The black miasma of the Primordial Poverty & Despair Contagion rolled across forty thousand galaxies like boiling ink.
Everywhere it touched, spiritual vegetation turned to brittle black dust. In mortal farm valleys, golden wheat fields withered and collapsed into gray ash within seconds. Rivers of fresh spring water curdled into foul, oily slime that smelled of rotting copper.
Across millions of viewing pavilions in the middle and lower heavens, veteran cultivators clutched their throats, coughing up thick, foul black blood as their dantian meridians decayed. In the border academies, young students collapsed over their wooden desks, their fingers turning numb and gray.
High in the cosmic abyss, the Chairman’s surviving red eyes burned with venomous triumph:
“FEEL THE DESPAIR OF TEN THOUSAND GENERATIONS,” the Chairman’s mechanical voice rasped through the poisoned void. “THIS CONTAGION WAS CULTURED FROM THE DYING BREATHS OF EVERY MORTAL WHO STARVED UNDER OUR FORECLOSURES. IT DEVOURS HOPE. IT CORRODES ALL IMMUNITY. YOUR FLEET WILL DROWN IN YOUR OWN ROTTING MERIDIAN BILE.”
Inside the debtor cage on the terrace, former Seventh Director Gu-Du—the former master of the bank’s poison and grain cartels—clutched the golden bars, cackling with sick delight:
“That’s the master pathogen! We spent fifty thousand epochs breeding that rot in the dark pits of Wall Five! There is no antidote in creation! Not even an immortal emperor can cleanse a contagion made of pure cosmic poverty!”
