The Blood Bleaching

History

The Blood Bleaching was a devastating plague that spread throughout the galaxy and wiped out a huge chunk of its population shortly before the series begins. The Blood Bleaching infected its first victim on Vigam in 21 BR, after he escaped from the web of a goatweaver tarantula. The goatweaver tarantulas were the main carriers of the disease, but they normally isolated themselves so much from the creatures they did not eat that this man on Vigam was the first to come into contact with the bacteria that caused the disease. The man was a citizen of Caputus Vigamius, a bustling center of both local and interplanetary trade, meaning that the disease had spread all across Vigam within two months. The first few deaths were reported in Caputus Vigamius almost exactly two weeks after the disease's first victim entered the city. The Vigamians, having never dealt with a pandemic before, were baffled by the rapid spread of the plague and the rapid death of their citizens. Since the Vigamians had no clue how to deal with this, their doctors offered little more than moral support. However, it was soon obvious that person-to-person contact was spreading the disease, and many people simply left the cities and went to live in less densely populated areas such as the Blue Forest and Hurrian Gorge. Vigam was not the only place that would be affected by the plague.

Soon after the first deaths were reported in Caputus Vigamius, a spaceship carried the disease to the planet of Rinascita. Although the Rinascitans were more competent than the Vigamians, they also lost many of their citizens. When the 8th City of Gold became so filled with the infected that those in the city who were not infected became less than 5% of the city's population, Rinascita's government simply burned the city down and had all the infected inhabitants hung to limit the spread of the disease. The bodies were burned to prevent the disease from spreading from corpse to person. Reports soon spread throughout the galaxy of a disease that was causing the Rinascitans and Vigamians to use mass graves, and some planets tried to cut off the disease by temporarily shutting down trade. However, the disease had already used the galaxy's trade routes to spread to most inhabited planets.  Iteru, Ishga, Arturia, and both planets of the Ryu system were among the first wave of planets to report cases, with Awal, Aurea, Bharatam, Aztlan, and Planet Squid among the second wave. Almost everywhere the disease went, it caused populations to disperse from the cities, huge population loss, social unrest, and unconventional methods of corpse disposal (the only exception was Bharatam, which had a tradition of cremation anyway). On Vigam, corpses were simply dumped in rivers, lakes, and ponds when the government ran out of land for mass graves. On Awal, corpses were simply dragged out into the desert and left to dry out. Aztlan dumped its corpses into Lake Coxcote when the Cenote ran out of room. The only planet that dealt with the plague with any level of competency whatsoever was Ishga, which simply cured most of its victims with antibiotics. However, the rest of the galaxy could not afford to pay the absurd prices that the greedy Ishga royal family set for the cure, leaving the rest of the galaxy to suffer. Meanwhile, Aztlan offered up almost an eighth of its entire population up to the Gods as human sacrifices. However, this did not work since the Gods were to busy with their constant parties and orgies to notice that their subjects all over the galaxy were dying. Some planets, such as Ryu 108 and Aurea, managed to avoid the worst of the disease either through their low population densities or limited contact with the rest of the galaxy.

Aftermath

By 15 BR, the disease had disappeared as quietly as it came, fading into nothingness as the last of its victims, a man on Iteru, died of the disease. What was left after this plague was a depopulated, demoralized, deorganized, and dysfunctional galaxy. The almost total loss of Planet Squid's urban population was a contributing factor to Yengwayo's Uprising. Iteru lost so much of its population that it was almost completely incapable of defending itself against outside invaders, allowing Tate to easily commit the Iteru Genocide less than a year later. Vigam, facing 85% total population loss, plunged into civil war as those inhabiting the now more populated rural areas tried to assert themselves over the last urban populations. The plague crippled Bharatam's Mongoose Empire, allowing the Rajphants and several Panthidian Kingdoms to declare their independence virtually unopposed. The lack of adequate response by King Arturius to the plague on Arturia resulted in the city of Dun Leigh losing almost all of its population and placed a strain on relations between the Froudlings and King Arturius, eventually resulting in the Coup of 11 AR. Among the plague's victims was the Aurean Dominus Theodosius IV, which resulted in over a decade of political instability on Aurea regarded by most historians as having paved the way for Tate's meteoric takeover there. The galaxy's lackluster response to the plague would play extensively into Tate's propaganda narrative, allowing Tate to portray the galaxy's governments (especially the Ishgas) as selfish cronies who avoided sharing the cure with the galaxy for monetary gain.

Biology

The bacterium that causes the disease, Sanguis Extinctor, is native to Vigam. Its normal host is the Goatweaver Tarantula, a huge spider that inhabits isolated, dry areas on the planet. Its webs are valued by sentients for their adhesiveness and durability, however the Vigamians unknowingly disinfect the webs before using them via their purification ritual. Unlike most bacteria, Sanguis Extinctor is not picky about its host species, being capable of infecting anything from sentients to salamanders. Sanguis Extinctor has an incubation period of around a week before it begins doing serious damage to the blood and the first symptoms occur. The bacteria feed on hemoglobin in the bloodstream, a process which empties the blood of its red color, resulting in the white color the blood takes on during the later phases of the disease. This process draws an extremely high concentration of white blood cells to the bloodstream, clogging up the bloodstream and preventing nutrients from getting through, which causes the intense hunger of the victims' final days. Lack of hemoglobin in the bloodstream causes extremely rapid and labored breathing, but even this usually fails to compensate, resulting in death usually within a week. The disease kills the overwhelming majority of untreated patients, and those who do survive usually suffer from brain damage and heart disease. However, with treatment, around 66% of patients survive with no lasting side effects.