Chapter 1501
Have you seen Chapter 1501 yet?
The rain is still falling.
But it's no longer the same rain.
Each falling raindrop, upon touching the shadow of the constantly fluttering butterfly wings, is silently tainted and transformed. The transparent droplets refract colorful light, like complex chemical reagents in a laboratory. Thousands of raindrops connect to form lines, then extend lines to surfaces, and finally weave a magnificent curtain of colors. From afar, it is breathtaking, yet also evokes an indescribable sense of suffocation, as if one is trapped in this cage, merely an insignificant cell in a petri dish.
The rain no longer fell crisply, but thickly and dullly, bursting into tiny, decaying flowers as it hit the ground. A stale smell filled the air: the bitterness of herbs before they wither, the sweet stench of rotting flesh, the astringency of insects wriggling, and something even more pungent, like the pale, disinfectant smell illuminated by a searchlight.
The phantom dragon controlled by Ovira stood tall in the rain. She did not move, but simply gazed, and the rain was reflected in her eyes, which reflected the truth of all things. Under the gaze of the mysterious king, these colorful threads gradually revealed a more essential state, which was also the basic logic that constituted the special mechanism of "epidemic".
If you can analyze and understand it, it's equivalent to understanding the core of this law, and thus you'll find a way to counter it.
In a laboratory setting, perhaps Ovira could have completed this task with ease, much like a tribal shaman from the barbaric era, a magician from the Golden Age, or a contemporary scientist, studying the mechanisms and phenomena that exist in the world to trace their essence and obtain answers about the universe. Unfortunately, this is a battlefield. Therefore, even with a thousand methods and boundless confidence, the enemy will not give her the freedom to act unfettered.
"Let's begin." Pereira's voice arose directly from the void, more like a sigh than a declaration.
As a result, all things fell silent, and a plague swept in.
All sounds—the rain, the wind, and even the suppressed yet undeniable breathing from the distant Blackfire Fortress—were completely abducted in an instant. While their disappearance might seem reassuring, the actual feeling was more like being swallowed by a larger, more greedy beast, lurking on the other side of the world, forever intertwined with life and civilization, bringing calamity and disease wherever life and civilization have traversed.
Absolute silence itself becomes a contagious medium; the auditory vacuum rapidly transforms into a cognitive void. All sentient beings with hearing are corrupted in this silence, losing both the ability to express themselves and gradually losing their existence, feeling themselves being stripped away by the world, yet powerless to do anything about it. This is a strange illness called "aphasia fever" and "amnesia disease." The former causes a person to temporarily lose the ability to speak due to a high fever, while the latter causes a decline in memory, once forcing the residents of a city to put labels on various objects to remind themselves of their fading memories.
In the hands of the plague monarchy, these diseases were amplified with astonishing force, and even the symptoms transformed from physiological phenomena into conceptual ones. At the very least, Ovira clearly realized that if they could not be cured in time, patients would inevitably lose their sense of self and be completely forgotten by the world.
Fortunately, I am the King of Mysteries.
The key to curing disease lies in treating the symptoms, but this is also where the difficulty lies: how to determine the cause of the disease through symptoms? How to formulate a treatment plan based on the pathology? How to provide treatment to alleviate the condition? In primitive times, tribal shamans or city-state healers relied mainly on experience, while the elite talents cultivated under the modern medical system rely more on their knowledge reserves. For the current situation, both are indispensable; and for the Mysterious Kingdom, it happens to possess both.
The Holy Grail's power, which grants near-wish fulfillment, may not be as powerful as the Maiden's Royal Power, but it serves as a suitable tool to assist Ovira in eradicating the plague. Just as the best doctors are equipped with the sharpest scalpels, only in this way can every mistake be ensured.
Saving lives is never a trivial matter. Ovira understood this when she was young and naive, but she only kept it in mind. Now, the more she knows, the more she reveres it.
Ovira calmly raised the fairy sword Hydras in her hand. The invisible magic within her seemed to quiet down, as if controlled by an unseen hand, and began to respond to the most skilled healer in the world. But what they were meant to do was not to purify, filter, or destroy; rather, they were to cut, remove, and separate: to cut away the decaying wounds, remove the diseased factors, and separate all impurities. This process was not a battle, therefore speed and efficiency were unnecessary; precision, stability, and meticulousness were paramount.
The silent realm shattered abruptly. It was the friction of star trails, the soft hum of elemental decay, even the faint buzzing of the most basic magical particles—the very sounds of the laws governing the workings of all things, sounds beyond the reach of ordinary ears. And today, they all returned, solely to break a disease caused by loss and forgetting. Indeed, this was the cure: since the aphasia and amnesia unleashed by the plague king himself gradually robbed people of their self-awareness and led to their abandonment by the world, then let's refill the lost and forgotten parts with a massive amount of information. When what is gained far exceeds what is lost, the disease will crumble on its own.
It sounds easy, but to possess the vast amount of information necessary to define an existence and have the ability to inject it into reality, there is no other person in the world besides the Mysterious Kings who could do so. In other words, unless it is Ovira, anyone facing such a bizarre illness would only face certain death.
Terminal illness.
What heavy and sorrowful words.
Yet it was also the most familiar impression in Perec's life. She had once regarded it as an irreconcilable enemy, a shadow that followed her to the death, or a traveler forced to walk the same path. Even today, she could still feel it beside her, watching like her breath. They both knew it, yet remained silent. To adapt to the changing times, or perhaps simply to cater to the needs of others, Perec constantly changed herself, and so it changed with her. When the Plague Witch walked the earth ten thousand years ago, spreading disease and corruption, those incurable diseases are now recorded in books and considered commonplace; while those diseases that could be cured by witchcraft and rituals in ancient times are now regarded as superstition and discarded. The incurable diseases of the past are now common ailments, and the curable diseases of the past are now feared. Is the world progressing, regressing, or simply going in circles?
Pere had no intention of delving into these overly complex topics. Her slight distraction on the battlefield was merely due to her reflections; she hadn't forgotten that the most dangerous enemy was right before her. So she raised her hand again, her butterfly wings fluttering lightly. Instantly, the earth beneath her feet lost all color, turning into a murky, pale white. Gray, like a living tide, rapidly spread in all directions from her footing. Grass and trees withered into ash, rocks weathered and crumbled, even the flowing mud solidified into fragile, wind-eroded structures, and eerie voids, like gaping maws, silently accused her.
The crimson mist carried a rusty, bloody stench, causing the capillaries of living beings to bulge and rupture wherever it passed, a sign of "hemorrhagic fever." The grayish-white frost spread silently, causing rocks, soil, and even magical remnants to quickly lose their vitality, turning gray and decaying. This was the erosion of matter by "decay syndrome," which had caused three recorded famines and the deaths of tens of millions of people in a short span of ten years. There were also distorted, invisible ripples that brought intense dizziness and a sense of temporal and spatial disorientation. It was said that "sun halo syndrome" would disrupt the perception of direction and balance within living beings. Long ago, a group of subterranean creatures first set foot on the sea, bringing this incurable disease to the world.
All the symptoms were traceable, and the Mystic Kingdom keenly realized that their spread, mutations, and even synergistic effects subtly conformed to a complex yet cruelly beautiful law—the cold logic of the Plague Kingdom as a "mechanism of evolution and elimination" in the universe. Perec wasn't recklessly unleashing her power; rather, through this battle, she was demonstrating this complex and rigorous mechanism to herself, or rather, issuing a challenge.
The corrupt goddess with butterfly wings on her back stands calmly amidst the tides of disaster and plague, gazing intently at her adversary: If you consider yourself an all-knowing king of mystery, then can you understand it, analyze it, and then... surpass it?
This challenge was not only about winning the battle, but also closely linked to the fate of the planet, so Ovira had no choice but to accept.
Let's give it a try.
With a thought, Ovira caused the dragon's phantom to crumble instantly, its massive body becoming translucent. Inside, countless phantoms of parchment scrolls, bookshelves, nautical charts, and experimental instruments seemed to swirl. "Knowledge" and "reason," the two core concepts that shaped civilization, were materialized and projected onto the battlefield. For the Mysterious Kingdom, which possessed all the knowledge of the entire universe, the foundation that supported it was undoubtedly the life that created, summarized, and concluded this knowledge—all intelligent races and civilizations.
In ancient times, tribal shamans wrote bizarre prescriptions on parchment with animal blood, accompanied by inexplicable rituals and incomprehensible blessings. Miraculously, the strongest warriors survived, the blood gushing from their wounds flowing back to their hearts through the same veins. In the city-state era, scholars traversed magnificent libraries, filling every corner of the shelves with their life's learning, sharing everything without reservation. Their efforts halted the decay spreading between city-states, and the people were no longer plagued by famine. In the Age of Exploration, the most experienced sailors and seamen pondered deeply under nautical charts, trying to find a route to avoid the dreaded halo effect of the sun. Ultimately, the solution came from the ship's doctor's ingenious idea and a small orange. In modern society, people have mastered more profound knowledge, developed more sophisticated instruments, and naturally conquered more intractable diseases. Many intractable ailments considered insurmountable in the past have now been effectively cured…
The battlefield transformed into a bizarre and spectacular state: on one side, a tidal wave of disease constantly mutating, multiplying, and displaying the cruel beauty of evolution; on the other, a wall of mystery that evolved in real time, responded precisely, and revealed the infinite possibilities of knowledge. The collision of these two fundamental laws of the universe, without fierce fighting or verbal coercion, created an atmosphere of clamor, anxiety, and near suffocation.
Beneath the butterfly's wings, Perec's cloudy, nebulous eyes flickered slightly. Ovira's response was both expected and admirable. After all, possessing knowledge is one thing; knowing how to use it, how to use it, and whether to use it rationally are quite another. The former is often theory, while the latter is practice. She had heard her two older sisters talk about Ovira before.
The Dark Witch Carabosse believed that Princess Beman, imprisoned in the castle, though bravely facing her fate, was inherently fragile; the Witch of Reality, Tentis, felt that the Mysterious Kingdom, accompanying Alice, though possessing a new life, remained fundamentally lonely. How could a fragile and lonely person muster the courage to fight and shoulder such heavy responsibilities? Ovira, from leaving the castle and embarking on her journey to now standing on the battlefield of the Young Princess Kingdom, only took two short years, while for Perec, it was a question that required ten thousand years of hesitation, confusion, and wandering to understand. Even at the very end, even after understanding the answer, what made her choose was not her own belief, but external pressure.
In this respect, she is indeed much stronger than me.
However, strength or weakness is not the key to determining victory or defeat.
"If you believe you can understand everything, and that understanding everything will change the outcome, and that changing the outcome will definitely be a good thing... then give it a try, Ovira."
"I've already seen it, but what about you?"
Pereira opened her arms as if to embrace this world filled with suffering. Her figure seemed even more frail in the rain, her tattered butterfly wings soaked through, like the blood that had flowed from their wounds, still bathing the girl's eyes—so sorrowful, yet radiating a sense of oppression that seemed to shake the entire universe. She had seen it all: the spread of the plague, the catastrophe of the world, the suffering of living beings, the decay of civilization, even the decline of the universe, yet she still stood there, stubbornly believing that there was no life in this world beyond redemption.
The prerequisite is that you pass my test.
"Diseases, disasters, epidemics—"
A powerful yet distant voice echoed through the lonely rain: "Everything is a test of evolution..." (End of Chapter)