Chapter 210: A Chance Encounter on the Snowfield |
After a long time, Fulan was once again riding her black horse along a road buried beneath heavy snow. She looked down at the map in her hand, carefully confirming her direction.
Now she had finally had a taste of just how miserable the road conditions in a poor region could be. At this point, she could only move forward by following the approximate direction marked on the map.
It was only after leaving the furnace of the Northern Society that Fulan remembered that this was the Northern Frontier, where the environment was extremely harsh.
She could hardly see the roads marked on the map and could only travel roughly along the intended direction.
Only now did she understand why there were so many landmarks marked on the map.
They were there precisely to help with navigation under road conditions like these.
“There it is. That should be the large tree marked on the map.”
Fulan looked ahead and felt relieved that she had not gone the wrong way.
Before her stood a giant tree that would have taken about four people joining arms to encircle.
Its leaves were fiery red.
Like a mass of flame appearing in the middle of the snowfield, the tree stood there all alone. Around it were many traces left behind by humans.
There were quite a few knife marks carved into the trunk, as though they had been made as markers, and a little lower down on the trunk, a wooden signboard hung there.
Written on it were the words:
“Snow Bear Territory ahead.”
Beside the tree was a patch of ground that had been partially cleared, exposing frozen earth as hard as stone. On it lay several charred rod-like objects piled together.
Fulan stepped forward to inspect the area and found that there were many human traces left in the surrounding snow as well.
“Judging from these traces alone, there should have been five or six people here.”
Fulan frowned. She could tell that these traces had been left not long ago, perhaps this morning or yesterday.
Were there actually other people here?
Fulan was very puzzled.
Logically speaking, there should not have been many people traveling through the Northern Frontier, because the environment here was simply too harsh.
Setting aside the hard-to-recognize roads, the freezing weather, and the fact that human traces were so scarce while monsters were so numerous that they could attack passersby at any moment—
most importantly, in the Northern Frontier, it was extremely difficult to find water and food.
Most settlements in the Northern Frontier had been built around places where water and food could be found more easily.
The area around the Northern Society was all barren wasteland. Perhaps people had once settled nearby, but after the Northern Society’s furnace was established, almost no one chose to live around here anymore.
The density of settlements in the Northern Frontier had already been quite low to begin with, and after the Northern Society was founded, it had further accelerated the destruction of the surrounding settlements, causing many common people to pack up their families and move outside the city of the Northern Society to settle there.
And under such circumstances, the fact that other people had passed through here was rather suspicious.
Anyone with experience would have taken the other road, the one with more settlements along it.
That road offered more settlements as reference points, making it less likely for travelers to lose their way, and they could also obtain supplies from those settlements.
And now, these traces of multiple people passing through the area around the Northern Society seemed suspicious.
What puzzled Fulan the most was that in the cleared patch of ground, there was one spot that was tugging at her spiritual power.
It was a kind of fluctuation she had never encountered before.
It was extremely faint. If the ground here had not been cleared by someone, she truly would not have noticed it.
It carried with it the aura of a tide, and it made Fulan immediately think of the sea.
“What is that?”
Fulan frowned.
But too little information had been left behind. She had no way of tracing that fluctuation, and in the surrounding area, she could not sense it at all.
It seemed as though some object had been placed here for too long, causing the place itself to become tainted with that object’s fluctuation.
Unable to figure it out, Fulan gave up thinking about it and instead began preparing a place to rest for the night.
The sky was already growing late. Fulan could almost make out the stars in the distant heavens with the naked eye, and in the Northern Frontier, where daylight hours were short, that already counted as very late.
Fulan had originally planned to rest here after arriving anyway.
“Since someone already cleared this place, I’ll just rest here tonight.”
Too lazy to go looking for another spot, Fulan went directly to the patch of ground the previous travelers had already cleared and gave it a brief inspection.
There were no traps at all.
She led her black horse over to the charred rod-like objects and discovered that they were not ordinary charcoal.
“Something like coal?”
Fulan guessed. Using Telekinetic Hand, she picked one piece up and examined it closely from nearby.
“So it really is. Where did those people get this from?”
Since arriving at the Northern Society, this was the first time Fulan had seen anything like coal. Neither in the Northern Society nor in Snowfang Town had she seen anything similar.
The furnace in Snowfang Town burned so fiercely thanks half to a special kind of nearby wood, and half to the teeth dropped by a certain special monster.
Those teeth felt extremely cold to the touch, yet when thrown into a fire, they amplified the flames.
But now Fulan had no way of finding the people who had camped here earlier. The heavy snow had already buried all traces.
“Let it burn.”
Fulan knocked off a small piece as a sample, then saw that the coal had not been completely burned through, so she simply lit it again.
After the fire was started, she did not sit down to rest right away. Instead, she began setting magical traps around herself.
By the time she finished laying down the magical traps, she had not even had the chance to sit when she heard the black horse stamp heavily against the flat ground several times.
Fulan immediately looked around, and her powerful spiritual power swept through the surrounding area. To the east, she discovered a group moving toward her.
There were more than ten people in that group, and each of them rode a special mount of the Northern Frontier—a riding wolf.
These wolves were far larger than the wild wolves Fulan had encountered in this world. Their broad backs made riding on them much more comfortable.
The black horse’s hoofbeats had warned Fulan, but they had also made that group aware of the unusual sound.
Fulan glanced at the black horse and said,
“Next time, you don’t need to warn me. Once they get closer, I’ll sense them first.”
After saying that, she had no idea whether the black horse’s mind could actually remember such a thing. She turned and faced these uninvited guests.
After hearing the disturbance from this side, the group suddenly sped up. Several of the people at the front rode their wolves through the snow and were the first to catch sight of Fulan standing beside the tree.
They reined in the wolves beneath them and stopped, not drawing too close to Fulan. Instead, they remained about twenty meters away, waiting for their companions to arrive.
Once Fulan could see the entire group clearly with her own eyes, she was so surprised that she almost forgot to close her mouth.
The group was extremely strange.
Some of them were not the humans Fulan usually saw in this world, but members of the other races of this magical world.
They all had certain animal features, such as brown fur, cat ears...