Miriam's letter was a gentle spark in the icy crucible of Reuben's heart. It did not fill him with warmth, but with a feeble, leading light in the searing blackness. He walked forward with a fresh, grim determination, the resonance of her statement—"I hope it's worth it"—a soft, internal mantra amidst the System's alerts and the thrum of his continued suffering. He was no longer merely rescuing anonymous millions; he was trying to achieve a morsel of redemption in his daughter's eyes.
It was in such a state that the new threat appeared, not as the quiet, insidious anomaly of the Ghost Fever, but as a fire that raged, a garish spectacle.
The alert came in the form of the System's Human Conflict Module, not Pathogen Tracking.
[Media Event: High-Impact. Source: Crane, Howard. Location: San
