Chapter 103: Pandemic
It would take less than a month for the new disease to be noticed, just because a nobleman was infected. A few days afterward, the Temple of Saint Nightingale the Healer would declare a state of emergency all across western Albion as the new plague started to spread widely.
After investigating its nature, the doctors called it the Devil’s Blood. The clergy officially named it Blackthorn Touch, which they shortened to Blackthorn. Commonly, it was also referred to as the Unholy Plague.
Like how the Gossipirium magazine in Elgard’s reported about it in its second issue, the Blackthorn disease was a parasite that would develop as a strange, jagged, black, line-shaped skin spotting on the body with varying lengths; the shortest recorded length was that of a knucklebone. The area around the skin spotting would be paler than the rest of the body, indicating that whatever it was, it was feeding off its host.
This spotting would grow, causing symptoms like general exhaustion and coughing to increase. The reason behind its sudden growth could be related to a large number of factors, but it mostly hoarded all the nutrients in the infected body for itself. This sort of behavior was described as devilish, and an analogy was established between the behavior of the parasite and the devil, relating it to how the Devil broke the earth into long fissures for his army of evil to emerge from.
How the disease spread remained a mystery that could never be solved. Neither air nor water was the transmitter of the disease, despite the origin of the disease appearing in the seaside districts. Usually, seawater is too salty for a disease to survive, but the main suspicion was focused on those who came as sea voyagers. News of the Blackthorn plague started to arrive from other parts of Albion, such as Buren and Vellen, but it was Vigonza that took the greatest hit and was designated as the ground zero for the Unholy Plague, despite the existence of the holiest of holies, the city of St. Athena.
As for the cure, the efforts never stopped since it was discovered on the body of a nobleman in Elgard. However, a couple of months later, a snake oil peddler came out and claimed that he had found a cure. Like a hundred other quacks, he would have been dismissed for his fake remedies that give hope to the hopeless, but that man had a big claim and a new cure that shook the public, quite literally at that.
It was called Electrotherapy.
Since electricity was being introduced by the Moore Conglomerate and ViTech as a means of refined lifestyle, a wave of frenzy started to associate electricity with all manner of the occult.
Luckily, the Moores had issued a judicial notice to clear their name from any electricity-related deaths, serving as a warning that coming into direct contact with electricity by touching the conducting parts of any machine was extremely lethal. Sadly, it did not stop the curious minds who wanted to awaken their innate magical abilities or talk to the spirits from coming into direct contact with electricity.
The victims of the plague increased as time passed, and yet not a single clue on the origins of the disease surfaced. The transmission was quite random, even; it infected nobles and commoners alike with no discrimination, but the death rate among the commoners was greater, and it was due to one single thing the world had realised about the disease.
The parasite grows when the body requires healing. This means that if an infected person were to get injured or overexert themselves a great deal, the Blackthorn parasite would start to grow exponentially, depriving the body of healing and keeping it in the bad condition it was in. This was noticed very early with the thug Vivian apprehended and Lord Julian Moore’s situation; the thug’s wounds were barely healing, and he died soon after, whereas the overexerted lord could not find rest and had to be bedridden until a cure was found.