Chapter 449: Demon-Eating Fungus

Autumn Dusk Island, Mechanical Palace.

In a laboratory on the second floor of the side hall, Shilov sat in a wheelchair, holding a wooden paper pad, and wrote on the experimental record according to the time.

The laboratory was painted white lime all around, with a thick iron bed in the center. The edges of the bed had many scratches with dark red bloodstains.

At this moment, the man, who was firmly fixed to the bed by several belts, chains and iron nails, twisted his body with a hideous expression. His muscles were trembling and his whole body was covered with a sickly flush.

The knight, who had once brutally massacred a family of fourteen farmers, was tied to an iron bed and gagged. He looked at Shilov pleadingly, making whimpering sounds for help.

But Shilov, who was sitting next to him, had no expression on her face. She just wagged her tail gently and looked at the proliferating tissue and tumors on his skin, and the bulging blood vessels that broke through his skin.

Blood spurted out like tiny fountains. The knight's eyes widened and he finally couldn't bear it anymore and stopped breathing.

Afu, who was standing next to him, walked forward, put his head on his chest and listened for a long time before shaking his head at Shilov.

"Oh, it's the ninth one." During this period of time, the classical intonation of Shilov's voice has dissipated a lot, and only some strange tones can be heard at the end of the sentence.

After scratching the report on the ninth experimental subject, Shilov lowered her tail in disappointment.

This was the ninth death row inmate, but her efforts to mitigate the witch's virus had not been successful.

Since Horn left, Shilov has been thinking about the mystery of the Holy Favor infection. If Giles hadn't forced Shilov to go to the yard to exercise every day, she would not have planned to go downstairs.

With the crystal cover and microbial theory provided by Horn, Shilov has made great progress in the research on the infection of the Holy Favored Ones.

With a snap of his fingers, several Cheka officers at the door pushed the door open and walked in, carrying the body of the death row prisoner out of the room.

With her back to the maid and Afu who were cleaning the room, Shilov turned her wheelchair and came to the wooden table.

On the wooden table in front of her was a lampstand.

This lampstand is made of a cypress wood tube, which is filled with fluorescent stones. There is a hole the size of a fingernail on the top of the tube, and bright white light is emitted from the hole.

She dripped two drops of dandruff mixed with slime liquid into the crystal cover, and added a drop of turbid liquid next to it. Then, Shilov closed the cover and placed it on the lampstand.

She picked up the eye drops and dripped them into her eyes twice. Then she leaned back, raised her head, rested the back of her head on the woolen cushion on the backrest, and looked blankly at the ceiling.

But in just a blink of an eye, a faint white light shot out from her eyes, which were originally black and white, and she suddenly lowered her head to look at the crystal cover on the table.

She stared at a focal point intently, and in her original field of vision, everything outside the focal point became blurred.

The next second, she was clearly sitting still, but in her eyes, the surrounding environment seemed to be passing by quickly, and the focus in front of her eyes was constantly enlarging, as if she herself was shrinking infinitely.

Until the blur gradually faded away, Shilov could still feel her hands holding the crystal cover, but her soul seemed to be in the ocean.

Around her, countless ghost sea monsters were swimming and twisting their bodies wantonly. Some of them were oval in shape with octopus-like tentacles, while others were rectangular in shape with crab-like claws.

Without exception, they all had ghost-like translucent bodies that glowed with a faint blue light. Shilov could clearly see their spacious internal organs through their skin.

Even though their internal organs are different from those of any normal creature.

Behind these countless ghost sea monsters, there is something like a floating island, on which grow several transparent flesh trees that seem to be intertwined with each other.

According to Horn's explanation in the letter, this thing is the peripheral nerve cells under the human skin.

At this moment, this group of nerve cells is being attacked by a group of spider-like microorganisms.

Compared with the ghostly sea monsters around, this spider-like microorganism is the size of an ordinary sea fish, but it is more ferocious than ordinary microorganisms.

They pounced on the nerve cells frantically and injected the red toxins in the translucent body. After the toxins were injected into the nerve cells, they began to twitch and shake continuously. This group of spider-like microorganisms was the source of the witch disease, a kind of microorganism that only existed in the witch's body and would degenerate from generation to generation in a low-magic environment - the witch's magic-eating bacteria.

The reason why Shilov named it mana-loving bacteria is because it is a kind of bacteria that can only survive in an environment rich in mana.

Using traditional wizarding theory plus Horn's microbial theory to explain, this is a kind of microscopic monster.

This kind of magic-loving fungus will die quickly after coming into contact with the external low-magic environment, but there is a certain probability of survival after coming into contact with the human body, especially the tissue under the skin.

In an environment where ordinary mortals have low mana, the mana-loving fungi will have a primitive urge to save themselves.

They release a toxin that is injected into the organism's nerve cells.

Although it is not clear what happened afterwards, it was this action that caused various deformations of the witch patients and generated more magic power.

The magic-eating fungus will then divide and reproduce, giving birth to the next generation that requires even less mana to survive.

This is the whole process of the witch disease spreading.

It is undeniable that there are still many unresolved problems.

Why does this kind of magic-eating bacteria only appear in witches' bodies?
Why can toxins change the entire human body by simply changing nerve cells?

Why do patients who have undergone deformation have more magical powers?
To date, these questions remain unknown.

But at least the thousand-year-old mystery of how the witch disease is transmitted has been revealed in the hands of Shilov, a witch with rare divination spells.

Shilov's greatest achievement in the past three months is that she has discovered a way to stably spread the witch disease.

Even in the past two weeks, Shilov has made new discoveries.

That is, when the magic-eating bacteria and a light golden spherical fungus are mixed together, the survival rate of the magic-eating bacteria can be greatly improved.

This solved the problem of the witch disease being highly lethal but not contagious.

Since this research started only after Jeanna and Horn left, Shilov has not yet started planning for the next step.

Shilov has a guess that the magic-loving bacteria in each witch's body may be different, which causes the witch disease patients infected by them to have different types of magic.

That Horn is a male witch, and his witch patients, that is, the saintly ones, have little reaction to the disease.

Does this mean that his magic power is milder or that his magic-loving fungus is a rare low-toxic magic-loving fungus?
It would be great if Horn came back. Shilov supported her face with her left hand, and the feather pen in her hand slid unconsciously on the table.

Of course, this was not what Shilov was looking forward to seeing Horn, it was just that the research had reached a bottleneck.

"咚咚-"

"Is there anything wrong? Didn't I tell you not to disturb me when I'm doing experiments?" Shilov's cold voice made Cheka at the door shiver.

He had seen with his own eyes many tough guys burst into tears or became incontinent due to fear after entering this small house, and so far, no one had survived.

The number of dead rabbits, pigs, sheep, and mice is too numerous to count.

"No, I didn't mean to disturb you." Cheka swallowed his saliva and swallowed his fear. "There's news from the outpost ahead that His Majesty the Saint Sun will arrive at Autumn Dusk Island for an inspection soon."

"When?"

The tail, which was originally drooping, began to rotate like a propeller.

(End of this chapter)