The Impenetrable Mountains

Middle-Earth (Middle-Earth)

It was evening.

The moon tore open gaps in the clouds, casting strands of moonlight down onto the Middle-Earth continent, which was covered in gray matter.

As the first infected of the new moon, William had been granted authority by Lorien, allowing him to use the moonlight to survey the basic conditions across the Middle-Earth continent.

The situation was more or less as he had expected. Middle-Earth as a whole had already fallen under the gray zone's coverage. Even the weakest areas had reached at least the shallow or mid-levels.

The outbreak of the diversity epidemic had killed roughly seventy percent of all species, while every survivor had been transformed into a sick one.

The formerly prosperous human cities displayed a "fairly uniform" situation.

Some cities contained only a single epidemic. For example, the absolute dead city ravaged by the death plague—under normal circumstances, Death Plague Mist Bacteria was incompatible with every other pathogen.

Most cities, however, showed signs of Cross-Infection. This was especially true of some coastal cities, where those infected with the Deep Sea Epidemic—vibrio and barnacle parasites—had also contracted other diseases.

William even spotted a small city controlled by Black Roundworm Company. It had continued developing technology while preserving the ruins of the original human civilization. The entire city was even cleaner than before, with large numbers of sanitation workers tending to the streets. Various large logistics factories were already under construction in the city center, making use of the railways left behind by humanity to lay out their logistics network in advance.

When the two worlds merged, most of these cities would be taken over by the Source Plague Zones and various organizations of the Old World.

However, it was unclear how power would be divided in the Cross-Infection cities.

Everything beneath the moonlight