Infected Realms

Prologue: The Dead Earth

The sun set over a desolate, forgotten world, casting long shadows over a landscape that had known nothing but silence for years. Buildings stood in ruins, their windows shattered and their walls crumbling under the weight of decay. Streets once bustling with life were now overgrown with weeds, reclaimed by nature in the absence of human hands to tend them. Cars lay abandoned where they had stopped, their drivers long gone, reduced to dust.

This was not Earth as it should be. This was a dead version of Earth, ravaged by a virus that swept through the population so quickly that no one had a chance to fight back. On this Earth, the timeline had taken a sharp and tragic turn when a hastily tested vaccine—created to combat a more aggressive strain of coronaviruses—was released prematurely. The mutation, a fusion of coronaviruses and a mad neurological pathogen, spread not only faster than expected but with terrifying consequences. The first to receive the vaccine, in a rash decision driven by ego, was the leader of the free world—a man who believed himself immune to consequence, determined to make his country great again.

But the vaccine wasn't safe. It was an abomination, a death sentence delivered in a syringe. Within days of its release, the mutated virus began to spread uncontrollably, turning people into hollow shells of themselves—violent, decaying, mindless creatures. The world fell in weeks, and by the time scientists realized what had happened, it was too late. The virus consumed everything.

On this dead Earth, nothing remained. Or so it seemed.

Beneath the surface, something stirred. Not life, but energy—the remnants of a decayed reality clung to existence, feeding off the quantum instability created by the collapse of their universe. It was not a physical infection anymore but a rip in the very fabric of reality, a tear that allowed the dead Earth to bleed into another world—our world.