the back of the dish. On a piece of paper beside me, I drew one of the strokes of a tally mark. I marked another five, then drew the next stroke.

When I finished marking all the colonies in one quadrant, the paper showed fifteen full tally marks, written as the five-stroke character for ‘correct,’ and one partial tally of three strokes. That meant seventy eight colonies in a quarter of the dish, or a little over three hundred in total.

"Just as calculated."

About a week had passed since the experiment began. Having gotten the hang of the aseptic technique, I was finally tackling the soil from the Red Forest that I had kept preserved in the Grand Duchess’s icehouse. As expected of forest soil, the bacterial density was higher than the soil from the academy garden. I adjusted the dilution ratio accordingly and managed to get a perfect three hundred or so colonies per dish.

With ten dishes in total, I could screen about three thousand bacteria. The question was whether that was a lot or a little. I’d cry if they all turned out to be E. coli. Then again, the E. coli here might have superpowers.

"At last, it is my time to shine."

Fulsy, who had been studying Imperial magic formation diagrams at his desk, rubbed his ringed hands together and stood up, holding a sheet of black paper. From this point on, we were in territory completely beyond my abilities.

"Whatever you do, don't open the lids," I warned.

"I know, I know. But why start with the plain black soil? I am aware you are searching for a material that inhibits magic, like the walls of this room, but..."

Fulsy’s gaze shifted to a jar. The source for these colonies was soil taken from the base of some green grass that grew in a tiny patch within the Red Forest. The soil itself was the same color as that of any normal forest.

He probably thought the red soil under the red plants would be more interesting. I understood the feeling.

"It’s better to keep the first experiment simple and easy to evaluate. The red soil, with its small Mucus monsters that actively use magic, could have all sorts of unpredictable effects. On the other hand, a substance that blocks magic would likely have a simpler mechanism of action. Another reason is cost. The bacteria from the red soil might not culture properly without the presence of magic. And finally, there's the danger, which I’ve mentioned repeatedly."

The further an organism's environment is from our own, the greater the potential danger should it enter a human body.

"There are still risks, you know. Are you sure about this? I mean, I know you don't have many years left, but still."

"I have plenty of years left. Besides, as if I would let anyone else have this much fun. In any case, you likely require a level of precision that only I can provide."

Well, the risk was probably lower than being bitten by a magic beast. Among all the bacteria in the soil, very few species would be able to multiply inside an animal's body. On the other hand, bacteria infecting a magic wolf would have a much higher risk of infecting a fellow mammal like a human.

I had Fulsy check just in case, but there were no records of plagues breaking out after monster exterminations. Still, didn't he value his own life, having risen to the rank of Grand Sage? Did he have no sense of self-preservation? He was nothing like me.

"...Also, it's a big help that we have a proper control for comparison."

Noel had brought me the undiluted magic-inhibiting paint from the walls. It appeared to be oil-based, so I had created a dilution series with oil at ten, one hundred, and one thousand-fold concentrations. This would serve as our standard for measuring the colonies’ magic-inhibiting ability.

"The basic principle is the same as with the tree rings, correct?" Fulsy asked.

I nodded. With the tree rings, we measured how miasma, a form of chaotic magic, was scattered by the pure magic from a magic tool. The more miasma there was, the less magic reached the magic-sensing paper to expose it white, leaving a dark spot. In this case, we were hoping that a substance produced by the bacteria would absorb, reflect, or scatter the magic. Either way, less magic would reach the paper, which should also result in a dark spot.

In short, Fulsy would pour magic over the dishes, and we could measure the effect of the bacterial colonies as a shadow on the magic-sensing paper.

"I did not understand when you first explained it. But now I see. Each of these white dots is a swarm of descendants from a single tiny Mucus monster. Though the power of one is weak, by cultivating a pure collective, its effect becomes measurable. Your knowledge truly knows no bounds."

I'm just standing on the shoulders of history, that's all.

If anything, Fulsy was the amazing one, understanding perfectly just from seeing how the dilution factor corresponded to the colony count and watching them grow over time.

Fulsy’s ring began to glow, and my eyes were involuntarily drawn to the pattern that appeared in the air. The lines of the pattern were about as thick as those drawn by the horsehair brush, more than twice as thick as the lines from my ballpoint pen. The pattern on the Empire’s magical battering ram had been even finer.

"Done. This should do it."

The control was a petri dish containing only medium, onto which we had applied the undiluted, ten-fold, hundred-fold, and thousand-fold diluted black paint. When Fulsy slid it off the magic-sensing paper, three spots of varying darkness were lined up neatly.

Even the faintest one, the thousand-fold dilution, produced a discernible shadow. The rest of the paper was pure white, except for a slight shadow along the dish's edge. It seemed magic was hardly refracted by glass.

"Perfect."

Magic really was incredible. Without any modern analytical equipment, we had just managed to assay over three thousand colonies in a remarkably short time.

I watched with bated breath as Fulsy slid the petri dishes away one by one.

The first dish was removed, then the second. Fulsy and I stared at the magic-sensing paper, our eyes wide. Other than the four black dots for alignment, there was not a single blemish. For reference, on all the dishes besides the control, I had marked four spots on the back with black pigment to help pinpoint the location of any reacting colonies.

Fourth dish. Nothing. The fifth plate was a bust, too. At this point, we had checked over fifteen hundred colonies, but there wasn't so much as a faint trace. I had tried to be pessimistic about our chances of finding a winner, but this was still making me anxious. Even screening three thousand colonies at a time, what if the true odds were one in a million?

"Oh. Could this be it?"

Fulsy cried out as he lifted the eighth petri dish. I scrambled to look where he was pointing. A small, faint black dot had appeared, barely visible. It was a tiny signal you would miss if you weren't looking carefully. Fulsy used the alignment dots to place the dish back over the paper.

"No mistake. It corresponds to this colony's position."

I let out a long breath. So there really was a bacterium with magic-inhibiting properties. But the reaction was minuscule, even fainter than the black dot from the thousand-fold diluted control.

Fulsy removed the last two dishes. Unfortunately, they were both blank.

"One in several thousand, and with such weak power. No wonder pointing an antenna at the soil was useless. And to think you managed to find it. I understood the principle, but to see it in practice is truly something..."

"But in the end, we only found one..."

And it was a faint one. Fulsy looked at me with an exasperated expression, but I was already feeling impatient. Of course, this was a success. We wouldn't know its true potency until we mass-cultured it and purified the active compound. But that was another problem. There was no guarantee we could successfully extract the substance. If it was a protein, for instance, it might lose its properties just from being heated. I would have much preferred to choose the strongest from multiple candidates. Considering that, odds of one in three thousand felt daunting.

Then again, thinking of how pharmaceutical companies in my past life would screen millions of compounds to find a single useful substance, perhaps I should have just felt lucky to find one at all. But honestly, seeing green grass manage to grow in the Red Forest had made me hope for a higher probability, or at least a stronger effect.

"...I need to increase the odds somehow."

Watching Fulsy amusingly compare the black dot on the paper with the colony on the dish, I started thinking about the recipe I needed to discuss with Dalgan.