Lord of Winter: Beginning with Daily Intelligence

Chapter 681: Chapter 389: The New Northern Territory and the Old North

When the snowstorm passed over Gray Stone Fortress, it was like shards of glass being tossed down from a great height.

The old trade road was mixed with permafrost and mud, jostling travelers and leaving them dizzy.

Even the luxurious wheels creaked under the strain when caught in the potholes, as if protesting the cruelty of this wasteland.

Sorel sat steadily in the carriage, reaching out to check the door and window seams to ensure they were tightly shut, before retrieving the worn silver pendant from the lining of his shirt.

Flicking open the clasp, inside lay a thumb-sized charcoal sketch of a little girl clutching a doll.

Her face was pale, her eyes disproportionately large, yet she tried to smile ever so faintly beyond the frame, holding the doll tightly.

Sorel’s fingertips gently caressed the image, briefly closing his eyes.

Then he fastened the pendant back in place, as if tucking away some secret into the crevices of his armor.

Sorel lifted a corner of the carriage window and looked outside.

The sound of the wind immediately rushed in, sharp and cold like needle pricks.

Withered Black Pine Forests lay twisted under the weight of the snow, and corpses sprawled by the roadside, some buried so deep only half their faces were visible.

In broken huts lived vagrants resembling beasts, their gazes numb as they looked up at the carriage, as if having abandoned all thoughts of survival long ago.

Chimney smoke was virtually absent in this stretch of wasteland, leaving the air with only the scent of rotting flesh and cold winds.

Sorel stared at all of this.

He knew he should maintain the royal envoy’s decorous restraint, but that aristocratic disdain from the South unwittingly seeped out.

Sorel chuckled softly, without warmth.

"This is what the Northern Territory is like."

Barren, uncivilized, chaotic, worthless.

Such was the consensus of the Imperial Capital regarding the Northern Territory, and everything he was seeing perfectly corroborated this prejudice.

"Being a king in such a place...it’s merely this."

He knew that Louis had a knack for political scheming, but being in the Northern Territory, he felt the conditions he brought from the Second Prince were practically useless.

"As long as I’m willing to offer a little Southern trade rights...he’ll know how to bow and welcome civilization."

The carriage continued to sway northward, snowstorms beating against the window frames with a death knell-like rhythm.

It had been three days since leaving Gray Stone Fortress, yet the snowstorm still raged.

Suddenly, the carriage’s jostling ceased, as if it had entered another world.

Sorel opened his eyes, frowning, clearly sensing something amiss.

He could feel the wheels were no longer being tugged at by muddy pits, the lightness even steadying the horses’ gait.

He lifted a corner of the curtain.

Cold wind poured in, but what he first saw was not snow, but a vast expanse of...

Gray-black, smooth hardened roads.

The surface was pressed extremely flat, rain and snow formed no mire upon it, but were instead blown to the sides with an imperceptible gradient.

The center of the road marked with straight white lines, neat, precise, like measured symbols, not casual strokes.

Sorel paused for a moment, then slowly uttered, "Is this...the Northern Territory?"

He had traveled the main roads of the South and visited the Imperial Capital’s road workshops, yet what lay before him was even better than many places in the South.

The carriage continued onward, soon the first building materialized in the snowstorm.

Red Tide waystation.

The house was modest in size yet cleanly lined, the walls made of neat gray stone bricks, a bright red flag with the Red Tide insignia hung at the entrance.

White smoke rose steadily from the chimney, indicating continuous warmth inside.

More captivating than the structure itself were the industrious people outside the waystation.

A team of workers in deep red uniforms were pushing iron snow scrapers along the road.

Their movements were orderly, occasionally whistling, a rhythm so carefree it seemed incongruent with laboring on the Northern Territory’s permafrost line.

No shackles, no whips, no supervising knights.

The foreman held a hardboard noting snow levels and road conditions, occasionally glancing up at the sky as if gauging when next to clear the snow.

Sorel watched for a long time before exclaiming, "The Northern Territory’s liegemen...are smiling?"

This whispered self-reflection carried an aura of unacceptable absurdity.

In his impression, the liegemen of the Northern Territory were either cold or hungry, either numb or terrified.

Those people should have been huddled in broken shacks trembling, not whistling as they worked in the snow.

Sorel slowly lowered the curtain, his brow visibly furrowed.

He even doubted whether he had mistakenly wandered into a land entirely engulfed by Red Tide, the scene here starkly different from the desolation he had seen for days in the Northern Territory.

And as the carriage journeyed further north, invitations flooded in.

Almost at every castle or town fortification, Sorel was stopped by the Lord’s attendants, insisting he honor them with his presence, even if just for a moment.

With his identity as the Second Prince’s Special Envoy, despite any deceitful intentions they might harbor, these Lords maintained a respectful facade.

However, Sorel quickly discovered the disparities among these banquets were astonishingly absurd.

It was as if he were being pulled into two completely different worlds along the same road, prosperity and decay, warmth and coldness, hope and rot.

The contents of the feasts, the Lords’ attitudes, the liegemen’s states of mind, were cleaved into starkly opposing halves.

The first kind of domain, were those places bearing the "Red Tide insignia" at the main street entrance.

For instance, when Sorel arrived at the first location, it was in the gray light before dusk. The sky seemed suffocated by snow, yet the castle gates opened swiftly, as if already waiting.