Favorite of the Beast-world: I Got Rich Through Farming-Chapter 385 - 258: Plague and Cremation

[DING—City successfully reclaimed. Task progress: 100%! You will receive the following rewards.]

[Rewards: ① Gold Coins +500

② Robust Body (SSR, physical constitution bonus. After use, provides resistance to all injuries and diseases for 72 hours.)

③ Recommended City Plan (one)]

With the arrival of the New City Lord, An Jin also bestowed a new beginning upon this city!

She renamed the Beast Slave King City to Re-refining City, symbolizing rebirth and tempering. It also embodied her hopes and vision for its future.

...

Beastmen lay scattered across the streets, like corpses.

From the corners came the sounds of widespread coughing, groaning, and weeping. The air was thick with the stench of blood and rot... This battered city reeked of starvation, poverty, and disease.

As An Jin led her people from the west side of the city to the north, an expression of sorrow uncontrollably crept onto her face.

But distant water couldn’t put out a nearby fire. Her own city was too far away; even if she sent someone for aid, the round trip would take nearly half a month.

Ze Sheng took the initiative and offered to send a contingent of Beastmen from Unicorn King City with food and medical supplies to solve the most pressing problems.

"No! Don’t drag him away! He’s not dead yet!" A female’s anguished cry caught An Jin’s attention.

She turned to see the city cleanup crew she had assigned dragging away a "corpse," only to be stopped by the Beastman’s mate.

The Beastmen on the crew seemed helpless in the face of the female’s tears and obstruction. Spotting An Jin nearby, they hurried over. "Lord City Lord, look, what should we do? This person is already sick. If we don’t clear him away, he’ll infect more Beastmen..."

After spending three days with them, and with An Jin having provided them with food and medicine, the Beastmen had already begun to spontaneously and respectfully call her City Lord.

"He’s not sick, he just fainted from hunger! If you just give him some food, he’ll wake up!"

The slightly older female pointed at the dying Beastman on the ground and wailed.

Her eyes were red from crying. She sloppily wiped her nose and said fiercely, "He’s the only mate I have left! I’m so old, I can’t find a young male who can hunt. What will I do if he dies? You can’t take him away to be burned!"

An Jin said expressionlessly, "He can no longer be saved. If you don’t want to end up like him in the next few days, then hand him over to the staff for cremation."

"What do you mean by that?" the female stared at An Jin in terror.

Her tears hadn’t yet dried, and mixed with the grime on her face, she looked like a refugee on the run. She subconsciously rubbed her itchy arm.

Although covered by dirt, the red marks on her arm and chest were still clearly visible. The itching forced her to scratch harder, almost drawing blood.

"You’ve already been infected."

Ignoring the female who instantly collapsed to the ground screaming, she lifted her chin and said to the Beastmen behind her, "Take her mate outside the city for cremation. Lock her in the camp for quarantine. Her symptoms look like they’ve been present for a while. Have someone keep an eye on her and make sure she takes her medicine on time..."

"Yes!"

The Beastmen replied respectfully, their eyes filled with urgency as they quickly got to work.

They took the fiercely struggling female and other sick Beastmen to the temporarily constructed quarantine camp.

Only after taking over the city did An Jin realize that its surface-level poverty and decay were the least of her administrative difficulties.

At some unknown point, a plague had begun to spread through the city. What was even more terrifying was that no one knew how long it had been spreading.

—Insect plague, dysentery, Red Scourge Rash...

More than half of the Beastmen had contracted these plagues.

Each of these plagues was more contagious than the last.

Mi Yin and the others were King Beasts with extremely strong immune systems. The reason An Jin was able to detect the plague so quickly was that she herself had begun to show initial symptoms on the first night.

If she hadn’t used [Robust Body], she probably would have fallen ill as well.

In the following days, she spent a considerable number of Gold Coins in the System Mall to buy the relevant medicinal formulas. Then, she led a group of Beastmen to search the surrounding areas for ingredients. After three sleepless days and nights, they finally managed to produce the first batch of medicine, which was urgently distributed to the sick Beastmen in the city.

But the number of infected in the city was too great, and most of the Beastmen were already terminally ill. She made the decision to give up on those whose chances of survival were too slim, saving the limited medicine for other patients.

Although this approach wasn’t very humane, it was the most rational choice at the moment.

Sick Beastmen would be sent to the quarantine camp to be isolated, making it easier to manage their conditions at all times. She would have people deliver food and treatment to them on a unified schedule.

As for the terminally ill Beastmen who had been given up on, or the rotting corpses piled in the city corners, they would be taken by the city’s administrative staff to a location outside the walls for cremation to prevent further infection.

The Beastmen had an instinctual resistance to cremation—

"Our bodies are born from the earth and should be returned to the earth! This violates the will of the Beast God! It also goes against the long-held beliefs of our race!"

"Maybe we could bury them instead. We could dig a deep pit, throw all the bodies in, and then cover them with earth. That way they won’t infect anyone else!"

"No." Facing the many appealing Elders, An Jin shook her head, her tone firm and admitting no argument. "The bodies of the sick must be cremated, and only cremated! Burial will not solve the problem!"

"If we simply bury them, when the rainy season comes, the bodies will all be washed out and exposed. The contaminated rainwater will flow into the rivers we drink from and cause the plague to spread all over again! And there’s a high probability it will be even more ferocious and severe than this time!"

A cold glint flashed in her dark eyes. She tapped her fingers on the stone table and said harshly, "If that really happens, can you bear the consequences?"

Her gaze swept over the Beastmen in front of her who were trying to persuade her.

"You, you, and you... even your relatives, your mates, and your descendants could die because of this. Is that the outcome you want?"

She could understand why the Beastmen found cremation difficult to accept; after all, it conflicted with their primal totemic beliefs. But this city, with everything waiting to be rebuilt, absolutely could not be allowed to revert to its former state over a single oversight!

’You have to accept things one step at a time, don’t you?’

Many of them lowered their heads in shame, having heard the hidden anger in her cold questioning. Looking anxious and constrained, one said, "We are willing to carry out the cremations..."

"The City Lord is right. Until we find another solution, cremation is indeed the only viable method. None of us want this city to go back to the way it was..."

Those words stirred up the memories that everyone hated most.

And so, no one questioned the matter of cremation again.