Zombie Girls Revival System-Chapter 181: When the Red Rot Returned… Death Wasn’t the End.

The maid's panicked shriek was like a siren, instantly replacing the sorrow with adrenaline. The fragile space of grief vanished. Evelise, despite her swollen eyes and trembling frame, snapped back into the cold reality of her mission.

"The Rot has returned?" Evelise whispered, horror replacing despair. "Impossible. My dosage stabilizes the genetic markers— it shouldn't regress this quickly… No it should not… returned."

Oshan immediately moved to the closet, retrieving Evelise's medical satchel.

"Lady Evelise, we must go. If the cure failed, the unification fails. We need to save her!"

Evelise nodded, pushing herself off the bed. "Guard," she commanded Sid, her voice strained but professional. "Follow with the emergency vials. We waste no time."

The four of them— Evelise, Oshan carrying the bag, Sid the guard, and the hysterical maid burst into the Mayor's wife's elaborate medical suite.

The scene was chaos. The Mayor was leaning over his wife's bedside, shouting incoherently, his face a mask of terror. Servants were huddled by the walls, whispering desperate prayers.

The Mayor's wife was in a state far worse than before. She was convulsing violently, her body shaking the entire bed. Her high fever was radiating palpable heat, and the tell tale red rot was now a sickening, widespread rash covering her face and neck, spreading faster than Evelise's initial treatment could have allowed.

"Evelise! You are finally here!" the Mayor roared, spinning around, his fury instantly focused on her. "Look! Look at what your barbaric cure has done! She is worse! Why? Why is the Rot back? You told me she was cured! You promised the City a miracle!"

Sid, holding the emergency vials, felt a chill of dread. He looked at the rapidly deteriorating woman, confusion mounting in his mind.

"Lady Evelise healed her, Your Honor," Sid's guard persona spoke, his voice unusually strained. "I witnessed the receding of the Rot myself. What could cause such an immediate and violent relapse?"

The Mayor ignored the guard, lunging toward Evelise. "Silence, Guard! This is between me and the failure!"

Evelise stepped past the raving Mayor, her focus laser sharp on the patient. She shoved the political noise aside, her scientific mind overriding her emotional pain.

"Oshan, quickly, the high-concentration paste!" Evelise commanded. "The genetic markers must have destabilized under an external shock!"

Oshan immediately opened the satchel, producing the jade green paste. Evelise took a finger full and, with the same gentle precision as before, applied it to a large, weeping patch of the Red Rot on the wife's forehead.

They all watched. Silence descended, thick and absolute.

The paste touched the skin. Nothing happened.

Evelise swiped again, harder. The Rot continued to fester beneath the herbal remedy. The infected tissue remained inflamed, sickly, and utterly unresponsive.

Evelise gasped, a sound of profound shock.

"It's not working!" the Mayor screamed, his voice cracking with panic and escalating anger. "The miracle is a lie! It's accelerating! You failed us! You promised!"

Evelise tried a different vial, a dark root concentrate. She rubbed it furiously onto the woman's arm, her movements losing their former grace, turning desperate.

"It must work! It must!" Evelise pleaded, her voice cracking with terror. "The stabilizing agent should be reacting! Why is it not reacting?"

The wife's convulsions grew more violent, her body shaking so hard the bed frame rattled. Evelise tried two more combinations, working frantically, her knowledge failing her for the first time.

The Mayor grabbed Evelise's shoulder, hauling her back. "Stop it, you charlatan! You filthy animal! You've done nothing but speed up her death! You are not a miracle; you are a mistake!"

Evelise stumbled back, her face streaked with tears and herbal paste. She looked at the woman on the bed, her breathing shallow, the convulsions slowing... slowing...

And then, with a terrible, final shudder, the Mayor's wife went completely still.

Evelise stared at the lifeless, rotting face, her hands frozen mid-air. She sank to her knees, a terrible, guttural sob escaping her.

"I failed," she whispered, her voice crushed. "I failed them all."

The Mayor stood over her, his face purple with absolute fury, his grief twisted into monstrous rage.

"Failure! You are a fraud! A common beast! You cost me my wife and my stability! You will regret the day you ever set foot in this City!" the Mayor roared, kicking the nearby supply table, sending metal instruments clattering across the floor.

"She did everything she could, Your Honor!" Sid's guard persona interjected, breaking protocol completely, his voice ringing with angry defense. "She risked everything! The fault lies in the disease, not in her healing—"

"Who the hell are you to speak to me!?" the Mayor thundered, rounding on the guard. "You are nothing but a hired uniform! Get out of my sight! Get both of these... these beasts out of my City! The agreement is dead!"

The Mayor's furious shouting was suddenly interrupted by a new, unwelcome presence. The door swung open again, revealing Harry, the Mayor's son, looking even more disheveled than at the engagement party, his eyes bleary and his suit jacket askew.

"What is all this bloody commotion?" Harry slurred, stumbling over the threshold. "Can a man not enjoy his well-earned rest? Who is making all the noise—"

He stopped short, his gaze landing on his father, who was sobbing uncontrollably beside the motionless bed. Harry blinked, the realization slowly filtering through the synth-wine haze.

"Wait... why is Father crying?" Harry mumbled, stumbling toward the bed. "Is... is my mother dead?"

He reached the bedside, looked down at the pale, still face of the Mayor's wife, and crumpled into a messy heap of drunken grief. "Mother! No! You can't leave me!"

Evelise, still on her knees, ignored Harry's melodramatic collapse. Driven by instinct, she crawled back toward the bed, pushing aside the distraught Mayor. She reached for the woman's wrist, seeking a pulse, her face a mask of desperate scientific inquiry.

"She was only convulsing!" Evelise whispered frantically. "The heart should still be active! The Rot attacks tissue, not the central nervous system instantly!"

She searched for a heartbeat, and her eyes widened in profound, chilling horror.

"Nothing," Evelise gasped, her voice raw. "There is no pulse. Why? It was too sudden! What happened in those last moments?"

The Mayor, wiping tears with a shaking hand, brutally shoved Evelise away from the bed. She tumbled backward onto the rug.

"Don't touch her, you failure!" the Mayor roared, his voice thick with a vengeful finality. "I knew it! I knew this would happen, but I kept hoping this... this beast was a miracle! But you are nothing! You are the curse!"

The Mayor turned his back on his dead wife and his sobbing son. He reached into the desk drawer beside the bed, his movements jerky and filled with deadly intent. He pulled out a heavy, ornate pistol— a ceremonial sidearm.

He leveled the weapon directly at Evelise.

"You are an abomination!" the Mayor screamed, his voice reaching a fever pitch. "You didn't cure her—you spread the curse! You used your touch to infect her and accelerate the Red Rot to hide your failure! You killed my wife, and now you will pay the price for the City!"

The sound of the metallic click as the safety came off echoed through the room.

Oshan, screaming a wordless sound of desperate loyalty, threw herself forward, covering Evelise completely. Sid, the guard, reacted instantly, placing himself squarely between the armed Mayor and the two humanimals.

"Your Honor, stand down!" Sid commanded, his voice ringing with authority and desperation. "This is madness! You will not execute an Alliance asset on a false charge!"

"I am the Alliance, Guard! And I say she dies!" the Mayor shrieked, his finger tightening on the trigger.

Just as the tension reached its breaking point—just as the Mayor was about to pull the trigger—a sound came from the bed.

It was a wet, involuntary gasp.

Harry, who was still slumped over the corpse, recoiled instantly, stumbling backward and pointing a terrified, drunken finger at his mother.

"Mother? Did you... did you just gasp?"

The Mayor, weapon still raised, froze. Everyone turned to the bed.

The Mayor's wife was no longer still. Her head slowly, unnaturally, lifted from the pillow. Her eyes, which had been closed in death, were now open, staring blankly upward.

But they were not the eyes of the living. They were milky, cloudy white, opaque and blind. A strange, inhuman shriek escaped her throat— a sound of tearing tissue and pure, mindless hunger.

Then, horrifyingly, the sounds began: the audible cracking and shattering of bone and cartilage as her body, driven by a violent neurological impulse, began to twist and contort itself. Her spine elongated, her limbs stiffened, and with a sickening crunch, the Mayor's wife hauled herself to her feet.

She stood there, pale and rotting, twitching with lethal energy. The Rot had completed its work.

Sid stared, his mind reeling.

"No… no way. This isn't just a sickness. This is…"