Saint's Vein

It begins with grace. A shared ritual, a psionic bond forged in faith, and suddenly the world opens up. Empathy sharpens until the emotions of others feel like your own. Physical wounds knit faster. The blood hums with light, and for a brief, luminous stretch, everything feels connected, holy, and right.
  Then the harmony breaks.
  Saint's Vein is a psionic and hematological disease that hijacks the Infection's electrical and empathic pathways, turning the very channels through which faith flows into vectors for destruction. It spreads exclusively through psionic interaction and ritual participation: acting as a participant or target of a Psionic skill, a faith rite, an induction ceremony. The energy exchange during these sacred acts carries the disease from one Infection to the next, and the more powerful the connection, the more certain the transmission. Any diseased host who performs a benediction or uses a beneficial Faithful skill while carrying Saint's Vein adds the disease to their call. The sacred and the infectious become one.
  Accensorites face particular danger. Their natural psionic resonance amplifies the disease's effects, causing accelerated progression and stronger psychic synchronization with other carriers. In Accensorites, the early-stage unity often twists into a compulsion to maintain connection at any cost, driving ritual fixation, self-harm, and eventually complete breakdown.
  The progression is swift and deceptive. Early symptoms are indistinguishable from spiritual awakening: euphoria, clarity, a sense of profound unity with those around you. Blood begins to glow faintly beneath the skin in pulsing patterns. As the disease intensifies, the body overcharges with psionic energy. The sensation of unity distorts into psychic noise, random emotional feedback and uncontrolled telepathic intrusion. Lesions open along the eyes and ears as luminescent compounds leak outward. In advanced stages, the veins shine like hot wires and blood seeps in slow, glowing streams from the eyes, nose, and ears. Delusions become constant. Victims laugh, weep, or pray incoherently as their systems burn out from within. Death comes through cerebral hemorrhage or complete psionic disintegration, whichever arrives first.
  Those who are not inducted into a faith will not progress beyond the first stage, and if they remain disconnected from any faith for two attended events, the disease clears on its own. For the faithful, treatment requires escalating intervention: therapeutic discussion to ground the mind, blood transfusions from non-Aberrant donors, nervous system surgery to drain psionic energy into crystals, and at the most severe stages, necrological surgery performed in a morgue space. The disease advances every four hours in play, or each time the afflicted performs a Benediction, making active practitioners of faith the most vulnerable to rapid decline.
  Saint's Vein poisons the well of belief. It turns moments of collective unity, the very rituals that bind communities together, into potential vectors for an illness that burns the devout from the inside out. The euphoria it brings makes diagnosis difficult and resistance unlikely. By the time the blood begins to glow, the faithful are already spreading what they believe to be grace.