The alarm bell wouldn't stop ringing.
It blared across the royal district like a dying whale. Noah River tore through the halls barefoot with smoke in his lungs and a half-dead slipper in one hand.
There were fires now.
Screams also rang out across the surroundings accompanied by the sound of something breaking — or being broken.
Somewhere behind him, guards still searched. Others were gone, either too afraid to chase him or too dead to care.
As for the black mist?
It was everywhere.
Still leaking from vents. Crawling across silk drapes. Seeping under doorways.
The same mist he'd released. Accidentally.
Probably.
"Okay, okay, okay," he muttered to himself as he ran. "This is fine. It was just a little smoke. I mean—sure, it hissed, and someone screamed the word plague but it could be a coincidence."
A court official staggered out of a side hall with torn robes and eyes glowing purple.
"Ahh what the hell happened to him?!"
Noah screamed and kept running.
---
Unbeknownst to Noah, the black mist hadn't been some ancient cursed relic. It wasn't divine punishment. Neither was it the wrath of an immortal god.
It was plan... A political stunt.
The Withergrin Plague had been meticulously crafted by the royal alchemists of Verdant Flame City.
Not as a weapon of war but as a tool of manipulation.
The plan had been simple:
=> Gift a sealed artifact containing the virus to *King Jian of Iron Thorn Province*, a long-time rival.
=> Wait until the airborne corruption spread quietly.
=> Once panic ensued and cultivators began getting corrupted, offer a cure.
=> Step in as saviors, rebuild their crumbling sects, and force them into a long-term alliance born from gratitude and desperation.
Elegant. Controlled. Powerful.
The Withergrin plague was meant to corrupt qi without instantly killing the host, rendering even powerful cultivators weak, delirious, or zombified.
And because only cultivators could absorb qi, only cultivators would fall. The non cultivators? The powerless? They'd be untouched.
The cure was created before the plague.
Every risk was calculated and every angle had been covered.
Except one:
A nobody from another world stumbling in and cracking the seal open inside the capital city.
---
"I didn't even open it on purpose!" Noah shouted aloud as he dodged a falling support beam. "Why would you store something world-ending next to the hallway?! Who does that?!"
Noah was starting to get the general idea as he noticed more cultivators writhing on the floor with their bodies turning purple. However, he was still unaware that it only affected cultivators.
The hallway cracked behind him. Black mist coiled across the floor like snakes in a fog.
A spirit beast that looked like some kind of panther with flaming paws leapt past him, wild-eyed and feral.
It crashed through the walls in its frenzy.
Noah turned into another corridor and found himself back in the main garden...
Or what used to be a garden.
Cultivators were lying on the ground, twitching. Some of them were shrieking. One woman was floating midair, wrapped in glowing talismans with her qi sputtering into sludge as the corruption spread through her meridians.
A few turned toward Noah.
They didn't move at first...
They just stared.
Their eyes were glowing black-blue now and their breathing was wrong.
Like they were trying to swallow the air rather than breathe it.
One of them shuddered forward.
Noah backed away while holding up his hands. "Nope. No, sir. Not today. I have zero qi, I'm poor, I don't even have a weapon. If you eat me, I promise I'll give you gas."
They kept coming.
He turned to run again and spotted a familiar servant corridor.
He ducked inside.
However, he didn't get far.
A young boy who happened to be one of the inner palace errand runners, stumbled out of the shadows ahead, crying.
"M-Mister! Please! Help me!"
Black mist clung to the boy's sleeves. His eyes were already turning but he was still partly conscious.
Noah hesitated.
Everything in him screamed: keep running.
The worst place to be during the start of an apocalypse was at the center of it.
But something else whispered:
'If this was Ava, would you ignore her?'
He paused briefly and the boy reached out.
The moment their hands touched, the boy eyes completely changed as his expression turned feral.
He opened his mouth wide and bit Noah on his forearm.
"Arrghhh!" Noah screamed in pain and withdrew his arm very swiftly.
"You little bitch!" Noah yelled and checked his arm while fleeing.
"Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! I'm so screwed now!" He kept lamenting as he outran the boy who fell to the floor and started writhing.
It looked like he was starting to turn fully.
Noah expected corruption after getting bitten.
But…
Nothing happened.
He stood still in confusion.
The black mist clung to the bitten area like it was trying to eat, but couldn't find a mouth.
"No way," he breathed. "I'm... not affected?"
Noah's heart pounded as he staggered back.
"I'm immune," he whispered. "I'm immune… haha... Finally something special about normies... But I still need to get out of here."
---
He climbed out through a broken window. Found a collapsed stable. Crawled onto the roof.
From here, the entire city unfolded beneath him.
Verdant Flame City was burning.
Towers once lit with golden talismans were now cracked and pulsing with black veins.
Spirit beasts ran wild. Sect disciples clashed with each other in confusion. Qi barriers burst.
People screamed.
Families fled.
And the mist kept spreading.
He could see it crawling down the mountain toward the lower rings.
The slums where he lived in was next.
Noah dropped to his knees.
"This was not my fault."
He paused slightly.
"Okay. Partially my fault."
Another pause.
"...Okay, like 80%. But I was trying not to become a eunuch! I was doing what any man would do!"
Sigh
His eyes suddenly widened. "Gotta get out of this city... But first..."
He turned towards the direction of the slums and rushed to get off the roof.
...
...
Minutes later, Noah River's lungs ached as he pushed through the press of bodies, stumbling down a dirt slope that led out of the noble ring and toward the Outer Slums.
It was one thing to see the chaos from above and it was another thing to be in it. Fortunately, he had taken a path that seemed the least crazy.
He wasn't the only normal person fleeing in panic around these parts because this happened to be the lowest district... The place they pretended didn't exist.
His home.
Or at least, it used to be.
---
Noah stumbled past the familiar sights: broken fences, soot-stained cloth roofs, fires cooking roots and rat meat over open barrels.
The city had always ignored this place. Now the plague had caught up.
But he wasn't here to mourn.
He was here for Old Man Duyi and Lian, the old herbalist and his firecracker of a granddaughter.
They were the only people who had truly looked out for him these past two years.
When he'd first arrived, still bleeding from injuries he got while trying to escape abominable looking creatures outside the city and barely conscious, it had been Old Duyi who'd dragged him from the gutter.
Bandaged his wounds. Let him sleep on a straw mat in their hut for days without charge.
"You don't owe me coin," Duyi had once said, chewing a root. "The world's cruel enough. If you've got nothing, you pay with manners. You've got those. Mostly."
Now, Noah wasn't able to let them get caught up in an apocalypse that he triggered.
The least he could do was help.
He soon reached the hut and fortunately, it was still standing.
Lian was outside, shoving roots and scrolls into a cloth sack with her sleeves rolled up and her short black hair tied back.
Old Duyi was seated on a crate, coughing and muttering something about his knees being cursed by the heavens.