The Steam Age: Gears and Bones

Chapter 4 The Source of Withering

They passed through three steel doors requiring double verification and descended a staircase encased in steam pipes.

The strong smell of hydrogen peroxide in the air made Perfitt feel a little more at ease.

At least they've started disinfecting, which shows that there are still people in the research team who are working diligently.

On the last stretch of corridor leading to the third basement level, Perfit stopped and opened his briefcase.

She took out a breathing mask and put it on. After adjusting the seal, she carefully tightened all the cuffs, collars, and glove seams.

Belfast also did the same

Archibald's expression became somewhat complicated as he watched their operation, which was clearly more secure than the base's standard protection.

He didn't ask anything, but silently pushed open the heavy iron door at the end of the corridor.

The dissection room was not large.

In the center was a steel-riveted dissection table, upon which lay a body whose appearance was unrecognizable.

Its limbs were tightly bound to the iron rings at the four corners of the dissection table by silver chains, but Perfit noticed at a glance that the ground around the dissection table was covered with black bloodstains left from the struggle.

The body had broken free from its restraints more than once in the past few days.

Now, its limbs are pinned to the joints by silver scalpels, and its mouth is completely locked by a steel gag.

Inside its open chest cavity, a heart that had turned completely black was contracting extremely slowly.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

The heartbeat was heavy and slow, each contraction causing the skin and flesh on both sides of the chest to tremble slightly, as if something was trying to push away the scalpels pinning it from the inside.

Perfit walked to the autopsy table, looked down at the corpse's heart, remained silent for a long time, then bent down and pressed his double-gloved fingers onto the still-beating black heart.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

His heartbeat was slow, but his strength was astonishing.

It doesn't feel like the heartbeat of a living person; it's more like a compressor pump evenly outputting power.

She closed her eyes and used her innate human senses to trace the specific path of the black substance as it spread inside the corpse.

She could feel that the black, gelatinous substance had completely replaced the blood in the blood vessels, spreading along the network of arteries and veins all the way to her fingertips, toes, and even the deepest parts of her cerebral cortex.

She opened her eyes and removed her hand from her heart.

"Did the Rossians treat Sample 7 at all when it was captured?" she asked.

“As far as we know, no.” Archibald stood behind her. “The Rus’ only told us where and when it was captured. It was found in the ruins of a hospital in the Predelshinsk district after the St. Petersburg fire.”

It was already in this state when it was discovered.

"In other words, it was among the first infected individuals to directly contact the lesions." Perfit straightened up, carefully scraping the black, gelatinous substance from his gloves with a glass petri dish, then capped it. "Have you tried handling its blood with silverware?"

"I've tried it," Archibald nodded. "After contact with silver, its blood will show a noticeable clotting reaction."

"And what about the holy water?"

"Yes, but only initially. After a while, the blood will regain its activity."

Perfit did not respond.

She turned and walked to the dissection table, picked up the silver scalpel that was stuck in the corpse's left shoulder, turned it over, and examined it carefully under the light for a while.

Among the black bloodstains remaining on the blade, there were faint, slowly fading silver-white specks.

“This isn’t a curse,” she said, placing the scalpel back in the metal tray and removing her breathing mask. “It’s a living, highly infectious agent. It invades the host’s bodily fluid system, taking over some of the functions of the blood, and then spreads to the next host through contact—especially blood and saliva.”

She turned to Archibald.

"I need to use my own microscope. I modified that microscope myself two years ago, and the lens group was treated with alchemy, so the resolution is an order of magnitude higher than the standard model of the Academy of Sciences."

I'm not sure if your equipment here can meet my observation needs.

Archibald opened his mouth, but before he could answer, Perfit continued speaking.

"We also need a few uncontaminated blood samples, and a complete list of those in quarantine. I'll personally examine them tonight." She paused. "My microscope is in the manor lab; could you please have the Navy send someone to retrieve it—Butler Foster knows where it is."

-----------------

The microscope arrived in the evening.

Two naval soldiers unloaded a heavy pine crate from the carriage, the lid of which bore the wolf head emblem of the Brandlis family.

Archibald personally led a team to move the boxes into the small, recently vacated laboratory on the second basement level.

Perfit opened the box, ran his finger along the brass tube of the microscope, and only after confirming that the lenses had not been damaged during transport did he let out a soft sigh of relief.

She modified this microscope herself two years ago.

The original frames were secondhand items she found in a closed-down watch shop in Langdon, while the lenses were remelted piece by piece using alchemy—not ordinary glass, but a high-transmittance optical glass melted according to a formula provided by the Emerald Book.

She added a fine-tuning knob and a condenser to the lens barrel, and installed a small lamp fueled by whale oil under the stage.

The standard model from the Imperial Academy of Sciences might be able to barely make out cell walls at its magnification, but this microscope would allow her to see even smaller things.

She placed the black, gelatinous substance taken from the heart of sample number seven into the petri dish on the stage, adjusted the focus, bent down, and placed the eyepiece over her right eye.

In a field of vision magnified two thousand times, the gelatinous substance revealed a structure she had never seen before.

It is not bacteria. Bacteria have a distinct cell wall and internal structure, a regular pattern of division, and basic morphological classification. What we see here seems more like something that exists between life and non-life.

Their shape is irregular and thin, with each thread slowly wriggling, like spider silk being blown by the wind.

Occasionally, the threads will clump together and then suddenly shoot out a small fork, hitting the surrounding blood cells, enveloping, eroding, and dissolving them.

But what concerned Perfit was something else even more.

As she adjusted the focus, trying to observe the finer structure of one of the threads, her left eye suddenly felt slightly hot.

The Jade Record has been activated.

A line of emerald green text, visible only to her, slowly and clearly appeared in her field of vision.

She held her breath and read on, word by word.

"The Source of Withering"

Materials used: Not applicable (non-man-made)

"Manufacturing process: Not applicable (non-material manufacturing process)"

Effects: Spreads between hosts through contact. Once inside the host's fluid system, it gradually replaces blood and erodes tissues throughout the body in the form of filamentous polymers.

After the host's consciousness and bodily functions are completely destroyed, the filamentous polymers will take over the host's nervous system, drive the body to continue to move, and inject new filamentous polymers into the next host through biting, scratching and other means during the activity.

Under current observation conditions, this substance has not been found to have airborne transmission capabilities.

"Evaluation: This is neither a virus nor a curse. It is a medium that simultaneously erodes both the body and the soul. It physically alters the host's bodily fluids and tissues, turning the body into a puppet driven by filamentous polymers."

At the soul level, it parasitizes the host's spiritual structure, gradually stripping away the soul and transforming it into energy to maintain its activity.

Before a host infected with it completely turns into a zombie, its soul is in a state of constant tearing—which explains why holy water can temporarily suppress its activity but cannot completely purify it.

The holy water doesn't burn its body, but rather the part of its soul that it resides in.

But everything is limited. The torn fragments weren't enough to kill it. It only interrupted the energy cycle for a fleeting moment.

Perfit took his eyes off the eyepiece and remained silent for a long while.

In her previous life, as someone living in a scientifically advanced era, her understanding of zombies was always limited to the categories of viruses, bacteria, and fungal infections.

Even after encountering alchemy, the Philosopher's Stone, and the Old Gods in this world, she still instinctively tended to explain everything using physical logic.

But the analysis that the Jade Record gave her shattered a crack in her cognitive framework.

This is not simply a virus. It is a medium that acts on both the body and the soul simultaneously.

The reason why holy water works on it is not because holy water itself has a bactericidal effect—but because it touches the part of the soul that this thing parasitizes.

However, the holy water's effects were too short-lived, only enough to calm the torn fragments of souls for a brief moment, but not enough to free them from the entanglement of the filaments.

She needs to rethink her treatment plan.

If the infection pathway of this thing covers both the physical and spiritual levels, then treatments that only target the physical body—whether disinfection, isolation, or drug intervention—can only slow down the rate of infection, but cannot stop the infection itself.

Simply relying on a priest to purify the soul cannot eradicate the part of its activity that is attached to the body.

It must involve both physical and spiritual intervention, carried out simultaneously and in a coordinated manner.

But what does this mean? It means she has to design a completely new treatment process, integrating alchemy and church magic into the same framework.

The idea itself is enough to make both conservatives and the church jump in anger.

Perfit pinched his brow with his fingers, closed the microscope lens, stood up, and walked towards the laboratory door.

She needed a cup of hot tea, or more precisely, she needed some time to process what the Jade Record had just told her.

As soon as she opened the door, she saw Archibald standing in the hallway, with another person standing next to him.

The man was wearing a dark gray robe with a few mud spots on the hem, and he was holding a thick book of sacred texts.

He wore a judge's badge around his neck, made of silver and badly worn.

“Miss Brandlis,” Archibald spoke first, “this is Inquisitor Sabel. She’s a representative from the Inquisition and a member of this research group. She says she has something important to discuss with you privately.”

Perfit glanced at the referee, who was also sizing her up.

The judge was in his early forties, with a thin face and slightly sunken eye sockets, but his eyes were surprisingly bright, like two clusters of embers just pulled from the ashes.

"Come in," Perfit stepped aside to make way for the doorway. "I happen to have some questions I'd like to ask you."

Sabel walked into the laboratory, her gaze lingering on the microscope for a moment, but she didn't ask anything.

She walked to the lab bench, placed the Book of Words on the table, but did not open it.

"Miss Brandlis," she began, her voice lower and steady than Perfitt had expected, "I performed a full exorcism on Sample Seven this afternoon."

"And the result?"

"The ceremony was forced to stop after only about five minutes." Sabel looked directly into her eyes, not avoiding the question. "The sacred words do indeed have a suppressive effect on that thing."

As I recited the scriptures, its heartbeat noticeably slowed, and its muscle spasms stopped—but that wasn't purification.

That was more like a temporary suppression.

Five minutes later, the power of the scripture began to fade, and it began to function again.

Worse still, its activity intensified after the ritual, as if it had been provoked.