Plague Doctor

Chapter 470: Price

After finishing this one page from The King in Yellow, Gu Jun stopped. His fingers trembled and he did not flip to the next page for a long time. He was afraid that he might see something like ‘Wu Siyu had died from miscarriage’. Based on the book, the child he had with Dirty-minded Yu accidentally, the child which had not even been born was already gone. After some time, Gu Jun gave out a long sigh. His heart throbbed with pain.

These pages of the book were soaked in blood. They not only came from the unborn children but also their mothers as well as the victims of Locust Sickness. Gu Jun did suspect that this Shub-Niggurath would not be some kind of loving existence, even though his fragmented memories told him that the foreign people believed this prayer could resist chaos. ‘I wonder what is the relationship between this Black Goat and the Goddess of Life...’

Using the Goddess of Life’s power would require sacrifice, that was the first lesson taught to Carlot Doctors. Therefore, Gu Jun knew summoning The Black Goat would require sacrifices as well. ‘Me and Dirty-minded Yu’s child... the children all over the world... The millions of unborn lives...’ Gu Jun thought to himself. The ‘bloody shadows’ should refer to the soul and livelihood of these babies. Were they the sacrifice harvested by Shub-Niggurath?

Sacrifice, a wicked term, caused Gu Jun to shiver. Or was this revenge taken by Nyarlathotep? Gu Jun read the page again but he could not make an affirmative call, all he knew was that he and Dirty-minded Jun had paid heavily. 100000 plus patients of Locust Sickness from Mysterium and Phecda Worlds had lost their lives... Peacock and Kathlyn lost an arm...

‘Can this be considered a victory?’ Gu Jun did not know. Plague doctors like himself and Wang Ruoxiang failed to save even a single patient of the Locust Illness. At the end of the day they still knew nothing about the pathology behind this genetic-modifying disease. So how could this be called a victory...

“Have we really protected our home?” Gu Jun read over the words left behind by Nyarlathotep. “I’m here so that I won’t be able to find my way home?”

‘So Nyarlathotep is responsible for this after all... but things do not appear that simple...’ His mind was convoluted. Like Lou Xiaoning and Uncle Dan, he too realized the spell used by the Son of Misfortune to create the humanoid banyan tree was similar to the spell used by the Black Goat. Even the spells shared similar terms. ‘But why? Is Shub-Niggurath the Goddess of Life? After the Son of Steel became the Son of Misfortune, he corrupted her spell using R’yleh’s power to mock her?’

Gu Jun resisted the pounding in his head to try to recover all the memories he had of the time he spent inside the altar. The broken chaos in his mind did react strangely to that prayer. Gu Jun was not expecting that.

“Jim, our time of conference is almost over.” Sanders’ voice cut into Gu Jun’s mind, “The book...”

“There are only a few pages left, let me finish.” Gu Jun’s throat was hoarse. He cleared his mind of the doubts and flipped to another page. His heart gripped. The first paragraph stated that the command central had ceased all orders to send reinforcements into Mo Bei. The expansion of the two mutated areas had stopped. The locust swarms and flying polypus hydroids had disappeared. The radiograph detected no trace of radiation in the air anymore. A barren land with yellow sand instead of scorched soil returned to Tian Fuhou’s tree farm. It was about 10 cubic km wide. It had nothing growing on it.

Phecda sent out scouts to investigate. They did not discover any border. The overlapping of the tree farm with the wasteland world ceased. Only old pictures showed that the place was once a hub of human activities with families, farms and houses.

At the desert wasteland, the endless abyss remained. It was like an entrance to hell. Perhaps more flying polypus hydroids were sleeping down there. The abyss was temporarily surrounded. Phecda World formed a brief alliance with the Mysterium World as they came up with solutions to deal with this.

The border at the desert wasteland was still present. There was about 10 cubic km of area that was the overlapping region between the two worlds. It formed a type of junction. People with high spirituality from either world could enter the region and switch over to the other world through sensing the ‘edge of the border’. Because of that the structure of both worlds changed enormously, the politics of the worlds became more complicated. Both worlds knew they had to come to a consensus quickly to strengthen human civilization to deal with the ‘imminent string of tragedies’. If they could, they would want to snuff out the tragedies when they were still in their cradle to suppress the dark forces. However, things were easier said than done, humanity was not that rational.

At this point, Gu Jun felt inspired. He was unwilling to believe in what he read when the pages described the injury and the death but he hoped that the part about the two worlds connecting were true. Even though there were pros and cons for the two worlds to still be overlapping, but at least, they came from the same race and same culture, it would be easier for these two worlds to understand and assimilate with each other.

Furthermore, Mysterium had access to Nine Mysterium Arts, which could bring Phecda to a higher level. Phecda could share the resource from the Dreamlands with Mysterium. If the two worlds combined their forces to find that Pnakotic Library and to continue their alliance with the Zoog tribes, the human civilization would only get stronger...

Of course, Gu Jun backed his optimism with caution. There was also a possibility of war between the two worlds as well. He hoped that the leaders of both worlds were intelligent enough to see that cooperation was more helpful than competition. If he and Yu Chi were still present, as ambassadors from both worlds, the issue of alliance should go much smoother...

Gu Jun finished another page of the book. It was more of a summary, there was no particular mention of any character. There was no mention of Zixuan, Dirty-minded Yu, Yu Chi or the monitor... He had no idea how they fared. There was not even the mention of the giant meatball above Mo Bei, the Black Goat of the Woods. What happened to it?

He turned to the next page and the first sentence was,

“After Wu Siyu woke up, the first thing she asked was, ‘Where’s Gu Jun?’ The poor girl had no idea she had lost her baby.”