Luciel listened quietly as the white-haired girl spoke, her trembling voice carrying the weight of years. With each sentence, the shape of her pain became clearer in his mind, like a wound slowly revealed beneath torn bandages.
So this was the virtual ghost infection—not just a disease, but a slow, cruel countdown.
It granted its victims a decade at most. Ten years to live, to hope, to pretend to be human before death—or something worse—claimed them.
When the time ran out, the infected no longer died. They transformed.
Luciel's jaw tightened as Elara described it: the body twisting, the mind fracturing, the soul consumed until nothing remained but a hollow monster. The "virtual ghost"—a name too soft for something so cruel.
They were creatures of madness and hunger, stripped of reason and mercy, their only instinct to devour the living.
"An infectious disease," Luciel murmured. "And when the infected become monsters, they pass it on by biting or scratching."
