Qian Duoduo had been running for a full forty minutes. His short legs were no longer under his control, and his cotton robe, soaked through, clung to his body. Every step he took was accompanied by a string of heavy pants. But he didn't dare stop. The Iron-clad Giants on either side of him maintained a frighteningly steady pace; if he slowed down by even a fraction, the knee armor of the berserker behind him would shove into his back.
The silhouette of Blackwind Fortress finally emerged from the wind and snow.
Qian Duoduo bent over, clutching his knees, and gulped down the frigid air. As his gaze swept toward the horizon behind the fortress, his breathing hitched. On the northern skyline, a layer of grayish-yellow dust was rolling in.
It wasn't a sandstorm. There were no sandstorms in the Winter Tundra.
It was a cloud of frozen earth debris kicked up by countless paws and hooves, hanging in the air and staining the entire horizon a dirty, earthy yellow. The ground beneath the dust was trembling—a continuous, dull vibration that traveled from the soles of his feet straight to his teeth.
"That's..."
"A beast tide," Lin Yuan said without looking back, already stepping through the fortress gates.
Qian Duoduo's knees grew even weaker. Being a merchant, he had heard legends of a Tier 3 Winter Beast Tide. The last one had occurred twelve years ago; a Northern Count's stone castle had been trampled into flat ground, and not even the bones of the Count's family were ever found.
He looked back at that earthy yellow line. It was wider than before.
"Get in," Lin Yuan's voice drifted from inside the gate.
Qian Duoduo scrambled and crawled his way into the fortress.
Lin Yuan stood in the open space at the center of the base. Karl had already come to meet him, his severed arm wrapped in fresh cloth, and the color in the old steward's face looked slightly better than the night before.
"Young Master, the beast tide—"
"I know."
Lin Yuan opened the system interface. The tech tree for the Lv2 Steam Magic-Modification Era unfolded before him, with rows of icons turning from gray to bright blue. His fingertips swept across the light screen with lightning speed, tapping the first construction blueprint.
[Steam Arsenal]
[Construction Cost: 800 Gold + 3,000 Energy Points]
[Function: Unlocks the production and deployment capabilities of all Steam Era weapons]
He hit "Confirm."
The ground beneath their feet began to vibrate. It wasn't the distant tremor of the beast tide; the stone slabs beneath them were actually cracking. Qian Duoduo, frightened, jumped back two steps and fell flat on his butt.
In the center of the fortress, dark red light surged from the joints of the stone slabs. The light spread across the ground, outlining a rectangular perimeter thirty meters wide.
Then, the ground heaved. The stone slabs were shattered, and the soil was pushed aside. One by one, pitch-black steel beams drilled out from beneath the earth, carrying mud and debris as they shot upward at high speed. The gaps between the beams were filled with metal plates, and rivets automatically embedded into their slots with a series of sharp "clack-clack" sounds.
Ten seconds. Twenty seconds. Thirty seconds.
A steel structure, roughly thirty meters square and eight meters high, rose from the ground. Its four walls were made of thick black steel plates, their surfaces carved with intricate, interlacing magical runes. The roof was slanted corrugated iron, and two thick chimneys protruded from the top, belching a heavy plume of white steam. The entrance was a double-door cast-iron rolling gate, embossed with a symbol of a gear crossed with a wrench.
Qian Duoduo sat on the ground, his mouth agape. His mind was blank, leaving only one thought—This building didn't exist a moment ago.
"This... this..." Qian Duoduo pointed at the factory for a long time, but he couldn't squeeze out a single complete sentence.
Lin Yuan ignored him. He walked to the factory door, and the rolling gate automatically rose. Inside were rows of neat metal tracks, with molds and forging presses mounted on them. Steam pipes emerged from the walls, connecting to machines that were already humming and whirring.
He stepped back and opened the next blueprint.
[Steel Wall (Overlay type)]
[Construction Cost: 600 Gold + 2,000 Energy Points]
[Effect: Overlays metal armor plates on existing stone walls, increasing height to 10 meters, Defense Level +4]
Confirm.
The four stone walls of the fortress let out a dull roar simultaneously. Dark red light spread upward from the base of the walls. Everywhere the light touched, the rough gray stone was rapidly covered by layer after layer of black metal plates. Runes flickered at the joints between the plates, and rivets locked themselves in from the inside.
The walls were growing. The original stone walls, barely three meters high, climbed at a rate of half a meter per second. Four meters, five meters, seven meters, ten meters. As the metal reached the top, a row of jagged battlements automatically extended from the crest. The spacing between each embrasure was perfectly consistent, just wide enough to mount a heavy weapon.
Qian Duoduo finally stood up. He craned his neck upward, his mouth still wide open.
A ten-meter-high, pitch-black steel wall now enclosed the entire fortress like an airtight metal box. The metal plates on the wall glinted coldly in the snow, and the falling flakes shattered into powder upon impact.
"A miracle... a miracle..." Qian Duoduo's lips trembled.
Karl was shaking as well. The old steward looked up at the black wall, his knees buckling, nearly kneeling down once more.
Lin Yuan pulled up the weapon list from the interface.
[Mana-Powered Gatling x10]
[Unit Cost: 50 Gold + 200 Energy Points + 1 Basic Mana Crystal]
[Total Cost: 500 Gold + 2,000 Energy Points + 10 Basic Mana Crystals]
Confirm.
Ten black machines slid out of the arsenal doors one by one, moving toward the walls along rails embedded in the ground. Each machine was half the height of a man, with a tripod base and six parallel barrels at the top. The barrels were engraved with blue runes, pointing forward like dark voids.
The berserkers took over the manual labor. They hauled the Gatling guns onto the walls and mounted them in the embrasures. The clamps on the bases bit into the pre-made grooves in the metal walls and locked tight.
The ten Gatling guns were distributed evenly across the four walls: four on the front wall, two on each side, and two on the rear. The spacing between each unit was sufficient to create overlapping fields of fire.
Lin Yuan pulled up the final blueprint.
[Heavy Magic-Modified Ballista x1]
[Cost: 300 Gold + 1,500 Energy Points + 5 Basic Mana Crystals]
A massive siege engine was pushed out of the arsenal. Qian Duoduo saw it clearly this time. Its chassis was as wide as a large truck, the limbs were two curved tempered-steel supports, and the bowstring was as thick as a jump rope. A bolt was already loaded in the groove; the shaft was thicker than a man's thigh, and the tip was carved with crisscrossing red array runes.
Six berserkers worked together to push the ballista onto the platform above the main gate. The four support legs of the base extended, pinning themselves firmly into the metal wall. The ballista's body tilted slightly upward, pointing toward the northern tundra.
Lin Yuan walked onto the wall. He stood at the highest point of the front wall and looked north.
The snow had lessened slightly, and his visibility was clearer than before. The grayish-yellow dust on the horizon had expanded to the full width of his vision. Beneath the dust, dense black dots were now visible. They were moving. Getting closer.
The vibrations beneath his feet grew more intense, and the metal plates on the wall let out a faint hum.
Qian Duoduo climbed onto the wall. He peered through an embrasure and froze. He had seen illustrated scrolls of beast tides before. But the drawings were nothing compared to the real thing.
It wasn't just a pack of monsters. It was as if the entire earth was moving toward them. The blackish-gray swarm carpeted the tundra, stretching as far as the eye could see in every direction. Iron-clad Rhinos, Frost Wolves, Bone Lizards, Frost Earth Scorpions—dozens of species mixed together, forming a living torrent several kilometers wide. The ground shattered beneath their feet. The frozen earth was trampled into powder, and the kicked-up dust blotted out half the sky.
"Ten thousand... no, more than ten thousand..." Qian Duoduo's voice cracked.
Karl came up as well. The old steward gripped the battlement, his face as white as the frost on the wall.
The beast tide continued to advance. Five kilometers. Four kilometers. The air was filled with a pungent, musky stench—the body odor of countless monsters, detectable from miles away.
Then, a sound came from the sky. It was too massive to be a mere roar; it was as if the entire sky was vibrating in resonance. A shrill shriek pierced through the clouds, and the metal plates on the wall trembled in response.
Qian Duoduo's legs gave out, and he sat down hard on the wall.
A giant shadow fell from the clouds. Its wingspan exceeded thirty meters. The skeleton was exposed, with no flesh or skin covering it; every bone was encrusted with translucent blue ice crystals. Within the hollow eye sockets burned two clusters of eerie blue ghost-fire. A complete spine extended from the skull all the way to the tail, which ended in a bone blade made of ice prisms.
Frost Bone Dragon King.
Dark-Gold Rank.
The absolute overlord of the Winter Tundra.
The Dragon King flapped its wings once, the resulting gust of air blasting the snow off the fortress walls. It circled once above the fortress, its bone claws skimming just ten meters above the wall, casting a shadow that swallowed the entire stronghold.
It spoke. It wasn't a beastial growl, but human speech. Every word squeezed out from those macabre, clacking jaws carried the screeching texture of grinding metal.
"Worms."
The skeletal frame hovered in mid-air, the two blue flame eyes looking down. "This King has slumbered for three hundred years. For my first meal upon waking, I require sufficient flesh and blood."
Its tail lashed once in the air, the ice-prism blade at the tip slicing through the wind with a shrill whistle. "Open your shell. Drive out everything living inside. Kneel on the ground and line up. This King will pick a few who look pleasing to grant them a quick death."
No one on the wall spoke. Karl's teeth were chattering. Qian Duoduo had shrunk behind an embrasure, clutching his head with both hands. The twenty remaining berserkers had no reaction. They stood at their posts, axes in hand, motionless.
Lin Yuan took a cigar out of his pocket. He didn't know which wreckage of a trade wagon he had picked it up from earlier; he had just stuffed it into his pocket. He put the cigar in his mouth and fished a box of matches from another pocket.
He struck one.
The match head hissed to life. He leaned in, took two puffs, and the tip of the cigar glowed a fiery orange. White smoke drifted from the corner of his mouth, scattered by the wind.
The Dragon King's blue ghost-fire stared at him.
Lin Yuan caught the spent matchstick between two fingers and flicked it over the wall. The stick tumbled into the snow outside, letting out a wisp of smoke before going out.
"Slumbered for three hundred years? You must have starved yourself into a delusion."
He kept the cigar in his mouth, the smoke veiling half his face.
The Dragon King's bone wings unfurled, and blue ice crystals shed from the wing-bones, shattering into powder in the air. Its skull tilted forward slightly, its hollow eye sockets locking onto Lin Yuan. Cold air surged from its skeletal maw.
It wasn't a breath. It was the pre-charging of the Frost Dragon's Breath. The surrounding temperature plummeted, and a layer of white frost instantly formed on the metal plates atop the wall.
Qian Duoduo poked half his head out from behind the embrasure, his entire face green with terror. "My Lord! That's Dark-Gold Rank! Dark-Gold Rank! Quickly—"
Lin Yuan took the cigar out of his mouth and blew a cloud of white smoke toward the Dragon King. Then, he raised his right hand and swung it down with force.
"Fire."