Within the Endless Forest.
Lin En had been traveling alone for five days.
He wore the dark travel attire prepared for him by Dean Morton, the wide hood nearly covering the upper half of his face, leaving only the cold, sharp line of his jaw exposed.
Leaving behind the clamor of the Academy, the true face of this world unfolded before his eyes in a more rugged and primal manner.
In just five days, the lethal threats he had encountered, and the variety of snakes, insects, rodents, and beasts he saw, outnumbered all the specimens he had ever seen in the Academy.
He had once detoured ahead of time to avoid the hunting path of two Blackscale Panthers, skilled at blending into shadows and striking at throats.
He had also sensed, before stepping into a marsh, the presence of swarms of Stinghide Worms lurking beneath the waterlogged earth, capable of releasing paralyzing toxins.
He could even, half a minute in advance, distinguish from the air the uniquely sweet, metallic scent drifting from the pollen of a seemingly dazzling Soulsoothe Flower, potent enough to lull a troll into eternal slumber.
The knowledge from books at the Academy had here transformed into the most practical survival laws.
Danger was omnipresent, but to him, anything that could be perceived was not to be feared.
Just like now.
Ten meters ahead, beneath the soil, a Death Earth Drake, camouflaged as withered vines, lay with all its breath concealed, waiting for prey to step into its attack range.
Lin En’s stride did not falter.
Through the Spirit Radar extended from the Crystal Core within his mind, he had already sensed the faint energy disturbances and life heat beneath that patch of earth.
His body shifted three steps to the left with the fluidity of water, perfectly skirting the deadly trap.
The entire process was seamless, without a single wasted movement.
The Crystal Core was his eyes, his ears, an infinite extension of his senses.
But the judgments and decisions were always made by his own mind—cold to the point of cruelty.
He drew out the rolled Beastskin Map from his chest and once again confirmed his position.
His fingertip traced the long main road leading to the Hall of Life, finally pausing on a thin side line marked as the Ancient Trade Route.
“Fallen Leaf Village…”
He softly recited the name on the map.
“Passing through here can save at least two days.”
Time was his most precious resource at this moment.
The Wither Fever within his mother’s body would not wait for anyone.
Though Lin En had done his utmost to control the damage before departing, her life force was still gradually fading.
Without hesitation, Lin En put away the map, turned, and stepped onto the shortcut leading toward the unknown village.
An hour later, the silhouette of Fallen Leaf Village appeared on the horizon.
However, what greeted him was not the billowing smoke and bustling voices typical of a ‘small trade settlement’ as marked on the map, but a deathly silence that chilled the soul.
The village was as quiet as a tomb.
Only the desolate wind swept through the empty streets, lifting a few withered leaves and producing a “sasa” sound, as if it were the final sigh of the land.
A strange smell permeated the air—a mixture of decaying plants, sour earth, and the bitter scent of herbs, which should have been redeeming but now seemed futile.
Lin En’s brows knitted slightly.
His Spirit Power spread silently outward.
At the village entrance, a half-open wooden door caught his attention.
From the gap in the doorboard, a shriveled hand hung limply to the ground.
Lin En stopped ten meters away.
Through the amplification of the Crystal Core, his Spirit Power transformed into countless invisible probes, scanning the corpse and the surrounding environment.
In his vision, the microscopic world was vividly clear.
He saw a type of Mimic Blight Fungus, its hyphae like vicious miniature tentacles, violently piercing cellular barriers, savagely tearing and devouring the lingering life energy within.
The whole process was chaotic, greedy, and filled with primitive destruction.
Lin En’s gaze remained cold and calm.
A crude plague.
Yet just as he was about to leave, a chilling sense of familiarity from the depths of his memory froze his mind for a fraction of a second.
Wither Fever.
Fragments of memory analyzing his mother’s illness surfaced instantly.
Those same life-devouring lesions, far more severe than what he saw before him, appeared clearly in his mind.
The Wither Fever within his mother had never manifested in such a violent form at the microscopic level.
It was more like an extremely tenacious and intricate creation—it never destroyed savagely, but silently infiltrated to the deepest layer of the Soul Structure, precisely finding the core nodes that sustained life, like the work of a master craftsman.
Although the manifestations differed vastly.
If the Mimic Blight Fungus before him was a battered axe swung by a blacksmith’s apprentice, then Wither Fever was the Deconstruction Scalpel wielded by an Alchemical Grandmaster—used not to destroy, but to disassemble a Perfect Masterpiece along its fundamental grain, piece by piece, back to its primal parts.
This black fungus could be considered a countless-times-weakened form of Wither Fever.
But…
Stripping away all appearances to the core.
Lin En’s scientist’s mind, within its sea of memories, captured a faint yet fatal resonance.
Their underlying logic.
Be it savage consumption or precise disintegration, the core objective of both diseases was to target the original energy of life, and to consume it irreversibly.
A malice of the same source.
As if Wither Fever was the Perfect Masterpiece of some terrifying existence, while the Mimic Blight Fungus before him was a blasphemous imitation by a mortal apprentice—crudely and filthily crafted after glimpsing a fragment of the original.
A mad thought exploded for the first time within Lin En’s otherwise perfectly rational mind:
If he studied this crude imitation, was there even a chance… just a possibility… that he could reverse-engineer a trace of the original masterpiece’s design and find an infinitesimal flaw?
That possibility was like a spark tossed into a dead volcano, instantly stirring a tidal wave within his frozen heart.
But reason suppressed the impulse just as quickly.
The risk was too great, the benefit unknown, the time consumption unpredictable.
The optimal solution was still to leave here and find the Hall of Life as soon as possible.
As he was caught in this brief yet intense struggle—
“Buzz…”
A faint yet incomparably pure Spirit Power fluctuation rippled through the air, like a speck of dust falling into dead water.
Accompanying it came a deliberately stifled cough and the weak sobs of a child, drifting from a particularly dilapidated farmhouse deep within the village.
Lin En’s head jerked up.
The Spirit Radar emitted ceaselessly by the Crystal Core instantly detected and relayed the truth of the Spirit Power fluctuation.
No analysis was needed.
He recognized it immediately.
It was Holy Light.
Its frequency and energy structure matched exactly the energy model he had sensed when Archbishop Edmund treated his wounds—and even personally reconstructed before.
No, it was even purer.
In his perception, this faint Holy Light contained none of the memetic impurities used to corrode Spirit Power that he had once discovered and separated.
The weakened Wither Fever, the Mimic Blight Fungus, was spreading here.
And a tool for purification—Pure Holy Light—one he had never seen before and which was theoretically superior, had also manifested here.
This was a perfect, living experimental control site!
He had to confirm with his own eyes: could pure Holy Light effectively cure a plague sharing its origin with Wither Fever?
How effective was it?
Where were its limits?
More importantly, just who could wield a force of Holy Light so pure that even the Archbishop of the Holy Light Church could not control it?
The answers to these questions were worth far more than the two days saved by a detour.
They might directly concern his mother’s life or death.
He changed his mind.
In a flash, Lin En moved soundlessly toward the farmhouse.