Chapter : 1067 Nᴇw novel chapters are publɪshed on 𝙣𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙡•𝔣𝔦𝔯𝔢•𝕟𝕖𝕥 What he saw confirmed his suspicions and opened a new, more horrifying chapter of the investigation, a chapter that would lead him from the realm of men into the abyss itself. The bottom of the well was not filled with water. It was a gruesome, tangled, and moving carpet of dead and dying bats. There were dozens of them, a writhing, pathetic mass of diseased flesh. This was not a random carrier that had found its way into a woodpile. This was a nesting site. This was a breeding ground. This was the outbreak’s ground zero. With a grim certainty that settled in his soul like a shroud, he knew he had to go down. He anchored a sturdy grappling rope from his pack to the well’s crumbling stone structure, tested the hold, and then, without a moment's hesitation, began his descent into the darkness. He was rappelling into the very heart of the plague. The hunter was entering the monster’s den, and he had no idea what he was about to find lurking in the shadows at the bottom of the world. The descent into the well was a journey into a cold, silent tomb where the very air was thick with the promise of a profane death. The shaft was narrow, the rough-hewn stones slick with a strange, dark slime. The stench was overwhelming, a physical presence that even the purifying herbs in his mask couldn't entirely filter out. It was the smell of decay, yes, but it was layered with something else—a cloying, metallic sweetness, like rotting fruit and old blood, an odor that was utterly alien to the natural world. As Lloyd’s boots touched the soft, yielding, and horrifyingly shifting mass of dead and dying bats at the bottom, a new and terrible detail became apparent even to his normal senses. The bodies weren’t just decaying in the way a normal animal would. They were… dissolving. Many of the creatures were little more than indistinct, tarry black puddles of sludge, their forms melting away into a corrupt, semi-liquid state. The few that were still alive were in their final, agonized throes, their wings twitching feebly, their tiny mouths open in silent screams. He landed softly, his mind already a fortress of cold, scientific analysis, ruthlessly walling off the part of him that was screaming in primal horror. He knelt, the ground beneath his knee a squelching carpet of death. He activated his [All-Seeing Eye] and focused his perception on one of the more intact bat corpses, a creature that had only recently succumbed. He braced himself for what he might find, expecting to see a more concentrated version of the engineered virus. But the reality was far worse, far more unholy, than anything he could have possibly imagined. He plunged his perception to the cellular level, the world of biology becoming a luminous, intricate schematic. And the image that greeted him was one of pure, unadulterated, and absolute damnation. Yes, the engineered virus was there, a seething, microscopic army moving through the bat’s tissues. But it was a secondary infection, a passenger. The primary pathogen, the true cause of this horrifying dissolution, was something else entirely. It was a living, corrosive energy. A form of black, writhing, hungry static that was not just killing the bat’s cells but was actively, systematically, and voraciously consuming its very life essence. It was a spiritual parasite, a living, sentient rot that feasted on the soul. He watched in horrified, academic fascination as the dark energy attached itself to the bat’s faint spiritual signature, its spark of life. He saw it break down the signature’s structure, unmaking it, erasing it from existence and leaving behind only a corrupted, biological sludge, a soulless husk that then became a perfect breeding ground for the secondary viral infection. He didn't need to guess what it was. He had felt this energy before, a faint echo of it in the cursed poison used by the fanatical assassin in the capital. He had battled a more potent version of it in the Black Spirit chimera summoned by the counterfeiters in Rizvan. But this… this was purer. More concentrated. More fundamental. This was the source code of that unholy power. He pulled back his perception, his mind reeling from the sheer, blasphemous nature of what he had just witnessed. And in the stark, cold, analytical interface of his System, a single, horrifying diagnosis appeared in letters of luminous, unforgiving blue light: [TARGET ANALYSIS COMPLETE: ABYSSAL CORRUPTION - GRADE C DETECTED.] The words hit him with the force of a physical blow, a confirmation of a truth so terrible it threatened to shatter his understanding of the world. This wasn't just an engineered plague. This was Devil power. The full, apocalyptic picture slammed into place with the force of a divine, horrifying revelation. This wasn't just biological warfare; it was a demonic incursion, an act of unholy alchemy. Someone—or something—hadn't just modified a virus in a laboratory. They had taken a natural pathogen and deliberately, with a level of dark knowledge that was supposed to exist only in forbidden texts, infused it with the corrupting, soul-devouring essence of the Abyss itself. They had weaponized a plague by marrying it to a demonic taint. And in that instant, the horrifying purpose of the Red Blight became sickeningly clear. The plague didn't just kill its victims. The secondary viral infection was merely the delivery system, the brutal but crude tool to stop the heart and lungs. The true weapon was the Abyssal Corruption. It was designed to infect the spiritual essence of the host, to rot the soul from within while the body was still alive. This wasn't about creating a simple plague to kill people and destabilize a region. This was about creating a tide of undeath. The ultimate goal was to create bodies so thoroughly corrupted, so perfectly hollowed out and prepared, that they would become ideal, empty vessels for something else to inhabit. Oakhaven wasn't a target. It was an incubator. It was a farm. And the crop was human souls. The sheer, monstrous, and breathtaking scale of the enemy’s ambition was a physical weight. This was an act of bioterrorism designed to tear a hole in the fabric of reality, to open a gateway to hell, one corpse at a time. The line between the political conflict with the Altamiran kingdom and the existential threat of the Devil Race, the two-front war his father had spoken of, had just been completely, terrifyingly, and absolutely erased. They were one and the same. The war in the shadows and the war on the horizon were a single, unified front, and this plague was its opening salvo. A cold, hard certainty, as solid and as heavy as a block of granite, settled in his soul. He had to contain this. Not just for the duchy, but for the world. He had stumbled, by a combination of duty and terrible luck, upon the opening move of a war for the very soul of reality. And he was standing at its horrifying, stinking, and profoundly unholy epicenter. His mission was no longer about finding a cure. It was about stopping an apocalypse before it could be born. The general’s mind, now fully engaged and processing the apocalyptic new intelligence, ruthlessly overrode every instinct for self-preservation. The presence of Abyssal Corruption, of active Devil power, fundamentally altered every parameter of the crisis. He began to cross-reference this new, terrifying data with his existing knowledge of this world, and a critical, glaring flaw in the initial narrative immediately presented itself: the transmission vector. The story of the boy and the woodpile was the point of ignition, but it wasn't the full story of the fire's spread. He mentally accessed the ducal archives, a vast repository of cultural, anthropological, and biological data he had committed to memory during his studies. The people of the northern territories, particularly the isolated, tradition-bound communities of the Whisperwood, held a deep, almost religious abhorrence for bats. They were not just animals; they were symbols, creatures of ill-omen, carriers of night-sickness and bad spirits, the subjects of a thousand terrifying folktales told to frighten children. They were never hunted. They were never eaten. They were certainly never handled. The idea of a lumberjack or his child casually picking up a bat, even a dead one, was culturally absurd. It was a taboo as deeply ingrained as their respect for the ancient oaks. Furthermore, his own analytical mind, the part of him that was still a 22nd-century engineer, dissected the biological data. He recalled the specific species of bat he had found: Vespertilio Murinus Minor. It was a small, insectivorous creature, timid by nature, with tiny, needle-like teeth so small they could barely break human skin, let alone deliver a significant viral load. The probability of one of these creatures managing to bite or scratch a human, especially a healthy, active child, with enough force to transmit a pathogen was statistically infinitesimal. The natural spillover event he had initially theorized wasn't just unlikely; it was a near impossibility, it was a magical world not Earth. The story didn't fit the facts. Unless the bats were no longer natural.