CHAPTER 470: CHAPTER 448 DEMON-LOVING FUNGUS

Autumn Dusk Island, Mechanical Palace.

In a laboratory on the second floor of a side hall, Hilov sat in a wheelchair, holding a wooden paperboard pad, writing in the experiment records according to the timeline.

The walls of the laboratory were brushed with white lime, and in the center was a sturdy iron bed, with its edges covered in dark red blood-stained scratches.

At this moment, the man fixed firmly to the bed by several leather belts and chains was twisting his body with a ferocious expression. His muscles were trembling, and his entire body was a sickly reddish hue.

This Master Knight, who had brutally slaughtered a family of fourteen farmers, was restrained on the iron bed, gagged, and was looking imploringly at Hilov, emitting pleading ’mm mm’ sounds.

However, Hilov, sitting beside him, didn’t show any expression and merely shook her tail lightly, watching the proliferating tissue and nodules on his skin, with bulging blood vessels breaking through the skin.

Blood spurted out like tiny fountains, and Master Knight’s eyes widened before he could no longer endure it and ceased breathing.

Ah Fu stepped forward, placing his head on his chest and listening for a long time before shaking his head towards Hilov.

"Sigh, the ninth one." Recently, Hilov’s theatrical classical pronunciation had dissipated considerably, with only some odd intonation still detectable at the sentence endings.

With a strike on the ninth test subject’s report, Hilov dejectedly lowered her tail.

This was already the ninth death row convict, yet her efforts to mitigate the Witch virus’s virulence hadn’t succeeded.

Since Horn’s departure, Hilov had been pondering the mystery of the Divine Favor infection. If not for Jils persistently forcing Hilov to go out to the yard, she wouldn’t have considered going downstairs.

Regarding the infection of the Blessed, Hilov had made significant progress on the research with the crystal slide and microorganism theory provided by Horn.

With a snap of her fingers, several Cheka at the door automatically entered, carrying the corpse of the death row convict out of the room.

With her back to the maids and Ah Fu tidying up the room, Hilov wheeled herself to the wooden table.

On the wooden table in front of her, there was a lamp holder.

This holder was made from a cedarwood tube filled with fluorite, and a nail-sized hole was opened on the top of the tube, with a soft white light shooting through that hole.

After dropping two drops of skin debris mixed with Slime Liquid onto the crystal slide and adding a drop of turbid liquid from nearby, Hilov closed the slide and placed it on the lamp holder.

She picked up the eye drops and dripped two drops into her eyes, leaning back in her chair with her head supported by the woolen cushion on the backrest, gazing blankly at the ceiling.

But in just a blink of an eye, a spectral white light shot from her formerly distinct black-and-white eyes, and she jerked her head down to look at the crystal slide on the table.

Fixating intensely on a focal point, everything outside of the focus in her original vision blurred.

The next second, although she was seemingly stationary, the surrounding environment appeared to speed by, yet the focal point in front of her continued to zoom in, as if she herself was shrinking infinitely.

Until the blurriness gradually faded, Hilov could still feel her hands resting on the crystal slide, while her soul seemed to be placed in an ocean.

Around her, innumerable ghostly sea monsters were swimming and twisting wildly; some were oval-shaped with tentacles like octopuses, while others were rectangular with crab-like pincers.

Without exception, all of them had ghostly translucent bodies emitting a blue light, allowing Hilov to see their spacious internal organs clearly through their skin.

Despite their organs being unlike any normal creature’s.

And behind these ghostly sea monsters, there was something similar to a floating island, growing some pieces of transparent meat trees intertwined with each other.

According to Horn’s explanation in his letter, this thing was the peripheral nerve cells beneath human skin.

At this moment, these nerve cells were being attacked by a swarm of spider-like microorganisms.

Compared to the surrounding ghostly sea monsters, these spider-like microorganisms were as big as ordinary sea fish but much more vicious than typical microorganisms.

They frantically pounced on the nerve cells, injecting red toxins from their translucent bodies, causing the nerve cells to twitch and shake continuously upon toxin entry.

This group of spider-like microorganisms was the source of the witch disease transmission, a type of microorganism existing only in the witch’s body and degenerating under low magic power environments — Demon-Loving Fungus.

Hilov named it Demon-Loving Fungus because it’s a bacteria that can only survive in abundant mana environments.

Using traditional wizard theories in combination with Horn’s microorganism theory, it’s explained as a type of micro demon.

These Demon-Loving Fungus will rapidly die when exposed to an outside low magic environment, but upon contact with human body, especially subcutaneous tissue, there’s a chance of survival.

In the ordinary mortal’s low mana environment, Demon-Loving Fungus will have a primitive drive for self-preservation.

They will release a toxin injected into the organism’s nerve cells.

Though it’s unclear what happens afterward, this action leads to various deformities in witch disease patients, producing more mana.

The Demon-Loving Fungus itself will also split and reproduce, giving birth to the next generation requiring an even lower mana environment to survive.

This is the entire process of witch disease transmission.

It’s undeniable that there are still many unresolved issues within.

Why does this Demon-Loving Fungus only appear in the witch’s body?

Why does the toxin only change nerve cells but alters the entire human body?

Why do patients after mutation produce more mana?

Until now, these questions remain unanswered.

But at least, the millennial mystery of how witch disease spreads has been revealed by this witch with rare divination spells, Hilov.

Hilov’s greatest achievement in the past three months is discovering a stabilizing method for transmitting witch disease.

In fact, Hilov made another new discovery in the past two weeks.

That’s when Demon-Loving Fungus mixed with a faint golden spherical fungus, the survival rate of Demon-Loving Fungus can be greatly increased.

Effectively solving the witch disease’s strong lethality but weak transmission flaw.

Since this research began after Jeanne and Horn left, Hilov hasn’t started her next step of the plan yet.

Hilov hypothesized that every witch’s body might contain different Demon-Loving Fungus, leading to varying properties of magic power in the infected witch disease patients.

If Horn, being a male witch, has only mild symptom response in his witch disease patients, who are the Blessed.

Does this indicate that his mana is gentler, or is his Demon-Loving Fungus a rare low-toxicity variant?

If only Horn would return, Hilov supported her left cheek with her hand, the feather pen in her hand unconsciously sliding across the table.

Of course, it wasn’t that Hilov was longing to see Horn; it’s just that the research hit a bottleneck.

"Knock, knock—"

"What’s the matter? Didn’t I say not to disturb me during the experiment?" Hilov’s cold voice sent a shiver down the spines of the Cheka at the door.

He had witnessed many tough men weeping or wetting themselves after entering this little room; so far, none have survived.

The number of dead rabbit, pig, sheep, and rat corpses is countless.

"It’s not intentional to disturb you." The Cheka swallowed hard, forcing down his fear, "The forward post reports that His Majesty Saint Sun will soon arrive at Autumn Dusk Island for inspection."

"When?"

The previously drooping tail spun like a propeller.