Chapter 202
The depths of the Society base were different from what Alice was expecting. The previous Society base had been like a makeshift fort. Most of the important bits were above ground, and while there was a basement, it was small. It had mostly been used for storage.
At first, Alice thought that this base was similar. However, as the group started to search the aboveground regions, she started to wonder. The Society base was different. The parts of the building that were above ground were filled with random magic supplies, and not a single test subject or report. It was almost like a glorified storage closet, filled with random bits and bobs. Alice had even started to wonder if the group had mistaken the owners of the base somehow. Perhaps the base wasn’t a Society base at all, but just a group of Mages that disliked civilization and set up a giant base in the woods for some reason? As ridiculous as the notion seemed, the base simply didn’t match her expectations based on the last Society base she had seen.
Then, one of the [Mercenaries] hired by Ethan found the real base. Near the back of the base, there was a hidden trapdoor which led to an underground floor. Since the group had found little aboveground, they quickly moved through the trapdoor.
The first floor of the underground facility was where things started to get weirder. The first room in the underground facility was filled with crystals. Lots, and lots, and lots of crystals. Alice had never seen them before. She had no idea what type of crystal they were, what they were supposed to do, or what they were made of. They weren’t particularly unusual to her various types of mana-sight, either. They were neither mana-rich nor mana-poor. They were somewhat pretty, but didn’t really stand out. If she had seen them while walking down the street, she probably would have thought they were some kind of raw gemstone that could be shaped into jewelry for upper middle class [Merchants] in this world.
The rest of the first floor was filled with a bunch of other supplies, all of similarly baffling nature. There were wooden sticks that had no special attributes, clothes that looked almost like those of a [Priest], but didn’t belong to any religion Alice knew of, etc. They were just random odds and ends, without any unusual mana characteristics or physical characteristics.
The second floor was filled with test subjects. Unlike most Society bases, the captives on the second floor were mostly alive - which was a small miracle. Only one in twenty were dead, which was an incredibly low casualty rate by the standards of most Society experiments. However, almost eighty percent of the captives had succumbed to some form of class madness. Several of them looked malnourished, or dehydrated, or both.
Alice frowned when she saw that.
Eighty percent… was a very high number of people to succumb to class madness.
Back in the capital of Morendia, Alice was willing to bet that less than ten percent of the population had succumbed to their class mana. Things there had reached a stage where it was hard to care for the sick and mad, but they were still sort of under control. In the Society base, the number of mad had already reached a point where there were few sane survivors left.