Chapter 438: The Dead End
As long as the Wall remained standing, this southern campaign—while seemingly a bold surprise—was in truth a pursuit of a hopeless cause.
The new High Priest of the Great Other stood in the shadows a few hundred meters away, watching the easily captured castle and the army of wights flowing into it. At a glance, the host still appeared magnificent; he listened to the desperate pleas and screams of the living, yet his heart was incredibly heavy.
He had inherited nearly half of the Night King's mana and, crucially, the status of the magical nexus for all the priests. However, he had not inherited a way to communicate with the Great Other.
That phrasing wasn't entirely accurate. In reality, he didn't know if the previous Night King even possessed the ability to proactively communicate with their deity. After completing his transformation, he had briefly sensed the presence of a higher-level power and received his first and final directive from It: abandon the original strategic objectives for the Gift and the Wall, and advance south.
He expressed confusion toward this command, but unfortunately, his inquiries met no response. He could no longer even sense the Great Other's presence.
Was it simply because they were too far from the magical breach at the Great Gorge, resulting in a poor signal and disconnected communication? Or had the Great Other actually abandoned them—issuing a simple order to move south and then leaving them to their own devices, merely wanting them to strike one last blow against the human world and burn away their remaining value?
The High Priest did not know, and he had no way to ask.
Bypassing the difficult-to-defeat Night's Watch forces to head south directly seemed wonderful, but it presented a fatal problem: every move the priests made consumed energy.
Maintaining a low body temperature suitable for movement, condensing ice weapons and armor, casting magic to aid in slaughter, and reanimating corpses into wights after a victory—all these actions had to be performed proactively. The priests were not perpetual motion machines, and the wights were not creatures from a zombie apocalypse; no resources would automatically snowball out of thin air.
...
A day and a night after their defeat at Queenscrown, the remaining priests led the dead south along the Kingsroad to the nearest Northern castle and winter town: Last Hearth, the heart of House Umber's territory.
What finally allowed them to relax slightly was the fact that the castle's preparations for their arrival were incredibly meager. Not only had the residents of the winter town outside the walls failed to evacuate completely, but the garrison's defenses were so rudimentary that the priests suspected a trap. Aside from some oils and pitch—whose flammability could not compare to wildfire—only a small number of frozen fire arrows posed a threat. Once the wights scaled the walls and entered the castle, the living soldiers, bearing the emblem of the roaring giant on their surcoats, resisted mostly with ordinary steel and iron weapons.
Ultimately, this battle became the first victory since crossing the Gorge where enemies killed exceeded casualties. The surrounding smallfolk gathered at Last Hearth for winter, members of the Umber family, and their soldiers—totaling over four thousand—were all slaughtered. The wight losses were less than a thousand.
Furthermore, the corpses in Last Hearth finally lacked that strange fire-attribute mana from an unknown source!
It was good news after good news, but did this truly count as a victory? The High Priest doubted it, for he now faced an unprecedented and awkward predicament: he lacked sufficient mana to turn the slain enemies into wights.
The priests of the Great Other had traveled from the Lands of Always Winter, and five years had passed before they finally invaded south through the Gorge... During such a long period, they hadn't simply been walking for seven seasons, as the jokes might suggest; they had been quietly preparing for this Great War.
While north of the Wall, the primary difficulty they faced was that qualified corpses were insufficient. Countless creatures had lived and died beyond the Wall over the millennia, but only a small portion could be converted into wights. The reason was that using necromancy to reanimate the dead was not as unconditional as humans imagined.
In summary, when the priests cast spells to resurrect and create wights, they had to consider two aspects.
First, was it worth reanimating? Second, could it be reanimated?
While smaller creatures required less mana to convert, each remained a single unit that required the converter's focus to link and control. This control capacity had a limit—ranging from several thousand to tens of thousands—depending on the priest's own mental strength. This meant a corpse had to possess conversion value: sufficient size, a structure suitable for combat, or the ability to use weapons and tools. Under these conditions, tiny animals and birds that could not fly after being wighted were excluded; most herbivores, which lacked flexible structures, fangs, or claws, were likewise set aside. Consequently, the only candidates on the list were giants, humans, and medium-to-large predators.
Even with a clear scope of candidates, it did not mean anything on the list could become a wight. Although the cold magic entering the corpse could replace the nervous system to control behavior, the wight's movement still relied primarily on the body's original muscles. This meant only those who met the conditions could be converted: those cremated into ash were naturally out, and skeletons picked clean by scavengers in the wilderness were beyond saving. Only the freshly killed or the well-buried who had not yet completely decomposed could be turned into wights.
These two major restrictions were why the Night King and his dozen-plus priests had spent years traveling and fighting in diverse locations, yet managed to gather only a little over a hundred thousand wights in total.
Beyond the Wall, it was nearly impossible for the priests to reach their maximum control limit, so their requirements for corpses were usually extremely low. As long as a body barely met the two criteria, even if it were mangled and hideous, they would inject mana to make it part of the magical link network—taking up one slot among their controllable puppets. When encountering an exceptional target, they would even stoop to personally hunting it down. But today, faced with a castle full of well-armed, fresh corpses that still retained body heat, they were trapped in the predicament of having insufficient mana to convert them. What an irony!
The further south they moved from the Wall, the weaker the suppression field became, but similarly, the further the priests moved from the mana-rich lands of the north. If the mana recovery rate beyond the Wall was 100 and 1 at the southern end of the Gorge, then it was 0.5 at Queenscrown. By the time they reached this Northern castle—a thousand miles from the Lands of Always Winter and separated by an intact Wall—it had dropped to a pathetic 0.1... And even this incredibly low figure would continue to decrease as they moved further south and as time passed after the peak of the Great Other's power.
The new High Priest could roughly estimate: after another two or three days of traveling south, the concentration of cold mana leaking through the Gorge would be halved again. This would officially drop below the survival line required to maintain their body temperature. Once the speed of absorbing energy from the outside could not keep up with the consumption needed just to stay warm, the priests would become like extreme divers holding their breath underwater. Once the mana stored in their bodies was exhausted, they would enter a state of consuming their own bodies to stay alive. At that point, never mind impenetrable ice armor, invincible ice swords, or magic that could quench wildfire—the priests might become so weak that a single torch or a bucket of warm water could boil them to death!
Once they crossed that red line, they would slowly fade away on their own without anyone lifting a finger.
Could they not solve this dilemma by sitting in a safe zone and waiting for their mana to recover? Theoretically, yes, but things were not that simple. The vast collective strength and home-field advantage of the human world meant that every moment of waiting was like drinking poison to quench a thirst—not to mention the band of Night's Watchmen hot on their heels!
Indeed, with the failure of the plan to seize the Wall and the human side's sudden deployment of a devastating weapon that could only be avoided, everything had turned farcical: a host of over ten thousand wights was being chased into a panicked flight by a group of living men only a fraction of their size.
Now, the new High Priest faced a choice even more difficult than the Night King's decision between Nightfort or Queenscrown: continue fleeing south from the Watch, crossing that dangerous line into mana-depleted lands to wait for death, or turn back for a suicidal stand to carve out some small chance of victory for the Great Other?
In short: wait for death or fight for life?
Any sentient being would choose the latter, but with the three dragons returning to join the Night's Watch, the latter had also become a dead end.
Between waiting for death or seeking death, there was no choice to be made.
If the Night King were still alive, how would he choose?
...
As he pondered, another priest approached him, asking in the Old Tongue what should be done with these nearly five thousand fresh corpses.
The question was not without reason—the new High Priest, having inherited the bulk of the Night King's legacy, was the only one among them with relatively abundant mana. He actually possessed enough to convert tens of thousands of ordinary wights.
However, having the ability to cast conversion spells also meant he was the only one who still posed a threat to the dragons.
The choice between fleeing and seeking death remained unfinished when another lethal question was placed before him: should he spend his precious remaining mana on converting wights, or save it all to deal with the dragons and the Night's Watch?
Mimicking the thought patterns of the fallen Night King, after several minutes of long consideration, he thought of the only remaining possibility for turning defeat into victory: the combination of dragons and the Night's Watch was invincible, but if he could find a way to lure them apart, he could crush them one by one. If he could solve the immediate crisis and then slowly recover north of the safety line—once his mana was full again—he could either head south to slaughter the unprepared residents of the North's interior or turn back to try his luck at the Wall. At the very least, his hope for survival would be slightly higher!
"We will rest here to recover mana and depart when the men in black catch up," the High Priest of the Great Other said, his voice sounding like a cracking glacier. "Let each priest choose corpses to convert personally. Take the strongest and best-equipped as puppets; leave the ordinary ones behind. As for me, I will save all my strength for the coming battle."
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