Chapter 1 The Last Guang Seeker

Wendell was a Guang Seeker—or perhaps the last one. As a man searching for residual light in the Nine Kingdoms, he was far too old for the task. His body was too frail, his spirit already withered, and every part of him constantly reminded him that he was completely unfit for this expedition. Continuing stubbornly would only lead to a distant death in a foreign land.

Yet, he resolutely left the warm and comfortable Twilight Capital, embarking on this journey of no return.

And it was his second departure.

Wendell had once challenged the Guang Seeker journey before. Twenty-eight companions had accompanied him then—half of whom died from the deadly effects of magical erosion shortly after passing through the first Rainbow Bridge due to carelessness. The rest gradually succumbed to the lethal poisonous fog of Niflheim. That Guang Seeker journey ended in near-total annihilation before it had even reached its halfway point. In the end, Wendell and the only remaining teammate dragged their battered bodies back to the Twilight Capital, and that sole teammate tragically died in nightmares and throes of pain on the third day after returning home.

But the ancestors had mercy; Wendell survived and lived healthily to this day.

Since the collapse of heaven and earth, and the departure of light, this world had been shrouded in scorching darkness. Hundreds and thousands of Guang Seekers had embarked on journeys in the long night, plunging into the darkness to search for the faint, surviving residual light in the ravaged wreckage of the world after the apocalypse. However, no one had ever brought back truly good news. The vast majority of Guang Seekers, like Wendell's friends, became rotting corpses in the twisted wastelands, barely even able to preserve their whole bodies. A very small number of Guang Seekers were lucky like Wendell, desperately fleeing back to the sanctuary before being completely swallowed by the darkness, tremulously recounting the deadly shadows and agonizing magical radiation in the darkness for the rest of their short lives. No one would mock those Guang Seekers who were frightened out of their wits and fled back, because merely stepping out of the Twilight Capital required immense courage, and those who could experience an adventure in the long night and return alive, their survival itself was already a commendable feat.

Among all these Guang Seekers, Wendell was the only one who had returned alive from the night and yet embarked on the journey again.

Some said he was a madman, while others praised his courage, believing that his almost irrational spirit of challenge was comparable to the Einherjar of ancient times. But Wendell dismissed all these comments. The only reason he embarked on the journey was to fulfill a promise he made to his wife when he was young: to find that last glimmer of light in the long night.

So when he realized that he had only one chance left in his remaining life, and that there would probably be no new Guang Seeker teams departing from the Twilight Capital, he volunteered to join the last expedition team, and amidst the gazes of others who saw him as a madman, he set off with a blessed amulet.

This last team departed from the Twilight Capital with only twelve members—the smallest Guang Seeker expedition team in history. They followed the routes left by their predecessors, traversing the wreckage of the Nine Kingdoms, and doing everything possible to search for signs of life and signs that the long night was about to recede.

However, no matter where they went, all they could find was rotten, twisted earth and magic-filled air. The remaining branches of Yggdrasil grew interspersed among these terrifying ruins of the world, but no more elven springs flowed from these branches. As the Doomsday Book said: the branches of the World Tree had become diseased and were dying, the Nine Kingdoms had collapsed with a bang, the entire universe had long been extinguished, and the humans who eked out a living were unable to reverse their fate.

Teammates fell one by one. The strongest, Bonham, was radiated to death for carelessly losing his amulet. The brave Andrew fell into the deep cracks of the earth. Helena also died. When crossing the Jotunheim Rainbow Bridge, she disappeared into the gate and never reappeared from the other side: the spatial storm swallowed her. In the end, only Wendell and Tanarosa remained in the team, but Tanarosa didn't make it through today either.

"Perhaps I won't make it through either," Wendell curled up in his small camp, his old body wrapped in leather. He felt as if his heart was being roasted by flames, but his skin was sending back a bone-chilling cold; this was a sign of magic eroding his nervous system. He felt somewhat ironic: the one who made it to the last step in the team was actually him. Those who were younger than him, more agile than him, and stronger than him had died one by one before him.

Perhaps it was the experience of having participated in a Guang Seeker journey before and the adaptability to magic that had allowed him to live a few more days, but it would end here.

Another wave of cold spread over him. Wendell subconsciously wrapped the leather around himself. He looked at his spiral cane and the compass hanging on it. The pointer on the compass was spinning wildly, and the spiral cane was covered in cracks. He knew he was lost, lost not long after burying Tanarosa, which made him a little regretful: if it weren't for this last obstacle, perhaps he still had hope of reaching Asgard, although he was sure that even if he reached Asgard, he would die of radiation sickness in a short time, but at least he could see the legendary kingdom with his own eyes and confirm the fact that had supported him all the way here:

Whether Asgard had survived.

Wendell laboriously took out the blackened parchment from his arms. There was only a hasty sentence on the parchment:

"...Asgard...has light."

This piece of paper was found by his team when passing through Vata Alheim. It was tightly guarded in the chest of a dried-up corpse wearing Guang Seeker equipment. Tanarosa believed that the Guang Seeker was a member of the expedition team that was completely annihilated a hundred years ago: the batch of Guang Seekers who set off a hundred years ago were considered to be the elite force most likely to successfully search all the kingdoms in history. The Twilight Capital had placed almost all its last hope on them, but in the end, no one from this team survived, which indirectly led to the demise of the special group of "Guang Seekers".

According to the content on the note, Tanarosa speculated that those Guang Seekers who disappeared a hundred years ago successfully arrived at the last ruin of the Nine Kingdoms—Asgard—and found evidence of surviving life there, but this team failed to bring this good news back to the Twilight Capital alive.

It was the content on this note that allowed Wendell to persevere to this moment. He no longer hoped to return to the Twilight Capital. He only hoped to see Asgard, even if he had to crawl there—to make up for the regrets of his life.

However, it seemed that regrets would eventually become regrets.

Another hallucination of coldness came from all directions. Wendell felt his mind was gradually sinking into an bottomless abyss. He tried again to tighten the leather around his body, but this time he couldn't even control the movements of his fingers. As his eyelids gradually became heavier, he felt as if he had returned to the Twilight Capital, back to that narrow city covered by a layer of pale yellow light film, filled with the smell of oil, and everywhere with steam and smoke. His small workshop reappeared before his eyes, and his dear Sasha also came back to life. She stood at the entrance of the workshop, wearing an old apron, looking over here with a sad face.

He struggled to reach out, but felt his vision gradually narrowing, gradually darkening, and finally, everything drifted away.

However, in the last second before he completely sank into darkness, a glimmer of light appeared in the distance.

A detection probe found the lost man. Hao Ren and his group finally arrived beside him before it was too late.

They found this inconspicuous small camp in the wilderness hundreds of kilometers away from the Rainbow Bridge. In the small camp, there was only an old man wrapped in tattered leather, hunched over and weak. The old man had a high fever at the time, his skin was unnaturally pale, and his breathing was so weak that it seemed to disappear at any moment. Old mage Anthony immediately judged that this was a severe symptom of magic erosion.

"He's almost dead," Anthony said as he set up a barrier around the camp to isolate magic. "But he's not completely dead yet. Give me some time, and I can pull him back from the brink of death."

When the magic-isolating barrier was established, the condition of the weak, comatose old man immediately stabilized. Although he was far from recovered, at least he was temporarily out of danger. While the old mage was busy setting up various purification magic circles, Vivian stepped forward to check the old man's condition. She was surprised to find that he was a human.

Although he was somewhat different from the humans on Earth today—this may be a mutation caused by living in a mutated environment for a long time—this old man was indeed a human.

"How did he survive in this environment until now?" Vivian felt incredible.

Gala卓尔摸索了在老人身边 about and found something that exuded magic fluctuations: "It's probably the effect of this amulet. I just sensed that this thing formed a barrier that continuously filters the magic and poisonous gas in the air, but its effect seems to be about to end, and the filtering effect is very poor."

Hao Ren took the amulet and said casually: "It seems that this is the 'Guang Seeker'."

At this moment, under Anthony's full treatment, the dying old man finally gradually recovered and slowly opened his eyes.