Chapter 752 — Growth
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
Whatever change had befallen the Storm Lord's divine seat, Gao Yang clearly had no way of getting an answer out of this Abyssal Harmonizer currently fiddling with the tip of its tail.
In fact, it seemed the entire siren race was still in a state of bewilderment.
He could not help but pinch his chin, lean back in the high-backed chair, and let his roiling thoughts wander where they would.
The news Tyr had brought stirred in him an urge he could scarcely suppress—an urge to journey into the deep sea, to the far side of the Endless Sea, to look with his own eyes upon the sirens' realm, or upon the Storm Lord's corpse, and to verify certain judgments of his own.
Yet he could not do it—not only because he could not casually abandon the empire so recently founded, but even more because the Cecil Empire did not yet possess the maritime technology to cross the Endless Ocean.
And at the words "maritime technology," Gao Yang could not help but recall another matter that troubled him: the Cecil Empire currently had no suitable outlet to the sea.
Most of the Cecil Empire lay inland; its southern, eastern, and western regions had no coastline at all. The only coastline lay in the Far North, beyond the mountains of the Northern Territory—and that was undeveloped land. Its savage climate, the barrier of the mountains, and the perils of the ocean itself had kept the old Kingdom of Anzu from even considering its development for hundreds of years.
But that place could not be left to waste forever.
Gao Yang lifted his head, his gaze passing over the tip of Tyr's swaying tail to settle on the full map of the continent not far away.
Beyond the mountains of Anzu's Far North, farther north than that coastline, there was not simply emptiness.
Across a narrow strait, one first saw a vast island, and upon that island stood the Violet Kingdom, renowned as the nation of mages. East of the Violet Kingdom, the territory of the Holy Dragon Duchy jutted out from the Loren Continent into the shape of a horse's head, then folded back westward into a peninsula whose tip likewise gazed across the distance at the mountains of the Northern Territory.
In the bygone Anzu era, the northern nations had been all but synonymous with mystery and remoteness. The closed nature of the feudal dynasties themselves, compounded by the objective inconvenience of travel, had left connections between the northern states exceedingly thin; border nobles maintaining basic exchanges plus a trickle of private merchant caravans had already been the limit. The so-called "international activity" of the old era amounted to no more than that.
Take the Violet Kingdom: between that mysterious nation of mages and Anzu lay only the narrow "Northern Strait." That stretch of water itself belonged to the "safe zone" of the Endless Sea, free of storms and magical turbulence, yet the two sides still had no fixed "routes." Exchange between the two nations depended solely on a handful of adventurer-like captains making a limited number of "private voyages," or on transcendents simply crossing the sea by their own power.
As for the Holy Dragon Duchy, matters were somewhat better—after all, that nation still shared a land border with the Cecil Empire. But the Holy Dragon Duchy exceeded even the Violet Kingdom in conservatism and secrecy, so that despite the land connection, strangers from the Holy Dragon Duchy were almost never seen within old Anzu's borders. Instead, it was among the various mage organizations, great and small, of the royal capital that one occasionally encountered traveling scholars from the Violet Kingdom.
Most of those mages crossed the strait directly by virtue of transcendent power; a small number came to the Loren Continent by private ship.
In the old days, all of this had been the norm.