According to the story of Pandora’s Box, Pandora was created by the gods and given many gifts—beauty, wisdom, and curiosity, among others.
Favoured as she was, the king of the gods personally gave her a beautiful box as a wedding gift, but warned her that she must never open it.
Unfortunately, curiosity just happened to be one of the other ‘gifts’ the gods had bestowed on her.
Unable to stay away, Pandora opened the box and released disease, despair, pain and countless other misfortunes to plague humanity.
Horrified by what she had unleashed, Pandora quickly closed the box, but it was too late—the world was forever changed.
However, as she closed the lid, one last entity remained inside: hope.
Looking around the relic, Kain couldn’t help but recall the story of Pandora’s box and the parallels it had with his current situation.
Disease is practically unheard of on this planet, and Kain had always assumed that it was due to the more hardy constitutions of the natives of this planet who’d been breathing in a faint amount of spiritual power since birth.
However, as Kain smashed in the head of a grotesque black and slimy figure that vaguely had a humanoid outline, Kain knew that his assumption was wrong.
Someone, or possibly many individuals, had gone through the effort of locating as many spiritual microorganisms as possible and locked them away.
They hadn’t even just stopped at the ones that could cause disease, like whatever had reanimated the corpses currently in front of Kain. Possibly knowing about the quick mutation rate of microbes and not wanting to take any risks, they’d gone through the effort of locking up every single microorganism with spiritual power that they could find.
Obviously, a few, like Bea and Eve, had managed to escape. But it is hard to imagine how much time and effort had gone into carefully combing essentially the entire continent, or maybe even beyond, in order to locate and lock up creatures that were difficult to even detect.
‘Unless…they had someone like me…with an affinity for all microorganisms…’ Kain pondered.
However, despite how challenging it made finding a contract for himself, Kain couldn’t say that he blamed him. Even on Earth there were countless times when entire populations were decimated by a disease. In this world where they’d probably be even more dangerous and develop strange mutations and evolutions, more likely than not a mankind-ending illness will come into being.
‘Rather I’m more surprised that nobody from the college has tried to restrict me due to my affinity. Obviously, they have some idea of what it is…’
As they got closer and closer to the center of the relic, the hotter the enchanted bracelet given to him by the school felt against his skin. Obviously, something unseen was trying to enter his body and the bracelet was exerting all of its efforts to keep it out.
The mere fact that pretty much everything in this relic, including many of the ‘plants’ that were actually composed of what Kain assumed to be types of fungi or algae.
Therefore, since nearly everything around him was causing a pull from his affinity, it impeded many of his senses and made it difficult to judge when something potentially dangerous that he couldn’t see was approaching.
He tried to create a barrier around him and Serena using Bea’s splits, but, although it helped with keeping some of the invisible enemies at bay, similar to Eve and the Vespirae many of the creatures inside of this relic were also quite resistant to Bea and did not die or even weaken much.
“There is one of the flowers that released the mist right before Bridge and the others fell ill.” Serena said while pointing to a field of glowing white flowers that looked like lilies with their petals closed.
“Once one of the flowers was picked, it opened and released the mist so remain cautious.” Kain nodded. Kain wasn’t sure how strong the bracelet provided by the school was, but he didn’t want to test it with a shot to the face with whatever made Bridge sick.
Kain slowly approached the field to avoid startling the flower buds open and tried closing his eyes to enhance his sensitivity to the pull and find the original body of whatever had infected Bridge with its splits, but there were just far too many spiritual creatures present.
“Every individual flower seems to be the host of some kind of spiritual creature. It might be better to just try and kill them all.” Kain turned to Serena, who then promptly summoned her Elemental Guardian in its fire-attribute form and began to set the field ablaze.
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However, discreetly Kain touched one of the flowers and transported it into his System’s Lab. A while ago he’d bought an incubator that could house some microorganisms Kain wasn’t contracted with, like Aby. Although space was limited, this relic was a good opportunity to collect some creatures of interest.
Along the way he’d already collected some glowing specks of blue light from a body they had passed previously that he guessed was similar to phytoplankton, as well as some kind of fungi that had almost knocked him and Serena unconscious due to some kind of gas it emitted.
Now he was adding what was inside of this flower to his collection. One never knew when some of this stuff would come in handy.
“Sigh…if the symptoms hadn’t taken so long to show previously until we were far away from these flowers, I could have destroyed them all the first time we were in here.” Serena said in irritation.
“You can’t take the blame for that. I’m sure you could tell that it wasn’t poison, and you weren’t on the lookout for something living inside of the flowers and causing the illness. It’s understandable that you let your guard down. Hopefully, killing the original body will cure those outside of the relic.” Kain said.
They then turned away from the scorched field and continued on their journey after Kain did his best to sense that no living microorganism was still within the field.
He hoped that Bridge’s condition would improve, although ideally while inside the relic they’d also find something with some healing properties for good measure.