I Rule Rome with a God-Tier AI-Chapter 115: The Ghost on the Wind

The city-forge of Vulcania was a testament to Alex's new world order, a roaring, smoke-belching symbol of Roman power made manifest. The work was proceeding at a pace that bordered on the miraculous. Barracks and walls rose from the earth as if summoned by a god's hand. The forges glowed day and night, their rhythmic hammering a constant, reassuring heartbeat that promised a future of unbreakable steel. The first cohorts of the northern legions were already training with Celer's repeating crossbows, their confidence growing with every volley that shredded the practice targets. The nomadic horde, according to the latest intelligence, was still a full season's march away, gathering on the far steppes. For the first time since he had arrived in this brutal, beautiful world, Alex felt the rare, unfamiliar sensation of being ahead of the curve. He was not reacting to crises; he was anticipating them, building the solutions before the problems had even fully formed.

He was in a strategic meeting in his spartan command post, a wooden building that smelled of fresh-cut pine and coal smoke. Spread across the table were maps of the northern frontiers, charts detailing the production quotas for Ignis Steel, and schedules for the rotation of the Artisan Legions. It was a meeting about the future, about a war that had not yet begun. He was in his element.

It was in this moment of supreme confidence that the ghost of the past arrived. Lyra's voice, a cool, clinical whisper in his ear, flagged a line in a newly arrived dispatch. The message was a routine logistical report from Pertinax in the East, a dry accounting of troop movements and supply requisitions. Most of it was mundane, but one line, buried deep within a paragraph detailing the staged return of the victorious legions, stood out to Lyra's analytical mind like a drop of blood on fresh snow.

"The Legio V Macedonica has been temporarily delayed in the city of Seleucia," Alex read aloud from the screen only he could see. "The legate reports an outbreak of a strange, swift-acting fever that has afflicted nearly a third of the men. He expects to resume the march west in a fortnight, once the sickness has passed."

A spike of ice-cold dread, so intense it was a physical shock, lanced through Alex's body. He felt the blood drain from his face. He knew that fever. He knew that city. He knew, with the terrible, unshakable certainty of a man who had read the last page of the book, exactly what this was.

The Antonine Plague.

In his own time, it was a footnote in the grand history of Rome, a dry statistic in the annals of epidemiology. But here, now, it was a living, breathing monster about to be unleashed. Believed to be a virulent strain of smallpox or measles, it had been brought back, historically, by soldiers returning from the very same campaign, from the very same city of Seleucia. It had a mortality rate of up to twenty-five percent. It raged for fifteen years, killing an estimated five million people, including, some historians believed, Marcus Aurelius himself. It had shattered the legions, crippled the Roman economy, and hollowed out the Empire from within, creating the perfect conditions for the Crisis of the Third Century he had been sent here to prevent.

It was here. It was now. And he, in his quest for a swift and total victory over Parthia, had brought the infected legion home sooner and more efficiently than in the original timeline. His own competence had accelerated the arrival of the apocalypse.

He stood up from the table, his mind racing, the discussions of road-building and crossbow production suddenly feeling like the concerns of children. He had been preparing for a visible enemy, an army of men on horseback. He was now faced with an invisible one, an enemy that traveled on the breath, that respected no wall, and that could not be killed with a sword.

He had to act, and he had to act immediately. But how? He couldn't send a dispatch to Pertinax commanding him to "quarantine the legion because of a highly contagious viral pathogen." The very concept of germ theory was seventeen centuries away. They would think he had gone mad. He had to translate a 21st-century medical crisis into a 1st-century Roman framework. He had to fight it with their weapons, with their beliefs.

He reconvened his council on site, gathering Celer, Centurion Cassius, and the visiting General Tacitus in his command post. He arranged his face into a mask of grim, prophetic authority.

"I have received an urgent message from my diviners and mystics in the East," he began, the lie coming smoothly to his lips. He was becoming frighteningly adept at crafting these plausible fictions. "They have been reading the portents, the stars, the smoke from the altars in Babylon. And they have sent me a terrifying prophecy."

The men in the room leaned forward, their expressions a mixture of skepticism and rapt attention. They had seen enough of their Emperor's 'impossible' knowledge to take his prophecies seriously.

"They have seen a great pestilence," Alex said, his voice a low, somber tone he had learned from Senator Rufus. "A plague carried not in the water or the food, but on the very winds from the East. They say it is a divine punishment, the curse of the defeated Parthian gods, furious at our victory. They call it the 'ghost sickness,' for it travels unseen, and it will sweep through the Empire and claim one soul in every four."

He had done it. He had framed a viral pandemic as a spiritual and military threat, a supernatural attack from a defeated enemy. It was a narrative they could understand, a foe they could conceptualize.

Having established the nature of the 'threat,' he now issued a series of shocking, radical orders, presenting them not as public health measures, but as a military defense against a spiritual invasion.

"First," he commanded, turning to a map of the East, "I am sending an immediate, priority-one dispatch to the Rector Orientis. Lord Pertinax is to immediately and completely quarantine the entire Legio V Macedonica where it stands, in Seleucia. A full cordon is to be established around their camp. No one enters. No one leaves. Any man attempting to break the quarantine is to be cut down without hesitation, his body burned to prevent the spread of the curse. The legion is to be considered consecrated to the underworld gods until the pestilence passes."

Next, he addressed General Tacitus. "General, you will take two of your most loyal cohorts from the Danube frontier. You will establish a 'sanitary cordon'—a line of checkpoints and roadblocks—across all major roads and trade routes leading west from the province of Syria. All travel from the East—merchants, messengers, even returning soldiers—is to be halted. We will build a wall not of stone, but of men, to stop this ghost sickness from reaching the heartland."

Finally, he dictated a message to a waiting scribe, a message for Sabina in Rome. "Tell the Lady Sabina to begin stockpiling resources immediately. She is to use the full authority of the treasury to buy every spare bushel of grain, every amphora of wine—the spirits will be needed to purify the sick—and all the clean linen she can find for bandages. These are to be stored in secure, isolated warehouses outside the city walls. We must prepare for a long siege against an enemy we cannot see."

His commanders were stunned, their minds reeling from the sheer, unprecedented scale of the orders.

"Caesar," General Tacitus finally protested, his face a mask of disbelief. "You would halt the triumphant return of a victorious legion based on a prophecy? You would shut down the entire Eastern trade, the lifeblood of our economy? This is madness! It will cause widespread panic. It will ruin merchants. It will be seen as an act of tyranny!"

Alex turned to face the old general, his eyes as cold and hard as the steel being forged in the furnaces outside.

"Panic is better than a funeral pyre that consumes a quarter of our Empire, General," he said, his voice low and deadly. "A merchant's lost profit is better than a million Roman dead. The orders stand."

He looked at the faces of his commanders, at their fear and their doubt. "Make no mistake, gentlemen. We are going to war. Not against the nomads of the steppe. Not yet. First, we fight a plague sent by angry gods. And it is a war we cannot afford to lose."