After Surviving the Apocalypse, I Built a City in Another World

Sadly, as nicely as Alterra and other territories were recovering from the Great Cold, there were still plenty of those who had not.

Villages were still burying their dead, both from the cold or the beast mobs that came after. Towns and Cities, on the other hand, had probably just finished fixing the infrastructure affected and also burning the dead, mostly from the poor areas.

This was nothing new, just that there were more corpses because the Great Cold lasted longer than usual this year. At least, that was what people thought.

This year, without warning, it gave rise to something even more sinister.

A disease.

An illness that could affect the majority of the population, giving it the potential to develop into one that could affect even the advanced physiques of the locals.

And, roughly a week after the temperature rose, it developed into a plague indeed.

It was called the Fire Plague, one of the diseases that could ’bloom’ in different places each time, though it would only appear once every hundred years or so.

The current generation, however, seemed to be an exception. After all, it hadn’t even been 50 years since the last fire plague happened

And it was a horrible time, and many middle-aged people alive would shiver remembering that period.

The fire plague was an enigmatic illness of unknown origins. There was no clear source; it just... happened. People were too busy not dying or not getting affected to study it, either.

At the very least, a great majority of territories were like this, and only a handful of people actually knew anything or discovered anything new about them.

The previous time, more than forty years prior, it started in the southern parts of the continent, from the land of the ogres and the trolls and the southern human territories, where the arid air was harshest.

In Xeno, the winters at the Southern tip were as cold as the Northern islands, but no one lived there, so no one cared. It was next to the deserts, too, which made living there very difficult.

There were also cases in the central west area of the deserts, though the spread there was slower due to the smaller density of territories. However, it still spread upwards after a while, affecting the rest.

This disease was terrifying, and the suffering of the afflicted was traumatizing. It wasn’t even clear how it started. People would just feel the symptoms out of nowhere.

The stricken felt like they were burning from the inside. They smoked from their mouths, bodies burning from within. Anyone without enough strength who inhaled even a whiff of smoke would be affected.

One had to know that this smoke was light-colored and difficult to even see. Most people, if encountering it, would just assume there was something burning at a distance.

It was a terrifying disease that would cause extreme pain for three to five days. If one were weak, then the skin could break, creating cracks as if one were exploding from inside.

More often than not, the victims would be bedridden even if they survived.

Many of the stronger victims, even if they survived, would be invalid, unable to gather aether anymore. For many fighters, it was a death sentence.

Among people below level 20, at least half of them would die. For people at level 10 and below, it had a mortality rate of over 80%.

The smoke itself was relatively heavy, so it kept close to the ground, but it was also light enough that if one was downwind of an affected territory, they could also be affected.

Further, the disease had a week of incubation time, so affected people might end up in a completely different place without realizing they were carriers.

It was here that the lack of communication and slow transfers in most territories were both a blessing and a curse, depending on where one was.

People would be informed more slowly of the disease, but the illness would also travel more slowly.

In these cases, those who were in Cities and Towns had a stronger and more immune population, as well as better infrastructure, but they could also be more vulnerable due to the number of people there.

Then it’d pass on to the surrounding villages when the smaller ones travelled to higher territories. The greater the commercial connection, the faster and wider the spread.

Not to mention, there were territories with teleportation arrays like the Center, the warehouses, and the Mercenary Hall, as well as the teleportation arrays. One could imagine how fast it could spread through these media alone.

Villages would have less traffic, fewer chances of welcoming carriers, but they wouldn’t have any warning at all unless they had an allied territory who’d remember to do so.

They might not get affected at first due to their isolation, especially if they were not under a superior territory, but when the disease entered their border, there was no going out anymore. It was like a death sentence to an entire territory.

Different places handled the disease in different ways; some had seen some success, while some were just outright cruel.

Regardless of where, because it could not be contained nor was a cure developed in time, it spread out more and more anyway.

The plague lasted more than ten years. And by then, it affected nearly all territories and every race, and each household would’ve lost at least one member to the disease, whether directly or indirectly.

This started 40 years ago and ended around a decade after that. Most people past 30 years old could still remember its horrors, and everyone above that age had lost at least a few people because of it.

When it finally passed, there were celebrations and cries all over the world. They all thought it was finally over.

And because of how it usually was—with the plague happening every hundred years or so—most people didn’t think they’d encounter this disease again. At least not in their lifetime.

They were asking for too much, apparently.