Chapter 602 — The Days of Snowfall
Blade of Dawn · Page 3 of 4
This world had no word for "banknote," so Gao Yang had directly coined the term "capital power" from the word "currency" and the word "skill." Clearly, Amber understood its meaning.
And so, after understanding the true source of magical industry's power, Amber also understood why, even armed with such a formidable tool as magical industry, Gao Yang still regarded Typhon as the strongest and most terrifying enemy.
She glanced at Gao Yang and dimly realized something.
No matter what business this man who had risen from his coffin intended to do with the Typhon Emperor—whether he meant to willingly accept Typhon's cotton dumping or to help the Typhonians build railways—his sole purpose from here on...
Was to counter the Typhonians' "capital power."
...
Winter snow swirled through the air; the coldest season of the year had descended upon this land.
On the Holy Spirit Plain, in a nameless village half a day's ride by horse from White Pine Town, the snow already covered the tops of people's feet, yet this snowfall was only the beginning; flurries of snowflakes were still drifting down.
This white gift from heaven covered everything indiscriminately, blurring the field ridges and gullies, blurring the roads and wasteland, blurring the boundary between heaven and earth. The nameless village was like a heap of stones in the snowfield, its man-made structures little by little being wrapped in silver white as the snow fell. In these perilously cold days, every household had sealed its doors and windows and plugged every hole in the crumbling walls to prevent precious heat from escaping. People hid indoors where they could shelter from the wind and snow, conserving their strength and warmth while praying the winter would pass safely, and at the same time listening with dread to every strange creak from the roof above.
The village in the snow lay utterly silent.
Yet beneath the snow, in the cellar of a certain longhouse, a secret gathering was underway.
Cheap, inferior candles were set upon a mottled, battered long table, and the flickering candlelight cast shifting shadows throughout the cellar. On the table lay pottery jars, daggers, stone shards, and other objects, and some kind of red pigment had been used to draw eerie, sinister magical symbols and chilling, twisted figures across the tabletop. Around the long table, a dozen or so ragged figures sat solemnly in the candlelight, and a dozen pairs of eyes, tinged with fanaticism, were fixed on the two figures beside the table.
The two figures were tall and broad, clad in tattered gray-black smocks, iron death-god amulets hanging at their throats—unmistakably the garb of corpse haulers.
"Brothers and sisters, the day of deliverance from suffering is at hand..."
One of the corpse haulers spread his hands wide and spoke as though preaching.
"Ye who suffer, receive this gift!"
The other corpse hauler bent low, praying piously as he lifted from the table a clay jar filled with some kind of liquid.
One by one the people around the long table rose to their feet, filled with a certain expectation, a certain fervor, and came forward to let the man in the gray-black smock with the jar smear the dark red liquid across their foreheads.
"Once you have received this gift... you shall be delivered from these days of suffering—not after death, not in the world to come, but a heaven on earth, close at hand..."
"Deliverance from the days of suffering..."
"A heaven on earth..."
"Close at hand..."
The chanting and praying rose and fell, echoing through the hidden cellar; and above the cellar, in the longhouse standing amid the wind and snow, several pairs of cold, wary eyes pressed close behind the narrow slits of the window boards, watching the world beyond the storm.
In the surrounding houses, in nearly every house of the village, eyes equally cold and wary were pressed behind every window.
...
Sorinburg, in the eastern reaches of the Holy Spirit Plain.