Through the transparent glass window, the mist at the far edge of the city could still be seen.
A light rain was also falling from the sky, making the mist seem even heavier.
Compared to yesterday, the distance appeared to have shrunk by half. Half the city had already been swallowed by fog.
At the computer desk, the person seated there began moving his ten fingers again. Aerith left the window and came to his side, watching as Mr. Kain started writing once more.
Although he had begun writing and the document was no longer only two hundred words long, she had ultimately still failed to stop Mr. Kain from sleeping. She had not been able to "wake" him before he fell asleep.
After one night, the gloom had still swallowed part of the city.
To Mr. Kain, it seemed as though he had truly slept through the night. But to Aerith, it was like the scene had switched in an instant. An entire night had been accelerated into the blink of an eye.
Because it was raining today, Mr. Kain did not go out. Instead, he actually began writing.
The plot was about the protagonist, using the alias Lance Plain, transmigrating into the world of Warhammer. He had also fallen into this same confusion.
Lance was also an alias. Mr. Kain, who was writing the story, had not revealed the protagonist's true name.
Mr. Lance had awakened from a state of cryogenic hibernation.
The world Mr. Lance came from was also the twenty-first century. Then, one day, a natural disaster suddenly occurred—an earthquake.
Although Mr. Lance was rescued by emergency workers, he fell into a coma.
It was not a coma caused by injury. In the city affected by the earthquake, one-tenth of the people—no, one-tenth of the people in the entire world—had mysteriously fallen unconscious.
One could imagine how terrifying that disaster had been. Across the entire world, one-tenth of the people who were not even injured had fallen into comas.
The world collapsed in an instant.
That meant the surviving people could not possibly rescue all of that one-tenth.
Mr. Lance was very lucky to be found and saved, but he never woke up.
Ten years passed like that. Most of the people who had fallen unconscious back then died for all kinds of reasons. Only a small portion remained, preserved through cryogenic hibernation technology in a state that seemed almost like time had stopped.
When medical technology became advanced enough, they would be thawed and treated.
As for those who had been frozen, most of their previous identities were eventually discovered during the reconstruction of civilization. But Mr. Lance's identity records were never found.
And that period of freezing carried him across an incredibly long span of time, until he finally woke forty thousand years later.
After awakening, Mr. Lance read through the recorded data and fell into confusion.
It seemed that he had transmigrated into the world of Warhammer 40K. But why was his body still his own? And why had he been frozen from the 2K era all the way to this age?
He tried to learn more about the 2K era in order to verify whether that had truly been the era he came from.
However, information about the 2K era was fragmented. The facility where he woke had very little data, so he could not prove whether he had been frozen from that era or had transmigrated there.
But since he had arrived in this era, his priority was not to think about whether he was a native or a transmigrator.
His priority was survival.
After waking, he was "summoned" by the Emperor, the supreme ruler of humanity, in what seemed like a meeting through a dream.
The Emperor had prepared a ghost ship for him, then told him several coordinates and instructed him to excavate the STC equipment located there.
That was the mission.
At the site of the first STC excavation, there also happened to be something called the Panacea. The Emperor told him to obtain it and consume it as well.
Now, Mr. Kain was writing the plot of the first STC excavation.
Piloting the ghost ship, Mr. Lance arrived at a strange planet—a planet that seemed shrouded in plague.
This planet appeared to have lost contact with the Imperium because of some Warp storm, leaving it isolated.
As for the planet's civilization, its development seemed rather similar to Aerith's world.
Some of its technology looked somewhat futuristic, but its architectural style seemed unable to keep up with the times.
Oh, so it was a world that combined retro aesthetics and futuristic technology, fusing wasteland and steampunk elements. That was another description Mr. Kain had written down.
In this world, sick people were everywhere. One after another, they had been tortured by disease until they barely looked human, making the sight enough to numb the scalp.
Some bodies were so rotten that it seemed impossible for them to still be alive, yet they were.
Some were covered in swollen tumors and pustules, their bodies twisted into grotesque, horrifying shapes.
In short, there was no one in this world who was not sick.
Even those with the greatest power had something wrong with their bodies, more or less.
And this plague was not limited to infecting humans. It infected all life.
Not only animals, but plants as well. The plants themselves had become diseased, festering and rotting. The entire world was decaying.
Even reading such a description made Aerith's scalp tingle, but this was probably something that had truly happened.
The reality must have been even more shocking.
Returning to the "story," Mr. Lance, as written by Mr. Kain, encountered danger after danger while excavating the STC, brushing against death several times.
In the end, Mr. Lance encountered a terrifying existence—a Beast of Nurgle.
A Beast of Nurgle was a creation under the command of Nurgle, a Chaos God of the Warp. In other words, this world had been shrouded in plague because of an evil god.
That god was the embodiment of plague.
Even setting aside the Beast of Nurgle's terrifying ability to spread disease, its appearance alone was enough to frighten someone to death, even drive them into a mental collapse.
It had a soft, sticky, multicolored slug-like body. It slapped the ground with weak feet. A whip-like tail extended from its back, and a distorted face grew on that tail. As its body constantly swayed, it left a layer of foul-smelling pus along the path it crawled.
Once it locked onto a target, it would happily go "show affection" to them. Large numbers of slick tentacles would surge from its body to seize the enemy and smear all kinds of foul, bizarre mucus across them.
Just that description made Aerith's hair stand on end.
After Mr. Lance was targeted, he accidentally came into contact with the creature's venom. It could be said that he almost died.
By the time he found the Panacea, half of his body had nearly rotted to the point that flesh was falling from bone.
After drinking the Panacea, the restoration and regeneration of his body was also torment.
It was like someone who was already ill needing extensive surgery without any anesthesia.
After that, he activated some kind of ancient medical sterilization system on the planet, beginning the process of sterilizing the world and suppressing the plague outbreak.
As for how long it would take the planet to recover, that was unknown, because Mr. Lance had already headed to the next stop.
Hm?
The plot stopped there. Was he not going to write anymore?
Was he going to play a game?
He was reaching for NieR: Automata, the work from Miss A2's world.
No. She had to make him continue playing Final Fantasy VII.
Aerith tried to interfere, but it seemed a little too late.
Her gaze unintentionally swept toward the computer. The document had already been closed, and This PC was open. She also saw the folder names in the Quick Access bar on the left.
If she opened that kind of video again, perhaps it would make him choose to play Final Fantasy VII.
Biting her lip, Aerith's face flushed red as she went to affect the mouse. She could barely interfere with it, as though she were a gust of wind blowing against it from multiple directions and making it move.
The cursor selected the folder and clicked. After entering it, the cursor moved again, aiming at the second video in the second row.
There was no time to choose.
She clicked directly.
Uh. It was another Christmas outfit.
And this time, there was one more person—"Tifa."
It seemed to be "Aerith" and "Tifa" playing with "Christmas toys" together.
(End of Chapter)
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