Chapter 1961 - Surveying the Lands of the Extreme North!

“Ah! Watch out!” a voice suddenly cried out. One of the horsemen guarding the perimeter had discovered something, a snow-white bear that had to weigh nearly two thousand jin and was a head higher than an adult man. This bear bared its teeth in a savage expression, ready to jump down from its tree to attack the party at any time.

A polar bear!

The horsemen were no stranger to these large white bears. They had run into some of these massive creatures that had gone south to forage for food. Their bodies were packed with strength, and they were capable of shattering stones with a single strike from their paws. Even a well-trained war horse would have their skull obliterated if struck by one of these polar bears.

At any other time, they would not have cared, but rushing all this way had greatly taxed both their physical strength and Stellar Energy, and they were far from peak strength. Moreover, this frigid land was the home terrain of these bears. If they were not careful, they really might suffer some losses.

“Be careful! Don’t provoke it! Slowly approach it!

“Everyone, approach slowly! We’ll work together and kill it as soon as we can!

“Take out a shield if you have one! Get to the first row and get ready to block!”

The leader of the team was extremely experienced, and he swiftly issued orders. It wasn’t long before the ten-some elite horsemen had taken up formation, and they began to slowly surround the polar bear.

Everyone walked on tiptoes, moving at an extremely slow pace.

The air was fraught with tension.

One hundred feet, fifty feet, twenty feet…

“Wait! Captain! There’s something wrong with this polar bear!” A scout in the team quickly noticed that something wasn’t right, and soon, so did the others. The group had been advancing for some time, but that polar bear continued to maintain the same posture, its teeth bared in aggression.

In all this time, the beast hadn’t even blinked. This was not the behavior of a living creature, at least not of such beasts they had encountered in the past.

An arrow flew and struck the polar bear’s body, but the bear remained motionless. Moreover, when the arrow struck, there was no meaty impact, but an abnormally crisp snap.

Everyone soon gathered around the polar bear. One of the horsemen extended a hand and found the polar bear to be ice-cold. Its fur had frozen into hard needles.

“Dead!” a horseman said, his body suffused with shock.

“This polar bear has already been frozen into an ice statue!”

As he spoke, the horseman circulated energy through his palm and slapped. Crack! Half of the polar bear’s neck instantly disappeared. The skin and its flesh had all turned into fine pieces of ice. And what was revealed behind the vanished neck was not normal flesh and blood, but large, blood-colored pieces of ice.

Its blood, muscles, blood vessels, and even the bones had all been turned to ice.

Upon seeing this bizarre sight, everyone speechlessly looked at each other.

Polar bears had dense fur and thick layers of fat and meat, making them more resistant to extreme cold than humans, even more than many human martial artists.

Moreover, this polar bear’s body was still large and stocky, so there was no way it could have died from starvation. It was truly difficult to imagine just what could have frozen it to death.

“Captain! There’s something here! Come look!” someone shouted before the group could ponder what was going on.

The captain’s eyes glinted with cold light as he quickly led his men over.

“Captain, look, look! There are a lot of frozen wolves here!”

Next to a large fir tree, an elite horseman pointed ahead.

Everyone turned to look and saw ten-some wolves scattered around the forest in a large arc. They were in a variety of postures, some of them crouched down, others with their backs arched, and some of them curled into balls. These were wolves that had been ready to go out on a hunt.

One of the horsemen pushed, upon which a wolf fell to the ground and broke into several pieces.

The ice chunks scattered across the ground made their hair stand on end. What had frozen all these snow wolves to death right before they were about to go hunting?

“Everyone, be careful. There’s something weird about this place!” the captain warily called out.

As they advanced, they saw more and more animals frozen to death. A snow rabbit had curled up in a bush, its eyes frozen into blue beads of ice. Underneath a pine tree, an adult sika deer had been frozen to death, its body fused with the icy ground.

Arctic foxes, squirrels, river deer, hedgehogs… more and more frozen animals became visible, all of them apparently instantly frozen to death.

“Captain! Look! There’s a house here!”

The party made a new discovery, a crude wooden building several dozen feet in radius. The entire building was crudely made from logs of fir and pine trees.

“Be careful! Barbarians!”

One of the horsemen immediately became vigilant.

The group had long ago learned that the extreme north was home to large barbarians who lived in tribes.

These people devoured their meat raw, and they wore simple clothes or beast hides around their bodies. Living in these terrible conditions and often fighting with beasts, in addition having so much meat as part of their diet, these barbarians, if they survived to adulthood, would mostly have stalwart bodies, divine strength, and extremely aggressive personalities. Not even the Turks were willing to provoke them.

While the Turks were often regarded by the Tang as barbarians, derided as people who ate raw meat and who were not on the same level as the agricultural civilization of the Central Plains, for the Turks, these ‘wildmen’ who wandered the lands of the extreme north were the true barbarians.

“There’s no need to worry. They’re already dead!” the captain said, and before the others could say anything, he pushed open the door and went inside.

The barbarians were not completely oblivious. With so many people shuffling their way through the snow, if they were still alive, they would have charged out already, not been so quiet.

“…Moreover, even a polar bear was frozen to death. Do you really think a human would have survived?” The captain’s voice came from inside.

The others were startled, but then they understood and followed the captain inside.

As expected, the wooden house had been turned into a freezer. Next to a wooden table, the group saw a family of three that had been turned into ice statues.

They were wearing crude clothes made of hide, and dried meat had been placed on the table along with some simple utensils. But the three people were covered in thick layers of ice and frozen in place. The life had gone out of them long ago.

“There’s a lot of meat on the table, and the jars contain wild fruits that they gathered and a lot of jerky. They weren’t lacking in food. This wasn’t a normal death!” an extremely experienced scout reported.

The members of this mission were hand-picked elites, but even for them, these scenes were getting far too eerie.

When a human encountered danger, they would rapidly react, not simply wait for death, let alone still go on eating. And those wolves in the forest had all been instantly slain. It all seemed like the work of ghosts and spirits, and they couldn’t help but feel very uneasy.

These men were all hardy individuals who had been through the trials of the battlefield, who wouldn’t even blink if a sword swept across their brow. But what they had seen could no longer be explained through common sense.

When they emerged from the wooden house, all of them were silent and abnormally dejected.

A horseman broke the silence. “So… did His Highness predict all of this? Was this the real reason he sent us here??”

This place was a land forbidden to life. Grass, animals, and the barbarians had all died in an eerie fashion. If they hadn’t come as a group, had come alone or with only one or two others, they probably would have fled for their lives already.

At this moment, sharp cracking began to ring out. Everyone turned and saw a massive tree nearly one hundred meters tall begin to tremble, snow falling from its branches. The trunk of the tree seemed to lose its balance and crashed down.

Boom! A snowy cloud rose into the air. Many more trees in the forest were pushed and squeezed, and began to fall down.

There was another massive boom, and as that first tree slammed into the ground, it broke into two. Countless shards flew through the air, but inside was crystalline ice.

“!!!”

Time seemed to freeze. Everyone stared at the fallen tree and the ice crystals in the air in utter shock.

They had noticed how the animals and barbarians in the forest had been frozen into ice sculptures, and that house had also been encased in thick ice, making it like a freezer. But none of them had noticed that many of the trees in the forest had also been turned to ice.

This was a world of dead ice statues.

While they were still in shock, the ground began to shudder, flinging the shards of ice on the ground several inches high.

Quickly, the captain furiously bellowed, “Go! Hurry! Everyone, leave this place at once!”

Unlike before, the voice was tinged with panic and anxiety.

Boom! Even though they didn’t know what was going on, the others chose to listen to their captain’s orders and rushed back toward where the horses were being kept.

A few moments later, the booming crescendoed. The shuddering intensified, accompanied by the groaning and crashing of trees into the ground.