Chapter 1 The Final Fortress

The far north: a land of bitter cold, where everything withers. Yet even these thousands of miles of icy wasteland within the Arctic Circle were once a battlefield where the “gods” of the mythical age fought ceaselessly. To this day, the mysterious forces left behind from the age of the gods still echo in the depths of this ice, like stubborn ghosts clinging to the planet, howling emptily in the winter winds about the glory of the mythical era—and this place truly is well-suited to be the final fortress of the Demon Hunters.

This was not the first time Hao Ren and his companions had set foot in the Arctic Circle, but they had never traveled so far north as they were doing today: their destination was the North Pole, one of the two most extreme places of cold in the world. As she stood on this endless ice field, listening to the howling wind, Vivian seemed to recall the most distant fragments of her memory—the years after the last ice age on Earth, when the cold had not yet completely left the world, and large swaths of land and sea were still covered by ice. It was on such an ice field that Vivian had awakened.

“Was the place you first woke up in the Arctic?” Hao Ren asked curiously after hearing Vivian’s sigh. “If we dig around here, might we unearth some of your relics?”

“It was just an ice field, who knows if it was the Arctic,” Vivian said, shaking her head. “And what do you mean, ‘relics?’ I’m still alive, you know.”

On the vast and boundless Arctic ice field, a beat-up Big Dipper car was parked behind a steep ice rock. Hao Ren and his companions got out of the car and observed their surroundings. But there was really nothing to observe: as far as the eye could see, there was only a monotonous expanse of ice and snow, and the millennia-untouched ice field was utterly silent. Although mankind had set foot on both the North and South Poles, this was, after all, a harsh and uninhabitable land. In the Arctic ice field, there were still large areas that had never been explored, and Hao Ren and his group were surely traveling through such a route.

In this deserted place, there wasn’t so much as a hair.

Bai Huo was still wearing her somewhat tattered Demon Hunter uniform, but she had added a fleece sweater underneath. This thin outfit was hardly suitable for the Arctic Circle, but everyone present was a superhuman who didn't fear the cold, so no one paid any attention to the incongruity in her attire. The Demon Hunter girl paid no attention to Hao Ren and Vivian’s discussion, but stood not far away, quietly looking up at the starry sky, silently calculating something from the position and state of the stars.

At this time, the Arctic was shrouded in polar night, and it was currently the darkest hour. The stars in the sky were clearly visible, and the exceptionally clear atmospheric environment made it very easy to observe them. Bai Huo looked up at the stars and breathed a slight sigh of relief: “The star patterns haven’t been disturbed yet. The ancient armaments of the Corpus shouldn’t have been activated yet. It seems that the Elder Council hasn’t been able to take down all the energy nodes.”

“You can tell just by looking at the stars?” Hao Ren also went over to stand beside Bai Huo and look at the sky, but in his eyes, stars were just stars, and he didn’t really understand the principles behind stellar magic. “I’ve traveled in space a lot, and those are just glowing stars that are thousands or millions of light-years away from Earth. Can they really provide any power for your magic?”

“The power of the stars doesn’t lie in the stars themselves, but in the meaning that people give them by using the stars as a chessboard. Even if the stars are gone, stellar magic can still work,” Bai Huo explained casually. “Actually, we just use the stars as a coordinate system to construct our spells.”

“After the Industrial Revolution, it became difficult to use stellar magic in some areas,” Vivian muttered from the side. “The coordinate system became blurred, and hand-drawn astrolabes weren’t accurate. Memorizing all the stars was too brain-intensive. Many wizards living in Europe gave up on this project.”

Hao Ren didn’t react for a moment. “Why?”

“Air pollution, and in modern times there’s also light pollution. Those are deadly things. You’d need half a pound of eye drops to do astrology, and many stellar masters have developed cataracts from staring at the sky,” Vivian said with a pout. “I admire humans in other ways, but I can’t admire them for this. They make it too hard for astrologers to survive…”

Hao Ren was speechless. He coughed twice to steer away from this somewhat strange topic and began to ask Bai Huo about the next step: “We’re already here. How far are we from the ‘fortress’ you mentioned?”

Bai Huo looked at the ice field under the dark night. An ordinary person standing here would probably get lost immediately, but she had lived and trained on this ice field since she was a child, and could accurately locate everything on the ice field with just her intuition. She pointed in a certain direction: “Go that way. You should reach the ‘mesosphere’ of the Ice Fortress in about ten kilometers. Judging from the stars, the Ice Fortress should still be in our hands.”

“What’s the relationship between that Ice Fortress and the ‘Corpus’?” Hao Ren was very interested in the Demon Hunters’ base. He still didn’t understand the logic behind the mystical hidden spaces and ancient secret realms. “Is it a gate?”

“You could say that,” Bai Huo nodded slightly. “The Corpus is a different space that existed in ancient times, like Tartarus, Asgard, and Olympus in the past, but it is more stable, more vast, and more mysterious. It can be said that this incredible space is one of the important reasons why the Demon Hunters were able to gain the upper hand in the war that ended the age of gods. The entrance to the Corpus is located at the North Pole and is completely fixed in that location. So, in order to protect their fortress, the first generation of Demon Hunters built a tower with powerful magic at the entrance to the other space, called the ‘Tower of Stars.’ Part of this tower is in the real world, and part of it extends into the Corpus. It serves as a passage. Later, as the Demon Hunter forces continued to grow, the predecessors began to expand the part of the Tower of Stars that was located in the real world, and gradually the tower was expanded into a huge fortress—that is the Ice Fortress.”

Lily’s ears twitched. “So the Elder Council is basically being suppressed by you in the Corpus space? Although they have an advantage in combat power, as long as the Ice Fortress and the Tower of Stars are still in the hands of the ‘normal Demon Hunters,’ the Elder Council can’t get out?”

“That’s right, that’s our only advantage,” Bai Huo said with a wry smile. “We gathered brothers and sisters from all over the world to drive the Elder Council back from the entrance to the Corpus, and we paid the price of nearly ten thousand lives to defend the Tower of Stars.”

Hao Ren didn’t say anything, but just squatted down and scratched on the ice and snow with his fingers. After a moment, he looked up: “It’s not safe to open the Legion portal in the Ice Fortress. That’s the entrance to the Corpus, and the spatial structure may be unstable. Opening the door might give the Elder Council an opportunity. If you don’t mind, I think this is a more suitable place to open the door.”

Bai Huo had been holding back a question the whole way, and now she finally couldn’t help but ask: “So you’re going to use a portal to teleport your ‘army’ over here? Do you really have an army?”

“Nonsense. We’ve come all this way, and you still think we’re planning to fight the hundred thousand members of the Elder Council with just these few people?” Hao Ren rolled his eyes, then looked at the few companions around him. Except for the one at home taking care of the fish, he had brought all the thugs from the “Hao Ren Shelter” this time, even Nangong’s parents. But these were still not the main force. The main force was now on the New Aerym Star, eight hundred light-years away, and was being organized by La Nina to be ready for the moment the portal opened. “My men are very far from here. To be honest, if your Elder Council didn’t pose a threat to me once they activated that ancient armament, I wouldn’t have used such a large-scale operation—you owe me a big favor.”

Bai Huo listened to Hao Ren in a daze and nodded very seriously: “I will remember it. As long as you can help the Demon Hunters get through this crisis, I am willing to swear allegiance to you.”

Hao Ren thought to himself, “What era is this that people are still swearing allegiance?” According to the normal script, he should be telling this damsel in distress to repay him with her body, but he felt that if he really said that, he would probably be beaten to death on the spot. So he swallowed those unrealistic thoughts and began to rummage through his personal space, pulling out all sorts of odds and ends.

This would be the largest-scale operation he had ever carried out on Earth:

To build a Demon portal and summon a hundred thousand troops from an alien planet!

Oh no, according to the work report, he was going to summon a hundred thousand peacekeepers—that sounded much better.

(The manuscript is late again… I’ll just do a single update for a while, and I’ll also brew up a big piece of news…)