Chapter 21 – The First Decay
The world didn't end in fire.
It ended in rotting flesh—silently, grotesquely, and without warning.
There were no mushroom clouds. No celestial cracks in the sky. No screams loud enough to echo through eternity. Just… silence. And beneath that silence—flesh melting off bone like wax dripping from a forgotten candle.
It began with one man in District 9. An accountant. Thirty-four. Father of two.
He collapsed on the way to the train station, knees hitting the pavement with a sickening crack. Commuters thought he fainted. But when they reached to help him, their fingers sank slightly into his skin.
His flesh had gone soft—like wet clay. Pale grey, with an unnatural slickness. Tissue peeling back in thin layers, revealing pink muscle that was already beginning to separate.
There was no scream. No convulsion. No sign of pain. He simply lay there, still breathing… as if unaware that his body was being quietly dismantled by something unseen.
They quarantined him within hours. By Day 2, the paramedics who had touched him without gloves were showing symptoms: blistering at the fingertips, minor tissue necrosis, unusual fatigue.
By Day 3, one of them was found dead. His tongue had disintegrated.
The scientific community scrambled for answers. Blood samples made no sense—white cells were attacking their own cytoplasm. MRI scans showed no signs of tumors or parasites. The immune system seemed to be accelerating against the host, like it had suddenly become suicidal.
The disease didn't have a name, but people began whispering one:
Decay Zero.
It took exactly fifteen days from first contact to full dissolution. Tissues went first. Then nerves. Then organs. No external bleeding—just slow liquefaction. The body didn't rot—it evaporated.
No known pathogen matched its behavior. It wasn't a virus. It wasn't fungal. It wasn't genetic.
And worst of all?
It wasn't airborne.
It spread through touch.
A handshake. A kiss. A shared towel. A mother holding her baby.
The world began to rot, piece by piece, gesture by gesture. Intimacy became lethal. Love became contagious. Touch became a curse.
Governments collapsed in less than a month. Martial law declared. Borders sealed. But still… people kept dying. Quietly. Painfully.
And from the top of a crumbling skyscraper, above the corpse-filled streets and burning churches, Yumiko watched.
Her eyes glowed faint violet under the shroud of dusk. Her skin was clean—untouched by disease, untouched by fear. The decay never reached her.
She never coughed. Never cried. Never ran. Only whispered:
"This is what happens…
…when you take him away from me."
The world believed they were under biological attack. Conspiracy theories exploded: a secret lab in Europe, a divine plague, even alien retaliation.
But no one, not even the top bioethics council or the last surviving CDC team, understood the truth: They weren't fighting nature. They were fighting obsession.
Yumiko hadn't released a weapon. She had unleashed her love.
Her bond had fractured the universe. Not metaphorically. Literally. The rules of biology were breaking under the weight of her despair.
The disease wasn't natural. It was emotional. A contagion born from grief, rejection, and possessive love too deep to remain contained in one mind.
Outside, survivors did what they could. They burned the bodies. Drenched their homes in bleach. Refused to touch their own children.
Some even cut off their hands—desperate to stop themselves from ever reaching out again.
Love became taboo. Touch became sin.
Religion crumbled. Science failed. Hope… died quietly in a hospital bed somewhere, clutching the hand of a nurse who didn't know she was already infected.
Decay Zero didn't just melt flesh. It melted humanity.
And all the while, Yumiko smiled through her tears.
Because even if the world died—her grief would be felt.
The world believed they were fighting a plague.
But in truth…
They were dying of a broken heart.
And this was only the beginning.
By the sixth week, language began to decay.
Not in the mouths of survivors, but in the structure of communication itself.
People no longer said "I love you."
They said, "Don't touch me."
Not "How are you?" but "Are you clean?"
Hospitals turned into fortresses.
Schools emptied overnight.
Children were forbidden to hug their parents. In some towns, newborns were wrapped in plastic—quarantined from love.
And the most terrifying truth?
You didn't even need prolonged contact.
One second. One brush. One careless bump in a hallway.
It was enough.
The body would begin to unravel slowly—like a zipper being undone from the inside.
Fingertips first.
Then lips.
Then eyelids would stop blinking, and the veins would shine black underneath translucent skin. The rot was beautiful in a grotesque way. Like watching a flower bloom in reverse—petals shriveling, stem wilting, until all that remained was ruin.
Some scientists tried to track it with maps and data.
Others… turned to ritual.
Mass burnings of the infected.
Pagan chants.
Sacrifices.
In one isolated region, survivors built a monument from the bones of the melted. A cathedral of decay, where people prayed not for salvation—but for numbness.
They couldn't fight something they couldn't understand.
And at the center of this quiet apocalypse… Yumiko moved like a phantom.
She never left footprints.
Security cameras fuzzed when she walked by.
Dogs howled in her presence.
And yet—she touched no one.
Her wrath was already done.
It didn't need her hand anymore.
The rot lived in memories now.
In a decaying subway, someone wept over a photograph.
Their spouse. Gone.
The next morning, they too had lesions—despite being alone for weeks.
The scientists called it "Echo Contact."
But Yumiko's smile hinted at the truth.
> "If you love them… you'll join them."
This was not a plague. It was not war. It was justice—carved into flesh by the hands of grief itself.
Entire cities began to wall themselves in.
Metal doors. Biohazard suits. Automated kitchens. No more human-to-human contact.
Society tried to sterilize emotion out of existence.
But it was too late.
The infection had learned to leap not only by flesh—but by longing.
Some died just from watching old footage of their loved ones.
Some from reading old letters.
Some… simply from remembering a hug.
The decay was no longer physical.
It was existential.
It feasted on memory.
On guilt.
On the desire to be held.
Humanity was being erased—not by destruction, but by its most fragile need.
And somewhere out there, Yumiko sat still in the dark, listening to the silence she had birthed.
The planet had gone quiet.
No more cries.
No more screams.
Only the slow dripping of life unthreading itself.
Decay Zero was no longer a disease.
It was a religion.