Chapter 314:
“There’s no way. That cliff has been fully explored a long time ago. How could there be a path there?”
“But I’m sure there is one.”
Yu-hyun couldn’t see it clearly from afar, but he had seen a golden light shining from the cliff.
It wasn’t a hallucination caused by the blizzard. Rather, because everything in the world was dyed white, the golden light was more vivid.
Lean still didn’t believe Yu-hyun’s words that there was a path there.
It was more plausible that Yu-hyun had seen something that wasn’t there.
“Let’s go and see.”
“No. It’s a waste of time.”
“We have nothing to lose by trying.”
“We have to get to our destination as soon as possibLeand scout the area. We should stick to the route we were on.”
Yu-hyun sighed at Lean’s stubbornness.
“Look, I know you don’t believe me, but I don’t lie about things like this.”
“…”
“Then let me ask you this. You said this place has been explored a long time ago, but did you do it yourself?”
Lean hesitated for a moment and shook his head.
“No. But even if I didn’t, many explorers have come here before. And above all, the emperor Fritchen often wandered around this area. If there was a path, they would have known.”
“So you’ve never seen it yourself? Then why don’t we take this opportunity to check it out?”
Lean wondered how to persuade Yu-hyun, but Yu-hyun didn’t care about Lean and moved first.
‘What makes him so sure?’
Lean was rather doubtful because of Yu-hyun’s bold movement. Could it be that the guide that Kaira left behind had shone at this moment?
Yu-hyun was the first to come this far, and he was also the first to reach here. Kaira before Yu-hyun had only lived inside the Guardian.
Considering that, it was possible, but it wasn’t easy to change the perception that had been hardened for the past 32 years.
But still.
If she was right, maybe.
Lean decided to follow Yu-hyun after all. He could tell by his stubborn attitude that he wouldn’t give up unless he used force. And using force in a place like this was suicidal.
Yu-hyun soon stood in front of the huge ice cliff.
He looked up and saw how high it was. It looked like it was over 500m high by estimation.
‘The width is… endless.’
The ice cliff that stretched out to both sides of his sight had no end in sight. At this point, it wasn’t just a mountain range that had frozen due to the curse of frost, but a fault line that had occurred due to tectonic movements.
It would be hard to see the end even if he walked along the cliff. In fact, on the map, this part had a very long boundary line.
“Look. There’s no way there’s an entrance here.”
Lean said that and scanned the area with a sharp eye, wondering if he had missed an entrance.
He examined the smooth ice wall carefully, but there was no gap to be seen.
Just as Lean was about to tell Yu-hyun that he had seen something wrong and that they should speed up their march, he saw Yu-hyun’s strange behavior. He stood in front of the ice wall alone and touched it with his hand.
Lean snapped at him.
“Touching it like that won’t make an entrance appear.”
“No.”
Yu-hyun drew his sword. Before Lean could ask him what he was doing, Yu-hyun stabbed the wall in front of him with his sword.
Thud.
The sword went into the inside easily as if it wasn’t filled with solid ice.
Right after he stabbed it, the ice around the sword cracked thinly and shattered like glass.
“There is an entrance.”
“What…!”
Lean looked at the newly created entrance with disbelief.
When? No, how? How could there be an entrance here? But he had never found it before.
Yu-hyun left Lean behind with his confused mind and entered without hesitation.
Lean followed Yu-hyun hastily.
“Wait! How did you find this entrance?”
“Is that important right now?”
“Answer me!”
“I saw it.”
“You saw it?”
“Yes. I saw it with my eyes. And when I got closer, I felt something out of place.”
“Is that… Kaira’s guide?”
He mentioned Kaira’s guide now, after denying it so much before.
Yu-hyun was too tired to affirm his words and replied vaguely.
“It might be.”
“…”
Lean looked around the entrance with a sunken gaze.
What Yu-hyun broke was a thin layer of ice that could be called a door. Behind it, there was a very narrow canyon path that could barely fit one person.
How did they not know about this path? How many people had come and gone here, without noticing it?
Lean’s eyes swept over the entrance with his hand.
This was not something that was naturally formed.
“Since we found it, are you just going to stand there?”
“…Let’s go in.”
Beyond the mountain range, there was still an unknown space. To check it out, they had to go around the ice cliff that blocked this path from afar.
To do that, they would need more than a few days of investment. It would take at least a month.
And the exploration team did not have enough food and stamina to move steadily in this harsh environment for more than a month.
The inside of the canyon was dark, but not to the point where they could not distinguish objects. Besides, the path was straight, so they knew where they had to go.
The high ice walls sometimes glowed with a light blue color, and sometimes with an emerald color.
It was as if the aurora of the sky had descended to the ground.
Yu-hyun stopped in his tracks as he brushed the wall with his hand and noticed something inside.
“What is this…”
There was something inside the semi-transparent ice wall.
As he strained his eyes to see what it was, Yu-hyun stepped back without realizing it.
It was the same for Lean.
He looked puzzled at what Yu-hyun had seen, and then he widened his eyes as he looked at one of the walls.
“What… Crazy.”
It was people.
Inside the ice wall, people were frozen to death and trapped.
They looked like they had packed their bags to escape.
When the curse of frost came from the north 32 years ago and swallowed up this world.
They were the people who were swept away while fleeing across the mountain range.
The number was estimated to be in the thousands.
Considering the width of this ice cliff, there were much more corpses that were not visible.
The canyon path that seemed beautiful at first glance was a grave for those who could not escape from the curse.
“…Don’t stop and keep going.”
Yu-hyun urged Lean and walked along the path.
The canyon path stretched for more than 3km. Far away, a white light burst out to signal the end of the canyon. On the other hand, Yu-hyun felt a more intense golden light from beyond.
‘The fragment is over there.’
He felt more worried than excited by the fact that he was getting closer to the fragment he had been looking for.
It was almost like an instinctive feeling, but he felt that there was a tremendous danger lurking beyond with the fragment.
When they arrived at the exit, Yu-hyun and Lean noticed something strange at the same time.
Near the exit, there was a small mound of snow that was strangely piled up more than anywhere else.
“Look at this.”
“…There’s something here.”
Yu-hyun dug up the snow with his sword. Then, inside, some miscellaneous items came out along with the ashes of a rune stone.
Yu-hyun and Lean’s expressions turned cold.
The two did not need to exchange words to understand what they were seeing.
“Someone… came here.”
“And not too long ago.”
Someone came here and stayed for a while. No, not for a while, but for a long time, as if to prove it, traces that could not be hidden appeared here and there.
Not once.
At least more than 10 times.
The entrance that felt unnatural was actually not something that was naturally made, but something that someone had hidden artificially.
It meant only one thing.
There was a traitor inside Guardian.
Yu-hyun swallowed his words as he realized Lean was there.
Lean would know that too, and he would be more confused than anyone else at this moment.
‘But if there is a traitor, it makes sense why they haven’t found where the curse of frost came from in 32 years. No matter how vast the northern continent is, someone should have found it.’
An internal traitor.
And one who had been hiding so meticulously for so long, it meant that he was one of the longest-acting explorers among them.
Yu-hyun suddenly thought of Frechen. Lean had said that his group came here most often.
‘No. I’m not sure yet. I have to check what’s inside first.’
Yu-hyun checked Lean’s condition.
He was looking down at the traces engraved on the exit with a dark face.
He looked like a bomb ready to explode at any moment, or like he would collapse as soon as he touched him.
He looked like he wanted to cry, but he couldn’t even do that.
“Let’s go.”
Yu-hyun grabbed Lean’s wrist and pulled him.
Lean was startled, but he couldn’t shake off Yu-hyun’s hand.
“Don’t worry about this right now, let’s go inside and see what’s there. That’s the best we can do right now.”
“…Is that so. Yeah. You’re right.”
Lean nodded his head with a tearful expression.
They walked across the white expanse beyond the exit of the canyon.
Until then, wherever they went, there were huge rocks or ice mountains everywhere, but this area was strangely empty of anything.
Rather, the ground was so transparent that they could see their own reflections.
‘No. This is, a lake?’
Yu-hyun realized that he was walking on a frozen lake.
Lean’s voice also rose a bit, as if he knew that.
“This is… Andolim Lake.”
“Andolim Lake?”
“Yeah. It’s known as the largest lake in the northern continent, at the very end of it. It’s also close to the capital of the Franzgart Empire.”
“Close to the capital, you mean.”
Yu-hyun looked around. Somewhere nearby, there was the empire’s capital where Frechen lived.
But that wasn’t what he had to check right now. Yu-hyun had been feeling a fragment of light getting closer since a while ago.
The direction was north.
He didn’t know if that was exactly north, but he had that feeling.
The two walked across the frozen lake.
It felt like the world was split in half and spread out above and below, and there seemed to be another world down there.
If this was the cursed world, then maybe the world under the frozen lake was the world of salvation.
The paths were clearly connected, but they never met.
Maybe from now on, the paths would only draw parallel lines.
The reality of the curse and the dream of salvation.
What would be at the end of this road?
“The snow, it stopped?”
The moment they crossed Andolim Lake, the snow that had been pouring down without stopping stopped. Even the wind didn’t blow.
A cold and clear space with no dust in the air.
What filled it was a misty fog.
‘It’s cold.’
The moment he put his hand in the fog, he felt a chill that made his skin crawl.
This was not a simple fog.
It was nothing but tiny particles of cold air compressed to the extreme, floating in the air and looking like fog.
‘I can’t stay here for long, but I can’t go in completely either.’
When Yu-hyun sent his gaze to Lean, he nodded his head with a determined face.
The two stuck close together and went inside the ice fog. If they were even a little apart, it would be hard to find each other.
The fog felt hazy even from outside, but when they entered it, it dulled their sense of direction as well.
If they loosened their tension even a little, they felt like they would freeze to death on the spot.
But they were able to keep going without stopping, thanks to one landmark that Yu-hyun saw in his eyes.
The golden light that shone through the gaps in the fog.
Yu-hyun walked without wavering and stopped his steps. Lean didn’t ask why he stopped.
The two looked up.
‘What is this…’
Kuuuuuuuuuuu.
Their ears hurt from the loud breathing that shook the space.
There was a giant giant there that they had to look up at from afar. The giant was sitting on one knee in his seat, bowing his head and falling asleep.
He was a frost giant, but much bigger than any of them they had seen before.
He couldn’t tell how big he was. If his sitting height was this much, his height must have been over 200m.
More than anything, the energy that flowed from the giant was extraordinary.
Fyuuuuuuuuuuu.
When the giant exhaled, a misty fog spewed out of his mouth.
‘Could it be… all this fog around here is his breath?’
Yu-hyun was appalled by this situation where he could freeze Gardin’s body with a simple breath.
Lean also couldn’t help but be shocked as he looked up at the giant.
He couldn’t see his face properly because of the giant’s breath and ice fog, but Lean was sure he saw his face.
Yu-hyun soon saw a large jewel shining red on the giant’s chest and the golden light that came out of it and quietly backed away.
‘Let’s back off for now.’
‘Yeah.’
Lean agreed with Yu-hyun’s words. They couldn’t do anything more here.
The two quickly cut through the fog and moved on. Their sense of direction was momentarily distorted, but thanks to Yu-hyun moving with the golden light behind him, they were able to get out in the shortest distance.
As they crossed Andolim Lake again, Yu-hyun finally let go of his tension.
“What was that… just now?”
“Why…”
“Lean. You recognized who that giant was.”
When he saw the giant, Lean’s expression was more than just finding a huge frost giant. It was mixed with other complex emotions.
Even in that confusion, Yu-hyun caught Lean’s change.
“…There’s no point in hiding it. I’ve seen that giant before.”
“You’ve seen him before? That huge frost giant?”
“Yeah.”
Lean turned his head to the direction where the giant frost giant was, beyond the fog at the end of the lake.
“He is, the god of this world. The Divine Spirit who should have disappeared after passing on his power to the successor.”
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