In the end, they never got around to playing cards.
Serika had fled at the last minute again.
You were such a good runner—why call yourself Serika? Why not Sprintika?
When Murphy returned to the Magic Research Institute, he felt as though a great deal of time had passed, as if he had suddenly returned to the modern age from the previous century.
The trip to the village had left him utterly exhausted in body and mind. After he and Serika each took a disinfecting shower and arranged for people to head to the village for another round of sterilization, Murphy fell asleep in his isolation ward.
He slept so deeply that he lost all sense of time.
In a daze, he seemed to see countless pairs of eyes again.
They hung high beyond some impossibly distant night sky—irises of every color, expressions all different: compassionate, furious, laughing, mad.
Those eyes did not move. They stared at him.
Across endless distance, and seemingly across eons of time, they watched him with eternal, focused patience.
Murphy woke in fright, drenched in cold sweat.
When he awoke, he found himself clutching that piece of fur from an unknown creature.
What the hell was this thing?
After being removed from its pedestal, the fur seemed to have lost its mystical properties. It was no different from an ordinary piece of hide.
Murphy decided to let the Institute's scientists study it first.
After several more days of quarantine observation, once it was confirmed that neither Murphy nor Serika posed a risk of spreading the plague, they were released.
Serika had mostly recovered. After a thorough physical examination, none of her indicators showed any serious problems. She only needed some more rest before making a full recovery.
Murphy, meanwhile, had possessed immunity before entering the