Today I asked Emericus to come out of his meditation. Keeping Tiddol’s kid alive is more important than making nice with a true immortal cultivator, and he might be able to do something that no one else here can. It turned out to be the right choice, Ednar was on the verge of death.

When I first went to him it was in hope that whatever technique cultivators use to push mana away from themselves would be able to cure this disease, but whatever it was that made it resistant to Null made it resistant to that as well. It causes the disease to burn itself out faster, but not by nearly enough. It does render him incapable of being infected though, and Solar Energy does not fuel the disease either. This means that Emericus can heal Ednar with minimal risk to himself. Healing is not his specialty, but he has access to enough Solar Energy and knows how to use it well enough to keep Ednar alive, and maybe a handful of others.

In exchange for his help I offered a favor, anything within my power, he just has to ask for it.

Between my Null and Emericus’ anti-magic aura the disease is slowly burning itself out, I give it a week before it is fully burnt out, assuming anyone is left alive. The problem is I don’t think anyone other than those Emericus can treat will live that long, and the scholars agree with my opinion.

The children, the elderly, and those that were otherwise vulnerable are already dying off rapidly.

And then around dinner time, Tiddol finalized a potion that I have had personal experiences with before. A potion designed to disrupt and destroy spells, especially those as complex and resilient as the ones used to make up mana based creatures like myself. The fact that she made it makes me distinctly uncomfortable, but I can recognize its usefulness here. A disease is nothing more than a spell, a malignant spell yes, but still a spell, trapped inside the body of someone.

And it worked, somewhat. Like Emericus’ anti-magic field and my own Null, Tiddol’s potion is speeding up the destruction of the disease, but it proved too resilient to be unraveled by just that. It is to the point that the scholars believe this to be artificially created, the chance of a disease being this resilient is too low. A curse instead of a disease. They have requested something called an inquisition to find the perpetrator before they create something that could wipe out all life. I do hope that they're exaggerating.

Were it not already contained with almost no hope of it breaking out standard procedure would have been to burn everything with nuclear fire. Curse or disease, something that is this resistant to treatment, this infectious, and this deadly is always treated as an existential threat. I’m struggling to keep them from doing just that despite having all of the infected under an effective quarantine.

I spent my day between meeting with the scholars to come up with potential solutions and refining Null in a way that would speed up the process. It turns out that the potion Tiddol made and the anti-magic field Emericus is making are some of the first things they attempt with any infectious disease, and many are curable that way, with attempting to bleed out the disease in a mana free environment being something they attempt any time they are able to as it is nearly universally effective, so-called ‘perfect’ diseases are almost completely unheard of. From there a variety of methods are used, few of them useful on a scale of more than a dozen people at a time, and even fewer feasible to us without a specialist. Among those methods include things like getting a powerful, and ancient, dungeon to cut the disease out of the body. This has less to do with any natural talent that a dungeon might have and more to do with the fact that they universally work with creating life, and as such are able to do something like this with minimal risk of causing harm, and are all incredibly powerful, but that method is very costly as the ancient dungeons always demand much in the way of payment. I might be able to bribe one, but it is irrelevant as there aren’t any close enough to reach without teleportation, which isn’t exactly an option here. Another option is for a specialist to manually deconstruct the disease, which opens them up to being infected themselves and is only effective on one person at a time. There is also Nuclear fire, which works every single time, but has potentially catastrophic results and leaves no survivors.

So without access to some kind of specialist or resource that we simply don’t have the best option available to me is refining to speed things up even if only slightly. The difference of a minute can be the difference of a life.

I think I am just going to burn my Fate when I am done writing for the day. I’m already exhausted and want this whole thing to be over with. Some new years this is turning out to be.

Anyway, Good Night Diary.