The Blight in its purest form is crystal, and the crystal pulses amber. That’s why the converted grow pointed, crystallization has a geometry and flesh obeys it. That’s why deep-stage skin reads cracked and glowing, amber light through fissured flesh. That’s why the Garden of Flesh is called a garden, why the Glass Taiga rings, and why deep Blight-glass and pre-Fall storage glass sit uncomfortably close under a loupe. And the crystal bends light. Stare too long at the horizon’s glow and your vision phases apart, colors separating and re-registering wrong. Stand too near a concentration, a creature, a bloom, a marked object, and the air itself distorts, the way heat shimmers, except colder and more deliberate. The Wisp at your shoulder ticks faster. Trust the tick.
What it is depends on who’s answering. The clinics file it as a conversion agent, not a toxin, a catalyst that rewrites what it saturates rather than killing it. The faiths file it as attention. Every instrument that measures it agrees on one thing only, the readings strengthen along the heading where the charts stop, and no institution in four centuries has published a sentence past that fact.
What’s documented is exposure. It accrues from ambient district contamination, Atomic worst inside the walls, from weather, Amberfall above all, from the deep Wastes, from contact with converted material, and from certain deliberate acts between people, which have their own chapter and their own consent rules. Accumulation is continuous, measured, and readable at any terminal, and it doesn’t care what you believe. Standing in the wrong district on a bad night is participation. Resistance is a discipline with its own culture. So is embrace. The city prices both.
[ADVISORY ENDS. CHECK YOUR RATE AT ANY TERMINAL.]