After the White-Gold Holy Blade Knights left the Holy City, they stopped in no other city. The Anointed One led them along the main road toward Selan.
Bad news kept arriving along the way.
One urgent dispatch reported only a few hundred patients in a city. By the time the Knights drew near, all contact with it had been lost.
Another city had requested protection for its main Holy Temple two days earlier, but refugees who escaped told them the temple had fallen yesterday.
More reports like these arrived, each lagging dozens of hours behind reality.
The Anointed One soon stopped relying entirely on dispatches. Instead, he judged where the disaster had spread from the growing number of refugees, abandoned outposts, and blocked roads.
The closer they came to Selan, the less the marks on the map meant.
Meanwhile, the Red Plague had long since crossed Selan's borders.
Before Selan ordered a nationwide lockdown, large numbers of people had already left the Quarantine Zone. Merchant caravans entered neighboring kingdoms along the major land routes, while riverboats continued downstream toward the ports.
Noble convoys took more distant inland roads to avoid the Royal Capital and other major cities.
Ordinary residents followed friends, relatives, caravans, and crowds of refugees toward places with no reported cases.
The Red Plague did not advance along a single front.
It spread along the roads humanity used most.
The first cases appeared near trade routes. River ports followed.
People farther from the Eternal Night Wall also began running high fevers.
By the time some kingdoms received Selan's warning, people had already died within their own borders.
What baffled local Clerics even more was that corpses were mutating in cities that had never used Red Marrow Incendiary.
The infected had begun carrying the disaster to new places themselves.