Zainan hovered above the husk of the reptilian beast, letting the aftermath of the memory storm settle inside him. The knowledge was still raw, flooding his being like a virus overrunning its host. But now he had context—fragments of instinct, glimmers of insight from the beast's final moments.
"Okay," he murmured internally, more to himself than anything else. "Let's think this through. Giant dead lizard. Fever dreams. Contagion. This wasn't just a random death—it was a plague."
He turned toward the horizonless expanse again, the endless mist swirling like a restless tide. And I'm in the middle of it.
He reached deeper into the memory imprint, weaving through impressions like combing tangled threads of DNA. It was delicate work, but Zainan was nothing if not meticulous—he hadn't been a researcher for nothing.
"This creature," he whispered, peering into the beast's final instincts, "wasn't from here. It fled here. Wounded. Panicked. It didn't come to die—it came to escape."
That's when he saw it. Or rather, felt it.
Not a memory, but a direction. A mountain ridge. Sharp, jagged. An outline burned into the dying creature's final gaze.
It wasn't far.
Zainan turned, aligning himself with the memory. He drifted slowly, cautiously, through the corpse field. The wind howled softly—still no scent, no birdsong, just the ambient hum of decay. It should have unsettled him more, but there was a clinical detachment building in his spirit.
"Focus, Zainan. You've dealt with worse back home. You made Red Wake, for God's sake."
That memory hit him hard. Not guilt—he had long passed that—but the irony. The creator of a deadly virus dies by infection and is reborn in a land where disease had carved a graveyard into the skin of the world.
As he moved, he noticed something peculiar. The land began to shift. Corpses grew denser the closer he floated toward the mountain ridge, piling atop one another in grotesque layers. Some creatures he passed had no biological equivalent back on Earth—some were like armored insects with crystalline shells, others resembled wolves with coral-like growths on their backs and teeth like obsidian needles.
He brushed against one—a canine-shaped cadaver with fungus blooming from its ribcage—and inhaled its final impressions.
A village.
Close.
Humans—or something like them. Screaming. Burning. Desperation. The image slammed into him like a wave: walls made of crimson stone, a windmill half-collapsed, smoke rising from pyres.
"So there are settlements nearby," Zainan muttered, eyes narrowing. "And they're being wiped out by the same thing that killed all these animals."
That strange spiritual energy surged again. A sense of presence. Of understanding.
He wasn't just observing anymore.
He was connecting. But not to the animals, but rather the disease itself.
Voices.
Real this time.
From somewhere deeper in the mist, two figures emerged—human-shaped but clad in bone armor, their skin pale with a faint bioluminescent shimmer. They carried long hooked spears and wore masks shaped like elongated skulls. One coughed violently.
"The rot's worse today," one said, voice muffled. "We shouldn't have come this far in."
"We need proof. The elder won't believe the rot has breached the deadfield unless we bring back a sample."
Zainan's curiosity spiked. So either he can understand them perfectly through the memories from the dead animals, or these humanoids speak great Chinese. He decided to go with the first option.
So this place is known.
He drifted closer, keeping low. They couldn't see him. Or perhaps they simply weren't attuned to spirits. He paused beside another half-decomposed beast and tapped into its memory.
Plague.
Something far beyond natural disease. Something... infused. The sickness didn't spread through mere physical contact. It latched onto spiritual signatures. Infected mana.
This world... it runs on magic, Zainan realized, feeling a chill ripple through his incorporeal form. But it's not pure. It's contaminated.
And as he pieced more of it together, his understanding grew.
This world—whatever it was—was at least five times the size of Earth. A supercontinent surrounded by vast oceans, dotted with sky-floating isles and fractured biomes. Magic existed in many forms: elemental, spiritual, biological. Creatures evolved with it. Lived by it. Died by it.
And something had gone terribly wrong.
"I need more," he whispered. "More information. More context. If I'm going to survive, I can't just float around playing ghost-forensics. I need a purpose. A vector."
He scanned himself—or what white humanoid mass passed for a body. He was more stable now. More defined. His shape no longer wavered with every breeze.
After absorbing the spirituality from fifty corpses now, he could feel if he had any density, his strength could match that of a toddler. A significant leap from when he first entered this world and had the power of a newborn baby.
He hovered over another corpse and reached out again. This one was fresher. Small. Rodent-like.
Images poured in.
A sickness that twisted from within. A bloom of spores in the lungs. A chain reaction triggered by exposure to ambient mana.
"Mana on this planet seems to be the force manifested by every living creature physically through the projection of Life energy, or what I call spirituality.
Somehow, by the virus being passed on from some force identical to mana, it attacks not only the physical manifestation for those who come in contact with it - but also the spirituality that fuels it."
Zainan pulled back and let out a mental sigh. "So it's not just a virus. It's a magical pathogen. Anaetheric contagion that targets spirituality."
He chuckled darkly. "What do you even call something like that? Mana rot? Spirit plague?"
The words sounded almost amusing in his mind, but the weight of them was real. Deadly real.
Still, he felt... energized. Informed. His scientific mind was working overtime. Puzzle pieces slid into place with every corpse he touched.
"Well," he muttered, turning back toward the distant mountains, "this world is clearly trying to kill me. But it's doing a terrible job."
There was a flicker of arrogance in his tone. The same quiet confidence that had once let him craft viruses on the edge of ethics and reason.
'I should be public enemy number one to this thing, yet I'm somehow not even the slightest bit affected. Actually, the exact opposite is happening: its as if my body is slowly becoming attuned to it.'
'I'm not the one who should be afraid.'
He looked around at the plague field one last time.
If I can learn to master this, he thought, then maybe I can cleanse it... or spread it. Whichever keeps me alive and suits my needs best.
The wind shifted.
And Xiang Zainan moved forward, deeper into a world brimming with monsters, magic, and the overlooming threat of death.