In the shadowed underbelly of Earth-02, where the remnants of ancient forests cshed with the encroaching sprawl of human settlements, a peculiar vermin had evolved into something far more sinister than its mundane ancestors. The common red rat, as it came to be known among the survivors and schors of this fractured world, was no ordinary pest. Its fur gleamed with an unnatural crimson hue, as if stained by the blood of the earth itself. These creatures were not born from the usual litters scurrying through sewers or abandoned ruins; instead, they manifested in swarms around the carcasses of their dull-gray kin—the ordinary rats that pgued the old cities.
Observers from the Frontier Research Collective first documented this phenomenon in the year 2047, amid the ruins of what was once the Amazon Basin, now a patchwork of regrown wilds and human-encroached clearings. The red rats would emerge seemingly from thin air, drawn by the scent of decay. They did not feast on the dead; rather, they circled the fallen bodies in ritualistic patterns, chittering in high-pitched symphonies that echoed through the night. But it was their peculiar habit that truly baffled the scientists: the red rats invariably sought out sites where trees had been half-felled or fully chopped down, depositing their waste in precise, almost deliberate piles upon the exposed stumps and roots.
These acts were no mere biological quirk. Reports compiled over decades revealed a startling corretion—trees marked by the red rats' excrement regenerated at an astonishing rate. What should have taken seasons or years to heal sprouted fresh growth in a mere seven weeks. Saplings burst forth from the tainted soil, their bark tinged with faint red veins, as if infused with the rats' essence. Ecologists hypothesized that the waste contained a symbiotic bacteria or enzyme, accelerating cellur repair in pnt life. In a world ravaged by climate wars and resource scarcity, this discovery sparked both hope and dread. Farmers in the outer colonies began luring ordinary rats to their death, hoping to summon the red ones and hasten crop cycles. But such meddling came at a cost.
The true horror of the red rats unveiled itself in the infamous incident of 2052, when a desperate band of scavengers from the Ironcd Encve stumbled upon a swarm in the felled groves of the Neo-Andes. Starving after a failed raid, the group—five hardened survivors led by a man named Kael—captured and consumed one of the crimson creatures. They roasted it over a makeshift fire, its flesh surprisingly tender and ced with a metallic tang. Within hours, the effects set in.
Kael's journal, recovered from the site, described the onset: "Our eyes burned like coals in a forge. The whites vanished, swallowed by a sea of red. Strength surged through us— I lifted a fallen log with one hand, five times my normal might. We ughed like gods reborn." But the euphoria was fleeting. The Red Pgue, as it was ter dubbed, ravaged their bodies from within. Fever spiked, muscles convulsed, and by the 24-hour mark, three of the group y writhing in agony. Death cimed them swiftly, their forms twisting into grotesque parodies of humanity, skin blistering crimson before the final breath escaped.
Only one in five exposed to the pgue survived the initial 48 hours, their bodies somehow adapting to the viral onsught. Kael was that rare survivor, enduring for another 20 years as a wandering oracle of sorts. But survival bore its own curses. The side effects were profound and irreversible: reproductive functions ceased entirely, rendering the afflicted Highly fertile in their private capacities—a quiet end to lineages in a world already teetering on depopution. Yet, this loss was counterbanced by a macabre gift. Vital organs regenerated at an unnatural pace; 50% of them could heal from major injuries in under an hour. Kael himself recounted losing a kidney to a bandit’s bde, only to feel it knit back together before the sun set.
Whispers spread through the factions of Earth-02—the Corporate Syndicates, the Eco-Rebels, and the Isotionist Cns—that the red rats were no accident of evolution. Some cimed they were bio-engineered relics from the pre-colpse wars, designed to terraform war-torn nds but mutated beyond control. Others saw them as harbingers of a greater pgue, a crimson tide that would one day engulf humanity. Kael, in his final testament before vanishing into the wilds, warned: "The rats do not scavenge death; they birth it anew. Eat of them, and you trade your soul for borrowed power."
As the forests of Earth-02 continued to rise and fall under the axe, the red rats persisted, silent guardians of regeneration and ruin. In their wake, trees bloomed red-veined and resilient, a testament to the delicate bance between life and the abyss. But for those who dared tempt fate, the pgue waited, eyes turning to blood, strength fleeting as the grave.