Hohsalle's Mittsual Investigation

Hohsalle’s Mittsual Investigation is a developing inquiry into the causes and spread of a lethal disease first encountered in the salt mine. Rather than treating the deaths as proof of a single explanation, Hohsalle and his collaborators compare the victims’ condition with later reports from across the former Kingdom of Aquafa, testing how infection might pass between animals and people. The investigation eventually reaches beyond immediate medical questions: an account of poisoned grain and sheep-eating dogs offers a possible ecological link, while the wide, irregular distribution of cases leaves the disease’s origins unsettled.

From the Salt Mine to a Wider Problem

The investigation takes shape after Hohsalle examines the bodies of the salt mine victims. He points out that every corpse bears a dog bite and a rash extending across the body. The observation shifts attention away from the initial suspicion of poisoned food and toward an illness associated with bites. Hohsalle’s method is to read the evidence in the bodies carefully before deciding what the disease is or how it spread.

He explains that black wolf fever can be transmitted by wolves and ossam, wild mountain dogs, and that fleas or ticks which have bitten infected animals or people can carry it as well. Yet the mine’s conditions complicate any simple account. The symptoms appeared rapidly and the deaths occurred almost together; both enslaved workers and slave keepers died, but no one working at the mine afterward showed signs of illness. Hohsalle therefore doubts that insects or airborne transmission explain the outbreak, while acknowledging that the disease has not yet been definitively identified. He initially considers animal bites the likeliest route, but cautions against indiscriminate hunting: if infected wolves or ossam had attacked sheep, shepherds should also have been bitten and fallen ill. Finding the carrier, rather than simply killing wild dogs at random, becomes a more precise question.

The disease’s significance is also shaped by competing ideas of medicine. Under the Pure Heart Creed, Zolian priest-doctors regard physicians as “the fingers of the god” and accept that an incurable patient should be left to divine care, with treatment limited to easing death. Hohsalle’s approach instead seeks causes and possible remedies. The contrast is not merely theological: the emperor Natalu once summoned Hohsalle and Limuelle to cure his wife when conventional doctors had given up, and their success provoked opposition from the priest-doctors. Against this background, investigation itself challenges established boundaries around what medicine should seek to know.

Building and Testing Explanations

The inquiry expands when Tomasolle presents a map compiled with Cheehana’s help. Red dots mark reports of mittsual-like illness across the former Kingdom of Aquafa, from the Yukata Plains in the south to the Oki forests in the north. The reported cases were not confined to the salt mine: one had occurred as far back as eight years earlier, according to Servants of the Inner Circle. Yet the reports describe isolated attacks, usually with only one or two people becoming ill and no known onward spread.

That pattern troubles Hohsalle. If a bite from an infected wolf transmitted the disease, and wolves lived in packs, he reasons, additional cases should have appeared around affected packs. Several years had also passed—enough time for ticks and other insects to multiply and potentially transmit infection further. The broad geography combined with the scarcity of secondary cases therefore resists a straightforward account of contagious disease. Hohsalle argues that the investigators must discover what is preventing the illness from spreading, rather than assume that the scattered reports already establish how it works.

Cheehana proposes that animal hosts may not remain in one place long enough to pass the disease to ticks. Tomasolle then raises a further problem for a natural-spread explanation: how could dogs and wolves in distant parts of the territory have become involved if northern and southern wolf populations never mingled? Movement from one neighboring pack to another might account for some transmission, but would not by itself explain the disease’s wide reach. Hohsalle suggests another possible carrier, such as a migratory bird. This remains a hypothesis, not a conclusion; its force lies in showing that the apparent limits of wolf movement do not rule out other routes.

The same attention to evidence informs Hohsalle’s comparison of patients. The Zolian falconer bitten near the chin experienced the most dramatic and rapid symptoms, while Sulumina showed the greatest resistance, followed by Mazai and Olimu. Because all the patients received the new medicine, Hohsalle cannot establish whether any would have survived without it. He wants to understand why resistance differs, and whether such differences could help prevent illness, but recognizes that gathering reliable accounts from remote regions and nomadic groups would be difficult. The investigation thus keeps its conclusions provisional: observed contrasts can guide questions, but they do not yet explain the cause of resistance.

The Case for Further Investigation

The scattered incidents also change the inquiry’s political stakes. Hohsalle considers whether the King of Aquafa might have directed the disease, but notes that the lack of a major outbreak since the falcon hunt could fit the possibility that such a plan had been abandoned. He does not allow that suspicion to settle the matter. Instead, the mapped cases and their irregular chronology prompt the investigators to ask whether the pattern could have arisen without human intention. The distinction between deliberate spread and natural transmission remains open for examination.

Cheehana asks Hohsalle, rather than Tomasolle, to investigate further. She considers Tomasolle too close to the Ahfal Oma, while Hohsalle is urged to pursue both the truth and a cure. She calls the possible outbreak too urgent to ignore and offers institutional support; Makokan, whose home is in the Yukata Mountains, may contribute regional knowledge. The assignment marks a shift from interpreting a single disaster to conducting a broader investigation, even though Hohsalle already has other work and the evidence offers no easy answer.

One later account supplies a possible connection between animal behavior and the disease’s spread. Tomeh recalls that a lone, full-grown wolf repeatedly attacked sheep, biting them one after another rather than simply taking prey for food. Her grandfather set traps after sheep began disappearing, but the animal evaded them; when the sheep remained disturbed during the day, Tomeh followed her father and grandfather to see what was happening. The account does not by itself establish how the wolf became infected, but it gives Hohsalle a specific pattern of repeated bites to consider alongside the wider case reports.

Taya’s explanation of the sheep-dancing sickness supplies another part of the chain. Rye pollen had apparently crossed into fields of Aquafa wheat, producing a hybrid grain whose strong poison killed both the Ahfal Oma’s fire horses and many of the settlers’ sheep. The sheep convulsed after eating it; after the Ahfal Oma were exiled, the settlers spent a long time burning off the wheat before they could grow rye safely. Hohsalle recognizes the importance of the detail that dogs were not harmed by eating grain directly: they dug up and ate sheep that had died after consuming the poison. The exchange points toward a possible route by which dogs encountered poisoned animals, but the investigation’s larger question—how the disease reached its hosts and spread across such a wide territory—remains unresolved.

The Case for Further Investigation

The scattered incidents also change the inquiry’s political stakes. Hohsalle considers whether the King of Aquafa might have directed the disease, but notes that the lack of a major outbreak since the falcon hunt could fit the possibility that such a plan had been abandoned. He does not allow that suspicion to settle the matter. Instead, the mapped cases and their irregular chronology prompt the investigators to ask whether the pattern could have arisen without human intention. The distinction between deliberate spread and natural transmission remains open for examination.

Cheehana asks Hohsalle, rather than Tomasolle, to investigate further. She considers Tomasolle too close to the Ahfal Oma, while Hohsalle is urged to pursue both the truth and a cure. She calls the possible outbreak too urgent to ignore and offers institutional support; Makokan, whose home is in the Yukata Mountains, may contribute regional knowledge. The assignment marks a shift from interpreting a single disaster to conducting a broader investigation, even though Hohsalle already has other work and the evidence offers no easy answer.

One later account supplies a possible connection between animal behavior and the disease’s spread. Tomeh recalls that a lone, full-grown wolf repeatedly attacked sheep, biting them one after another rather than simply taking prey for food. Her grandfather set traps after sheep began disappearing, but the animal evaded them; when the sheep remained disturbed during the day, Tomeh followed her father and grandfather to see what was happening. The account does not by itself establish how the wolf became infected, but it gives Hohsalle a specific pattern of repeated bites to consider alongside the wider case reports.

Taya’s explanation of the sheep-dancing sickness supplies another part of the chain. Rye pollen had apparently crossed into fields of Aquafa wheat, producing a hybrid grain whose strong poison killed both the Ahfal Oma’s fire horses and many of the settlers’ sheep. The sheep convulsed after eating it; after the Ahfal Oma were exiled, the settlers spent a long time burning off the wheat before they could grow rye safely. Hohsalle recognizes the importance of the detail that dogs were not harmed by eating grain directly: they dug up and ate sheep that had died after consuming the poison. The exchange points toward a possible route by which dogs encountered poisoned animals, but the investigation’s larger question—how the disease reached its hosts and spread across such a wide territory—remains unresolved.

An Inquiry Between Medical Traditions

The search for causes also exposes a dispute over what medicine is supposed to know. Under the Pure Heart Creed, Zolian priest-doctors regard physicians as “the fingers of the god.” If they declare an illness incurable, accepted practice is to leave the patient in divine hands and provide only medicines that ease death. Hohsalle’s investigation takes another path: it asks what produces illness, how it travels, and whether its agents can be weakened or countered. The difference is practical as well as theological. When Emperor Natalu’s wife suffered a mortal illness, he summoned Hohsalle and Limuelle despite his advisers’ opposition to Otawalle remedies. Their cure led Natalu to ask them to remain as palace physicians and teach their methods; the priest-doctors’ furious resistance turned the episode into a clash with the emperor, and news of Otawalle medicine’s success spread through the Zolian aristocracy.

Hohsalle’s explanatory method likewise treats the body as a field of evidence and intervention. He describes the body’s defenses as soldiers that must learn to recognize particular disease agents: a weakened agent can introduce the enemy without its full power, training those defenses to respond. This account connects investigation of mittsual to the possibility of prevention, not only treatment after illness has taken hold. Yet the inquiry does not assume that every available explanation or intervention will be accepted. Mana, a priest-doctor of the Pure Heart Creed, declines Hohsalle’s offer to see disease-causing organisms. For Mana, visible signs in the patient are sufficient: identifying a particular organism is unnecessary if illness can be understood as defilement and the obstacles it creates can be removed. He chooses to study the human form and care for patients, illustrating the distance between Hohsalle’s search for specific causes and a medical practice centered on the patient’s condition.

The proposed remedies make the corpses from the mine significant in more than one way. Milalle explains that they may contain disease agents from which a weakened preparation could be developed to build resistance, substances that might suppress or eliminate the illness, and antibodies that could help form a serum for infected patients. The proposals are possibilities, not established treatments: identifying agents and useful substances must come first. Later, Hohsalle reports that every patient received the new medicine, leaving no untreated comparison by which to know whether anyone would have survived without it. His account makes the limits of the evidence explicit even as he seeks permission to continue improving the remedies.

What the Toxic-Grain Account Adds

A later conversation offers a possible ecological link, though not a proven origin for the disease. Tomeh recalls that sheep were disappearing at night and that her grandfather set traps for the culprit without success. When the sheep remained disturbed by day, Tomeh followed her father and grandfather to investigate. They found a single full-grown wolf, quick and cunning, biting sheep one after another. It did not behave like an animal merely taking prey to eat. The account gives Hohsalle a particular pattern of repeated bites to weigh against the broader reports, but it does not establish whether that wolf carried mittsual or how it had acquired the disease.

Taya describes a separate chain involving hybrid grain and animal deaths. Rye pollen had apparently blown into fields of Aquafa wheat, creating a hybrid whose strong poison killed the Ahfal Oma’s fire horses and many of the settlers’ sheep. The poisoned sheep leapt and convulsed, a syndrome called the sheep-dancing sickness. After the Ahfal Oma were exiled, the settlers spent a long time burning off the Aquafa wheat before they could grow rye safely. Hohsalle focuses on what happened next: dogs did not eat the grain, but dug up and consumed sheep that had died from it. This supplies a possible connection between dead animals and dogs’ exposure, while leaving the investigation’s central questions—how the disease reached its animal hosts and why cases appeared across such a wide territory—unanswered.