Chapter 550 - 547: Rainbow Virus

Chapter 550: Chapter 547: Rainbow Virus

Colorful, spindle-shaped tufts of fuzz drifted slowly in the lake, their fine, hair-like threads swaying constantly.

This thing Xi called the "Rainbow Virus" seemed no different from the aquatic plants in the lake.

But Mo Ling could clearly sense that Xi was extremely tense. ’Is this Rainbow Virus some kind of terrifying thing?’

"What is the Rainbow Virus?" Mo Ling asked Xi.

"Senior, you don’t know?"

"I don’t know," Mo Ling answered honestly.

Xi thought for a moment. ’Senior probably hasn’t encountered a new type of virus in a very long time. Different healers specialize in different diseases, so it’s perfectly normal that he wouldn’t know about this one.’

And so, Xi began to explain to Mo Ling.

"This virus hasn’t been around for long. Before my slumber, the healers had only just discovered its existence. They hadn’t even figured out the details of how the disease progressed. After that... I don’t know what happened."

"Why would it appear on Senluo Island?" Xi was clearly just as bewildered.

"Is this virus that terrible?" Mo Ling asked, intrigued.

To Mo Ling’s surprise, Xi fell silent for a long time after hearing the question. After a while, they answered awkwardly, "It’s a little terrible, but then again... not so terrible."

In the dark depths of the lake, Xi gazed at the swaying, spindle-shaped tufts and began to tell Mo Ling the story of the virus’s origin.

...

One day, a unique group of patients arrived on the Hua Sheng Islands, having migrated from a passing Sky Island.

They were a species that looked very much like penguins and possessed simple intelligence. The healers had treated individuals of this species before, but the penguins who arrived this time seemed different.

Their entire bodies exhibited varying degrees of "coloration."

For penguins with mild coloration, the tips of their feathers reflected a colorful light, glistening beautifully.

But the penguins with more severe coloration looked rather strange...

Colorful markings crawled all over their bodies, as if their original coloring had been utterly destroyed. While their textures remained, everything had become multicolored.

Their feathers were colorful, their beaks were colorful, their claws were colorful. When the healers examined the penguins’ internal organs, they were shocked to find that they too were colorful and would reflect a dazzling, iridescent light under the sun.

Since the species possessed simple intelligence, the curious healers, upon seeing this strange coloration, were eager to communicate with them and find out what was happening.

"Why did you migrate here?"

"Too dangerous! Too dangerous!" the penguins squawked all at once. "We’re being eaten! Hiding is no use! Eaten all up!"

"What do you mean?" The healer conducting the questioning was baffled but continued, "What are you hiding from?"

"Bears, eagles, crocodiles, wolves..." the penguins chattered again, all at once.

The more the healers listened, the more confused they became. It wasn’t until they took another look at the penguins’ coloration that they finally pieced together what was happening...

"You’ve turned colorful, so you can’t hide from your natural predators. You’re found quickly even when you hide, so your only choice was to migrate, is that right?"

"Yes, yes! You’re a smart one... Colorful... can’t hide." Seeing that the healer understood them, the penguins praised him happily.

At last, the healers understood the reason for the penguins’ migration.

After some discussion, they reached a consensus: this was a rare disease, and it was the cause of the penguins’ color change.

The healers immediately set out to determine the cause. They had to understand the source of the coloration to have any hope of treating it.

At first, they thought it was a fungal infection, as the spread of the coloration followed the typical pattern: starting on the exterior, gradually spreading over the entire body, and finally penetrating into the internal organs.

But after a closer examination, the healers discovered it wasn’t a fungus.

After another period of examination, using their special perceptive abilities, the healers finally confirmed that a virus was causing the coloration.

It was a minuscule, rod-shaped virus that could infect every type of cell in a penguin’s body.

Once infected, a penguin would inevitably become multicolored.

After confirming the virus’s existence, the healers gave it a very fitting name: the Rainbow Virus.

Now that they knew the cause, treatment should have been the next step. But the healers didn’t act immediately; they wanted to gain a deeper understanding of this strange virus.

"Do you feel any discomfort?" a healer asked the penguins.

"No," the penguins replied earnestly.

"Is your vision blurry?"

The healers questioned a penguin whose eyes had turned colorful.

"No."

The penguin’s answer surprised the healers. With its eyes turned colorful, its vision should have been severely impaired, perhaps even causing total blindness. Yet this penguin seemed completely unaffected.

The healers performed a vision test on the penguin and found its eyesight was indeed no different from that of a normal one.

"This shouldn’t be possible. The crystalline lens has turned colorful—how can it still refract light normally?"

This was clearly an anomaly. The healers immediately examined the penguin’s eyes and were astonished to discover that the virus within them was actually controlling the cells to transmit normal light signals.

Even though light could no longer refract properly within the lens, the virus could control the optic nerve to generate the correct light signals and send them to the brain.

As a result, even if the light refraction was a complete mess, the image the penguin saw remained perfectly normal, with no distortion whatsoever.

This discovery left the healers completely stunned. They had witnessed all sorts of strange diseases and studied countless bizarre viruses, but they had never encountered one that went out of its way to keep its host’s bodily functions normal.

’Does the Rainbow Virus have a greater conspiracy in mind? Is it trying to control the entire penguin species?’

The healers had always operated under the principle of assuming the worst about any disease.

Out of a sense of responsibility to their patients, they conducted more in-depth research on the Rainbow Virus while also examining the infected penguins.

They soon figured out the virus’s infection mechanism:

"It requires no other nutrients; it only needs to—and only will—devour pigment... It then replicates within the cell, occupies it, and controls it to begin changing color. It doesn’t destroy cells or affect the host’s bodily functions. In fact, it even helps the host maintain the integrity of those functions."

In simple terms, once the Rainbow Virus entered a patient’s body, it turned the body into a "living screen." The virus would then use individual "cell pixels" to display a brilliant array of colors on that screen...