Chapter : 1065

  The puzzle pieces of the zoonotic spillover—the jump from animal to human host—snapped into place with the cold, satisfying clarity of a perfect diagnosis. Tomas, the young boy, while diligently stacking the wood, must have disturbed the creature. In its panic, it had scratched or bitten him. It would have been a minor wound, perhaps not even noticed. But in that fleeting, fatal moment of contact, the viral army had been transferred from its dormant host into the warm, welcoming, and utterly unprepared environment of the boy’s human system.

  Inside Tomas, free from the bat's natural immunities that kept it in check, the virus had awakened. It had mutated, its replication sequence kicking into overdrive. It adapted to its new host with terrifying speed, becoming the hyper-aggressive, airborne killer that was now consuming Oakhaven. The diagnosis was complete. The method of transmission was confirmed. A natural, if statistically improbable and deeply tragic, disaster. He could report this, and the mystery would be solved. They could focus on containment and finding an antidote based on the bat's own antibodies. It was a clean, logical conclusion.

  But the general in him, the man forged in a lifetime of paranoia and the cold calculus of war, was not satisfied. There was one more detail, a loose thread that his analytical mind couldn't let go of. The sheer, perfect efficiency of the mutated virus still felt… unnatural. Natural mutations were messy, chaotic, and often inefficient. This was elegant. This was a scalpel.

  He pushed his perception deeper, a feat of immense concentration that made his head ache. He began to analyze the very genetic structure of the virus itself, placing the dormant version from the bat and the mutated version he had scanned from the dead healer side-by-side in the laboratory of his mind. He began to compare their code, line by line.

  And that’s when he saw it. The thing that turned his blood to ice.

  The differences between the two strains were not just the random, chaotic errors of a natural mutation. There were subtle, elegant, and terrifyingly deliberate modifications etched into the virus’s core programming. A protein spike on the virus’s outer shell had been artificially enhanced, its shape subtly altered to achieve a perfect, high-affinity bond with human ACE2 receptor cells. Its replication sequence contained a tiny, synthetic marker, a biological signature that was as out of place in a natural virus as a steel gear in a flower. It was an artist’s signature on a weapon of mass destruction.

  A wave of cold, absolute fury washed over Lloyd, so intense it was a physical sensation, a burning pressure behind his eyes. He felt a low growl rumble in his own chest.

  This wasn't an accident. This wasn't a tragedy. This was murder. This was an act of war.

  Someone had engineered this plague. Someone with a level of bio-alchemical knowledge that was centuries ahead of this world had taken a dormant, relatively harmless animal virus, and in a secret, unholy laboratory, they had refined it. They had perfected it. They had turned it into a weapon of mass destruction with a near-perfect transmission vector and a terrifyingly high mortality rate. They had loaded this perfected weapon into a biological missile in the form of this bat and had deliberately, with cold, calculated intent, fired it into the heart of this innocent, unsuspecting village.

  The entire context of his mission shifted with the force of a seismic event. He was no longer a doctor fighting a disease. He was a soldier, a hunter, standing at the scene of a bioterrorist attack. The questions were no longer medical; they were strategic, geopolitical.

  Who had this level of scientific and magical knowledge? What was their motive? Was Oakhaven the intended target, or was it a test site, a gruesome field trial for a weapon destined for a larger stage—the capital, the army, the Arch Duke himself? Was this the work of a rival house, the long arm of the Altamiran kingdom, or something else entirely, something darker and more insidious?

  The weight of this new reality was a crushing, suffocating thing. He could not reveal this truth. He couldn't walk back into that command tent and announce that the plague was an engineered weapon. To do so would be to ignite a panic that would dwarf the fear of the blight itself. It would shatter the duchy’s morale, incite a witch hunt, and perhaps even trigger a premature, disastrous war based on suspicion alone. He was utterly, completely alone with this terrible, world-changing knowledge.

  Chapter : 1066

  He carefully, reverently, wrapped the desiccated bat in a piece of clean oilcloth from his medical kit. It was no longer just a biological sample. It was Exhibit A, a piece of evidence for a crime so monstrous that no one else in this world even knew it had been committed.

  His face, hidden behind the impassive, bird-like leather of his mask, was a cold, hard mask of absolute resolve. He would play the part of the humble, brilliant healer. He would find a "natural" cure for this "natural" plague, using the antibodies he would "discover" in the bat’s blood. He would be the hero Oakhaven needed.

  But in the silent, hidden, and now-burning corners of his soul, the hunt had begun. The general had been given a new, singular mission. He would find the architect of this horror. He would find the monster who had signed their work on the very soul of a virus. And he would introduce them to a form of justice that was as cold, as precise, and as absolute as the weapon they had just unleashed upon his people. The war had been declared, and only he had heard the trumpet call.

  The general’s mind, now fully engaged, ruthlessly overrode the immediate impulse to return to the quarantine camp and begin the charade. A single infected bat, found by chance in a specific woodpile, felt too neat, too localized for a weapon of this magnitude. It was the point of contact, yes. The bullet that had killed the first victim. But an airborne virus this aggressive, this efficient, suggested a wider, more concentrated source of contamination. A good commander never trusts his first report from the field, even if he wrote it himself. He needed to confirm the full scope of the initial deployment before drawing any final conclusions. The single bat was a clue, not the whole story.

  He stood, the oilcloth-wrapped evidence a cold, hard lump in his satchel. Instead of heading back toward the distant camp, he began to walk toward the center of the village, his mind a cold, calculating machine processing probabilities and potential vectors. He needed a larger, more common point of contamination, a location that could have exposed a significant portion of the population simultaneously and created the explosive outbreak he was witnessing. The communal water source? Possible, but less likely for an airborne pathogen. The grain stores? Unlikely to harbor bats. The village longhouse, where they held their gatherings? A possibility.

  He expanded the field of his [All-Seeing Eye], turning his perception from a high-powered microscope into a wide-area, multi-spectrum sensor array. The gray, desolate world of Oakhaven dissolved into a shimmering, ethereal schematic of energy and matter. He began a systematic sweep of the village, his gaze passing over the cottages and through the very earth beneath his feet. He was filtering out the background noise of rock, wood, and the fading, flickering life signatures of the sick and dying. He was hunting for a specific anomaly, a concentrated, resonant echo of the unique, malignant energy signature he now knew belonged to the engineered virus.

  He scanned the village’s main well, the one used for their daily water. It was clean, its heavy stone cover and solid construction having protected it. The food stores in the central longhouse were likewise uncontaminated. His scan continued, a silent, invisible sweep of divine reconnaissance, a god’s-eye view of a tragedy. He felt like a drone flying over a silent battlefield, searching for the enemy’s hidden command bunker.

  And then he found it.

  Near the dilapidated, weed-choked village square stood an old, forgotten well. Its stone lip was crumbling, its wooden bucket-and-winch mechanism long since rotted away to nothing. It was a relic, a scar from a previous, poorer generation of the village, abandoned when the new, deeper well was dug. It was a place no one would ever look. But from its dark, deep, and open maw, his [All-Seeing Eye] detected a faint but undeniable concentration of the viral signature. It was a whisper of the same malevolent energy he had found in the bat, but it was a chorus, not a solo. It was a weak signal, but it was a clear and definite source. This was the epicenter.

  He approached the abandoned well, a sense of cold, professional dread growing with every step. The air around it was colder, the oppressive silence of the village somehow deeper, more profound here. He peered over the crumbling stone edge into the absolute blackness. A faint, foul, musky odor rose from the depths, the smell of rot and something else, something cloying and sweet and utterly alien.

  Using his power, he pierced the darkness, his perception plunging down the thirty-foot stone shaft.

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  Chapter : 1067

  What he saw confirmed his suspicions and opened a new, more horrifying chapter of the investigation, a chapter that would lead him from the realm of men into the abyss itself.

  The bottom of the well was not filled with water. It was a gruesome, tangled, and moving carpet of dead and dying bats. There were dozens of them, a writhing, pathetic mass of diseased flesh. This was not a random carrier that had found its way into a woodpile. This was a nesting site. This was a breeding ground. This was the outbreak’s ground zero.

  With a grim certainty that settled in his soul like a shroud, he knew he had to go down. He anchored a sturdy grappling rope from his pack to the well’s crumbling stone structure, tested the hold, and then, without a moment's hesitation, began his descent into the darkness. He was rappelling into the very heart of the plague. The hunter was entering the monster’s den, and he had no idea what he was about to find lurking in the shadows at the bottom of the world.

  The descent into the well was a journey into a cold, silent tomb where the very air was thick with the promise of a profane death. The shaft was narrow, the rough-hewn stones slick with a strange, dark slime. The stench was overwhelming, a physical presence that even the purifying herbs in his mask couldn't entirely filter out. It was the smell of decay, yes, but it was layered with something else—a cloying, metallic sweetness, like rotting fruit and old blood, an odor that was utterly alien to the natural world.

  As Lloyd’s boots touched the soft, yielding, and horrifyingly shifting mass of dead and dying bats at the bottom, a new and terrible detail became apparent even to his normal senses. The bodies weren’t just decaying in the way a normal animal would. They were… dissolving. Many of the creatures were little more than indistinct, tarry black puddles of sludge, their forms melting away into a corrupt, semi-liquid state. The few that were still alive were in their final, agonized throes, their wings twitching feebly, their tiny mouths open in silent screams.

  He landed softly, his mind already a fortress of cold, scientific analysis, ruthlessly walling off the part of him that was screaming in primal horror. He knelt, the ground beneath his knee a squelching carpet of death. He activated his [All-Seeing Eye] and focused his perception on one of the more intact bat corpses, a creature that had only recently succumbed. He braced himself for what he might find, expecting to see a more concentrated version of the engineered virus.

  But the reality was far worse, far more unholy, than anything he could have possibly imagined.

  He plunged his perception to the cellular level, the world of biology becoming a luminous, intricate schematic. And the image that greeted him was one of pure, unadulterated, and absolute damnation.

  Yes, the engineered virus was there, a seething, microscopic army moving through the bat’s tissues. But it was a secondary infection, a passenger. The primary pathogen, the true cause of this horrifying dissolution, was something else entirely. It was a living, corrosive energy. A form of black, writhing, hungry static that was not just killing the bat’s cells but was actively, systematically, and voraciously consuming its very life essence.

  It was a spiritual parasite, a living, sentient rot that feasted on the soul. He watched in horrified, academic fascination as the dark energy attached itself to the bat’s faint spiritual signature, its spark of life. He saw it break down the signature’s structure, unmaking it, erasing it from existence and leaving behind only a corrupted, biological sludge, a soulless husk that then became a perfect breeding ground for the secondary viral infection.

  He didn't need to guess what it was. He had felt this energy before, a faint echo of it in the cursed poison used by the fanatical assassin in the capital. He had battled a more potent version of it in the Black Spirit chimera summoned by the counterfeiters in Rizvan. But this… this was purer. More concentrated. More fundamental. This was the source code of that unholy power.

  He pulled back his perception, his mind reeling from the sheer, blasphemous nature of what he had just witnessed. And in the stark, cold, analytical interface of his System, a single, horrifying diagnosis appeared in letters of luminous, unforgiving blue light:

  [TARGET ANALYSIS COMPLETE: ABYSSAL CORRUPTION - GRADE C DETECTED.]

  The words hit him with the force of a physical blow, a confirmation of a truth so terrible it threatened to shatter his understanding of the world.

  This wasn't just an engineered plague. This was Devil power.

  Chapter : 1068

  The full, apocalyptic picture slammed into place with the force of a divine, horrifying revelation. This wasn't just biological warfare; it was a demonic incursion, an act of unholy alchemy. Someone—or something—hadn't just modified a virus in a laboratory. They had taken a natural pathogen and deliberately, with a level of dark knowledge that was supposed to exist only in forbidden texts, infused it with the corrupting, soul-devouring essence of the Abyss itself. They had weaponized a plague by marrying it to a demonic taint.

  And in that instant, the horrifying purpose of the Red Blight became sickeningly clear.

  The plague didn't just kill its victims. The secondary viral infection was merely the delivery system, the brutal but crude tool to stop the heart and lungs. The true weapon was the Abyssal Corruption. It was designed to infect the spiritual essence of the host, to rot the soul from within while the body was still alive. This wasn't about creating a simple plague to kill people and destabilize a region. This was about creating a tide of undeath. The ultimate goal was to create bodies so thoroughly corrupted, so perfectly hollowed out and prepared, that they would become ideal, empty vessels for something else to inhabit.

  Oakhaven wasn't a target. It was an incubator. It was a farm. And the crop was human souls.

  The sheer, monstrous, and breathtaking scale of the enemy’s ambition was a physical weight. This was an act of bioterrorism designed to tear a hole in the fabric of reality, to open a gateway to hell, one corpse at a time. The line between the political conflict with the Altamiran kingdom and the existential threat of the Devil Race, the two-front war his father had spoken of, had just been completely, terrifyingly, and absolutely erased. They were one and the same. The war in the shadows and the war on the horizon were a single, unified front, and this plague was its opening salvo.

  A cold, hard certainty, as solid and as heavy as a block of granite, settled in his soul. He had to contain this. Not just for the duchy, but for the world. He had stumbled, by a combination of duty and terrible luck, upon the opening move of a war for the very soul of reality. And he was standing at its horrifying, stinking, and profoundly unholy epicenter. His mission was no longer about finding a cure. It was about stopping an apocalypse before it could be born.

  The general’s mind, now fully engaged and processing the apocalyptic new intelligence, ruthlessly overrode every instinct for self-preservation. The presence of Abyssal Corruption, of active Devil power, fundamentally altered every parameter of the crisis. He began to cross-reference this new, terrifying data with his existing knowledge of this world, and a critical, glaring flaw in the initial narrative immediately presented itself: the transmission vector. The story of the boy and the woodpile was the point of ignition, but it wasn't the full story of the fire's spread.

  He mentally accessed the ducal archives, a vast repository of cultural, anthropological, and biological data he had committed to memory during his studies. The people of the northern territories, particularly the isolated, tradition-bound communities of the Whisperwood, held a deep, almost religious abhorrence for bats. They were not just animals; they were symbols, creatures of ill-omen, carriers of night-sickness and bad spirits, the subjects of a thousand terrifying folktales told to frighten children. They were never hunted. They were never eaten. They were certainly never handled. The idea of a lumberjack or his child casually picking up a bat, even a dead one, was culturally absurd. It was a taboo as deeply ingrained as their respect for the ancient oaks.

  Furthermore, his own analytical mind, the part of him that was still a 22nd-century engineer, dissected the biological data. He recalled the specific species of bat he had found: Vespertilio Murinus Minor. It was a small, insectivorous creature, timid by nature, with tiny, needle-like teeth so small they could barely break human skin, let alone deliver a significant viral load. The probability of one of these creatures managing to bite or scratch a human, especially a healthy, active child, with enough force to transmit a pathogen was statistically infinitesimal. The natural spillover event he had initially theorized wasn't just unlikely; it was a near impossibility, it was a magical world not Earth. The story didn't fit the facts.

  Unless the bats were no longer natural.