novelraw Chapter 370: Lethal Poison or Antidote
Chapter 370: Lethal Poison or Antidote
In the "infinity" dreamscape that endlessly rotated layer upon layer like a kaleidoscope, Fisher's soul was dragged out of reality by that massive magical power, entering the Crevice between the Spirit World and the World. Groggy, his consciousness seemed to be ceaselessly falling. During this long plunge, his mind, previously injured by the Base, recovered bit by bit. With difficulty, he looked at the Ring of the Magic Monarch still worn on his finger, radiating a dark red glow.
"Valentiina!"
Then, as if he had just realized something, he called out Valentiina's name. However, no one around answered. The only response Fisher got was a sudden feeling of landing.
"Thud!"
Fisher's consciousness crashed heavily onto a tangible ground like a meteor. As the feeling of falling completely dissipated, an extremely familiar sensation welled up in his heart. It was very similar to the feeling when he entered the dreamscape with Valentiina at the campsite last time. His soul had once again detached from his body. However, unlike that time, the dreamscape this time gave him an exceptionally real feeling.
As soon as he hit the ground, his nasal cavity was instantly occupied by an extremely strong stench. That intense stench shot straight to his brain, causing even Fisher to feel somewhat nauseated.
"Sigh..."
"Ah!"
"It hurts..."
Fisher panted for a moment, then struggled to support himself and stood up. What caught his eye, however, were massive, massive piles of corpses heaped together regardless of whether they were dead or alive.All these corpses were wearing clothing styles of the Schwalian people from a century ago. Men, women, young, old, and people of various occupations were simply piled together like this. Through the gaps between the mangled bodies of the already dead, and amid the dying groans of those still holding onto their last breath, Fisher clearly saw that all of these people no longer resembled human beings.
The swollen pustules abruptly growing on their bodies were like demons squeezing every drop of marrow, turning originally slender, beautiful women into skeletons encased in foul-smelling pus. Extreme pain stimulated the fragile human nerves, causing them to madly dig their fingernails deep into their own thin, fragile skin, letting thick, black-turned blood ooze from the wounds.
Is this the Death-Rot Plague?
Fisher frowned tightly and covered his mouth and nose, slowly taking in the extreme horror of the surrounding scenes. The Schwalian clothing and the twisted, deformed sights of the diseased instantly made him recall the great epidemic recorded in history books—the Death-Rot Plague.
Around Fisher, hill-like piles of corpses were heaped everywhere. Groans echoed off one another like the dirge of this piece of heaven and earth. Pus flowed continuously over the corpses like rivers, converging and dyeing the Schwalian soil a mix of bright red and pitch-black, an unknown color. The flames ignited by lamp oil burning the corpses could never outpace the ceaseless flow of corpses brought here piled on horse-drawn carts. Even the once-tall steeds were tortured to skin and bones by this disease, continuously vomiting black pus from their mouths.
The sky was dreary. Not a glimmer of sunlight shone through the black, fish-scale-like clouds layering the sky; instead, only continuous streaks of scarlet were revealed. The stench in the air was mixed with a bit of moisture, making this place stuffy and hot, making one loathe to stay for even a second.
Fisher vigilantly surveyed his surroundings. In his hand, fragments of a magic crest began to take shape. This was a method he had thought of when researching his trump card, the Dream magic. Constructing a fully-formed magic directly within a dreamscape consumed a heavy toll on the soul. But if he constructed the corresponding magic materials and repeated the engraving process in his mind, he could quickly engrave a usable magic in his hand at a relatively low cost.
However, the prerequisite for doing this was that one must be extremely familiar with the process and theory of constructing this magic. Furthermore, there could absolutely be no mistakes or pauses in the mental conceptualization, otherwise, it would directly lead to the magic engraving failing and draining one's mana.
Warming up his hands, Fisher walked while slowly starting to practice from low-ring magic, because he hadn't entered here again since that last time with Valentiina.
"Save... save me... doctor..."
Just as Fisher was vigilantly and slowly walking forward, his right leg was suddenly grabbed by a tiny hand. His pupils shrank, and he subconsciously was about to raise his foot to break free. But looking down, beside a pile of corpses near him, a little girl—whose face was completely covered in Death-Rot pustules to the point her original appearance was indistinguishable—was struggling to breathe. Using her one remaining clouded eye, she stared fixedly at Fisher, who was about to pass by.
"Save... so... it hurts..."
Her hands were tainted with a lot of black pustular blood, unknown if it was her own or from others who had long died around her. She just weakly grabbed onto Fisher like this. Even though she wasn't using much force, a faint light of the will to survive still flickered in her eye that had been squeezed into almost just a slit.
"Doc... cough, cough..."
The magic in Fisher's hand dissipated bit by bit. He opened his mouth and had just wanted to say something, but the girl's hand grabbing his pants had already dropped weakly bit by bit. Following the trail of her falling fingers, that pustular blood left a long, trailing mark on his pant leg. She kept her eyes open but was no longer breathing. The mouth that had just wanted to say something was immediately occupied by wisps of clouded pustular blood, turning her into just another one of the sentient beings within this massive Asura Purgatory.
Fisher knew full well that what was appearing before his eyes now were merely illusions constructed by the Dream magic. But he still couldn't help but sigh. Because since the scenes here could appear in the dreamscape, this meant that someone here had once truly seen these scenes. Otherwise, the dreamscape couldn't construct them, just like that touch of paleness seen in Valentiina's dream.
Looking at the young life that had died of illness amidst the pile of people, Fisher slowly stood up and continued forward. Soon, between these piles of people taller than mountains, he saw rare people who were still walking.
Those were several people wearing thick black robes. Horses and draft oxen had fallen ill, and there were no more beasts of burden to push these continuously arriving patients sent for disposal. They had no choice but to use human power to push carts piled with dozens of corpses forward.
The outward attire of these black-robed people was very uniform. Wearing such thick black robes in this exceptionally scorching weather, one didn't even need to think to know that just standing in Schwari's summer while wearing this would instantly leave you drenched in sweat, making even breathing extremely difficult. Yet, these black robes were merely the most basic gear for these people.
Even more iconic were the rudimentary masks they wore on their heads, seemingly made of some leather material. The long, bird-beak-like masks extended out from the black robes they wore. At the eye openings, a pair of glasses-like lenses were inlaid, heavily magnifying the exhaustion and pain of those hiding beneath these masks.
On their black robes, over where their chests were stationed, was first a nameplate written in Schwalian script, which normally wrote the person's name, followed by their hometown. And beneath the nameplate, there was an emblem depicting a slender sword pierced into the head of a dying snake.
Remember? In the myth of the Mother Goddess creating the world, she saved an injured little rabbit. After eating the apple gifted by the rabbit, she had the child known as "humans". In reality, within this story filled with religious metaphors, the true humans were that injured rabbit.
The reason the rabbit was injured was that it was bitten by a poisonous snake in the forest, and that poisonous snake represented suffering and disease in the teachings of the Mother God religion. Thus, when Schwari was founded, the Emperor slaying that giant snake held such symbolic significance, because it signified that the suffering of the Schwalian people being enslaved and oppressed would come to an end.
And conversely, bearing an emblem with a sharp sword pierced into a poisonous snake's head also proclaimed the identities of these people before him...
They were all doctors who had taken an oath before the Mother God's doctrines, swearing to use all their knowledge to combat disease and suffering.
The history books of Naris rarely recorded matters concerning that epidemic in Schwari. Because it was precisely that epidemic that definitively halted Schwari's advance on Naris, pulling Naris back from the brink of national extinction to the negotiation table. The Naris people kept their mouths completely shut regarding that humiliating period of history, just as Balzac had said before: for Fisher to roughly know the course of the epidemic's outbreak was already truly not easy.
Looking at those doctors coughing while hauling corpses, Fisher frowned without saying a word. Because those rudimentary medical masks absolutely couldn't fend off the attacks of the terrifying Death-Rot Plague. The doctors fighting on the frontlines faced an extremely high risk of contracting the disease. Even after exhausting their lives and knowledge, in the face of such a terrifying epidemic, all many of them could do was incessantly incinerate countless corpses.
"Cough, cough..."
A doctor pushing a cart collapsed onto the ground coughing painfully. The doctors pushing carts nearby, however, seemed numb. They tossed the collapsed and dying doctor onto a pushcart as well, throwing him amidst a pile of corpses. They poured oil over them and silently watched the fragile flames burn those corpses.
And it was also at this moment that Fisher discovered the nameplates on the chests of all these doctors bore the exact same name, which was,
"Tolga Dalel"
Frowning, Fisher continued forward. Crossing the largest mountain of corpses before him, crossing the stench carried over by the hot summer wind, in the scene before him, he suddenly saw a doctor dressed very similarly to the previous ones holding a notebook, using some sort of container to collect the pus secreted by those Death-Rot patients.
Fisher paused his steps slightly, looking at that doctor running constantly through the epidemic zone wearing a heavy bird-beak mask with a bit of red hair slipping out from under the black robe. He watched as that doctor researched day after day, persistently fiddling with corpses in a world filled with the stench of death and pus.
"Whoosh~"
A gust of bloody wind blew past, and sheets upon sheets of theses, drafts, and experimental proofs scribbled full of Schwalian text scattered over. The bloodstained manuscript papers were covered by the blurred time and years within the dreamscape. Fisher picked up many of the scattered original manuscripts, only seeing the conclusions. But there was much, much more—the process witnessed by day after day of repeated deaths, day after day of witnessing a devastated land, went unseen by him.
"Tentative Treatise on the Origin of the Death-Rot Plague I: The Mana Origin Theory"
"Tentative Treatise on the Origin of the Death-Rot Plague II: The Schwalian Long-Tailed Rat Variant Origin Hypothesis"
"Introduction to the Origin of the Death-Rot Plague: The Death-Rot Bacteria"
"Introduction to the Prevention and Treatment of the Death-Rot Plague"
"Study on the Resistance between Secondary Secretions of Schwalian Cassia Grass and Bacteria: Conclusion on Failure I"
"Hypothesis on Transmission Inhibition"
"A Letter Pleading for Protective Supplies for Frontline Medical Personnel"
"Tentative Treatise on the Manufacturing of the Anti-Rot Agent"
"Tolga's Theory on Curing Rot"
What fluttered in the wind were manuscript papers with rigorous argumentative structures, filled with densely packed experimental records and research reports. Every single page, every single word on them, was authored by a doctor named "Tolga Dalel".
Those manuscript papers stained with blood and pus slipped through Fisher's fingertips one by one. Taking step after step forward, scenes of even more grotesque and bizarre imagery imprinted themselves onto his eyes one after another.
He saw one Anti-Rot Church after another, built from living patients and skeletons. He saw a church personnel, looking like a skeleton and with a repulsive appearance, leading coughing Death-Rot patients in reciting the "Scripture of Creation." He saw the tightly sealed fortresses of the nobility. He saw Sun Knights wielding longspears and giant cannons charging through flesh and blood. Only, the steeds beneath those knights were all deformed lumps of flesh, and the ground they trampled upon was composed of crawling patients...
Amidst silent pacing, grotesque and bizarre scenes arrived in quick succession, until all the clamor receded into the distance. Only then did Fisher see, at the end of the road, a strange gentleman dressed in black leather clothes, wearing a bird-beak mask on his head that seemed embedded into his face. He had his back to Fisher, with no nameplate or the doctor's emblem of a giant sword piercing a giant snake's head on him.
Before that quiet back view—which Fisher found both deeply familiar and deeply warded against—was a giant, shattered statue of the Mother Goddess. The upper half of the Mother Goddess statue's head was already broken off, symbolizing the complete vanishment of the Mother Goddess's benevolent gaze. And before that Mother Goddess statue was an enormous cross. Nailed to that cross was a red-haired girl dressed in coarse linen clothing. The girl had her gaze lowered, a devout smile on her lips, and was just nailed to death before the Mother Goddess statue like this.
Fisher also finally recognized that the silent black figure standing before the cross was no longer a part of the dreamscape, but truly and genuinely Erwind.
But looking at Erwind, who remained as quiet as a statue, merely looking at the cross before him, Fisher hesitated for a moment but still spoke,
"Tolga..."
Erwind's body heard Fisher's voice behind him. He didn't deny it, nor did he turn his head. Merely looking at the peaceful girl nailed to the cross before him, he spoke,
"Fisher, you truly are a genius. Everything in the Crevice between the Spirit World and reality is an aggregate of subconsciousnesses and souls. The mana normally consumed to construct a magic is surely astronomical. You actually managed to dissect the engraving of magic layer by layer, construct it, and lastly assemble it for it to take effect. Although this concept is simple, accomplishing it is as difficult as ascending the heavens."
Being able to say this meant that right after entering this Crevice, Erwind immediately perceived the nature of this place and could give a definitive conclusion on the phenomena occurring. In that case, he must also quickly realize that complex objects and life could not be constructed here.
They were both extremely brilliant scholars. Even as enemies, after seeing those densely packed manuscript papers just now, Fisher still immensely admired the unparalleled brilliance and resilient will of the person before him.
"You overpraise me... Hundreds of years ago, when observation magic hadn't even been created, you could surprisingly deduce the true pathogen and transmission routes of the Death-Rot Plague, and even discovered the inhibitory effect of the secondary derivatives of Cassia grass on the Death-Rot bacteria. Moreover, at that time, you had not yet obtained the Life Completion Manual. In comparison, my accomplishments are absolutely nothing..."
Yes, Tolga had not yet received the help of the Completion Handbook—an rule-breaking item—back then. At that time, just like the millions of bird-beak doctors falling on the front lines, he wore a rudimentary bird-beak mask. Battling against corpses that could never be fully burned and illnesses that were ubiquitous every single day, he summarized the nature and laws of the Death-Rot Plague, and created the [Panacea Potion] that was still usable to this day...
"Heh, the Magic Lord praised me the same way. She told me that, in their world, such medicine wouldn't be designed by humans until several hundred years later. She called me an unparalleled genius and personally gifted me the notes left behind by the previous Lord of Life for research..."
Erwind remained utterly motionless, merely looking at the quiet, red-haired girl nailed to the cross before him. He seemed to want to reach out and touch the girl, but was deterred by the piercing smile on her face, making him unable to lift his hand.
"Superb talents... You know, Fisher, superb talents are the things least tolerated by humanity. In this physical plane, there are always only superiors with superb talents stooping down to accommodate downwards; there will never be the multitude of commoners reaching upwards. Because being a misfit is what the multitudes loathe the most."
"Our entire family were devout followers of the Mother Goddess, my younger sister especially so. Because I followed the Mother Goddess's guidance, I embarked on the path of medicine, attempting to use my meager knowledge to save the common people tormented by illnesses everywhere under heaven. And whenever I saw you, a rapidly rising magic prodigy, I invariably thought of my younger sister. Her innate amount of mana was larger than normal people's; her perception of the World's Echo far exceeded the ordinary. She had a very high chance of becoming a magic master rarely seen in Schwalian history, someone just like you."
"Until that year, when war erupted from everywhere, and the Death-Rot Plague ran rampant. I, along with countless doctors, answered the call to enter the epidemic zones to combat the Death-Rot Plague. I saw far too much suffering brought by the torment of the plague; I saw towns whose populations halved in just one day; I saw piles of corpses taller than mountains; I saw renowned medical masters brought down by the epidemic, their lifetimes of rich knowledge splattered across the earth with pus and fresh blood."
"Through all of this, I never gave up. Trying time and time again, innovating, researching. Attempting to exhaust an infinite disease with my finite knowledge, striving to return peace to the home where I dwelt."
"Rumble!"
In the sky, dreary, fish-scale-shaped dark clouds intertwined and clashed, until that scarlet skylight was drawn by force to form an extremely obvious clap of thunder.
"Yet, what countless corpses and sacrifices bought was absolutely nothing. The soldiers who caught the disease brought the originally controllable epidemic to further places as Schwari incessantly launched wars upon the disease-breeding lands; the Church we believed in, which was supposed to guide its believers to be strong, flogged frail lives, squeezing their flesh and blood to construct massive Anti-Rot churches; the castles of the nobles were shut tight, gorgeous clothing worn no more yet just tossed in bookcases, food left to spoil yet unwilling to distribute to others—because as long as one opening was made, those maddened commoners would eat them along with it."
"Neither ignorance nor madness ever stopped me. Shielding myself from sight and hearing, I firmly believed that as long as I could research an antidote, all this madness would end. Yet, that madness driven by desires did not wane in the slightest. The bishops siphoned money under the guise of 'worshipping the Unbladed Knight'; under the guise of 'hunting Witches,' they humiliated young girls who had finally managed to survive the plague with great difficulty. Men tortured by starvation and disease were once again dragged out by Schwari onto battlefields for foreign conquests..."
"The enemies we dedicated our lives to fight against were transformed in the blink of an eye into an apocalyptic revelation they felt immensely grateful for. They became 'Unbladed Knights,' envoys of the Mother Goddess worthy of praise. The people we offered everything up to protect were transformed in the blink of an eye into slaves they wantonly exploited and oppressed, livestock to be taken from at will, animals they trampled beneath their feet and spat upon..."
Looking at the young girl nailed to the cross, Fisher suddenly understood that in that era, possessing superior magical talent was not a good thing for a person. Because of properties extremely similar to the Witch Species, many of them died violent deaths. The young girl before Tolga's eyes must have been one of them.
"Fisher, aren't you curious exactly what favor I owed Elizabeth that made me help her like this in Naris?"
"The conditions to enter churches to enter slumber are harsh. Even though my younger sister has been dead for hundreds of years due to that madness, even though her name as a devout follower of the Mother Goddess has faded, she still carries the unwarranted crime of being executed for resisting rape and thus cannot enter a church... Kadou, Schwari, not even those small nations had a single church willing to officially accommodate her to enter slumber at the Mother Goddess's side. But Elizabeth gave me this chance."
In the sky, thunder rumbled once again. The moisture blown in waves by the freezing wind was about to converge into drops of liquid, washing heavily down toward the earth.
"Drip, drop..."
Drop by drop, wisp by wisp, finally turning into an overwhelming curtain of rain that covered this stretch of heaven and earth. Fisher twitched his nose but only smelled a thick stench of blood. Raising his hand to look, he saw that the raindrops from the sky falling onto his hand left smears of vivid red identical to blood. Looking up, he only then discovered that this piece of heaven and earth had already been dyed red by endless blood.
It was raining...
"Over a long period of time, I gradually realized that the cause of so much suffering wasn't the Death-Rot Plague, nor war, nor Elizabeth, nor Blake... it was ignorance. This is an attribute carved into the core of fragile humanity. No matter how eras change, no matter how the world changes, ignorance still drives humanity to commit mistake after mistake..."
"I am not going to kneel before beings of a higher tier than us, even if they are gods. But I must climb upwards. To use a whip to flog and correct their mistakes, just as they praised within the disaster, to use the truth of wisdom to guide them into not making mistakes..."
Similarly standing within the curtain of blood rain filling the sky, Erwind, just as he had hundreds of years ago, stood blankly before the cross bearing his younger sister's corpse. Tilting his head up, he gazed at the pouring rain filling the sky. The Mother Goddess did not answer his bewilderment, only letting the heartless rainwater beat against the bird-beak mask that had once witnessed him saving the common people, until that mask embedded itself bit by bit, inch by inch, seamlessly onto his face, never to be taken off again.
Beneath Fisher's feet, the mountain of corpses and sea of blood behind him, the puddles of pus large and small behind him, the enemies Erwind fought and the compatriots he sheltered, at this very moment, all flowed along the thick bloody water on the ground. Accompanied by the continuous rain curtain and thunder falling from the sky, they all flowed fully into the silently standing body of Erwind before him.
Only at this moment did Fisher suddenly discover that those sights he had seen earlier weren't constructed by the dreamscape at all; they were entirely a part of Erwind's soul!
"Rumble!"
Above the sky dome in the distance, thunder inextricably mingled with the curtain of rain. Just as the devout servants by the side of the loving Mother Goddess sang,
"Under the benevolent gaze of the Mother Goddess, your pure white cape is stained by the scorching gale."
"Without the flogging of blades, confirming the purity of the soul with death."
"The punished children are ignorant, unable to tell whether you are lethal poison or the antidote."
"Ah, esteemed envoy of the Mother Goddess, the pure and flawless Unbladed Knight!!"
The holy song of the ignorant believers praising the Death-Rot Plague gradually grew spirited. At the same time, that massive, countless amount of flesh and blood also fully poured into Erwind's body. His originally illusory soul became ten thousand times more solid. Even wandering outside the world, it still produced a sense of substance as the divine and soul gradually merged into one. And this, precisely, was proof that Erwind was only one step away from the Mythical Rank.
Erwind's entire dreamscape became completely pure and flawless, as if that filthy, disgusting flesh and the Death-Rot Plague had never even existed. In his dreamscape, there were originally only simply two objects: the cross nailing his younger sister's corpse before him, and the broken statue behind that cross, with half of its head damaged so that one could not see the Mother Goddess's benevolent gaze.
Erwind stood before the cross, looking just that frail, until inch by inch, a bit of white cape that seemed to be composed of the purest radiance in the world grew out from his back.
"In order to explore the truth and shake off the ignorance of humanity, I rightfully abandon ethics and morality, societal structures, my body as a human, my name, my past. To turn what I have obtained, what I have thought, into the path of the future..."
"Only power can correct ignorance, only logic can restrain desires..."
The pure white cape fluttered against the fierce wind, rain curtain, and thunder. Erwind turned his head bit by bit. Empty-handed, he carried no tangible blades or weapons, yet like a revelation from the Mother Goddess, he quietly fixed his gaze upon Fisher before him.
The enemy before his eyes had no original name, only crowned with a noble name due to the terror he wreaked and the ignorance of the believers.
Amidst despair, they sang for and praised this heartless epidemic, laughably believing it was an envoy sent down to the mortal realm by the Mother Goddess to punish her beloved children...
He was the pure white Unbladed Knight, Erwind.
"Fisher, it's just the two of us here now. Come."
"..."
Fisher remained silent, the magic in his hands growing ever brighter, until the ring count of the constructed magic elevated bit by bit, bursting forth with an extremely dangerous color.
"Rustle~"
Along the sound of the pure white cape fluttering, in the next second, heaven and earth had already lost all color.