Chapter 305 — Contact
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 3
Owing to a peculiar tradition of the silver elves, roughly one in three of them, upon coming of age, choose to travel beyond their homeland to broaden their horizons and acquire knowledge. Most keep their wanderings within the Highland Kingdom of the Southern Reach, but for those elves who relish a challenge, who are driven by curiosity (and who are desperately in need of hair-growth tonic), nothing short of a journey across the entire continent will prove that their lives have not been wasted (or that their baldness truly is incurable).
The monitoring stations set up around the Great Wall are more than just maintenance and surveillance hubs for the Sentinel Towers; they also serve as vital relay points where elves roaming the continent can make contact with their homeland.
Walking the streets of the town, gazing at the familiar architecture of his homeland on every side, at the faces of his fellow elves passing to and fro, with snatches of affectionate Elvish—seemingly imbued with a certain cadence—drifting to his ears, Suojilin felt a stir of emotion: this was the second homeland that long-exiled wanderers had built for themselves in the continent's northeast. Every elf gathered here was someone who had left home and survived for many years among human society; if one but listened closely, one could hear in their accents the weariness of long wandering—at least half of them spoke with a northeastern twang (note).
Note: "Northeast" refers to the northeastern region of the continent.
"I'd almost forgotten what a pure Elvish accent sounds like," Suojilin said with a smile and a shake of his head, turning to Berna beside him.
"Your accent's still pure enough," Berna said, blinking, then asked with some curiosity, "By the way, what were you and the guard talking about back there? It looked like it took you ages to get through the inspection..."
"Nothing much—just the situation, since we're so close to the border between Ansu and Typhon," Suojilin answered offhandedly. "What about you? Was something wrong with your badge?"
"Seems the activation structure broke. Must have been a magic trap in that ruin we explored last time," Berna said, scratching her hair. "Thankfully the guard didn't give me too hard a time."
Suojilin nodded and pointed ahead at a certain building. "I need to go to the Messenger Hall first, get in touch with friends back home. And you?"
"I'm coming too!" Berna nodded at once. "It's been ages since I contacted my friends—especially my mentor. I want to know if she's paid off her gambling debts yet."
Suojilin's mouth twitched. That druid sage of the Moon Valley really was risking her late-life reputation—no sooner had she retired than she opened her doors to take on students again, all because she was drowning in gambling debts. Then again, Master Heart of Thorns's early reputation had never been exactly intact either...
The Messenger Hall stood at the center of the town, a handsome white building in the classic silver-elven style: oval in overall form, crowned with tiered white roofing that resembled layered petals, with three vein-like outer beams of lightweight alloy running along the curved roof and converging at one end of the hall. There the alloy beams joined to form a long bridge that led to the base of the relay tower not far off, linking the two structures into a single whole.
The Messenger Hall was an annex of the relay tower, its purpose being to let elves wandering abroad contact their homeland and report what they had seen and heard in distant lands. Elves sent their messages here; the messages were amplified and broadcast through the relay tower, transmitted to the Sentinel Towers, and finally relayed back to the Silver Empire, where they were received and processed by the vast sky-fortress "Luminous Vault" that floated above the Empire.