Book 3: Chapter 314: Entering the Epidemic Zone

Two weeks later, Sylutia followed the team as they set out for Worze District in the northern part of the Alliance.

The airship rose slowly, piercing through the clouds, and flew at a steady pace.

Inside the cabin, Sylutia sat leaning against the round window, gazing through that small pane at the scenery outside.

Unfortunately, as the airship climbed higher, the cloud cover grew thicker and thicker, making it hard to see anything clearly.

She gave up looking, lay down on the bed, stared up at the wooden ceiling overhead, and felt the airship's gentle rocking in the sky, drifting into a half-asleep, half-awake state.

In her hazy daze, she seemed to return to her childhood, when she had accompanied her mother on a visit to the eastern continent. The journey back then had also been aboard a massive airship warship, slowly crossing the vast cloudsea.

Much of what had happened in between had grown blurry; she only vaguely remembered that the airship was enormous, and she had wandered for a full month before managing to see most of it. There were also many escorting airships in the convoy, and somewhere along the way, she seemed to have spotted True Dragons soaring beyond the airships' perimeter.

Suddenly, with a slight jolt, Sylutia woke up. At the same time, she heard the sound of cannon fire coming from outside the airship.

She looked out the window again, hearing only a few muffled cannon blasts. Scorching flames and waves of heat briefly scattered the clouds outside, revealing what lay within.

A flock of southbound migratory birds was torn apart in the bombardment, shattered into sprays of blood that scattered across the sky before falling into the cloudsea below. During the process, a few of the dead birds were captured by mages using spells and collected into transparent containers.

That night, while Sylutia was having dinner inside the airship, she heard the news: among the migratory bird carcasses that had been shelled, traces of plague pathogens had been detected.

This is bad. If birds and other animals could also spread it, containing the outbreak would become extremely difficult. And if the spread couldn't be limited, this might very well become another "Mad Crow Riot," bringing unimaginable catastrophe to the entire sky continent.

The next day, the team descended into Worze District with heavy hearts and began their inspections and experiments. Some physicians attempted to treat the "Flesh Plague" with medicinal agents, and the accompanying airship also carried a considerable amount of medicinal raw materials for everyone to mix and try.

Sylutia donned the special mask issued by the "White Scroll Herb Jar," changed into attire with tightened cuffs, gloves, and a sealed hood, and entered the main city area along with a group of physicians to survey the local situation.

The streets were bleak and desolate. Storefronts that had once bustled with activity were now mostly shuttered. Many shops and facilities bore signs of struggle, with dark red bloodstains still lingering on the ground. Some people, even if still alive, wore especially numb expressions. Some simply sat by the roadside, the interiors of the houses behind them in complete disarray.

"The people still alive on these streets are all confirmed uninfected, relatively normal individuals," the local mage accompanying the group explained to the physicians.

"These count as normal? Then where are the abnormal ones right now?" someone asked.

"The abnormal ones are currently sealed off in the lower district. I'll take all of you there later," the other replied with a sigh.

An hour later, everyone arrived at the lower district. Before they even got close, they could hear shouts and roars from afar.

"Get lost, don't come any closer! You're already infected, you know that? Coming out will only hurt others!"

"Please, let me out! Inside, inside they've already started eating people!" The sound of anguished wailing drifted over.

At this moment, Sylutia followed the group around a street corner and saw the scene in the distance. Standing atop a temporarily erected watchtower, several soldiers shouted down at the quarantined residents behind the fence below, their mechanical crossbows aimed at them as a warning.

Her gaze swept past the sealed fence line. The people inside were crowded at this very edge, constantly trying to climb. And whenever someone attempted to scale the tall fence, the mechanical crossbows on the watchtower would converge fire on them, riddling them full of holes.

"The situation is pretty dire," a mage observed, shaking his head before raising his hand.

An invisible wave of force surged forward, pushing the climbers back away from the tall fence, keeping them from being shot and killed.

The group then arrived at the entrance of a building on the boundary and asked the personnel stationed there about the situation.

"Report, sirs! We are under strict surveillance, preventing the infected inside from escaping outward. If necessary, we will take every measure to stop them!" The man stood at attention and answered in a booming voice.

"Is that so," the lead mage said in a deep, complex tone, merely repeating the words without commenting on whether their actions were good or bad.

The group rested briefly there, then split into four small teams and entered the lower district.

Sylutia followed her team, encountering quite a few infected individuals along the way. However, their conditions didn't seem severe, with no highly abnormal features yet manifesting.

Just as the group was beginning to feel somewhat puzzled, they encountered their first mutated resident in front of the team.

The man seemed to still possess some shred of reason, brandishing an iron rod and howling incoherently. Based on the fragments of words that slipped through, he appeared to have been locked in an iron cage before, and had now broken free, harboring intense hatred toward those who had imprisoned him.

"You chicken-snake-spawned bastards!"

"Heh heh, so you're afraid of dying too."

"It's you, it's you."

"Huff, huff... if I die, none of you are getting off easy."

After swinging wildly for a while, he became winded and panting. It seemed this plague could drive people mad, but without food, even madness couldn't sustain the physical drain.

Seeing that he could no longer run, the several people who had been fleeing from him also stopped to catch their breath. They then scavenged random objects by the roadside to defend themselves against the man.

At this point, Master Zelalin, leading the team, walked over. He simply raised his hand, and several vines grew up from the ground, tightly binding the man before he began questioning him.

"Can you tell me what exactly happened?"

The few people exchanged glances, then approached timidly before slowly recounting the situation.

It turned out the madman's name was Johnson. He was their relative. Originally, they had all lived together as one large extended family in Worze District, supporting one another with good relationships all around. But after the plague recently broke out, Johnson was quickly found to be infected, and the family members who had come into contact with him were also herded into the lower district.

At first, everyone's spirits were still relatively good. They believed that with such a powerful organization as the Mage Alliance, as long as they held out for a while, a solution would certainly be found. But things escalated quickly.

Soon, mutants infected with the "Flesh Plague" appeared in the lower district. These mutated individuals often experienced explosive increases in strength and enormous surges in appetite. The already insufficient rationed food meant they couldn't get enough to eat, so they started stealing from others.

Even if some managed to hold onto their sanity at first, as hunger deepened, their reason gradually dissolved until they were completely reduced to monsters driven by bestial instinct.

It was then that fighting and killing began to spread. And those mutated monsters, their eyes bloodshot from murder, could no longer control their appetite for anything, which led to the cannibalism incidents they'd heard about when first arriving at the lower district.

These events inflicted tremendous psychological trauma on the local residents. Many went mad trying to escape, while others were utterly crushed by despair, becoming dazed and self-destructively apathetic.

The shifting situation made Johnson's family wary and worried about him as well. In the end, several of them decided to lock him in an iron cage. Though Johnson was extremely resentful and hateful throughout the process, several people had to hold him down and force him inside.

In the following days, Johnson howled in his cage all day long. But his elderly mother couldn't bear it any longer. In the middle of last night, she used a key to open the door.

"At the time, Auntie just wanted to let him out to feed him some food she'd saved from her own rations... but then..." At this point, the man shook his head, unable to bear finishing the thought.

"Alright, I understand," Zelalin cut him off. He already knew what had happened afterward.

As a grandmaster physician of Hidden Grove, he had witnessed many extreme situations. But for the young people behind him, this scene was still far too much of a shock.

After hearing the account, the accompanying physicians also looked unwell, though their expressions were hidden behind their masks.

For the rest of the half-day, they continued their inspections in the lower district, recording the progression of symptoms in infected individuals, and occasionally collecting blood samples and specimens.

That night, all four teams returned intact. Everyone sat together to discuss, the atmosphere heavy.

Though the plague had erupted within Mage Alliance territory, the members from the Hidden Grove Alliance and the Harp Flower Alliance were equally disheartened, because they had witnessed the reality of the situation and knew that if the plague spread, such tragedies might very well play out in their own homelands.

"No matter what, we must do everything we can to accelerate the research on medicines to prevent and treat the plague."

No one objected to this decision. And over the following month, all the physicians and apothecaries involved worked anxiously and busily conducting experiments and research.

As time passed, certain pathological mechanisms were gradually deduced and verified, and targeted medicines for those processes began to show promising results.