Baron Blood

It had been over ten years since I washed my hands of penicillin. After giving the scientists the initial spark and grinding away for a decade, even the seemingly impossible became reality. Although the "still" underdeveloped refrigeration and preservation technologies left much to be desired in terms of shelf life... mass production was a resounding success!

"The patient is foaming at the mouth and passed out mid-surgery!"

"Pump him full of penicillin!"

"But the patient's pneumonia symptoms are severe!"

"Then give him penicillin!"

"He passed out from a morphine overdose!"

"Obviously, the answer is penicillin!"

Doctors were practically swooning over the sheer, intoxicating magic of penicillin. Of course, there were minor side effects—namely, that they prescribed it for almost every single disease and injury under the sun. What was truly hilarious, however, was that it actually worked.

Most illnesses were caused by bacteria, and even if they weren't, it was incredibly common to develop secondary bacterial complications. Take insomnia, for instance, a frequent ailment for highly strung individuals like Joseph Stalin. Insomnia naturally weakens the immune system, allowing bacteria to invade the body and cause minor ailments. To such patients, doctors mindlessly administered penicillin. Naturally, it wasn't entirely ineffective.

Given the abysmal hygiene standards of the early twentieth century, it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say people lived hand-in-hand with bacteria. Once penicillin was administered, whatever the ailment, the patient showed some improvement. Indeed... penicillin had truly become a panacea.

"With this, you Swedish bastards had better hand over the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine!"

But then again...

I had no-showed the Nobel Peace Prize. I had talked politics at the Nobel banquet and practically set Serbia ablaze. I was probably blacklisted as a major headache in Sweden, so I doubted I would ever receive it.

At any rate, penicillin was enjoying sensational popularity among surgeons. Since surgical medicine was still in its infancy, surgeons tended to mindlessly reach for the bone saw first. Generally, when you sawed through a human body and gouged around with a scalpel to extract a bullet, the patient died more often than not. The unholy trinity of mortality—infection, shock, and blood loss—would inevitably pay a visit.

The final boss, infection, has been dealt with. As for shock... ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠we need anesthetics. But let's not rush into making those. Seeing how recklessly they pump penicillin into everyone, God only knows how they'd abuse anesthetics. Besides, I can't even make them right now. That leaves blood loss.

Because Dr. Karl Landsteiner had abandoned his primary field of hematology to work on penicillin, his discovery of the ABO blood groups had been delayed. By about three years? After a long while, I paid a visit to the kind and gentle doctor.

"It has been a long time, Director Shtal. How long has it been? You've risen so high in the world now that it's no easy task to secure an audience with you."

"That is true."

"I miss the days when we used to idle away our time in Dr. Sigmund Freud's laboratory."

"Aren't you just as busy, Dr. Landsteiner? I heard you frequently head out to the front lines."

No matter how vast the medical supply on the battlefield, it was never enough. Surgeons had already set up makeshift laboratories right on the front lines. To an outsider, it might look like a psychopath's butchery, but for the surgeons, this was the best they could do. That didn't mean physicians like Dr. Landsteiner, who specialized in internal medicine, had nothing to do. The battlefield itself was a breeding ground for disease. Consequently, the warm-hearted Landsteiner dispatched countless disciples to the front lines while personally volunteering for medical service there.

"War is... truly a horrific thing," Landsteiner sighed. "It is not just the bullets that are terrifying, but the diseases as well. Ironically, because of this war, medicine is advancing at a terrifying pace."

"You have been through a lot. Ah, by the way, I heard you crossed paths with Marie Curie on the front lines?"

"Yes. The surgeons were absolutely wild for that X-ray machine of hers. Though, since she is on the French side, I only caught a glimpse of it once."

"Well, that is why I have brought another idea that will drive surgeons absolutely wild."

"Oh? What might that be?"

Dr. Landsteiner had already completed all the foundational research on blood transfusions—how to classify blood types, and what happens when patients with incompatible blood types receive transfusions. Of course, the concept of the Rh factor had not yet been discovered... but since over eighty-five percent of the population was Rh-positive, it was still clinically viable. However...

"Transfusions?" Landsteiner mused. "Certainly, it would be wonderful if blood transfusions became commonplace. Now that we have prevented infections, if we can just stop excessive bleeding, the mortality rate from surgeries will be cut in half. However..."

"The issue is blood preservation, isn't it?"

"Indeed. Blood coagulates the moment it leaves the body, does it not? We face the challenge of having to transfuse it immediately upon drawing."

"If coagulation is the problem, mixing in a little sodium citrate should stop it."

It was nothing groundbreaking. If one simply knew the properties of citric acid, deducing that it could prevent blood coagulation was not particularly difficult.

"H-How on earth did you...?"

"Would you believe me if I said it was just a hunch?"

"Ah, right. I forgot who I was talking to. Haha. You were the exact same way when we developed penicillin."

Dr. Landsteiner and I immediately conducted an experiment and confirmed that citric acid did indeed prevent blood coagulation. However, we still had a long way to go before practical transfusions could be realized.

"Haha, we have managed to extract the blood, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠but... will this truly be effective? We still need to preserve it somehow."

"Can't we just put it in a refrigerator? Or freeze it...?"

"No, that won't do. Spoilage, decay? Hmm... after observing blood over a long period, I have discovered that blood is also 'alive.' It dies once it leaves the body, just like any other organ."

"Hmm..."

Right. Blood is made of cells. The moment it leaves the body, cellular activity ceases, and the red blood cells become damaged.

"If blood is alive, doesn't that mean blood consists of 'cells'?"

"Indeed. Cells responsible for transporting oxygen. Of course, they are slightly different from other cells since they lack a nucleus and mitochondria."

"Then wouldn't they use glucose as an energy source, just like other cells?"

That cells required an energy source like glucose to survive and breathe was a fact already experimentally proven by the 1910s. Although the specific metabolic pathways had not yet been mapped out... it was well worth testing. We preserved mouse blood mixed with glucose and citric acid under various conditions. The results were astonishing. Landsteiner gasped in admiration.

"D-Director! My goodness! It remains perfectly fine even after prolonged storage. The upper limit seems to be roughly three weeks!"

"Hmm... once we factor in temperature fluctuations and other real-world variables, that window will certainly shrink, but even this is revolutionary."

"Of course, we will need to conduct further tests regarding its effects on the human body. However, there is no doubt that this alone is a monumental achievement! The Nobel Prize is as good as ours!"

Thanks to my future-knowledge cheat key, we had successfully preserved blood after only three or four months of fumbling around. Considering that even in the twenty-first century, the maximum shelf life for stored blood was about a month, this was a highly respectable result. Yet, I still felt a lingering sense of dissatisfaction...

Whether in life sciences or physics, in terms of pure theoretical knowledge, a twenty-first-century high schooler could honestly surpass the scientists of this era. Penicillin was a prime example. Or take the theory of relativity. Naturally, most science and engineering college students dropped into the twentieth century wouldn't be able to mathematically prove relativity. You can't write a groundbreaking thesis with just a vague concept, after all. Even so, the mere idea that if the speed of light is constant, time can flow differently depending on gravity, speed, and other conditions—that time is relative, not absolute—was an immense advantage.

I was no different. For the first time in a while, I began to sift through the jumbled mess of future knowledge stored in my head. Then, I recalled a biological discovery that had yet to be made in this era.

"Perhaps if we add phosphate, we might get even better results."

"Pardon? Phosphate? I know phosphate is essential to the human body, but... why on earth?"

"I just have a feeling that adding it will yield good results."

"..."

The existence of ATP, the most fundamental energy currency of cells, had not yet been discovered. Of course, I couldn't map it out myself. I only had the concept, after all. I merely possessed a vague recollection that the production of an energy source called ATP was essential for cells to live and breathe, and that phosphate was a key ingredient in synthesizing ATP. Well, it was similar to how we made penicillin. I began by running several experiments, adding phosphate in various ratios to our existing blood preservation solution. Since I now owned a fully staffed research institute, this was essentially the equivalent of setting a game to auto-hunt; it only took a few days. And the result?

"I-It works! My god...!"

"Well, look at that. It actually worked."

"This is revolutionary! Theoretically, we can store it for up to a ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠month, Director Shtal!"

Dr. Karl Landsteiner hugged me so tightly I thought my circulation would cut off. His reaction was even more explosive than when we had first discovered penicillin. While penicillin was only now reaching the stage of commercialization through mass production, this preservation solution was something we could deploy almost immediately. To Dr. Landsteiner, it must have seemed like an absolute miracle.

"We are already shipping massive quantities of penicillin to the front lines, aren't we? Since this solution shares roughly the same storage requirements as penicillin, we can distribute them together."

"What shall we name it?"

Our ammonia production via nitrogen fixation had been dubbed the Shtal-Wittgenstein process. ...Which was probably why the Nobel Prize in Chemistry had gone to Wittgenstein. I had to prevent such a catastrophe from happening again!

"Naturally, it must be the Stahl Solution."

"Yes, of course! Haha! Then..."

"We are not finished yet. We need to secure large-scale blood donations if we want to put this to practical use, don't we?"

"Y-Yes, indeed! That will be the truly difficult part."

"Really? I think that will be far simpler than inventing the Stahl Solution itself."

"Pardon? How?"

Come to think of it, this was my actual specialty. There was nothing difficult about it. In fact, it was far easier than before, thanks to the rapid, day-by-day evolution of mass media. All I had to do was pull off my usual routine—milking public sympathy and orchestrating a massive media play—to turn "blood donation" into a trendy movement. I immediately contacted Anna Freud, who had now transitioned into a film director.

"Miss Freud? Pull up movie script template number four."

"The family drama template?"

"Yes. Actually, wait. Pull up the religious film template and the action movie template as well."

At the end of the day, propaganda films were all the same. They only needed to meet a bare minimum threshold of quality. Thus, while preparing for the triumphal procession, I had categorized films into seven distinct genres: melodrama, comedy, romance, action, war, family, and religion. I had created a template for each genre so that no matter what kind of propaganda we needed, we could simply swap out the protagonist and plug them into the script. I felt a bit sorry for the creative minds... but our objectives were entirely different, weren't they? I just needed to churn out moderately watchable, low-budget films like a factory assembly line.

In this manner, a total of four films were produced.

Though in a slightly different sense, every single film was drenched in blood! All that was left for Archduke Franz Ferdinand and me to do was host a screening, squeeze out a few tears, and give emotional interviews afterward. The plots were so formulaic and tedious that it was hard to muster actual tears... but hey, it was a job. Still, Baron Marx 'Blood' Stahl was actually quite entertaining. It was a story about a vampire who, upon realizing the grace of Christ, begins stealing blood to distribute to the poor like a heroic outlaw! Thanks to a massive budget, the action was solid, and it even had some decent horror elements.

"It was... truly heartbreaking," I choked out during an interview. "To think that human life is so fragile. All for the lack of a single drop of blood."

"Your Imperial Highness, what were your thoughts on the film?"

"Shtal as a vampire... It was absolutely hilari—ahem, I mean, deeply moving. After watching this, I was thinking that perhaps Wittgenstein, Shtal, and I should pool our capital to establish a blood bank."

"A blood bank?"

"Indeed. The three of us—myself, Shtal, and Miss Wittgenstein—intend to go down in history as the very first individuals to donate blood."

And so, my wife Margarete, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and I stood in the laboratory, flashing bright smiles for the cameras as we prepared to donate blood. However...

"Wait a minute. Why is that needle so monstrously huge?! You're going to stick that into a human body?"

"Yes, Director."

"W-Well... let me think about this for a moment. It's not that I'm afraid of the needle, it's just that I've been feeling a bit faint lately, and I'm worried there might be something wrong with my blood..."

"Darling! Have you lost your mind?!" Margarete hissed.

"Director Shtal! Stop making a scene and get on the bed this instant!" Franz Ferdinand barked.

As I recoiled ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠in sheer terror from the wicked-looking donation needle, the laboratory staff pinned my arms down, and my blood was forcibly drawn.