This morning, before dawn, I was alerted to a potential disaster. There was an infectious disease discovered in town. It couldn’t have been active for more than three hours before we found it, but even then it had managed to infect at least four hundred people and is believed to have killed seven.

As I was the only one capable of rooting out everyone infected quick enough to minimize further spreading I was asked to gather up and quarantine all of the infected in a low mana environment, to try to starve out the disease. At the same time, I was to stay away from any of the infected, being a mana based creature meant that I was particularly vulnerable to infectious diseases.

And so I did. For a while, everything stopped as I pulled on the full weight of my hivemind for the first time ever. After figuring out what I was looking for I was able to find any traces of the disease through my hivemind and my trees, and through my trees I was able to teleport them into a containment building I created and was actively draining mana out of. I put the infected to sleep so as to ease any pain they might be feeling. Even as I was moving them three of them died, all of them mana based creatures. Healing did not help as the very structure of their bodies was being twisted up into a corrupted spell in a manner very similar to flesh manipulation.

The nature of this disease rendered it incapable of spreading through my trees or through my hivemind, if it had the only thing that would have awaited my forest and the great empire built within it would be a purge by nuclear fire. The containment building has also done its job of preventing the disease from spreading. Small mercies, those.

All of the scholars here know how to diagnose diseases and to even treat particularly nasty ones, but no one here has training in dealing with infectious diseases. The order doesn’t have many of those, not because they struggle to find people with the talent for it but because those people usually die an early death. But luckily infectious diseases are both rare enough and a serious enough threat that requisitioning the help of a specialist will be easy, relatively speaking.

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But that will still take days, if only due to how long it takes to travel via teleporter. In the meantime, we have hundreds of sick dying people, many of which are important to the continued operation of pretty much everything. And not just that but Ednar is sick, I can’t let Tiddol’s son die.

And so we come to the disease itself. First is that it is very dangerous, which was obvious enough, it causes a lot of damage to the host, enough to kill a flesh and bone creature within days, or enough to kill a mana based creature within hours. It is also very hard for the scholars to actually study it directly, to the point where all of them flat out refuse to do so as if their skills prove inadequate to remove the infection they will die. I can’t fault them for that however much I want to.

From what they have been able to observe from the outside they have said that the disease is imperfect, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. Good news is that every single cycle the spell goes through it releases a bit of mana, which it would normally reabsorb latter but with the mana being pulled out constantly some of it is removed every cycle. This means that the disease can be burnt out eventually. Bad news is two-fold, one that process is slow enough that everyone inside will die before the disease burns itself out, two this means that the disease likely changes slightly every single cycle. From how they explained it to me this means that at any given moment the disease could suddenly get much worse without anything even resembling a warning, potentially even becoming able to propagate through my hivemind.

So I cut off everyone infected from my hivemind. It took a bit of mana and likely made their conditions worse, but it had to be done. That kind of risk is not something we could afford to take.

We have already discussed quite a few treatments. Nuclear fire would work, but it would also kill more or less everyone infected. Healing will keep the people alive, but it will also feed to disease as the mana has to go somewhere. Eventually, the disease will grow too powerful for me to heal that many people fast enough to keep them alive.

Null does help, whatever this disease is it is surprisingly resistant against the stuff, but null does increase the amount of mana it sheds every cycle. It will help burn out the disease faster, and I could no doubt design something that could work much faster, but that will take a couple days that I am not sure we have.

At this point, all of the mana based creatures that were infected are dead, nearly one hundred of them.

If we don’t come up with a way to at least keep Ednar alive then I will be burning my Fate tomorrow morning. It’s not as much as I would have liked, but it will be something.

All of my attention was on this today, so I wasn’t able to do much of anything else.

Anyway, Good Night Diary.