What Happened During The English Sweating Sickness Outbreak?

My husband's first love was scalded by boiling water. To punish me, he forced me into a customized steamer half my height, turned the heat to its highest setting, and sealed me inside. "I'll make you feel the pain Jessica suffered a thousand times over!" Trapped in the suffocating space, my breath came in ragged gasps. Heat seared my skin, and my body felt as though it would melt. I sobbed, begging him for mercy. "Please! I'm going to die!" But he didn't look back. Holding his beloved in his arms, he walked away. He even locked the door after he left the room. "Don't worry, you won't die. This is the only way you'll understand Jessica's pain." Despair swallowed me whole. I screamed, my voice raw, but the boiling water beneath me splashed up, scalding my skin, stealing even the strength to cry. He left the country with Jessica that same night. A week passed before he finally remembered my existence. "That wretched woman must have learned her lesson by now. Let her out." What he didn't know was that the water had long since boiled away, the heat had faded, and inside the steamer, my corpse lay rotting—swarmed with maggots.

Chloe, the maid I share a room with, is dead. I watched the head housekeeper and another maid pin her to the floor. I watched them as the housekeeper vomited up a slimy, black web of fungus and forced it down Chloe's throat. I should have screamed. I wanted to. But my selective mutism took over, trapping the sound in my throat. It probably saved my life. The next day, Chloe was alive again. She walked into the young miss’s room to brush her hair, just like always. I was so scared I dropped the water basin I was holding. As I stood there, frozen, the young miss leaned in close, her voice a whisper only I could hear. "You've noticed it too, haven't you? They're not themselves anymore."

In 1612, he couldn’t save her. In 2026, he might not want to. Elias Thorne was a man of maps and measurements, the King’s most trusted surveyor, until the smoke of the Lancashire witch trials choked the life out of everything he loved. Catherine wasn’t a witch—she was just an innocent woman caught in the gears of a superstitious world. When Elias was turned into something monstrous that same year, he didn't see it as a curse; he saw it as a deadline. He had forever to find a way to bring her back. For four centuries, Elias moved through the shadows of history, building an empire of wealth and dark influence. He hunted every myth, funded every occult discovery, and bled for every lead—all to find a soul that refused to return. He grew bitter, his heart hardening into the very stone of the London streets he walked. He eventually gave up on the heavens and the hells, settling into a life of cold, immortal apathy. Then, on a Tuesday afternoon, he sees her. She’s standing in line for coffee, wearing headphones and a denim jacket, looking exactly like the woman he watched die under a grey Jacobean sky. She has no memory of the fire, the maps, or the man who has spent four hundred years hating the world for her sake. Now, Elias faces a choice: Walk away and let her live the peaceful life he once prayed for, or reclaim a love that doesn’t belong to him anymore. But Catherine has secrets of her own—and in the modern world, the ghosts of 1612 are finally starting to catch up.

A heatwave swept across the surface of the Earth right after the end of boot camp. Temperatures rose to 200 degrees Fahrenheit, and all electronic items stopped functioning. Even our water source had all dried up. I was lucky that I never liked the taste of water in college, and I always had five boxes of bottled water standing by in my hostel room. If I rationed my water, I could sustain myself until help arrived, but our instructor suddenly requested everyone to hand in their water to be managed by one person. "We're a group, and it's only by working together that we will be able to sustain ourselves until help arrives! Whoever doesn't hand in their bottled water will be considered the common enemy!" I had no choice but to hand in all the water I had. However, the instructor was not fair with his water rationing. He would give the women one bottle a day, while I only had one bottle cap's worth of water. "You're a man, aren't you? It doesn't matter if you have less water. Do you really want to fight the fairer sex for a little water? The ladies should be pampered like princesses. Can't a man like you bear some responsibility to take care of them?" I wanted to argue with him, but my girlfriend, who was also my childhood sweetheart, helped the instructor tie me up and flung me under the sun to be burned to death. When I opened my eyes next, I had returned to the day before the heatwave. This time, I moved all of my water into a cave and watched gleefully as that lecherous instructor got thrown under the sun by his pampered female trainees to be burned.

My boyfriend’s childhood sweetheart had bound a transfer system to me, causing the cool air around me to automatically converge on her. From then on, her family no longer had to pay for air conditioning. They even made a fortune by selling the cool air at a low price, thanks to this supernatural arrangement. When I explained the situation to my boyfriend, he was lying in his childhood sweetheart’s arms while eating an ice pop. He looked at me as if I were an idiot. “Your family is so poor that you can’t even afford to run the AC. Instead of looking at yourself, you came up with such a ridiculous excuse.” Later, I installed three air conditioners at home, but it did not help at all. In the end, I literally baked to death in an air-conditioned room at 60 degrees Fahrenheit. By the time I was discovered, I had turned into a dried corpse. Even after my death, my boyfriend still tried to profit off my misfortune. He became an internet sensation as the “first person to discover a dried corpse in an air-conditioned room.” He went on to live the life of a rich influencer with his little sweetheart. When I opened my eyes again, I had returned to the very day his little sweetheart had bound the transfer system to me. Knowing the future ahead, I immediately booked a reservation at the nearest sauna to escape the heat!

I spent countless sleepless nights developing a breakthrough drug for a devastating illness, and I expected at least some recognition from my CEO girlfriend. Instead, she accused me of wasting the company research budget and promoted a newly hired young assistant to oversee the company finances. It was the middle of a brutal heatwave with temperatures that soared past ninety-eight degrees. The assistant locked the lab air-conditioning controls away so no one else could use them, while he shut himself inside his private office with the AC set to sixty degrees. He wrapped himself in a blanket and played video games. I complained to my girlfriend, and she brushed it off as part of building company culture. She claimed she gave him authority for my own good because she believed it would prepare me for a future management position. According to her, I was too narrow-minded to understand her intentions. She then shut off the lab main power supply and locked the control panel as if she wanted to teach me a lesson. The fans stopped working, and the heat grew worse. Several coworkers collapsed from heat exhaustion and were taken to the hospital. The assistant posted photos of himself and my girlfriend at an indoor ski resort. They wore winter jackets and ate ice cream together. The caption read, “Some people are sweeter than ice cream.” I finally understood everything. Her idea of company culture had never been anything more than an excuse to favor him. Everyone expected me to confront her or demand an explanation. I packed up my things instead. She mistook my silence for obedience. She believed her air-conditioning punishment had worked, and she promised that once she returned from closing her business deal, she might consider letting me enjoy the AC again. She did not know that when she shut down the lab power, the research equipment stopped running. The drug we had just finished developing became unstable, and the experimental data was destroyed. By the time the delivery deadline arrived, there would be no formula left to hand over. She would face a catastrophic breach-of-contract lawsuit and enormous financial penalties. Without access to the medication in time, she would also suffer permanent long-term complications from the illness we had tried to treat.