Chapter 219 Seaside: The Answer Lies in the Sea

Chapter 219: The Seaside: The Answer Lies in the Sea

In the 1970s, the golden age of infrastructure in America came to an end. Since then, the pace of infrastructure development across the country has declined year after year, often living off past glories.

Take Radyard City, where the zombie outbreak happened—it's been two years since it was bombed, yet there are still only two flight routes from Dwight State to New Osebah State: "Senk—Jilosha—Conkard" and "Senk—Gega—Conkard."

Two months ago, when Everly came home from school, she'd taken the latter route.

Back then, Gega City was still in the last stretch of calm after the "Ten Plagues of Egypt" incident, with no major violent incidents. During her layover, Everly swung by an art exhibit downtown, where she saw the famous painting "Sea Hag Under the Moonlight."

But in just one summer, things in Gega City took a nosedive—a string of serial killings broke out!

The first case occurred in mid-July on the outskirts of Gega City. A resident out for a morning jog stumbled on the body of a young woman who'd been brutally murdered in the bushes by the roadside.

The girl had been reported missing three days earlier. Based on evidence found in her apartment, police concluded she'd been kidnapped from her home. The kidnapper never asked her family for ransom, and she had no enemies in her social circle. Police were still working the disappearance when they found her body instead.

When she was found, the girl's body was covered in wounds. According to the coroner, the killer had sexually assaulted her while she was still alive, then cut off her left breast and stabbed her dozens of times, causing her to bleed out.

Because the killing closely matched the infamous "Gega Ripper" serial murders from the 1980s, the news threw the whole city into an uproar.

Police got the call and rushed to the scene, throwing massive resources into the investigation.

But all four perpetrators of the original "Gega Ripper" killings had already been caught. One was still in prison, and the other three had been executed by lethal injection—there was no way they were out committing crimes.

So police figured it was a copycat crime.

Just as the Gega City police were ramping up their investigation, another murder happened.

The victim was another young woman, killed in exactly the same way as the last one. But this time, the body was dumped right in front of the police station.

Clearly, the killer was messing with the police!

The Gega City police were furious—and then did absolutely nothing. Once they'd cooled off, they held a press conference, confidently telling the media and the public they had a lead on the killer and would crack the case within three days. They assured everyone to stay calm.

After the press conference, the Gega City police launched a swift operation and arrested a homeless drifter within two days.

But the very next day after the big arrest announcement, another victim was found. Ironically, the third body was found in the exact same banquet hall where the press conference had been held.

The killer was rubbing the police's face in it, over and over!

The Gega City police lost face big time.

Over a month has passed, and the serial killer dubbed the "New Gega Ripper" is still on the loose. The whole city is on edge, with new bodies turning up every three or four days. As of the day Everly checked, eleven people had died, and the police were still being led around by the nose with nothing to show for it.

Everly had no idea what the situation would be like when she and Misha flew into Gega. If she could avoid it, she didn't want to take that gamble.

Don't go thinking this is just some simple serial murder case.

According to what Everly found, the original "Gega Ripper" was four Satanist cultists. They hunted young women and cut off their left breasts to complete an evil sacrificial ritual.

Officials never disclosed the specifics of the ritual, but it was probably something like offering young women's flesh and blood to Satan in exchange for supernatural powers or summoning demons—standard horror movie stuff.

That ritual never succeeded back then.

When they killed their sixth victim, the four cultists slipped up. The sixth victim, despite being stabbed multiple times and having her breast cut off, was still clinging to life. After the killers dumped her "corpse" and took off, she dragged her battered body to the roadside, managed to get help, and gave police the crucial clues that led to their arrest.

As for the current killings... if the Gega police stayed as useless as they were now, Everly seriously worried things would drag on until the evil ritual was completed.

The death toll was at eleven. Two more kills would make thirteen. In the West, thirteen is widely considered an unlucky number:

Judas the betrayer was the thirteenth guest at the Last Supper; folklore says witches hold gatherings on the thirteenth of each month, and the thirteenth to arrive is Satan himself; when the thirteenth lands on a Friday, you get "Black Friday," when Satan's power peaks...

So Everly formed a theory—maybe the evil ritual required killing exactly thirteen women.

On some Friday, the Satanists would kill the thirteenth woman, offer all the collected sacrifices to Satan, complete the ritual, and then... what happened next, Everly had no idea, but it would definitely be way worse than an ordinary murder case.

Everly wasn't about to take that risk, so she turned her attention to Jilosha.

Things weren't exactly peaceful there either.

Before summer break started, Quila of the Winton tribe had told Everly that tons of dead fish had washed up on Jilosha Beach, including a huge, terrifying sea monster.

The dead fish seemed to carry some kind of contamination. Anyone who got near or touched the beach started showing symptoms within days: headaches, diarrhea, skin spots, and nosebleeds. Unfortunately, the outbreak hit right in summer, when tons of tourists were packed at the beach. The illness seemed to spread from person to person, and before long, nearly a third of Jilosha's population had gotten sick.

Hospitals and pharmacies were swamped with patients, straining the city's fragile healthcare system. Healthy residents, seeing the situation, fled the city by car, terrified of becoming the next victim. Others took advantage of the chaos to loot stores and steal property on the streets... Jilosha quickly descended into paralysis.

Unlike the obscure Radyard City, Jilosha was a port city and a crucial transportation hub on America's West Coast. When something went wrong there, the entire national economy felt the impact.

So the federal government reacted with unusual speed.

On the third day of the "epidemic," soldiers sealed off all major entrances and exits to Jilosha, imposing martial law and prohibiting anyone from entering or leaving.

On the fourth day, a flood of doctors, volunteers, virologists, and researchers arrived by sea, land, and air, throwing themselves into treating patients and studying the virus.

Through the collaborative efforts of experts across various fields, they quickly discovered that the strange illness wasn't caused by a virus at all—it was radiation sickness.

And radiation, of course, required a radiation source.

Attention turned to the dead fish and sea monster that had washed ashore. Samples were collected and sent to laboratories for testing, which confirmed that the radiation levels in these marine carcasses far exceeded safety limits.

But here was the strange thing: the dead fish stopped appearing after just five or six days. To contain the "virus," the Jilosha municipal government had already organized workers in hazmat suits to clean up the dead fish and burn them all.

Logically, once the radiation source was eliminated and people received decontamination and medical treatment, their conditions should have improved. Yet no matter what treatment protocols the doctors tried, the citizens of Jilosha not only failed to recover but grew increasingly worse over time.

This defied all scientific explanation!

While the medical team was tearing their hair out, the investigative team responsible for determining the cause was making rapid progress.

The fish that washed ashore were all ordinary species—they couldn't naturally produce radiation. So where did the radiation come from?

Seizing on this key question, the investigation team deployed their "summoning spell" and brought in marine and biological experts from outside.

Marine experts analyzed ocean current patterns, while biologists collected samples of the stranded fish species and precisely mapped their habitats and activity ranges. Working together, within days they pinpointed a specific area of ocean northwest of Jilosha.

If their calculations were correct, the radiation-carrying fish had emerged from that very stretch of sea!

The conclusion came just as Jilosha's strange epidemic reached the one-month mark.

During that time, despite the medical team's treatment plans being flawless on paper, patients grew weaker by the day. Not only did no one recover, but several critically ill patients died. With no hope in sight and unable to leave the city, tensions between patients, medical staff, ordinary citizens, and the government escalated daily, with violent clashes occurring regularly.

To calm the public and prevent further bloodshed, the investigation team was forced to hold a press conference and publicly announce their conclusion that the radiation came from the sea.

Suddenly, attention from all sectors of society turned toward that stretch of ocean.

The continental shelf around Jilosha's coastal waters was narrow—in some places less than a kilometer wide. Beyond the shelf, water depth increased dramatically, and satellite imagery showed the sea color rapidly shifting from light blue to dark blue.

The radiation-carrying dead fish had been pushed by ocean currents from the deep sea beyond the continental shelf to the shore.

That area of ocean, located northwest of Jilosha about 40 kilometers offshore, was international waters—unremarkable on any map.

What makes it special? Why would it be there?

While most people were still baffled, a ninety-year-old retired veteran saw the press conference and reached out to reporters on his own.

The old man had served on a warship on the West Coast. His eyes cloudy, he looked at the reporter and said that the U.S. government had dumped nuclear waste into that sea area after World War II.

"I remember it was 1946, right after the government completed its first atomic bomb test. Not long after, our warship received a secret mission to dump hundreds of metal barrels filled with radioactive waste into the sea. If I remember correctly, the place where we discarded the nuclear waste was right in that strange sea area." On camera, the elderly veteran trembled all over, his face filled with terror.

The reporter interviewing him keenly seized on the key point and pressed further: "You say that sea area is strange?"

"Yes... it is a very strange sea area. No matter what the weather is like outside, a thin fog always shrouds that place. When ships sail into the mist, compasses suddenly fail, radios go static, and sometimes eerie crying and screaming can be heard through the intercom. Because of all the strange occurrences, anyone who knows about that sea area gives it a wide berth. Perhaps that's why the brass chose to have us dump the nuclear waste there..."

The interview was quickly pulled by the U.S. government. But while they could control the media, they couldn't control bored internet users.

The veteran's story was too bizarre. Not only the official investigation team, but also some capable private individuals turned their attention to that sea area.

Why is it so special, always shrouded in fog? In the deep sea, besides the dumped nuclear waste, are there other secrets hidden? Why did this severe nuclear radiation disaster happen when it did—not earlier, not later, but exactly 70 years on?

The answer clearly lies within that vast ocean.