The temporary lab was tense, filled with a feeling heavier than Master Fen's strange fumes. The failed healing test was a huge, unanswered problem hanging over them. Lira sat quietly, looking after the rescued pot plant, her brow furrowed, seeming to listen for a whisper only she could hear.

Jonah paced the stone floor, his mind replaying the scene over and over: the blight's relentless, hungry return. It wasn't just a force; it was an organism.

The lab was split into two worlds.

In one corner was Master Fen's messy area for alchemy. Glass vials softly bubbled with strangely colored liquids. A complex set of lenses pointed at a slide holding a tiny piece of bad soil.

Hiss. Bubble. Clank.

"Useless fungi!" Fen complained, turning a brass knob. "Lazy bacteria! No drive!" He peered through the eyepiece, his wild white hair looking stiff with frustration. For hours, he had been trying to find what caused the spread, the true start of the sickness.

Suddenly, he went still. The constant grumbling stopped. He leaned in closer, his breath fogging the lens. "Wait a minute…"

He suddenly worked fast and very carefully. His hands a blur as he switched slides and added a drop of a glowing, silver liquid. He looked through the eyepiece again.

"There you are, you little monster," he whispered, a strange mix of horror and admiration in his voice.

He tapped a control, and the image from his alchemical microscope appeared on a large projection screen in the center of the room. Floating in a field of magnified soil particles was a single, tiny object. It wasn't a rough, natural spore. It was a perfect geometric shape, twelve-sided with razor-sharp edges and a pulsating light at its core. It looked less like something that had grown and more like something that had been built.

"This is the vector," Fen announced, his voice tight with discovery. The entire team turned to look. "Every sample of blighted soil, every particle in the corrupted air, is filled with these. They are the blight's seeds."

He zoomed in on the image, revealing impossibly complex structures within the spore. "Look at that genetic structure. It's too clean. Too ruthlessly efficient. There are no wasted elements, no evolutionary dead ends. This isn't the product of a million years of natural selection."

His fist came down on the table with a loud thud. "This is not natural! This is a weapon!"

________________________________________________________________________________

While Fen had been exploring the physical world, Vanessa was mapping the magical one. Her corner of the lab was the complete opposite of his: clean and orderly. Glowing runic arrays were projected in the air around her, buzzing with a low energy. She was analyzing the very soul of the blight.

"The chaotic energy is a smokescreen," she murmured to herself, her fingers flying across her data slate. "It's designed to look like random, uncontrolled corruption."

She filtered out the noise, layer by layer, peeling back the magical static. And then she saw it. Beneath the roaring chaos, there was a repeating pattern.

It was a runic signature, a magical trademark, woven into the very fabric of the blight's aura. It was faint, almost undetectable, but it was there, repeating over and over again like a maker's mark stamped onto a blade.

"Got you," she whispered.

Her expression hardened. A signature this complex and this well-hidden was the work of a master. But who?

She opened a secure connection to the Academy's restricted archives. Her new status on Jonah's team had granted her clearance to databases very few students ever saw. She carefully transcribed the runic sequence, her stylus a blur of light, and initiated a search.

The system whirred, cross-referencing the signature against centuries of magical records: forbidden texts, confiscated research, and the files of every Elite who had ever been disciplined or exiled.

For a long minute, nothing happened. Then, a single file beeped onto the screen. A match.

ACCESS RESTRICTED: LEVEL 7 CLEARANCE REQUIRED. FILE REDACTED BY ORDER OF THE HEADMASTER'S OFFICE.

Vanessa's heart began to beat faster. She overrode the lock with Jonah's authority, granted to her for the mission. The file opened.

Her blood ran cold.

The screen displayed the portrait of a man with sharp, intelligent eyes and an arrogant smile. Below it was his name.

Dr. Aris Thorne.

Class: Alchemist / Bio-Mancer.

Status: Exiled.

Citation: Expelled from the Academy thirty years ago for unethical and forbidden experiments in creating weaponized, sentient flora.

The words hit her like a physical blow. Weaponized flora. It all clicked into place. The perfect spore. The intelligent design. The self-propagating nature.

She immediately opened a secure, encrypted comms channel. Jonah saw the look on her face and was at her side in an instant.

"Jonah, get Seraph on the line. Now." Her voice was dangerously quiet.

A moment later, Seraph's face appeared on another screen. Her image was crisp and clear, transmitted from a military lookout post miles away. She looked as serious as always. "Report."

Vanessa didn't waste time with pleasantries. She shared her screen. "Master Fen was right. The blight is a weapon. And I've found its creator."

She put Thorne's file front and center for everyone to see.

Jonah stared at the face on the screen, a cold dread creeping up his spine. He listened as Vanessa read the summary of Thorne's expulsion, the pieces of the puzzle snapping into place with a series of sickening clicks.

Lira, who had come over to see what the commotion was, let out a small, pained gasp. "A Bio-Mancer… a creator. Like you, Jonah. But he… he tortures life. He forces it to be an instrument of pain."

"He's not just its creator," Jonah said, the chilling realization dawning on him. "An artist doesn't abandon his masterpiece. He's here. Somewhere in the province, watching his handwork, enjoying the show."

The mission had just changed. They weren't fighting a mysterious plague anymore. They were fighting a brilliant, but evil scientist.

And he was watching them.