The World's Rekindling

Yes, Lina.

Lina, who had remained unconscious and firmly strapped to Karg's back, suddenly convulsed violently and let out a sound clearer than any she had made before.

It was also a more agonized whimper than before.

The scales on her face gleamed with an ominous oily sheen in the dim light. Beneath her tightly shut eyelids, her eyeballs seemed to be darting rapidly, while her breathing turned hurried and wet.

She looked like a drowning person struggling desperately.

"What's happening!?"

Karg and Saruman were both stricken with alarm.

Lina's sudden change had come far too abruptly.

Even more terrifyingly, the black contamination patterns on her exposed skin, writhing like living creatures, seemed to have been violently stimulated by something.

The markings suddenly brightened, giving off a dim, unsettling purplish-black glow, and began spreading toward her heart and brain at a visible pace...!

"Lina!!" Karg instantly snapped out of his daze. Forgetting Ian before him, he hurriedly unfastened Lina from his back and held her in his arms. Her complexion had already shifted from pale to an eerie bluish-gray, her lips were purple, and her body was frighteningly hot. Her painful spasms came in ever stronger waves. "She's being affected on a deeper level!"

Saruman's face changed drastically as well. He immediately crouched down and tried to cast calming and healing spells. But the glow of his magic vanished into Lina's body like a stone sinking into the sea.

It even provoked a fiercer reaction—and backlash—from those black markings!

"The contamination is erupting! And... it's more violent than ever before!" Saruman's voice trembled, his eyes full of helplessness. Among the thousand years of knowledge he had inherited were studies on combating this kind of contamination.

But here, in the core region of R'lyeh, facing an eruption in Lina that seemed