Tucked away at the edge of the forgotten farming town of Crow Hollow lies an overgrown greenhouse, its shattered panes glinting like broken teeth beneath the moonlight. It was once a place of promise, run by a reclusive botanist named Dr. Elias Grinshaw once hailed as a genius in agronomy and plant pathology. But his obsession with crop resilience, disease resistance, and genetic manipulation took a dark, irreversible turn after the death of his only child.
Grinshaw’s daughter, Clara, died from a rare fungal infection contracted after a picnic in their family cornfield. Wracked with grief and fury at nature’s cruelty, he locked himself inside the greenhouse and vowed to bend nature to his will. The locals whispered that he had gone mad muttering to his plants, feeding them blood, and tending to them in the dead of night with syringes and scalpels.
He began experimenting with a mutated strain of corn smut fused with parasitic cordyceps. This bio-engineered fungus could lie dormant in the seed, waiting. His goal was to create a crop that would never succumb to blight or pest immune to drought, disease, and death itself. But instead, he cultivated The Hollow Blight, a pathogen that did not feed on the corn… it fed on the consumer.
