Cheese found Heather in the basement of the two-story building. It is also worth mentioning that the basement of this building is not a cellar used by ordinary people to store miscellaneous items or food, but rather a specially converted private prison. Even the passage to the basement is opened by a mechanism hidden in the bookshelf. This made the mage have to suspect the fetish of the previous owner of this building. However, regardless of the previous owner of this building, he left Turbidity with all his possessions as soon as the plague broke out, and the small building was taken over by the Kingdom Knights and became a prison for Heather and the Hammer Knights who followed her back to Turbidity.

It stands to reason that Heather, as the knight chief of the first real lord of the Blue Lion Kingdom, the Grand Duke of Hammer, naturally no one dares to do anything rude to her. So in fact, Cheese was not worried about Heather's safety at first, in his opinion, the most that the people of the Kingdom Knights were to find a place to put the female knight under house arrest, and maybe even in addition to not being able to move freely, they also had to meet some of Heather's personal needs, so as to ensure that the Hammer Grand Duke would not be furious when he learned about this in the future.

However, when the mage finds the female knight, Heather is not in a good state. No, maybe it's not an exaggeration to say it's terrible. Even Heather's blonde hair had lost its luster like a withered grass stalk, and there were even tiny black spots visible on the female knight's skin that was exposed beyond her clothes. Cheese certainly knows what that means.

"Are you infected?" the mage looked incredulous as he crouched down and picked up the female knight who was curled up on the ground. You know, before the two of them in Vale City separated, Cheese could guarantee that Heather did not have any plague viruses on her, and judging from the letters from the female knight after that, she should not have encountered an attack from the nezumi on the way to Turbidity Town. So, why did Heather get infected with the plague?

"Boom...... Hearing ......a familiar voice, Heather looked up and saw the man walking into the dungeon. She was surprised by Cheese's appearance, but as she excitedly tried to say something to the mage, she couldn't make any discernible voice in her throat.

Cheese frowned and lost his voice, that's what he called the symptom. This process of losing the ability to speak is one of the signs that the plague is transforming the human body, and the inability to make a voice means that Heather's articulatory organs are changing from humans to rat people. During this process, her throat changes slowly like a fetus in the mother's womb, so while a rat-man can return to human language after being trained, a person in the process of being diseased cannot. This internal change preceded the physical transformation, which is why Heather still seems normal now, she has not been infected with the plague for long. According to the data collected by Cheese in the quarantine area, people who have symptoms such as aphasia but do not have obvious mutations will never be infected for more than five days.

"Fortunately, the infection is still very short, and it should be possible to reverse the mutation. After a brief examination of Heather's physical condition, Cheese determined that with his current knowledge of the plague, he could cure the lesions on the female knight's body, and he could even reverse catalyze the viruses so that they could restore Heather's body and the mutated parts back.

Despite losing her ability to speak, Heather's hearing was apparently normal. Hearing the mage say that he could cure her of the plague, the chief knight grabbed the cheese's clothes excitedly, and at the same time waved her other hand and pointed to the inside of the dungeon. Heather's room is at the entrance to the secret door, which means that when Cheese came to the dungeon, he immediately found the female knight captain, and the other parts of the dungeon have not yet been explored. Now it is not difficult to understand from Heather's body language, Cheese, that the female knight chief means that the other hammer knights who came back with her should be locked up in the depths of this dungeon.

"Are they infected too?" the mage asked.

Nodding vigorously, Heather gave Cheese an affirmative answer, and the anxious expression on her face intensified. As if urging the mage to leave her alone and check on the other knights in the dungeon.

Cheese's brow furrowed even tighter, and he whispered a few words of comfort to Heather, then got up and walked deeper into the dungeon. This basement was much bigger than he had thought. Even the mage guessed that it had already covered an area larger than the part above ground. A mansion with a small dungeon could be understood as a special need for the owner, but looking at this stance, it seems that this basement is far beyond what it should be. Although the top of the basement is lit by candles at every other interval, as the hallway stretches, those candles also provide light in spaces where air circulation is so poor.

Before he knew it, Cheese had used his night vision and somehow temporarily stopped his body's need to breathe. The basement contained enough gas in this space to supply a human with breath. In the process of going deeper, Cheese also saw the other Hammer Knights, although they also had some aristocratic status in the outside world, but it was clear that their status in front of the owner of this basement was not enough to save their lives like Heather. The knights were cruelly hung on the iron hooks on the walls like winter bacon, and judging from the state of their corpses, they were all infected by the rat-man plague during their lifetimes, and they also produced varying degrees of mutation. Their bodies did not decay in this oxygen-deprived environment, which allowed Cheese to scrutinize the cause of their deaths.

Strangely, none of the knights' deaths seemed to be due to trauma or the plague itself, but rather to some kind of potion unknown to the mage, and the recipe of the potion was constantly changing from one knight to another. Cheese felt a strange sense of depression in his heart, and when he saw the knights' disemboweled bodies hanging from iron hooks, he realized that the people who killed them were probably doing the same thing as him—finding an antidote to the plague. However, unlike the mage, the other party obviously did not have the in-depth training of the Gray Tower, so his understanding of the plague was still only at the level of ordinary diseases, and no matter who studied it, he did not realize that the so-called rat-man plague was essentially a curse that could continue to spread.

At the end of the underground corridor, Cheese found a separate room, which was already a place that would be absolutely impossible for normal humans to reach, and even if they were running at full speed, it would be impossible for ordinary people to go so deep into the anaerobic zone without holding their breath. The door to the room was unlocked, and the mage carefully pushed open the thin wooden door, revealing an ordinary-looking study. On the table in the room was an open notebook that seemed to contain something. Despite his night vision, Cheese still needs to be very close to see the text on his notes. After reading the contents of this notebook, the mage felt a chill welling up in his back. He seems to have grasped the truth of this plague. But just a corner to peek at the whole event. Cheese also felt a visceral fear.