Chapter : 1061

  He paused, swallowing hard. “The blight… it is not natural, my lord. I have seen plague in the southern campaigns. It is a slow, dirty thing. This… this is different. It moves too fast. We’ve seen healthy men, strong lumberjacks, go from a cough at dawn to dead by dusk. And it spreads on the wind.” He gestured grimly toward a small, isolated tent at the edge of the camp. “We lost two of our own men on the initial perimeter patrol. They never even set foot in the village. Just got too close. The air itself is poison.”

  Amina’s face was pale, her analytical mind struggling to process a threat that defied all known rules of engagement. “Airborne transmission with such a high mortality rate?” she whispered, the question a stark, academic horror.

  Lloyd nodded grimly, his own mind already working, the cold, detached logic of an epidemiologist taking over. He had faced biological weapons before, in another lifetime, on another world. This was familiar, terrifying territory, and the captain’s report confirmed his worst fears.

  He turned to the commander of his own small retinue. “Unpack the medical supplies. Work with Captain Brolin to establish a triage tent here, well away from the main camp. Any soldier who so much as sneezes is to be isolated immediately. This is our clean zone.”

  He then began to don his own equipment, a grim ritual he had rehearsed in his mind a hundred times on the journey. He pulled on a pair of thick, oiled leather gloves that reached his elbows. He drew up the hood of his dark, heavy cloak. Finally, he secured a plain, bird-like leather mask over his face. It was a grotesque-looking thing, with a long beak stuffed with purifying herbs and thick, waxed canvas over the mouth and nose. It was a primitive but functional piece of personal protective equipment, the best this world could offer.

  “What are you doing?” Amina demanded, her voice sharp with genuine alarm as she realized his intent.

  “I am going in,” Lloyd stated, his voice muffled and distorted by the mask.

  Captain Brolin stepped forward, his face a mask of horrified disbelief. “My lord, it is suicide! We cannot guarantee your safety. My orders from the Arch Duke were to support you, not to let you walk into your own grave!”

  Amina was at his side in an instant, her hand gripping his arm, her regal authority flaring like a sudden fire. “Lloyd, this is madness. You are the commander of this operation. You are the only one who can analyze this threat. Your mind is the asset we need, not your life. Send a scout. Use a disposable asset to gather your samples.”

  Lloyd looked at her, his eyes the only part of him visible behind the strange, bird-like mask. They were cold, calm, and absolute. “Amina, this is not a curse that can be observed from a distance with a scrying crystal. It is a biological agent. I need fresh tissue samples. I need to observe the victims at different stages of the disease. I need to find Patient Zero and trace the path of infection. A scout would be a blind man in a dark room; they would not know what to look for. And,” he added, his voice hardening, “there is no such thing as a disposable asset.”

  His resolve was a wall of granite. He was a hunter, and the prey was a microscopic, invisible killer. To understand it, he had to enter its lair.

  He gave a final, brutal command to Captain Brolin. “Maintain the quarantine at all costs. No one enters or leaves Oakhaven. Anyone—soldier or civilian—who tries to cross this line without my direct authorization is to be cut down and their body burned. There are no exceptions. Is that understood?”

  The captain, stunned by the cold, absolute authority, stammered a reply. “Yes, my lord.”

  Against Amina’s frantic, whispered pleas of “Don’t do this, Lloyd,” he gently removed her hand from his arm. He turned and walked toward the silent, waiting village. He stepped across the invisible line that separated the living from the dying, a solitary, cloaked figure walking into a world that had been consumed by an unnatural, horrifying silence.

  Chapter : 1062

  The world on the other side of the quarantine line was a place scrubbed clean of life. The oppressive silence was the first and most terrifying assault on the senses. Lloyd’s entire existence, both in this life and the last, had been a symphony of ambient noise—the hum of a city, the whisper of wind through leaves, the distant call of an animal. Here, there was nothing. The birds had fallen silent. The insects had ceased their chirping. It was a dead zone, a vacuum where the only sound was the crunch of his own boots on the leaf-strewn path and the ragged, unnervingly loud sound of his own breathing inside the leather mask. Oakhaven was not a village; it was a tomb in the making.

  As he drew closer, the silence began to be punctuated by a single, horrifying counterpoint. A cough. A deep, wet, hacking sound that tore through the stillness, followed by another, and then another, echoing from the shuttered log cottages like a grim, percussive chorus. It was the only sign that anyone was still alive in this place, and it was the sound of them dying.

  The village itself was a ghost town, a perfectly preserved tableau of a life that had been abruptly, violently interrupted. A child’s wooden toy lay abandoned in the middle of the dusty main street. An axe was still embedded in a half-split log in a cottage yard. A line of washing hung limp and forgotten, the clothes swaying gently in the breeze. But it was the doors that held the most potent terror. Over half of them were marked with a piece of dark red cloth, a stark, desperate symbol of the plague within. It was a silent, screaming testament to the speed and ferocity of the blight’s conquest.

  Lloyd’s mind, the dispassionate engine of the general, ruthlessly suppressed the wave of human horror that threatened to overwhelm him. He could not afford pity. He could not afford grief. He was an instrument of analysis, a detective at the scene of a mass murder, and the killer was still at large.

  He bypassed the homes of the living dead. His goal was not to treat the sick; it was to learn from the dead. He made his way to the largest hut at the edge of the village square, a building with a crudely carved wooden sign of a mortar and pestle hanging above the door. The village healer’s hut. This was where the first battle against the blight had been fought and lost.

  The door was ajar, hanging crookedly on one hinge. It opened with a low, mournful creak. The scene inside was one of apocalyptic failure, a snapshot of a man’s final, desperate moments. The small, one-room hut was a warzone of failed alchemy. Vials and clay pots were shattered on the floor. Braziers had been overturned, their cold charcoal spilling across the wooden planks. The air was thick with the mingled, cloying scents of dozens of different herbs, a testament to the healer’s frantic, futile search for a cure. It was the smell of desperation.

  And on the floor, amidst the ruins of his life’s work, lay the healer himself. He was an old man with a kind, weathered face, now frozen in a mask of agony. His body was contorted, his hands still clutching a bundle of wilted, useless herbs. On two cots nearby lay two other bodies, likely patients who had come to him for a miracle and had found only a shared death.

  Lloyd stepped over the threshold, his boots crunching on shattered glass. The stench of sickness and death was a physical, cloying thing that coated the back of his throat. He ignored it. The doctor in him, the cold, clinical observer, took command. He knelt beside the dead healer, his gloved hand hovering a few inches above the corpse, not touching, just observing. He closed his eyes, shutting out the grim reality of the room, and plunged his consciousness into a world of far greater, more intricate horror.

  He activated his [All-Seeing Eye].

  The world of sight and smell dissolved, replaced by a luminous, multi-layered schematic of pure biological data. His perception plunged through the healer’s cold skin, peeling back the layers of his biology like the pages of an ancient, forbidden text. He saw the man’s ravaged lungs, the tissue inflamed and saturated with a dark, bloody fluid. He saw the kidneys, swollen and failing, the liver under catastrophic assault. He saw the circulatory system, a raging warzone where the very walls of the veins and arteries were breaking down. The organ failure was systemic, absolute.

  Chapter : 1063

  But the general looks for the army, not just the battlefield. He pushed his perception deeper, diving to the microscopic, cellular level. And there, he saw the enemy.

  It was a virus. A vicious, spiky, and previously unknown entity, a masterpiece of malignant design. He watched in the silent theater of his mind as the tiny killers, numbered in the trillions, systematically executed their beautiful, terrible function. He saw one attach itself to a healthy lung cell, its protein spikes acting like a key in a lock. It injected its genetic material, and the cell’s own machinery was instantly hijacked, transformed from a bastion of life into a factory for death. The cell swelled, replicated the virus a thousand-fold, and then burst apart in a shower of new assailants, which immediately moved on to the next victim.

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  It was a biological blitzkrieg, a war of annihilation being fought on a cellular level. The speed, the efficiency, the sheer, ruthless perfection of it was breathtaking.

  The diagnosis was no longer a theory. It was a cold, hard, and absolute certainty. This was not a curse. This was not a poison. This was a biological weapon of a sophistication he had never imagined possible in this world. The Red Blight was not a sickness; it was an invading army, and it had been designed to be unwinnable. His hunt for a simple cure was over. The new mission, a far more terrifying one, had just begun: he had to find a way to fight a war against an enemy he couldn't even see.

  The diagnosis was a paradigm shift. The problem was no longer a mystery to be solved but a weapon to be dismantled. But to dismantle a weapon, you must first understand its origin, its point of deployment. The hunt for Patient Zero was now the single most critical objective. Lloyd pulled his perception back from the microscopic world of horror, the image of the spiky, cell-destroying virus burned into his mind. He stood, his joints protesting from the cold, and surveyed the grim tableau of the healer's hut. These bodies were the end of the story, not the beginning. He needed the prologue.

  He stepped back out into the oppressive silence of Oakhaven, his mind working with the cold, detached logic of a bloodhound on a scent. His [All-Seeing Eye] was not just a microscope; it was a temporal scanner of sorts, capable of sensing the faint, lingering energy signatures of life and, more importantly, the resonant echoes of death. He began to sweep his gaze across the red-marked doors, not as a man looking at houses, but as a sensor array searching for a specific frequency.

  Most of the houses pulsed with the chaotic, vibrant energy of a fresh and ongoing battle—the sick were still fighting, their life force warring against the viral tide. But one house, a small, humble cottage at the very edge of the village, felt different. The pall of death hanging over it was deeper, more settled, a cold and quiet stillness that spoke of a battle long since lost. The signature was older. Fainter. This was it.

  The door creaked open to his gentle push. The scene inside was one of quiet, heartbreaking tragedy, a portrait of a family extinguished. An elderly couple sat at a rough-hewn wooden table, their faces hollowed out by a grief so profound it had scoured them of all other emotion. They were not yet sick, but their souls had already died, left behind in the wreckage of their world. They stared at nothing, two statues carved from sorrow. On a small cot in the corner of the room, covered by a simple, clean linen sheet, lay the body of a young boy. He couldn't have been more than ten years old.

  Lloyd’s heart, the one he worked so hard to encase in the cold, hard steel of the general, felt a sharp, unwelcome pang of pure, human pain. He had seen countless dead soldiers. He had seen the aftermath of battles that had leveled cities. But the sight of this small, still form under a sheet was a different kind of wound. He ruthlessly suppressed it. He was not here to offer comfort; he was here to conduct an autopsy on a tragedy, and this boy was his primary source of intelligence.

  He approached the couple, his voice softened, muffled by the strange beak of his mask. He played the part of the ducal physician, a figure of authority and hope, a lie that tasted like ash in his mouth.

  “I am here to help,” he began. “By order of the Arch Duke. I need to understand what happened. Your… your son… was he the first to fall ill?”

  Chapter : 1064

  The old man looked up, his eyes a cloudy, unfocused grey. He nodded slowly, a single, jerky movement. “Our grandson,” he whispered, his voice a dry rustle of leaves. “Tomas. He was the first.”

  His wife, the old woman, began to weep, a silent, shoulder-shaking grief that was more terrible than any scream. Through his own tears, the man told the simple, devastating story. Tomas. A good boy. Strong. Always helping his father, always smiling. He’d had a fever a week ago. Just a simple child’s fever, they thought. Then the cough started, that terrible, barking cough. The local healer had given him willow-bark tea and told them to pray. The prayers had gone unanswered. In two days, the boy was gone. Then, his parents, the boy’s mother and father, had fallen sick. Their ragged, wet coughs from the back room were a grim, ongoing testament to the truth of the story.

  Lloyd needed more. He needed the trigger. “In the days before he fell sick,” he asked gently, probing, “did anything unusual happen? Did he wander into the deep woods? Eat any strange berries? Was he bitten by an animal? Anything at all out of the ordinary?”

  The old man shook his head, his gaze lost in memory. “No. Tomas was a homebody. A good boy. He played in the yard. His greatest pride was helping his father chop and stack wood for the winter. That… that was his world.”

  The word snagged in Lloyd’s analytical mind like a fishhook. Wood. A tangible, physical connection to the environment.

  “He was so proud of his work this year,” the grandfather whispered, the ghost of a sad smile touching his lips. “Stacked the whole winter pile himself, right over there, against the side of the house.” He gestured with a trembling hand toward the cottage wall.

  Lloyd excused himself, a cold certainty coiling in his gut. His every instinct, the honed intuition of a hunter who had tracked far more dangerous prey across far more hostile landscapes, was screaming. He walked out of the hovel and into the gray, dying afternoon light. He approached the woodpile. It was a perfectly ordinary stack of oak and pine logs, a testament to a young boy’s diligent, proud work. It was a monument to a life cut short. But his enhanced senses, the subtle perceptions granted by his bond with his spirits, felt something else. A faint, almost imperceptible trace of… wrongness. A lingering, alien echo of something that did not belong.

  He began to carefully, reverently, unstack the logs, his gloved hands moving with the deliberate precision of a bomb disposal expert. And there, tucked into a dark, damp crevice between two large oak logs, he found it.

  It was a small, brown bat. Its fur was matted with a strange, dark fluid, and its tiny body was strangely desiccated, as if it had been drained of all life from the inside out. It looked like a dried-out husk, a piece of leathery, forgotten trash left behind by the changing seasons.

  But to Lloyd’s [All-Seeing Eye], it was a smoking gun. It was the key.

  He knelt in the dirt, the fate of the entire duchy resting on this one, pathetic, dead creature. His perception plunged into the bat’s body, and the image that flooded his mind confirmed his theory and ignited a new, more terrifying one. The bat was a bomb. And this little boy, in a simple, innocent act of a child’s work, had been the one to trip the wire. The natural disaster was about to be unmasked as an act of unimaginable evil.

  Kneeling in the cold, damp earth beside the woodpile, Lloyd transformed from a field medic into a forensic analyst. The world of Oakhaven—the silent cottages, the grieving grandparents, the ever-present sound of the dying—all of it faded into an irrelevant, blurry background. His entire universe contracted to the small, desiccated body of the bat clutched in his gloved hand. He unleashed the full, high-resolution power of his [All-Seeing Eye], not as a wide-area scanner, but as a quantum microscope. His perception plunged past the matted fur and the leathery, paper-thin skin, diving into the very cellular structure of the dead creature.

  The image that greeted him was both a perfect confirmation and a horrifying revelation.

  The bat’s tissues were teeming with the virus. But here, in its natural, intended host, the microscopic killer was different. It was dormant, stable, a sleeping army waiting for a signal. He could see the viral particles, their spiky protein shells perfectly formed, but their internal replication machinery was inert, locked in a state of suspended animation by the bat’s own unique, highly evolved immune system. It was a perfect biological payload, a stable, contained weapon system waiting for deployment.