Chapter 903 — Journey to the Far North
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
A dragon!!
Gao Yang's gaze froze in an instant, lingering long on that string of forcefully written letters, as though through the faint tremors at the edges of the strokes he could see the violent turmoil in Mojin Wilder's heart when he set down those words.
Then he lifted his head and looked at the map hanging not far from the desk—on it the whole of the Loren Continent was marked out with precision, yet the vast oceans beyond it and the new continents that might exist lay outside the reach of his satellite surveillance, and so were indicated only by symbolic outlines and rough bearings:
Deep in the endless ocean southwest of the Loren Continent stood the "Tower of Heaven" of the elves' ancient legends; the tower's existence had been confirmed by ground scans from Skyvault Station;
Southeast of Loren, across waters of unknown distance, lay the "New Continent" discovered seven hundred years ago by the ocean expedition led by Gao Yang Cecil; part of that continent's coastline, too, had been confirmed through Skyvault Station;
In the far eastern seas of Loren, beyond the storms and currents, lay the "Aio Continent" ruled by the sirens, and their capital, "Antavien."
North of Loren, past the seaward peninsula of the Holy Dragon Duchy, came first the Eternal Storm, which humans had actually observed; and beyond the Eternal Storm lay the dragon kingdom that so far existed only in secondhand records: Talrond.
That dragon kingdom stood in the far northern reaches, perhaps even near the North Pole itself; the waters around it were likely crowded with drifting icebergs, which matched the details Mojin Wilder had set down in his notes...
"He actually crossed the Eternal Storm by sheer mischance... and drifted to the vicinity of Talrond..." Gao Yang could not help murmuring to himself. "Is that fortune or misfortune..."
Muttering, he lowered his head and returned his attention to Mojin Wilder's unbelievable adventure:
"...For a short while afterward I was in a state of high tension, mingled with astonishment and excitement and other complicated emotions—it was a dragon! A real, living dragon! At first I suspected that long solitude and drifting had strained my mind into hallucination, but very soon I realized that everything I saw was real; the dragon even circled in the sky for a little while...
"I watched that dragon tensely, not knowing what it would do to an 'uninvited guest' like me. I am certain the dragon had noticed me—just as I could see them. But for some reason the dragon only circled in the distance for a time, then flew off straight toward somewhere farther away...
"It seemed not to have noticed this side... or perhaps it simply took the pile of rotten planks I was sheltering on for some kind of flotsam drifting on the sea? I do not know what I ought to feel now. On one hand I feared the dragon would suddenly turn back and make trouble for me—in my present state that would mean no chance of survival at all; on the other hand I hoped it would come to me... that may be my only hope of escaping this predicament, if the dragon is friendly enough...
"I passed a cold night in uneasy suspense... or rather, I passed a long dusk.
"After crossing a certain boundary, the sun at the horizon never set below the sea; it rose and fell within a certain range of height, cycling in the order of 'morning—noon—dusk—morning again.' All exactly as the scholars of old calculated: our planet orbits the sun at a tilt, and that angle gives the far south and far north long stretches of daylight or long nights... I think I have gained another very important observation record, though no one knows whether I shall ever have the chance to carry this precious knowledge back to the human world...
"Day X of Month X... On the third day after sighting the dragon, I saw on the distant sea a wall of storm of unparalleled scale.