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Chapter 136: Stone Shatters in Rage
The victory was ash. The doctors were freed, the cages were broken, but the cost was a city tearing itself apart. The riots had devolved into a hundred smaller, uglier conflicts. Looting, score-settling, and the desperate, brutal logic of survival had replaced the initial, righteous fury. The state’s authority had collapsed, but nothing had risen to take its place except chaos. And through it all, the plagues—the Ash-Fever, the Grey Breath—continued their work, unimpeded by the political drama.Amelia felt it all. Every act of kindness, a flicker of warmth in the Obelisk’s cold expanse. Every act of cruelty, a shard of ice. But the balance was breaking. The scales were tipping, and the weight was not that of disease, but of deliberate, human malice.It was the children that broke it.A report, passed through Ethan’s network, was more horrific than any bio-weapon. In the anarchy, a fringe group, calling themselves the “Purifiers,” had decided the only way to save the uninfected was to
Chapter 135: Medicine in Chains
The shattering of the cages had been a declaration of war, and the state’s retaliation was swift and surgical. They could not cage the sick without a backlash, so they moved to cage the cure. The government, in its frantic bid to maintain a monopoly on the narrative of survival, issued Directive 8: The Nationalization of Medical Personnel.Amelia first felt the shift when the usual, harried flow of information from the remaining city hospitals slowed to a trickle, then stopped entirely. Overnight, the military cordon around the medical district tightened, not to keep the sick out, but to keep the doctors in.Ethan, his face pale beneath a layer of grime, brought the news. “They’ve locked them down. All of them. Every doctor, nurse, and medic with any significant training. They’re calling it ‘The White Coat Draft.’ They’re being conscripted into the National Health Guard.”“Conscripted to do what?” Sophia asked, her voice trembling. “We’re already working to the bone.”“Not to heal,” E
Chapter 134: Cages for the Sick
The riot had shattered the city’s fragile façade, and the government’s response was not repentance, but a descent into pure, unvarnished brutality. The “Parade of Strength” had exposed the state’s weakness, and now, like a cornered animal, it bared its teeth.The new policy was announced not by Chancellor Lysandra, but through cold, impersonal bulletins from the National Health Directorate. The language was sterile, bureaucratic, and all the more horrifying for it.“Directive 7: Mandatory Relocation of High-Transmission Risk Individuals.”Amelia first learned of it when the heavy, grinding sounds of large vehicles and the shriek of protesting metal replaced the usual morning sounds of distant sirens and cries. From the command post’s window, she watched a convoy of massive, windowless trucks, flanked by squads of soldiers in full combat gear, roll into a residential sector known to be a hotbed of the Grey Breath.“What are they doing?” she asked, her voice hollow.Kincaid stood beside
Chapter 133: The Military Parade
The stillness that followed the burning of the Rime-leaf patches was more oppressive than any accusation. It was the silence of a door slamming shut, of a historical cure being erased not just from memory, but from the very soil. Amelia felt the loss like a physical amputation. The brief flicker of hope she had kindled was now just another ghost in Oakhaven’s haunted streets.It was in this vacuum of despair that the government chose to speak. Not with medicine, not with aid, but with a spectacle.The announcement blared from every functioning public screen and crackled over emergency radio bands. Chancellor Lysandra, her voice digitally smoothed to a mask of unwavering authority, declared a “National Day of Resilience.” In Oakhaven, this would be marked by a “Parade of Strength,” a column of the army’s finest marching through the city’s central boulevard to demonstrate that the state, not some rogue healer with a cursed stone, was the true bastion against the plague.“It’s insanity,”
Chapter 132: Forgotten Cure
The tide of public opinion had turned to ice. Amelia moved through the streets of Oakhaven like a ghost, the whispers a chilling fog around her. Plague-bringer. Grave-robber. The Prophet’s lies were a poison in the water supply of the city’s soul, and no amount of logical argument from Ethan’s articles or Kincaid’s terse bulletins could purge it. The Grey Breath continued its slow, suffocating work, and with every blue-faced victim, the accusation against her seemed to solidify.Hope was a currency that had been devalued to worthlessness. Until Amelia, desperate and ostracized, decided to stop fighting the current plague and start digging for its historical shadow.She remembered Professor Hale’s old adage, spoken during a late-night study session on epidemiological history: “The answer to the next pandemic is often buried in the archives of the last one. We just forget to look.”The Oakhaven University archives were a ruin, but the military had secured a digital backup server in a ha
Chapter 131: The Spanish Flu Revisits
The hush after a battle, Amelia was learning, was often more dangerous than the fighting itself. In the quiet that followed the Rewrite, paranoia grew like a fungus in the dark. The people of Oakhaven, no longer focused on immediate survival, began to look for someone to blame for the hell they had endured. And the Prophet of the Silent Stone was a master carpenter, ready to fashion a scapegoat from their fear.It began in the outer districts, in the makeshift camps for those displaced by the Ash-Fever. The symptoms were different this time. Not the hemorrhagic rot of the Ash-Fever, nor the fungal puppetry of the Revenant Strain. This was a slower, deeper strangulation. Victims were seized by a sudden, crushing fatigue. Their skin turned a dusky, blue-grey hue—the dreaded "heliotrope cyanosis" of drowning on dry land. Their lungs filled with fluid, turning to heavy, useless sacks. It was a plague of suffocation.And it was hauntingly familiar.Ethan brought her the first reports, his
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