Read Novel Full Chapter 469: The Main Continent and the South Pole
Chapter 469: The Main Continent and the South Pole
The darkness had no end in sight. Only the stars overhead were flickering.
Woooo~
The wind here didn't simply gust and blow. It shrieked like a ravening ghost, and it never once let up.
It was as though countless ghosts haunted this dark expanse of earth, howling out a grief fit to tear their very organs loose and spill them on the ground.
At last, a change stirred within the boundless dark. Somewhere far off, a single point of light appeared.
That single point, the only light in the whole dark world, lit a small patch of ground, and at last showed what kind of world this really was.
There was no plant life anywhere around. No structure of any kind.
Only ice frozen solid for ten million years, and snow that never once melted.
The light came from a small lantern hooked over the arm of a short, child-sized figure in its God's Form, hands tucked into its sleeves, staggering against the wind as it made its way out into the open.
Having taken its God's Form, walking now on two legs, the ceramic figurine was coated head to toe in layer after layer of frost.Icicles had formed along its brows and hair, and its whole body shook like a sieve.
Woo woo~
Woo woo~
In the dark, it too let out a sound like a ghost's moan. Hands still tucked away, shivering, it could not keep the noise in, and its whimpering fell into near-perfect rhythm with the freezing wind.
The wind made its sound because it blew.
It made its own because it was freezing.
This nesting-doll of a divine artifact was tremendously powerful. It could hide away every trace of the ceramic figurine's true nature, and turn it into something living, indistinguishable in every way from real life.
It could even let the ceramic figurine taste the wonder of food, let it reach out and touch every part of the world through a mortal's own senses.
And it was extraordinarily sturdy, too. It looked like an ordinary body of flesh, but it carried a toughness that far outstripped any mortal frame.
But right now, there was a problem.
The ceramic figurine felt this cold, dozens of degrees below freezing, exactly as a mortal would, and yet nothing could freeze that body into breaking.
So it simply went on freezing, until its very brain felt as though it had turned to ice, and still it could not so much as pass out.
Nor did the ceramic figurine dare shed this shell. Its true body was damaged badly enough that, without the shell's protection, it might shatter in an instant.
And it needed this body besides, if it ever meant to leave this place and walk out of this endless dark.
It walked on for who knew how long, until at the foot of a snow-drift the ceramic figurine finally stopped.
It curled up beneath the drift, whimpering from the cold, breathing out in ragged puffs.
Woo~
Woo~
Woo~
The ceramic figurine cupped its hands to its mouth, and with every whimper its whole body shook.
It seemed to want to warm its hands with its own breath, straining with everything it had to force out more of that warm mist, anything to take the edge off the cold.
But the breath that left its mouth turned to ice crystals the moment it hit the air, pattering down against its rubbing hands instead.
Whether the ceramic figurine was only pretending not to notice, or had truly been frozen half-witted, it kept right on repeating the motion regardless.
After warming its hands like that a while longer, it went on, "Been walking this long. Time to warm myself up properly."
Anticipation lit up the ceramic figurine's eyes. "Here it comes. The best part of the day."
Trembling, it unhooked the lantern from the crook of its arm, crouched down, and pressed its hands and body close against it, hoping, it seemed, to warm itself against the fire inside.
The glow fell across the ceramic figurine's face and flickered in its eyes, and for a moment it seemed as though the warmth had reached all the way down into its heart.
Woo~
It pressed both hands flat against the lantern's glass and whimpered again, but this time the sound seemed to carry all the cold out of its body at once, threaded through with pure relief.
"So warm. So hot~"
"There's nothing like warming yourself by a fire!"
The ceramic figurine felt much better now. Comfort spread across its face, and its whole body went slack, sinking back against the snow-drift.
There in that cold, hopeless waste of ice and snow, it warmed itself by the fire, savoring the one good moment its whole day would offer.
Not satisfied with warming itself that way, the ceramic figurine pressed its hands flat against the lantern's own casing.
It basked there by the fire, a look of pure happiness spreading across its face.
And just then, its stomach made a sound.
Growl~
The sound dragged on, long and hollow.
That was right. This body could feel hunger too, exactly like a mortal's.
Only hunger could let a person truly taste how wonderful food was, truly savor the joy of eating. This body could feel that hunger, and it would never actually die of it.
In a certain sense, it was practically perfect.
Whatever divine being had crafted it possessed extraordinary skill, and had thought of absolutely everything.
Only now, reduced to wandering this godforsaken place, did all that extraordinary skill and thoroughness leave the ceramic figurine in despair.
But no matter. A clever little thing like it had ways of coping.
Hungry? Then eat.
It pulled a plate from its own spatial artifact, then gathered loaf after loaf of bread from the ground beside it and laid them out.
"Main course, done."
"Still needs a little something on the side."
It rummaged through its own storage space and at last drew out a piece of black seaweed, setting it down on the plate with great care, until the whole arrangement was finished, elegant as could be.
The ceramic figurine chewed the bread slowly, forcing each bite down, then swallowed with a look of pure enjoyment.
It nodded, and passed its own verdict aloud.
"Not bad."
"This bread's not half bad. Just the right amount of sugar in it."
But when it tried the side dish next, dissatisfaction crossed its face, and it shook its head.
"The seaweed's a bit lacking in flavor, though. Tomorrow I'll switch to a different one."
Even in a wasteland like this, the ceramic figurine's life was still full of little rituals.
After warming itself by the fire and filling its stomach with what felt like a proper feast, the ceramic figurine seemed to have truly recovered.
Next, it set about finding its bearings again.
In a world this dark and dead-still, only one thing could point the way, and that was the stars overhead.
It tipped its head back to the stars above and turned in a slow circle a few times.
"This way."
"No, this way."
"Right, this way."
The ceramic figurine settled on its heading, and pressed onward.
It had already been walking that same line for a long, long time.
Ten days?
A month?
Longer than that, even.
It didn't even know anymore. In a frozen hell with no day and no night, even time itself had lost all meaning.
Once it left the snow-drift behind, the wind turned savage again, forcing its head down so it couldn't even look ahead.
Somewhere inside the freezing wind, the ceramic figurine's own muttering could be heard.
"Where in the world even is this~"
"Not one person out here, not a single living thing."
"Not even a tree."
"Not even a sun."
No one answered. In all this time it hadn't seen so much as a living thing, let alone a tree or a single insect.
Across this vast, frozen waste, its voice traveled out on the wind toward the horizon, and never once came back as an echo.
Here it wasn't only life that got swallowed whole. Even sound itself was devoured along with it.
Of one thing it was certain. The Ice-Sealed Plateau, that place they called the Forbidden Zone of Death, wasn't even a fraction as bad as this. It had never once heard of a place like this, a godforsaken hole where even the sun refused to rise.
If the stars hadn't still been hanging overhead, it would never have believed this was still the mortal world at all.
What the ceramic figurine didn't know was that this place was what the snake people called the New World, the very southern tip of the Main Continent.
The South Pole.
In this age, the South Pole was still joined to the Main Continent as one whole.
In truth, every landmass in the world, save for Ruhe Beast Island, was joined together, forming one single supercontinent the likes of which had never existed before.
But Ruhe Beast Island, the Avel Peninsula, the Witch Mountain Peninsula, and the Land of Light all sat in the northern hemisphere, and to the snake people and the winged people, this place could rightly be called the very end of the world.
Across all the endless years, it was the first living thing ever to pass through here.
The ceramic figurine kept walking on and on, but no matter how far it went, the darkness never once let up.
It went without rest and without sleep, pressing forward, desperate to walk itself out of this frozen hell one day sooner.
And yet it always felt as though it were marching in place, the scenery around it never changing by so much as a hair.
Along the way, whenever the cold grew too much to bear, it warmed itself by the fire. Whenever the hunger grew too sharp, it ate.
But some things had their limits.
On a night when the stars themselves dimmed, a howling gale swept across the frozen tundra, and a blizzard came down with it.
The ceramic figurine had no choice but to stop, huddling inside a snow hollow, shivering.
Once again it turned to the lantern's flame to warm itself.
But this time was different, though it did not know why. No matter how long it warmed itself by the fire, its body only grew colder and colder, and it could not work out what was wrong.
It pressed its hand against the lantern, muttering over and over.
"Fire is warm!"
"Hahahaha!"
"That's right, fire isn't just warm, it's downright hot."
"So warm. So wonderfully warm."
"I can feel it, I can feel it, my body's warming up."
Even as it spoke, the ceramic figurine pulled out its plate and set its food in place.
It stuffed bread into its own stomach like a thing possessed, as though it thought eating itself sick might warm its body up all the faster.
But somehow, loaf after loaf went down without the faintest sense of fullness, and its body only grew colder still.
"It's fine," the ceramic figurine told itself. "There's still the seaweed."
"It's the salt, that's got to be it. Nothing's got any taste in my mouth, that's the whole problem. A bite of something salty and I'll be fine."
"Today's seaweed was plucked straight out of the deep sea, and it's been pickling for two hundred and fifty million years. It's bound to be delicious."
It picked the seaweed up off the plate, and lost in its own delight, licked at it to savor the taste.
So caught up in the moment was it that it actually bit straight down without thinking.
The result was one of its own teeth, knocked clean out.
"Ah!"
"My tooth!"
The ceramic figurine cried out in pain, clutching at its own cheek.
Fumbling in a panic, it found the tooth that had fallen out, jammed it back into place, and somehow, it actually took hold again.
Then it glared down in wrath at the culprit lying on the ground, and cursed it aloud.
"What's going on here?"
"Why's this seaweed so hard?"
But when it looked closer, there was no seaweed on the ground at all.
What lay there was plainly a lump of magic gold, smelted from deep within the ancient Abyss Trench.
And when it looked again at the bread beside it, there was no bread on that plate at all, only a ball of packed snow.
The pain in its tooth broke the spell, and shattered, once and for all, the fantasy it had been talking itself into the whole way here.
There had never been any food, any bread, from beginning to end. It had been eating snow this entire time.
There had never been any side dish either. The "seaweed" it swore had a different flavor every single day was nothing but a mountain of assorted stones and minerals piled up in its storage space, one licked clean and set aside each day.
Could something like that even count as eating a meal?
The ceramic figurine's own experience proved it could. This body could never starve to death anyway, so all that mattered was quieting that miserable, gnawing hunger.
So long as one could fool oneself, it might as well be a feast fit for kings.
But a person could lie to themselves a thousand times over, and the fake would still be fake. It could never stand in for the real thing.
In that moment, the ceramic figurine's despair broke wide open.
In the dark, it kicked over the lantern beside it.
It raged, demanding answers of itself, of everything.
"Why can't I ever get full?"
"Why won't it get warm?"
It lay flat on the ground clutching the lantern, pressing its hands and face against it again and again, trying to draw out whatever warmth it could.
But this time, whatever the reason, its hands and face could feel nothing but cold.
The ceramic figurine's fury boiled over.
"Why won't you get warm?"
"Get warm. Get warm right now."
It picked up the rock-hard "seaweed" and beat it against the lantern, again and again, until the whole thing smashed to pieces, then dug the "flame" out from inside.
It cupped the "flame" in its palms.
But even like that, its hands still felt only cold.
Then something dawned on it, and it could only stare at the flame in its hands.
What sat inside the lantern's casing, it turned out, had only ever been a crystal.
It remembered now.
From the very start the lantern had only ever given off light, never any fire at all.
It made sense, when it thought about it. A lantern that burned real fire could never have lasted this long. Only an artifact crystal lamp like this one could.
There had never been any flame at all. In a world of ice and snow like this there wasn't a single scrap of fuel to be found, and catching a fire demon out here was simply impossible.
It had been freezing for months now, months without knowing what warmth even tasted like.
All it had was that faint light, and a fantasy it had built around it, imagining it as fire enough to warm itself.
Cupping the crystal in its hands, the ceramic figurine broke completely.
It woke at last from its own fantasy, unable to lie to itself any longer.
All the hunger and cold it had held at bay for so long came flooding into its body at once.
It felt itself going mad with hunger. That snowball, cold enough to set its teeth chattering, and that "seaweed" hard enough to knock a tooth loose, had never given it a single true taste of food.
The ceramic figurine felt frozen clean through, inside and out. It shook its head, and even its own brain seemed to grind and crackle with ice. That damned illusion of a fire had never once, from beginning to end, given it a scrap of real warmth.
It threw all caution aside and burst out of the snow hollow, straight into the blizzard beyond.
"Fake!"
"Fake!"
"All of it's fake."
The ceramic figurine looked up at the sky. "Those stars are all fake too. Direction? There was never any direction at all."
It ran on, screaming wildly at everything around it, "This place doesn't even exist. It's all fake here. And I'm fake too."
It sprinted on through the dark blizzard, and within the storm even the stars themselves vanished, leaving it with no direction at all.
The ceramic figurine's laughter warped completely inside the storm, until it sounded like nothing so much as a vengeful ghost.
"Kekekekekeke~"
"I must be dead."
"I really must already be dead."
"That was no teleportation gate. That was a door straight into death, it must have been."
The ceramic figurine looked out at this world, at the storm surging without pause around it, and felt the full weight of a cold and a despair that had no end.
"The Dark Abyss."
"This place is the real Dark Abyss!"
It kept sprinting through the blizzard, until at last its strength simply gave out.
In the end, it drew from its storage space the one thing responsible for all of this, the teleportation gate that had carried it here.
It beat at the teleportation gate in a frenzy, shoving at it over and over.
It had tried the teleportation gate before. For whatever reason, every time it stepped through the vortex behind the door, it came out again in the exact same spot where it had first appeared in this world of ice and snow.
"Why?"
"You lied to me?"
"You're a nymph. How could you lie to someone?"
"Where even is this? What in the world is this place? This isn't the Land of Light at all! This isn't anywhere I ever wanted to go!"
"Let me out."
"Let me go. I want to leave this place."
"I want to leave this place~"
The blizzard froze the ceramic figurine's body stiff, bit by bit, until it was left kneeling there before the teleportation gate.
Before its eyes, an illusion seemed to rise once more, a shadow slowly taking shape.
There, it seemed, stood the nymph who had given it the key in the first place, come before it once again.
But by now, it could no longer tell whether what stood before it was real or only another illusion.
"Is it real?"
"Or is it fake?"
Door Spirit Realm
Rosa had heard every word the ceramic figurine said, and to her ear it sounded as though the thing were blaming her doors for something gone wrong.
Not that a nymph's handiwork ever came with any guarantee, of course. Once sold, no refunds and no exceptions.
But nymphs were a merciful people, and having caught the thing's cries, Rosa decided she ought to at least hear the ceramic figurine out.
After all, Rosa had only just become the Door Nymph, and she couldn't help worrying that something had genuinely gone wrong with one of her teleportation gates, and that it might drag the whole Door Spirit Realm down with it.
All the same, Rosa didn't step through the door to the other side. Even nymphs knew better than to walk carelessly into the mortal world. Within the Divine Kingdom of Creation a nymph was perfectly safe, and even inside the Dream Realm few things could ever hold one of them there, but the moment one stepped into the mortal world, everything changed.
Rosa made her way to the Dream Starry Sea, and through its power she found the ceramic figurine.
Rosa slipped into the ceramic figurine's dream, and found it frozen there just the same, even in sleep. She touched a finger to its head, and watched it wake, little by little.
"I have already given you the key. I have already given you the door. On what grounds do you say that I lied to you?"
The ceramic figurine shook without stopping. It lifted its head, saw Rosa standing there at last, and asked with a blank, dazed look.
"Is it real?"
"Or is it fake?"
Rosa told it, "Take hold of your door key. It will tell you whether I am real or fake."
The ceramic figurine took hold of its own key, and felt the power of the dream stir within it.
At last it was certain. This wasn't a dream at all.
Overjoyed beyond words, it lunged forward to throw its arms around Rosa's leg, but Rosa stepped back, and it went sprawling to the ground instead.
But the ceramic figurine didn't care in the least, and kept right on chasing after her, like some small monster, until it had the nymph running circles around the door.
The Nymph Rosa asked, "Why are you chasing after me?"
The ceramic figurine, a mess of tears and snot, cried out at the top of its voice.
"Lady Nymph, you finally came!"
"This isn't the Land of Light at all."
"You lied to me! I pushed that door open and fell straight into this godforsaken place."
"There's not one stick of firewood in this place. There's nowhere to even dig if you wanted to eat dirt. Not even the mud-eating swamp demons of the Abyss would come near a godforsaken hole like this."
"You have to get me out of here! Leave me in this place any longer and I really am going to go mad."
Watching the ceramic figurine chase her without end, Rosa finally brought the book in her arms down on its head, and that made it settle down.
Rosa stood before the door, both arms wrapped around the book she was still writing, Labyrinth, Door, and the Reflection Realm, and told the ceramic figurine plainly, "A teleportation gate truly can take you anywhere. But you must first have the coordinates of another place, which is to say you must know where another door stands."
"That information should have appeared in your mind the moment you opened the door."
"It would have told you that if you charge straight inside, you will fall at random into a space rift, and appear wherever it is possible for you to appear."
"And I remember it well. You told me yourself that it would be best to go to the very end of the world, to a place where no one at all could find you."
Rosa looked out at the darkness all around, a place no living thing had set foot in for ten million years.
Smiling, she gestured to every side of it, telling the ceramic figurine just how perfect her teleportation gate really was.
"You see? Your dream has come true."
"Your door happened to connect with a rift right here, and it carried you to the very end of the world. Here, no one at all can find you."
Rosa suddenly realized she'd just found it herself, which rather broke that particular wish already.
"Well. So long as you do not call out to me, no one at all would be able to find you."
So really, if the wish was broken, the ceramic figurine had broken it itself. That had nothing to do with her.
The ceramic figurine felt hopelessly wronged. The instant it had pushed through that door, it had been fighting for its life. How was it supposed to have thought about any of that?
"Then where in the world even is this?"
Rosa said, "If you divide this world into two poles, you are standing at the very southernmost of them."
The ceramic figurine asked, "How far is this from the Land of Light? How far from Ruhe Beast Island?"
Rosa repeated, "How far?"
Rosa held up two fingers, one to the left, one to the right. "If you divide the world into two ends, you are standing at this end of it, and the Land of Light lies all the way at the other."
"If you wish to go there, you need only cross the entire world."
"Ruhe Beast Island is a little nearer from here. You need only fly across half the world."
The ceramic figurine's mouth fell open, and it could only stare at Rosa.
It seemed to be asking, "What do you mean, I need only cross the entire world?"
Rosa looked at the sorry state the ceramic figurine was in, and seemed to feel a little embarrassed herself.
So she let the ceramic figurine in on a secret.
"If you truly wish to reach the Land of Light, there is still one other way."
"There is an ancient demon spirit who set out for the place where the sun rises. He once said that if the day ever came when he reached his journey's end, he would set his own teleportation gate down there."
"He will open the door, and let all who wish to go to the place where the sun rises come and see it for themselves."
The ceramic figurine protested, "But I don't want to go to any place where the sun rises. I want to go to the Land of Light."
The nymph told it, "The place where the sun rises, the place he will reach, is the very Land of Light you have in mind."
"So if the day comes when you push open your door and see another door far off, standing open just as yours is, that place should be the Land of Light."
The ceramic figurine asked, "And how long would I have to wait for that?"
Rosa answered, "It should not be too long."
But the ceramic figurine knew perfectly well how long-lived a being of the dream races truly was. Those spirits had lived from the First Era clear through to the present day, so that "not too long" was very much up for debate.
So it asked, very carefully, "This 'not too long' of yours, exactly how long is that?"
Rosa replied, "The kind of not too long that you should still be around to see."
A look of pure dismay crossed the ceramic figurine's face. Not too long, technically. At least it would still be around for it.
At last, the nymph pointed it in a direction.
"Keep walking toward this place without turning, and you will walk your way out of this world of ice and snow."
"It will not be long before you see the sun."
"That is the southern continent of the New World, a place of extraordinary abundance."
"No one has ever set foot there, but it is rich all the same, a land that holds life and green things."
Rosa, now certain the fault lay with the ceramic figurine and not with her door, gave her answer and took her leave.
And the ceramic figurine finally woke, there in the ice and snow.
It was still kneeling before the teleportation gate, snow piled up in layer after layer across its body.
The blizzard had stopped at last, but the darkness all around had not lifted in the least.
The ceramic figurine looked around itself, then down at its own body.
"Was that a dream?"
"Or was it real?"
It couldn't tell either. All it could do was follow the direction the nymph had pointed it toward. If it managed to walk its way out, then it would know, for certain, that it had all been real.
And if it had only ever been a simple dream.
Then there would be nothing left to do about it.
Dream Starry Sea
Rosa left the ceramic figurine's dream behind and drifted above the Dream Starry Sea, letting out a long, relieved breath.
"Not the door's problem."
Then she flew off toward the distance, and the Star Key at her neck gave a sudden pulse.
A faint smile crossed Rosa's face. "There happens to be one close by?"
Before long, she had arrived inside another dream entirely.
Inside was a dream she had never seen the like of, one aching with longing for some distant place.
It was a lizard person's dream.
His face looked rather fierce, but what he dreamed left Rosa utterly astonished.
It was the most beautiful dream of some distant place she had ever seen, brimming with wonderful wishes, brimming with hope on top of hope.
And what mattered most was that no one else's dream came anywhere close to this one in scale.
Within the dream, she saw a colossal golden feathered serpent sweeping its wings across the sky, the earth below spreading out in green, fields heavy with row upon row of fruit.
She saw everyone dressed in splendid clothes, saw a civilization risen to dizzying heights, saw harbors packed edge to edge with ships, saw snake people, winged people, lizard people, and demon spirits all living together in harmony.
Rosa made up her mind. She would gather this dream into her Star Key.
She stepped into the dream, and came to stand beside the dreamer's own consciousness.
"Your dream is the most beautiful one I have seen. Is this the place you long to reach?"
"How far is it from Ruhe Beast Island?"
"How have I never seen anything like this before?"
The lizard person, standing on the deck of a ship and gazing out over the sea, turned back and said, "This is not a dream of some distant place."
"It is farther than far could ever be!"
"But I believe that one day it will appear in this world, appear before the eyes of every last person."
Rosa nodded, only half understanding.
"Oh, so this is a place farther than far."
And when the lizard person actually saw who had been asking him these questions, he froze in place.
"A nymph?"
Rosa nodded, then held out a key to him. "I want your dream. In exchange, I can give you a key."
The lizard person took the key, and asked Rosa, "What is this?"
Rosa said, "A Teleportation Gate Key. Whoever holds it can summon out a teleportation gate, and go to any place where another teleportation gate stands, with distance counting for nothing."