Chapter 748 — Challenging the Ocean
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
The greatest courage a mortal can possess is to challenge the sky and the sea.
A faintly briny sea wind blew in from the east, sweeping across the long coastline of the eastern shore, past harbor houses with black-sloped roofs and ancient spired towers. The banner of the black crown and shield snapped and streamed above the main keep of the port city of Möbius, facing the endless ocean, where the morning sun was just rising.
Count Owen Dyson—short black hair, deep blue eyes, a long black double-breasted coat—stood at a window facing the sea. From this highest point of the castle, he quietly overlooked the thriving city below and the calm, glinting expanse of ocean in the distance.
This was Möbius Harbor, the largest seaport on the eastern coast of the Typhon Empire, and the necessary first stop for humanity in the east when venturing out to sea.
Once, it had been.
The Dyson family had ruled this land for several hundred years. Count Owen's forebears had led the first settlers here, hacking a foothold out of the wilds, and had reshaped this stretch of the Empire's eastern coast into something sturdy with great stone and magic. Seven hundred years ago, this had been a city of exceptional prosperity; Typhon, barely founded, had used this harbor to knock upon the door to the sea and had opened important colonies on several islands to the east. The first settlers mined ore and grew spices on those islands, pouring a steady stream of precious resources into the newborn nation, while the thriving East-Continent routes kept the flow of goods moving through the Empire's southeast and northeast. Möbius Harbor, the hub of it all, had for a time stood peerless.
But that prosperity lasted only a very short while.
The corruption of the three dark cults forfeited humanity's right to challenge the ocean. With the departure of the Child of Storms, humans could no longer sense the storms and magical turbulence over the Endless Sea, nor could they calm the ocean's fury. The waters safe for navigation shrank to a mere dozen or so miles hugging the land, and even these "safe routes" were broken and intermittent, impossible to link into a whole.
At first, brave captains and scholars still tried to maintain those routes through experience, courage, and substitute transcendent spells, but the exorbitant cost, together with the straitened national strength of Typhon in its early years, ultimately drove those bold challengers to give up. The colonial islands in the far sea were abandoned, the ore, plants, and marine produce of the ocean were cut off, and this briefly prosperous Möbius Harbor sank into hardship over the centuries that followed.
From a bustling port city it became a gathering point for coastal fishermen and a rest stop for nearby merchants and travelers, sustained to this day by lackluster inshore catches and transit tolls.
And then, until today—it had unexpectedly flourished once again.
Count Owen's gaze swept the city's edge, past the towers rising near the coastline and the faint columns of dust lifting into the air.
Those were the firestone mines.
No one had expected that what would finally bring Möbius Harbor back from the dead was those gray-white stones once deemed utterly useless, worth less than silt.
Firestone was everywhere along the coastline. Those stones were the raw material for producing Dust of Abundance and crystal matrix, and the advent of new techniques had turned them from worthless to red-hot. As the largest city on the eastern coast, Möbius Harbor had been miraculously revived overnight—within just a few short years, it had become prosperous again.
And what was changing as swiftly as Möbius Harbor was the entire Typhon Empire.