The Immortal Calamity

After a few less eventful excursions into the lower city, I separated from the guard unit and made my way to the center of the city. Here stood The Church of the Myriad Realms. This building was identical to the one that stood in Ater-Albus. The same engraved carvings, the same thirteen paintings, and the same stars on the ceiling.

I examined the stars carefully, comparing them to what I saw before. Three stars had changed. “Two losses and a victory,” I mumbled.

“You are very knowledgeable for someone so young,” said a young man in official blue robes. He stood from one of the nearby pews and approached me. “Have you come here to learn of the great deeds of the Thirteen Divisions?”

“In a way,” I replied, “I would like to access your hall of records. Specifically, those dating about three hundred and twenty years ago.”

“Due to the circumstances, no special price has been added to those dates. The church supports any effort that helps the war effort,” The priest replied, “Nearly a dozen people have come to see those records in the past few days. There is still one in there now if you do not mind sharing the hall.”

“I don’t mind.”

“Good,” The priest replied, holding out his hand expectantly, “I assume you know the price to enter the hall of records?”

I sighed, fishing a silver coin out of my pocket. The priest smiled and guided me through a side door in the church. We entered a small room, lined with blank stone tablets placed prominently on large pedestals. A hard wooden chair was placed in front of each of the tablets.

In the room was a familiar figure. It seemed I was not the only one in my family interested in how things were resolved when the Thirteen Divisions faced this same calamity.

“Charly… somehow I am not surprised you ended up here,” I said as the priest left us alone in the room.

Charly blinked a few times as he looked at me. “Wren? You are here to read… on purpose?”

“Ninety percent of war is information. That is what my teacher used to say,” I replied tapping one of the nearby stone tablets. At my touch, the tablet lit up. Blue words were displayed on a black screen. This was technology far beyond anything normally available on this planet.

I sighed, seeing the familiar technology for the first time since my rebirth. I missed it.

The insane energy fluctuations on this planet made electronics almost impossible. I had tried to find a workaround during my time as empress, but the only solution I found was encasing the device in a rare stone that even made me flinch at the price. Only the Fourth Division and its ridiculous amount of wealth could afford to do something like this. Just the amount of stone in this one room was enough to buy a continent.

“Amazing isn’t it,” Charly spoke, noticing my gaze, “Hundreds of thousands of books and millions of reports at the touch of a finger. Back home, I would spend hours every day at the church just for this.”

“You should see the one I used to have before my death,” I said, swiping through the selections on the screen, “Almost everything on here is just propaganda for the war. Mine had some real information that would blow your mind.”

“Really? There is more than this?”

“Of course. I will show you one day. Once all this is over.”

“I will hold you to that promise,” Charly replied with a sparkle in his eye.

Looking down at the tablet, I opened a section labeled under history and picked the date for over three hundred years ago. Charly looked at me curiously as I read through the options.

“Didn’t you live through the creation of the drug the first time? Why do you need to look at the records to find out what happened?”

“The Five Calamities did not have much authority three hundred years ago. While we are now known as the leaders of the Thirteenth Division, back then Thirteenth Division did not even exist. Only Twelve Divisions stood. The thirteenth was something we created about two hundred years ago. Before that, we were a special operations group under the command of the Fifth Division. During the event of the drug outbreak, a simultaneous attack was launched by the Archdemon. We were busy fighting on the front lines.”

“The Fifth Division? Really? But aren’t they depicted as holy angels in the paintings? How did a group so well respected create something as monstrous as the Five Calamities… no offense.”

“Like I said, almost everything here is propaganda,” I replied, tapping on the tablet, “The Thirteen Divisions are incredibly two-faced, and none more so than the Fifth. Only information the individual division deems fit for the public is spread by the church. The rest is classified.”

“Does that mean that will not be any information on how to cure the effects of the drug in here?” Charly asked looking down at the tablet with scrutiny.

“I do not know,” I replied truthfully, “But we have to try. The outbreak was a major event that affected a wide variety of people so very little of it should be classified. Hopefully, we can find something. Even the smallest clue could make all the difference.”

Charly nodded, and I focused on the tablet in front of me. The first report I read was a first-person account from a soldier in the Second Division. It detailed the horror of the soldier watching his friends turn into monsters. I started with the Second Division because they had always been a group that believed in personal strength over everything else, so their reports were the ones least likely to be tampered with. They also had the most experience in dealing with mutation among the Thirteen Divisions.

After reading one report, I moved on to the next, and then the next. Again and again, reports from people of every walk of life, detailing the event. There were thousands of them. A literal sea of reports was recorded in the system, but none of them had told me anything I did not already know.

Every hour, like clockwork, the priest would stick his head into the archives. He would stick out his hand for payment, and only leave once he had his silver.

After some time, I sent Sylvie with a message to our parents explaining where we were. I did not want to get in trouble again when I came back late at night without an explanation.

I leaned back with a sigh and stared at the ceiling. None of the stars were visible from this little room. I wish they were at least that would be a decent distraction.

“Found anything?” I asked Charly while rubbing my eyes

“Nothing substantial.” He replied. “I found one report with a mention of a Ninth Division technique that could siphon the energy, but no details on how it worked.”

I ran through my hair in frustration. If only I had spent more time studying Ninth Division techniques. A rune pattern to siphon chaotic energy could not be that hard to figure out.

“Wren, I have a question about the drug, Lot twenty-three,” Charly asked hesitantly, “Is it really the same thing we are dealing with now?”

“What do you mean?” I asked sitting up in my chair.

“Well… it is true both drugs give people innate talents, and then mutate them into Demonkin, but everything else seems… different,” Charly said hesitantly, “Lot twenty-three described in the reports was a small pill that lasted weeks not a powder that only last a few hours, maybe a day or two. It did not make people sick either. In every report I read, everyone afflicted transformed in less than a few minutes. Meanwhile what we are dealing with has people stuck on their deathbed for a month before they begin to mutate, and even that process takes weeks.”

“The original lot twenty-three was created in an extremely sophisticated lab. Nothing like that can exist on this planet,” I replied, “It is only natural that what we are dealing with is a less refined version of the drug or even an earlier lot…”

A sudden realization hit me. “Charly, you are a genius!” I closed the page I had been reading and switched to another date. A date from the very beginning of the war over a thousand years ago.

“What did you figure out?” Charly asked curiously.

“That I am an idiot. During the lot twenty-three incident, we could not treat those who began to mutate because it happened too fast. It seemed almost instantaneous. But for this drug, it is slow. Months pass before the effects truly begin to mutate.”

“Yes, and?”

“The Endless war began with the birth of the first Archdemon. He was terrible and monstrously powerful unlike anything anyone had ever seen before, but that is not the real reason people feared him. Everywhere the archdemon went, plague followed. A horrible disease that slowly mutated almost everything into Demonkin.” I paused as I found the files I was looking for. “The survivors who fought that first Archdemon are the founders of the first four divisions.”

“A plague that mutates people into Demonkin? How did they fight something like that?” Charly asked in awe.

“Each had their own methods. The First Division, the Tressans, are not something that can be recreated. They could barely be considered human even before the plague. After it, they became something in between. Not quite human, but not a demon either. Those who became the Third Division survived by enhancing their bodies with various technology. They became more machine than man. The Fourth Division was just lucky. They were people immune, or at least resistant to the virus.”

“And the Second Division?”

I smiled. “The second Division is the key to our plight. The way they survived was truly unique. Rather than fight against the virus, they embraced it. Using a few materials and ingredients, they could isolate the chaotic energy to a single point in their body. The process is painful, and takes over a week, but rather than the entire body mutating, only a single area did. To this day, the second division still uses this method to create its soldiers. It is always quite a sight to see, a man walking around with a giant mutated arm or two mutated legs.”

“You want to do that to the sick people here? Would it even work?”

“It should. It is not a perfect solution, but it is more than we had before.” I replied, tapping the tablet. “Most importantly, the process is completely documented in the archives, and the materials required are not that rare.”

“Will people accept being turned into half monsters?”

“Better than dead, or going on a rampage, killing your loved ones.”