As soon as you step inside, your senses feel like sinking into a cold sea of mercury.
The noisy sound of the wind suddenly faded away, replaced by a deep, solemn silence in the ice crevice.
The air was so dead silent that I could hear the echo of my own blood rushing and my heartbeat hitting my eardrums.
The temperature dropped by several orders of magnitude, and Mark even felt that his magic circuit was running a little slower.
Even the source of warmth transmitted by Xiao Mu seemed weak and powerless, struggling to resist the omnipresent and all-penetrating bone-chilling cold.
The towering black ice walls converge inward to form a huge, endless arcade, covered with a thick, ancient layer of ice, appearing a deep inky blue or night black.
This should have been a heavily fortified outpost of the Deepforge branch dwarves, but instead it was deserted and eerily silent.
Mark slowed down his pace, and his soul perception was like a fine net, carefully sweeping across the ice wall, the ground and the dome, not daring to miss any detail.
After all, he is also an outsider to the Deep Furnace branch.
If he was accidentally mistaken for an enemy and was hit by a powerful dwarf cannon, he would have nowhere to complain.
There are some traces left on the ground.
The messy ruts were deeply engraved into the frozen soil and were half covered by the subsequent thin ice.
The remains of several long-extinguished campfires were reduced to grayish-white embers, and scattered around were a few unusually cleanly gnawed remnants of what looked like the leg bones of giant glacial mammoths.
There were also several places where heavy objects had dragged across the ground, leaving broken and chaotic grooves on the ice shell...
These traces all indicate that someone had recently been active on a large scale here, eating, or even hastily moving heavy objects.
However, there is no one here now.
There were no lights, no talking, no clanging of metal, no roar of furnaces, no clacking of patrol boots on ice.
An extremely abnormal vacuum-like silence reigns here, as if all living things were erased by an invisible eraser at the same time, leaving only these cold traces.
After walking several hundred meters, the space inside the ice crevasse gradually became wider and the terrain became more complex.
Some man-made ice cave entrances appeared, deep and dark, like the mouths of wild beasts ready to devour people.
Some simple stone houses were built against the ice wall, with their doors and windows crookedly open. It was pitch black inside, and some chisels, broken rope coils and overturned stone bowls were scattered at the door.
Mark stopped beside the largest stone house.
Next to the house stood a half-finished ice sculpture nearly as tall as a person. It was the image of Mornlock, the dwarven god of soul forgers, with his battle axe raised high and a resolute face.
But at this moment, the axe blade was only half carved, and the eyes of the god of war only carved a vague outline before stopping abruptly.
The chisel was still lodged in the unfinished pupil, and scattered around were a few fresh, sharp-edged shards of ice crystals.
It was as if the sculptor was suddenly interrupted by something, and with fear and confusion, he hastily dropped everything.
It's so abnormal!
The Shenlu branch is being hunted by multiple forces and is hiding in such a dangerous place. How could it not have any vigilance at all?
Not even a lookout?
Even if the main force retreats to a deeper fortress, the periphery should not be so empty!
A sense of uneasiness heavier than the shadow of the star leech weighed heavily on Mark's heart.
He smelled a scent more ominous than the encirclement of external enemies.
A complete, devastating silence from within.
The starlight coming from deeper in the ice crevice grew stronger, dark blue and cold, illuminating this strange empty space with a chaotic mixture of light and shadow, like a nightmare realm lurking beneath reality.
The dead silence swallowed up all sounds, including the sound of Mark's footsteps.
However, in this absolute, suffocating silence——
“Ugh—Ahhhhhhh!!!”
A scream that tore through the gloomy air suddenly erupted from the shadows deeper in the ice crevice without any warning!
The voice was filled with extreme pain and despair, as if the soul was being torn apart and burned alive by the most horrific means!
But it also brings with it an indescribable sense of pleasure, as if while suffering, one feels some supreme joy from the deepest part of the soul!
The direction of the sound... is exactly where the starlight is the brightest!
The tragic howl pierced Mark's eardrums.
My heart seemed to be tightly grasped by an invisible hand.
Xiao Mu, who was clinging to his arms, squirmed violently, conveying a clear sense of uneasiness.
"What's going on! Have the dwarves of Deepforge fallen?"
Mark was grumbling in his heart, his eyes as sharp as a knife.
All the anxieties and doubts were temporarily suppressed to the bottom.
Following the teeth-grinding roar of pain that kept echoing in the dead ice crevice, Mark rushed through like a shadow swallowed by the fog itself.
The soul's perception condensed into a detection beam, locking onto the source of the sound.
Go around several huge twisted ice crystal stalactites hanging from the crevasse dome.
A relatively open ice crystal cave completely covered by dark blue starlight suddenly appeared in front.
The roar came from here, like the desperate struggle of a dying trapped beast.
Mark slid silently to a natural shelter formed by the angle of ice and rock. With the cover of thick fog and the perfect convergence of his own soul breath, he carefully stretched out his sight.
The scene in front of him made Mark's pupils shrink suddenly!
Near the center of the cave, a rough wooden stake was driven deep into the ice.
A dwarf was tied tightly to a wooden stake.
It was the familiar image of the Graybeard Clan, with long gray beards braided into three braids under the chin. This was Enzo's classic image when they first met him!
It was just that Enzo felt that he had already joined the Dark God, so he went to a barber shop in Osborne Town to have his beard trimmed into a beard about an inch long.
Of course, although the dwarf in front of him should be from the Graybeard Clan, he is definitely not a normal dwarf warrior.
His tangled muscles were bulging wildly, and the veins on his neck and thick arms were bulging like twisted blue-black earthworms.
Bound by the ropes, he unleashed an inhuman strength, struggling and twisting violently. The thick wooden stakes creaked under his immense strength.
What is truly terrifying is the changes in his body!
Deep blue, sharp crystals like ten-thousand-year-old black ice were emerging from beneath his skin...
No, it was more like it violently pierced through his flesh and even bones!
These ice crystals grew in a random pattern, some looked like broken lenses, some looked like twisted fangs, covering his arms, shoulder blades, and even half of his face.
Inside the crystal, countless tiny, dust-like bright stars were spinning and colliding madly like imprisoned living things!
“Ho…ho…hoaaaaaaaaaa——!”
A broken, inhuman roar emanated from the dwarf's throat.
The voice was filled with a violent rage that could melt cold iron, and it distorted his face.
What's even more bizarre is that deep within that anger, there's actually a hint of indescribable...ecstasy.
It was as if this extreme pain also gave him some kind of sensory experience beyond common sense.
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