The winter snow is flying, and through the leather of the upper, it freezes people's toes.

The road in the town is narrow, and you go three hundred meters to the south, and there is a small church with a pointed roof at the top of the ramp.

When Nance got out of the car, he met someone on the long stone staircase who came out to greet them. This is the mayor of Nanwan Town, a man in his forties, with a short yellow mustache, a tall man, a little hunched back, and long and thin limbs.

He walked down quickly, blew his nose, and said to Li Ting, "Just now, two more people fell ill, sir, please hurry up and take a look......

Li Ting didn't say much, raised his legs and ran towards the church.

"Be careful, be careful of getting infected." Nance said to Susa, and looked back at the car, "You're not going to go into church, are you?"

"Ha~"

Li Qingxian yawned lazily.

With an owl in her arms, she closed her eyes and fell asleep directly.

Nance walked up the stairs and into the church door.

There is a small ward separated by a simple screen, and the light is quite bright, but the furnishings are simple.

A rope hangs straight from the chandelier, and there are two folding beds underneath, and the ropes hang alone.

On one of the folding beds lay a man, struggling to breathe, his bloodshot eyes staring at the comer. Nance stopped in front of the entrance to the ward, and at the slight breathing of the patient, he seemed to hear the squeak of a mouse.

He subconsciously glanced at the dark corners of the church.

No trace of rats was found.

Li Ting walked to the hospital bed.

"Sir, save me......" said the patient, with a voice that was having trouble breathing.

"Don't be nervous, tell me how you feel right now." Li Ting said patiently and gently.

As soon as the patient opened his mouth, he suddenly leaned half of his body out of the bed, pressed one hand on his abdomen, and the other around his neck, and spat out a large gulp of red liquid into the bucket of booty under the bed.

The mayor and the priest, who were still inside, suddenly felt unwell and turned to leave the ward.

The patient vomited breathlessly for a long time before he struggled to lie down again.

Li Ting asked a few basic questions, took his body temperature, and had a high fever of 39.5. The lymph nodes on the neck and limbs are swollen, and light black spots are found on both sides of the abdomen, and they are all enlarged.

"It's burning badly, I feel like something is biting me......" The patient turned his gaze to Li Ting, his eyes glistening with tears, "Sir, what's wrong with me?"

"Any disease is possible, it's not certain." Li Ting said gently, turning his head to look at the family members on the side, "Just leave one person outside to watch, and give food and anti-inflammatory drugs according to the regulations." Drink plenty of water."

The patient became agitated and leaned up from the bed while asking himself if he was going to die.

"Be quiet, don't move." Li Ting said patiently, "This is nothing to be afraid of, please believe me, I will report to the mayor."

The patient let out an "oh".

Then he leaned back and began to sob.

Li Ting walked out of the ward and asked the mayor who was sweating profusely, "Are there any other cases?"

"Not yet."

"Have you had any recent cases of fever due to local inflammation?"

"Ah, yes, there are two patients with fever in the hospital, and both of them are showing symptoms of swollen lymph nodes."

"Is it normal to swell?"

Mayor Mare's face was stunned, and he stumbled and said, "Well, the so-called normal, at this point in time, it must not be normal. You also know that in winter, the strange beasts in the mountains can't eat......

"Take me to see the corpse." Li Ting commanded.

"Right here, sir, come and take a look."

The mayor turned around and led him to the church's cross.

The first two people to die were placed in front of the statue so straight and straight, their whole bodies frozen hard.

Li Ting put on rubber gloves and squatted next to the corpse, sometimes picking at his eyelids and sometimes knocking on the corpse

Oral view of the body. The people next to him didn't dare to disturb him, and the death-like heavy atmosphere pressed on everyone like a mountain.

During this time, Nance swept away the corpse with a sabotage engine and obtained two pieces of data.

Both data points to the condition exactly.

- The plague.

After Li Ting inspected the corpse, he looked at the mayor with a solemn expression: "Arrange for someone to burn the corpse."

"It's easy to burn." The mayor didn't object to this, but just looked at him with a worried expression, "But now the people are uneasy, and gossip about his illness is growing. We are in such a hurry to burn the corpses, I am afraid that this is a plague."

"Isn't this a plague?" Li Ting asked rhetorically.

The mayor's expression was stunned, and after a moment, he smiled bitterly, "Understood."

"Send those two patients to the church for quarantine, and contact the mercenaries and old hunters separately, and prepare to enter the mountain." Li Ting said solemnly, it seems that he has experience in dealing with it.

"I'll go right away."

The mayor didn't dare to slack off, and immediately ran out.

The two patients with abnormally swollen lymph nodes were quickly transferred from the only hospital in the town, and Nansi was afraid that Miss Su would also be infected, so she asked her to take Li Qingxian back to Li's house. And he himself put on a full set of protective clothing to help Li Ting record some data.

Drowsiness, respiratory failure, red eyes, filthy mouth, headache, inguinal adenitis, talking nonsense, blemishes on the body...... When almost all of these symptoms appear on the same body, a person's life is like a hanging thread, and the slightest movement of the body may suddenly lose breath.

At noon, several more cases arrived.

One of them, a woman with a weak constitution, pressed her hands tightly on her abdomen as soon as she was delivered, and she vomited while talking nonsense. The lymph nodes around her neck were shockingly large, and she said that yesterday it was just pus, but today it was like rotten fruit. qδ

Li Ting made a cross on the scalpel.

Lymph nodes overflow with bloody pus.

At this time, the patient is bleeding, his limbs are spread apart, and spots appear on his abdomen and legs.

By the time the lymph nodes stopped pus, her body temperature reached 40 and she began to talk nonsense incessantly, hissing and howling, "Ah! Those brutes!"

- It's the rats who are scolding.

The lymph nodes, which had been deflated, soon swelled again, and became even larger, and felt as hard as a wooden block.

Her husband went crazy.

"You're guarding her here," Li Ting said to him, "and let me know as soon as there's anything going on."

At two o'clock in the afternoon, the patient's body temperature dropped to 38.

Seeing that the situation was much better, she was in good spirits and lay on the bed smiling.

Her husband pulled Li Ting back and asked anxiously, "Sir, she's much better, isn't she?"

"We'll see later." Li Ting's face did not relax in the slightest.

Nance noticed that the patient's eyes were not shining abnormally.

It is a kind of eyes that only people have when they are dying, a brief reflection after burning life, and if you use some banal clichés to describe it, then it can be said that what she sees in her eyes at this moment is a "dream moment" or "fairyland-like lights" and so on.

At three o'clock in the afternoon, the patient's body temperature soared to 40 all of a sudden.

She kept saying words that no one could hear, and she vomited again, and her lymph nodes were so swollen that she could burst her neck at any moment. Her husband knelt beside the bed, his hands on the quilt, and looked at Li Ting helplessly.

Li Ting said calmly, "I'll inject her with some sedatives."

Of course, sedatives will not cure the plague, but only make the patient more comfortable.

But at this moment, the patient's mouth spat out a few words intermittently, "rat", "fly", or something. Her lips were sallow, her breathing was weak, and she was curled up in her cot.

It was as if something from beneath the earth was calling to her.

The husband began to cry, "Sir, is there no hope?"

"She's dead." Li Ting said.

At the moment when his voice fell

, the patient stopped breathing.

In Shin-Yokohama, some of the scattered patients began to die without warning.

Many doctors only feel a slight sense of uneasiness at first.

When there are only a few cases, it cannot be called a plague.

What starts out as an isolated incident can turn into a catastrophe in a very short period of time.

For ordinary people, just do some preventive work.

Night is falling.

Looking down on the city from the window, it's still so bustling, a super metropolis with a lot of money.

But the word "plague" began to spread in the streets.

Not only does the word have a medical connotation, but it also carries a series of heavy, gray images that are very incompatible with the mood of Shin-Yokohama.

This megacity, which has just been lit up with neon lights at this time, can only be said to be the beginning of a drunken nightlife; It has a mood that is both joyful and melancholy – if the two can coexist, but on the whole, at least for the wealthy.

Only a portion of medical practitioners, when they heard the news, recalled the disaster in history.

Athens, which was hit by the plague, nearly 1/2 of the population died, and the whole of Athens was almost destroyed, and even the birds flew without a trace; In the ancient city of Guangzhou, the streets and alleys were full of silent dying patients and the corpses of 100,000 rats; Marseille built a plague wall to drive death row prisoners and push bloody corpses into caves; In the hospitals of Constantinople, damp and rotting beds were made on hard mud floors, and patients were dragged out with hooks and burned; piles of people in the Milan cemetery who have not yet died; Carloads of corpses in the city of London......

The most feared symbol is the "Bird's Beak Doctor" that was ubiquitous on the streets during the Black Death.

These brave retrogrades, just because the plague was so terrible, became terrifying messengers of death in the hearts of the people.

"Spots, oh, rose spots

Pockets full of floral scents

Ahh Ahh

We're all finished."

Roses refer to the rose-shaped rash of the Black Death, and the streets are filled with the scent of flowers, which gives a glimpse of the horrors of European society at that time.

But right now, Shin-Yokohama is still in the midst of a carnival.

In front of the monastery church, Tokizaki looked at the brightly lit city in the distance and remembered the picture of the plague described in the book: Muscovites set up firewood piles by the Moscow River and burned the corpses of infected people.

The pyre was not well placed, and in order to compete for the place to place the bodies of their loved ones, the living people held torches and fought with each other.

The lifeless water of the river reflected the light of the burning pyre, the sparkling torches illuminated the living who had beaten the dead to the brim, and the foul-smelling smoke rose into the night sky...... It's scary to think about.

"Chief, come on......

Muttering to himself, a little hope ignited in Tokizaki's heart.

In the afternoon, she summarized the situation of Sister Marlene's injuries and listed some possible useful methods. She sent all of this to the section chief, who replied to her that Li Ting had a more evil prescription and that he was learning about the effectiveness of the prescription......

If the plague is really allowed to spread, the number of deaths may be tens of millions......

At this moment, the adjutant's lady can't wait to grow a pair of wings for herself and fly to her boss's side to assist her.

※※※※※

South Bay Township.

From the window of the church, Nance looked out at the cliffs of the mountains in the distance.

At this time, the sun was already very low, but there was still a little sunset in the west, and the sky was blood-red.

The sunset shone obliquely into the church, as if it bleeded the deserted building, and the face of the idol of God was scarlet. On the weather-beaten lattice behind the statue, a raven was singing a horrible cry with all its might.

A patient by the window seemed stunned, his mouth wide open, and he listened in horror.

As he took his last breath, the sun vanished with his life.

The sunset has also cleared.

The sky was dark, faded as night fell, and the surrounding landscape darkened.

"Go back, come back tomorrow." Li Ting came over with a gas lamp and handed it to him, "Tomorrow I will go into the mountains with Orion to look for the strange beasts infected with Gluttony, if you want to be free, you can come together."

Because of the dim light, he was much older than when he first saw him.

His skin was loose, his hair was loose like a plant in the wrong place, his face was full of brown spots, and he was a tired old man in the truest sense of the word. People are going to grow old and die, and no genius seed expert can avoid it.

"How can I help?" Nance asked him, "If you need someone or equipment or something, I can help a little."

After a moment of silence, Li Ting said, "I am not a doctor, and from my own non-professional point of view, this plague bacterium can enlarge the spleen four times in three days, and make the mesenteric ganglia the size of an orange and have a paste-like texture. Current medicine can't do anything about it, and in less than two months, tens of millions of people in California will die. If you can't bear to see such a sight, please use your best ability to gather as many potions masters in California as you can and let them prepare the standard alchemy."

Nance nodded solemnly, "Do what I can."

"It's also best if you can get a potions master to come over tonight," Li Ting said, "Tomorrow we will enter the mountain, and it will probably take a week to come and go, and having a potions master by your side can save a lot of time for drug testing."

"I am."

「…… Haha."

Nance walked out of the church and walked back to Lee's house.

The gas lamp illuminated the snow under his feet, and as he walked, he suddenly smiled helplessly.

Miss Su has been shouting that she wants to go into the mountains to fight strange beasts, and now she finally got her wish, and I don't know if she can fulfill the promise she made......