Chapter 170: The Plague Plan

Chapter 170 The Plague Plan

"Hmm, the research topic is death..."

As the words fell, the air seemed to congeal for a few seconds, thick and sluggish like coagulating gel.

All gazes covertly settled on Elius and Truth Key, which suddenly reminded Elius of the survival rules in the depths of the jungle, among packs of beasts—

Rank within the pack is always determined through combat, bloodshed, and death, until the weaker party is utterly broken, their fangs snapped and claws dulled, left kneeling breathlessly before the strong, groveling without dignity—only then is the pecking order established.

Whether by coincidence or deliberate design, Truth Key, fellow Rank 8 superior, had been pushed to the forefront, ideally positioned to probe Elius's strength and demeanor.

Elius raised an eyebrow, found herself genuinely intrigued.

Before this, almost no one had dared to challenge her so openly.

The atmosphere around the round table was stretched taut as a bowstring, ready to snap with a sharp "crack" at any moment.

Suddenly, a bewildered voice cut in, muffled but cutting through.

"Didn’t the leader tell us to properly welcome the new member?"

The hoarse voice emerged from beneath the burial shroud, reeking of chemical preservatives: "Asking such a question right after meeting... isn’t that inappropriate?"

Elius blinked in astonishment.

She had assumed the leader’s idea of "welcoming" was anything but welcoming, but rather laced with deeper implications.

Yet, Shadow of the Mind seemed not only oblivious to the subtext but had outright voiced it in front of her, at this very moment?

A thousand thoughts swirled in Elius’s mind, all converging on one question:

Has Shadow of the Mind always been like this?

Compared to her colleagues, brimming with the vitality of the living, this corpse wrapped in cloth was almost charmingly guileless.

"..."

Clearly, someone else was even more incredulous than Elius.

Truth Key's metallic face betrayed nothing—its face, as if cast from metal, bore a smooth, unchanging upward curve at the corners of its mouth, making its emotions impossible to discern.

But King of Metal and Stone’s reaction was far more obvious.

The old man’s eyes widened in shock before he hunched over, gripping the table as he doubled over in a coughing fit.

Covering his beard with a hand as if to mask his reaction, King of Metal and Stone rasped between coughs,

"Shadow... *cough*! I think the leader probably meant..."

Yet, Shadow of the Mind remained oblivious to the cue, instead pushing a glass of water toward the old man and asking with concern, "Are you alright?"

After a long pause, she finally seemed to realize something, her bewilderment palpable beneath the shroud: "...Did I say something wrong?"

"No, you didn’t."

Elius offered Shadow of the Mind a reassuring smile before turning to the other two, her gaze cooling, her left pupil elongating unnaturally, taking on the vertical slit of a predator.

She chuckled lightly, her tone unreadable: "How... enlightening. I should thank you for letting me know just how 'warm and sincere' my new partners are toward me."

A silver mirror, luminous as a full moon, began to coalesce in Elius’s hands. She stared indifferently at Truth Key and said with lethal calm, "If you’re curious about death, I’d be happy to let you experience it firsthand."

The mirror’s reflection burned into Truth Key’s monocular gaze, causing its pupil to contract violently. The light lanced like molten silver into its very marrow, flooding it with an overwhelming sense of impending doom.

...It was going to die.

Run!!

Every instinct screamed—Truth Key had never felt so close to death before. It could almost smell the grave-mold and decay, feel the brush of Death’s fluttering shroud against its nose.

"Hah," Truth Key convulsed with paradoxical ecstasy, yet its eye burned with fanaticism as it babbled in scholarly rapture, "I’ve always been the researcher, never the lab rat... But to be ushered into oblivion by your grace—what a rare opportunity! If I miss this, I might never get such experimental conditions again..."

As a descendant of Fallen Knowledge, Truth Key’s worldview, logic, and emotions were warped beyond mortal comprehension.

It existed solely to pursue its chosen research topics, sacrificing all in pursuit of knowledge—treating all worlds as testing grounds, all things as expendable subjects. In extreme cases, that included itself.

Sweat beaded like mercury down King of Metal and Stone’s temple as he cowered into the chair's embrace under the sudden pressure of Elius’s aura, trembling while spluttering placations:

"There’s no need for violence! Peace serves us all! We’re all here for our own interests and ideals—no need to shatter this bond so soon..."

Elius smiled a knife's-edge smile, but the figures in her silver mirror were already growing clearer.

An executioner's certainty took root in everyone’s hearts:

Once those shadows fully materialized, foretelling their final moments, their doom would be sealed.

Only now did they truly grasp what "the ancient Ill Fate Witch," "the sorceress who wields the negative aspects of fate," represented—

Even among superiors of Rank 8 and above, Elius reigned supreme, one of the few closest to the True Gods.

Her killing intent was as inexorable as a landslide, all the misfortune, calamity, and fear in the river of fate surging forth like a tsunami of divine retribution, capable of erasing them from existence in an instant. Against such power, ordinary Rank 8 beings like Truth Key were less than insects before a god.

So powerful, so terrifying...

For a moment, the meeting room was a tomb's silence.

King of Metal and Stone, the lowest in rank, scuttled with undignified haste for his age, pointlessly crouching behind his high-backed chair, only his balding, white-haired scalp visible.

The woman beneath the burial shroud glanced left and right, realizing she might have messed up again, and shivered beneath her wrappings as a living nightmare took form behind her, half her body sinking into the world of bad dreams.

Truth Key, whose psyche was most profoundly twisted, simultaneously displayed fear from survival instincts and excitement for a new research opportunity—recoiling even as its eye remained transfixed on the mirror, as if eager to witness its own demise.

As for Elius...

Had she not wanted to further engage with the organization’s leader and plumb Longinus' secrets, she might have seriously considered striking now—after all, their annihilation would require but a thought.

Just then, an unfamiliar voice echoed from above.

It seemed to issue directly from the pulsating walls of the room, soft yet reverberating: "Lady Witch, on behalf of Longinus, I apologize. I only ask that you withhold your blade from your colleagues for now."

"As for Truth’s unauthorized provocation, I will ensure it is appropriately punished."

The voice chuckled lightly, its tone oozing saccharine diplomacy, carefully omitting the fact that it had been his orders that prompted Truth Key to test and "welcome" Elius in the first place.

The moment the words faded, Truth Key’s singular eye abruptly burst apart like a burst grape under a boot, thick crimson streaked with white oozing from the ruptured socket.

The tall, pale figure let out a low groan of pain, hands clutching the wound as it wiped away the inexhaustible wellspring of gore.

Elius raised her eyes to the dome, realizing that the leader's voice echoed from deep within the crimson room—or rather, the entire room might be an extension of the leader's own body.

The location of the high council meeting was actually inside the leader's own body!

Indeed, the current leader of Longinus was clearly a High Being of the Life Domain...

No wonder, among the players who attempted to steal the serpent's shed fate-skin in the snowy mountains, there was one clone with a preternaturally short thread of fate.

Though Chen Hui bore the emblem of the Burning Pure Land, all knew well that this terrorist organization specialized solely in violence and destruction, making it nearly impossible for them to develop and master mature artificial human technology. But if Longinus had collaborated with the Burning Pure Land, imparting this sacrilegious life-craft to them, then it all made sense.

Being able to forge an alliance with such a notorious terrorist organization made it hard to believe that Longinus was truly advancing toward noble and rational goals.

Suppressing the calculating glimmer in her eyes, Elius chuckled softly, the silver mirror's afterimage dissipating in her palm as she remarked with sardonic amusement, "Of course, I trust in your 'fairness.'"

The leader offered no further explanation on the matter.

From the moment he recruited Elius, he had known this witch was not one to be swayed by ideals or collective slogans. Even their relationship required no bond of goodwill or trust.

Among high beings, cooperation often needed no such intangible things.

—Shared gain sufficed as binding.

In the leader's view, Longinus could not easily find another practitioner of Elius's caliber to wield the "Eternal Canvas," nor could Elius find another organization as audacious as Longinus to defy fate itself... That was sufficient.

For these divinity-spurning renegades standing against the divine, neither had many alternatives.

They could only keep daggers poised warily against each other's waists while leaning back-to-back, striving to seize their goals in a perilous world.

Still, to placate the new member, the leader offered choice bait to secure greater leniency from the witch.

"I will, of course, prove my fairness and sincerity."

The crimson walls pulsed slowly as the leader's voice echoed from within. "I’ve heard you bear the will of the old gods, seeking to sow chaos and misfortune in fate, letting the capricious and corrupt negative aspects of destiny reclaim dominion over mortals—on this front, we’ve already achieved the first fruits of our research."

After a brief silence, Elius's lips curled like a night-blooming flower—beautiful yet perilous. "Do enlighten me."

Confidently, the leader expounded, "The essence of fate is the convergence of countless causal probabilities."

"For any single individual, there exist countless divergent possibilities, like forking channels at a river’s end, leading to different futures. As the river of fate flows forward, at the moment it reaches a branching point, it selects one possibility, entering a fixed tributary, thus sealing one future's dominion... This is the immutable law of fate."

"But have you ever considered... what if this rule were broken?"

"For instance, at the very instant fate has chosen a possibility but not yet merged into the tributary, applying a 'warping' influence to forcibly divert the river into an incorrect branch..."

"Oh? An intriguing proposition."

Elius leaned slightly forward, elbows resting on the round table, her emerald eyes brimming with intrigue and amusement, as if genuinely captivated by the leader's proposal.

After a moment's thought, she responded, "I suppose this could cause some eddies of discord in the river of fate?"

"However, such minor disturbances would be too insignificant—like a droplet splashing from the sea, quickly smoothed over or corrected by the vast totality of fate."

"Precisely. The disorder of a single possibility may seem trivial, but we can make these minor disruptions spread... like a creeping plague."

At the center of the scarlet wall, a bulge suddenly swelled, extending a long blood vessel that coiled around a lead-gray vial filled with swirling particulate essence, placing it before Elius.

"If we plant seeds of chaos deep within the fates of countless beings, causing multitudes of individual destinies to veer off course, creating a massive collective disorder—"

"It would be like dripping potent poison, one drop after another, into the river of fate. Though each drop may seem negligible, their accumulated toxicity would be enough to render the entire river chaotic and disordered... even afflicting the tail-devouring serpent guarding its banks, weakening its grasp over the scepter of authority."

"Does this not align perfectly with your desires?"

The leader chuckled lowly, reminding Elius of a luridly-hued venomous serpent. "I believe we can collaborate on this 'Plague Project.'"