The kinetic suppression of the trade routes was execution at its most clinical. While The Eternity Team deployed synchronized defensive arrays to shield a stranded merchant caravan along the Northern Obsidian Artery, Markus moved through the vanguard like a localized spatial anomaly. His violet mana blades sliced through the armored hides of Tier 5 Iron-Gorged Behemoths, instantly collapsing their cellular structures before they could breach the caravan's defensive perimeter.
Yet, as the beasts dissolved into ash, Markus's sub-spatial awareness caught a profound environmental contradiction.
Beneath the rancid, ink-like odor of the extra-dimensional corruption choking the soil, rare pockets of the deep wilderness were reacting against the infection. In the absolute center of these untainted zones, the local flora and fauna had concentrated a substance exceedingly rare in Aethelgard's current era: pure primordial energy. This was the ancient, undiluted architectural blueprint of the world's power—dense, pre-elemental mana that had frozen in its original state before fracturing into the modern sub-disciplines of Fire, Water, Wind, Earth, and Space.
Recognizing the immense value of these pristine specimens for high-tier cultivation and structural fortification, Markus systematically isolated and preserved them using localized spatial vacuum seals, ensuring their delicate cellular compositions remained perfectly intact.
As the team systematically cleared the three designated transit corridors, Markus extracted three unique primordial specimens that had mutated to survive the localized extra-dimensional friction.
"The density of these plants is fascinating," Rosanne remarked during a brief operational pause on the crag lines, her eyes tracking the faint, silver-white luminescent pulse radiating from the sealed storage case attached to Markus's belt. "The closer we get to the heavy infection vectors, the more violently the natural ecosystem seems to fight back by condensing these ancient pockets of energy. It's almost like the continent itself is generating anti-bodies."
"It is an evolutionary race," Markus replied, his voice a cold, steady anchor as he scanned the freshly cleared horizon. The mountain paths behind them were completely silent now, the caravan routes permanently insulated by the team's swift sweep. "The corruption seeks to asphyxiate the metropolis by turning the local fauna into a biological blockade. But in doing so, it forces the deep roots of the world to surface. These specimens will provide the baseline material needed to upgrade the team's core vitals before we descend into the lower metropolitan channels."
Before the dust could fully settle over the shattered crags of the western transit route, Markus knelt beside the massive carcass of a Tier 5 Shadow-Stalker Alpha. His silver-blue eyes glowed with a concentrated geometric focus as he peeled back the creature's obsidian hide, revealing the underlying muscular and magical pathways.
The anatomy was completely wrong.
Standard primordial beasts operated on a rigid, predictable logic of territorial survival and caloric conservation. They rarely attacked heavily armed human caravans unless provoked or starving. But as Markus traced the creature's main mana veins, he found them warped into rigid, blackened conduits pulsing with a volatile, hyper-adrenalized crimson energy. The infection hadn't just decayed the tissue; it had hijacked the beast's primitive consciousness, tuning its entire being to a singular emotional wavelength: Wrath.
This wasn't a passive biological decay. The extra-dimensional corruption was actively broadcasting an artificial psychic resonance—a localized frequency of absolute, unreasoning rage that completely dissolved the beasts' natural self-preservation instincts. It turned apex predators into suicidal bioweapons, driving them to sprint through protective fields and iron-plated vanguard formations just to tear into civilian meat.
"This explains the sudden spike in caravan massacres," Markus noted, his voice a level, freezing current that cut through the mountain wind. "They aren't hunting for sustenance. They are being mathematically driven to eradicate the city's outer infrastructure by a systemic broadcast of rage."
"No wonder they fought like demons," Rosanne muttered, stepping up beside him while wiping a thick, dark slime from her buckler. The rest of the team stood in a vigilant perimeter, their gold-flecked eyes scanning the jagged ridgelines. "Even after I severed this one's hind tendons, it kept crawling toward us, trying to bite through our shields with its bare bone. It didn't feel pain. It just felt... angry."
Markus stood up, his heavy dark coat falling back into perfect, unwrinkled lines. "A broadcast requires an antenna, and an infection requires a patient zero. We do not return to Aethelgard just yet. We follow the trail backward."
Instead of harvesting the tainted meat, Markus extended his left hand, his 100% Space Mastery spreading across the terrain like a translucent, razor-thin web. He wasn't looking for physical paw prints or broken twigs; he was tracking the invisible, residual friction left behind by the Wrath frequency as the infected packs migrated toward the trade routes.
[SYSTEM CORE: FREQUENCY TRACKING ACTIVE]
>> Target: Latent Wrath Resonance (Crimson-Ink Spectrum)
>> Spatial Friction Discrepancy: DETECTED
>> Vector Orientation: 32° North-West (Deep Tectonic Fissures)
>> Distance to Source Node: CALCULATING...
The tracks were stark. In the spatial dimension, the path taken by the rabid beasts looked like a jagged, bleeding scar cut directly into the fabric of the steppes, leading straight off the main maps and down into a deep, uncharted volcanic canyon where the world's heavy gravity began to warp erratically.
"The team, fall into a stealth-march configuration," Markus commanded smoothly, slipping into a localized spatial fold that dampened his acoustic footprint to absolute zero. "Mask your mana signatures and maintain a twenty-meter interval. We are tracking this variable back to its cradle."
The descent into the absolute depths of the volcanic trench felt like stepping into the throat of a dying god. The temperature dropped unexpectedly, replaced by a stagnant, freezing chill that defied the surrounding volcanic geology. The ambient light of Aethelgard's triple suns was entirely swallowed by dense, basalt cliffs, leaving only the cold, silvery glow of the team's synchronized tracking runes to illuminate the path.
At the base of the canyon, the cavern floor ruptured into a massive, hollowed-out subterranean amphitheater. And there, dominating the dead center of the abyss, stood the source.
It was a colossus of biological distortion—a titanic, weeping willow-style organism that had completely abandoned its natural botanical functions. Its bark was a jagged, obsidian shell, split open in thousands of vertical fissures that oozed a thick, hyper-dense fluid. It was the exact same matte-black, light-consuming extra-dimensional source that Markus had extracted from Saylor Vane's neural network back at the academy.
The tree's true malice, however, lay beneath the soil. Its massive, braided root systems did not spread outward for stability; they plummeted vertically like colossal, armored boring drills, punching straight through the bedrock and into the continent's deep subterranean water tables.
[SYSTEM CORE: ANATOMICAL INFRASTRUCTURE AUDIT]
>> Target: Corrupted Primordial Arbor (Patient Zero Variant)
>> Anchor Depth: 1.4 Kilometers (Sub-surface Aquifer Intersection)
>> Primary Vector: Subterranean Hydro-Contamination
>> Contaminant Strain: Extra-Dimensional Ink [Wrath Spectrum]
Markus stepped to the edge of a deep fissure, his silver-blue eyes flaring with the geometric matrices of Fate's Eyes. He looked past the solid stone, tracking the flow of the liquid corruption. The tree was acting as a massive alchemical filter in reverse, drawing up pure primordial freshwater from the deep earth, saturating it with the concentrated Wrath frequency, and pumping the poisoned fluid directly into a sprawling, cavernous lake that fed the entire sector's wilderness.
Behind him, the four members of the team halted in a tight defensive perimeter, their weapons lowered but their mana circuits completely primed. Mika stared at the pulsing black veins of the tree, her hand instinctively tightening around her staff as her mental firewall flared to repel the faint, rhythmic psychic thrumming radiating from the bark.
"It's a breeding factory," Rosanne whispered, her voice tight with absolute disgust. "It's not just infecting random packs. It's using the world's own water supply to systematically manufacture an infinite army of rabid monsters. Every creature that takes a single sip from this valley becomes a drone for the blockade."
"The scale of this design implies an intelligent deployment," Markus noted, his voice an unyielding, freezing frequency that completely stabilized the trembling air of the cavern. "The entity that planted this seed did not intend to conquer Aethelgard through a standard military siege. They intended to drown its commerce in the blood of its own ecosystem."