Read Novel Full Chapter 671 - 386: Iron Pulse
Chapter 671: Chapter 386: Iron Pulse
In the early autumn of the Northern Territory, the wind already carried bits of a chilling cold.
In the northern district of Red Tide City, the newly built freight platform was cordoned off by a solemn circle of red-armored knights.
Only a few people were allowed to approach the inner circle: a black-robed scribe from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, a surveyor in a gray uniform from the Road Department, just over a dozen business group representatives, and seasoned craftsmen permitted to witness the scene.
On the hillock in the outskirts, a circle of citizens gathered from afar.
They were flushed with cold, but their eyes were fixed intently on the parallel tracks stretching into the gray-white mist.
"Damn this weather..." Retto shrank his neck, trying to tuck his frozen chin into the fox fur of his collar.
He looked to be in his early twenties, wearing a well-tailored but slightly thin silk suit from the South, seeming out of place among the thickly fur-coated Northern people.
This was his first time following his father to this place, Red Tide City.
"I don’t understand why we have to stand here in the cold wind." Retto stomped his feet, complaining to a small, inconspicuous man beside him.
He had no idea who this man was, only that he was also invited by Lord Bradley, the head of internal affairs.
"Hey, listen." Retto sniffed, his tone filled with the arrogance of a young master from a major trading house, "My father, the president of Golden Wheat Sheaf Trading Company, had urgent matters to attend to, so he sent me to take his place.
The people from the Internal Affairs Office said this is some epoch-making moment? Ha! Just because of these two iron bars laid on the muddy ground?"
The small man beside him was called House, and he wasn’t angered by Retto’s arrogance.
He wore a coal-dust-covered work uniform, the attire of the Craftsman’s Office.
"Sir," House spoke softly, "You’d better fasten the buttons of your collar tightly."
"What?" Retto frowned, thinking this lower-class person was mocking him for wearing so little.
"Because that is the Snowfield Iron Vein." House murmured, "First-time viewers often have weak legs. Falling down would be quite embarrassing, sir."
"Ha?" Just when Retto wanted to laugh off the warning as mere alarmist talk, an unusual sensation wafted up from the ground.
Just as he began to feel slightly uneasy, the pebbles at his feet started jittering and clacking against the tracks.
It wasn’t the violent shaking of an earthquake, but a tumultuous vibration akin to thousands of horses galloping.
"Woo——!!!"
Suddenly, a sound he had never heard before tore through the cold stillness of early autumn.
The sound was neither the impassioned blare of a horn nor the roar of a magical beast.
It was cold, deep, highly penetrating, diving straight into Retto’s marrow, making his scalp tingle, and his taunting words were instantly choked back.
The distant mist was violently shattered.
In Retto’s tightly contracted pupils, a steel behemoth spewing thick smoke was pounding towards him along the track.
"What...what kind of monster is that?!"
Retto instinctively retreated two steps, his legs giving way, his back colliding heavily against the railing.
If not for the railing, he truly would have ended up sitting on the ground as House had said.
"That is the Snowfield Iron Vein." House said softly, eyes gleaming with an excited light.
The gigantic plow on the front of the locomotive was like a knight’s heavy shield during a charge, gleaming with the cold sheen unique to cold iron.
Vast metal connecting rods drove the waist-high steel wheels, producing an achingly rhythmic metallic clashing sound, carrying an irresistible physical oppression, as though anything in its path would be ground to pulp.
"Crunch, crunch, crunch!"
As the train approached, Retto felt that the land beneath the platform seemed to tremble slightly, his ears filled with the mechanical roar and the piercing sound of steam currents spewed by the colossal machine.
He had never seen anything so immense, so formidable.
The confidence and contempt he had as the young master of a merchant convoy were completely shattered by this steel monstrous entity.
He felt an indescribable shock, one that surpassed anything he ever imagined from any weapon or warrior.
He instinctively opened his mouth, but he could not utter a word.
"Is that...it?" Retto finally choked out this sentence from his throat.
The platform fell into dead silence, only heavy breathing echoed in the air.
The train, accompanied by the screeching howls of brake shoes, precisely halted beside the red line of the platform.
Scalding white steam sprayed from the pressure release valve, instantly engulfing half the platform, a wave of heat dispelling all cold.
The carriage door slid open.
The Red Tide Lord, Louis Calvin, was the first to step out.
He wore that signature black lord’s long coat, his expression calm, his gaze sweeping over the crowd.
"Open the cargo hold."
With a gesture from Louis, the soldiers pulled open the seemingly immensely heavy enclosed cargo hold behind.
Stacks of burlap bags were inside, each one fully bulging, marked with a golden wheat ear and sun emblem.
Instinctively, Retto shielded himself, for he had seen too many scenes of the starving fighting brutally over half a loaf of black bread.
He expected these Northern people to eye those bags of flour like wild dogs, with a glimmer of greed in their eyes.
But he was wrong, terribly wrong.
When those life-saving food bags were laid out in front of them, of the hundreds to thousands of citizens surrounding them, not one gave those bags of flour a second glance.
Countless eyes, seemingly pulled by some magnetic force, were fixed intently on the young man in black standing amid the white steam.
It was something more primitive, more fervent than the desire for food.
It was the absolute reverence for the bringer of miracles.
"Lord Louis!!!" Someone shouted first, unknowingly.