53: Chapter 53 The Black Wall

An ice-blue beam of light shot up from the ground beneath the feet of the thirty-meter-class Giant.

The beam was a full ten meters in diameter, swallowing the Giant whole.

Inside the beam, ice crystals accumulated at a speed visible to the naked eye. The water vapor in the air, the moisture in the ground, and even the breath exhaled by the Giant were all instantly frozen, compressed, and piled onto the Giant's body.

The Giant's struggles grew slower and slower.

Its arms remained in a pushing posture, but its fingers were completely frozen solid, unable to move. Its mouth was still open, but no sound could escape its throat. Its eyes were still two black holes, but deep within those holes, something seemed to be extinguishing.

Three seconds.

The beam dissipated.

A thirty-meter-class Brainless Giant had turned into a complete ice sculpture.

It was an exquisite work of art, every detail perfectly replicated. The Giant's pose was frozen forever in that moment of struggle; the texture of its muscles was clearly visible, and every tooth in its open mouth was embedded completely in the ice.

Jiang Ruoxue pulled the longsword she had stabbed into the ground.

The blade carved an ice-blue arc in the air, the trail of which lingered for half a second before slowly dissipating, like a crescent moon hanging upside down in the air.

With a flick of her wrist, she sheathed the longsword.

"Click," a crisp, clean sound.

Then, she snapped her fingers.

"Snap."

Over twenty ice sculptures shattered simultaneously.

They shattered into ice crystal powder, each fragment only the size of a fingernail, reflecting a crystalline glow in the sunlight. The Giants' bodies had been completely permeated by frost, frozen until they lost all resilience. When they shattered, there was no spray of flesh and blood, only the faint sound of ice crystals hitting the ground.

The powder drifted in the air like a magnificent rain of ice crystals.

Over twenty Giants, including that thirty-meter-class behemoth, had all turned into ice shavings on the ground in less than ten seconds.

The experience bars of all four people jumped forward by a large margin. Lin Yan's experience jumped from 3662/25000 to 9116/25000. Qin Chuan and Shen Xin's gains were even more exaggerated, as they went directly from level 11 to level 12, with the light effects of leveling up appearing on them almost simultaneously.

Qin Chuan walked out from behind a rock.

He lowered his head to look at the ice shavings on the ground, then looked up at Jiang Ruoxue, then back down at the ice shavings, his mouth opening and closing repeatedly.

"Over twenty Giants," he said, struggling to get the words out. "Gone in ten seconds. I thought I might actually be useful, but it turns out I'm just riding coattails!"

Shen Xin also walked out from behind the rock, but her expression was much like Qin Chuan's; her pupils were slightly dilated, her lips slightly parted, as if she had seen something that exceeded her understanding.

"Is this... the true strength of an Awakened from a Great Family?" Her voice was very soft, carrying a sense of daze after being shocked.

"We had seen the data on Jiang Ruoxue's talent in the training hall before, but those were just numbers on paper. Only after seeing her go all-out in real combat do I understand where the gap lies." Although they all knew Jiang Ruoxue came from the Jiang Family of the 7th Zone, they hadn't expected that the gap between A-rank Awakened would be so large.

Qin Chuan looked at the short blade in his hand, still stained with the blood of the previous Giant. For him to cut down a five-meter-class Giant, breaking its defense and finishing it off, it took at least a dozen strikes, and that was only with Lin Yan tanking in front and Shen Xin providing support from behind so he could fight so easily.

Yet Jiang Ruoxue, all by herself, wiped out over twenty of them with a mere wave of her hand.

He silently sheathed his short blade back at his waist.

Better not look. Looking just makes him feel awful.

Jiang Ruoxue turned around, her steps still steady, but Lin Yan noticed that her breathing was a bit heavier than usual. There was a thin layer of sweat on her forehead, and the fingers of her right hand, which held the sword, were slightly curled.

Lin Yan looked at her: "Is the consumption high?"

Jiang Ruoxue did not deny it.

"The 'Eternal Frost Coffin' not only consumed mana but also used up nearly half of my ice-element energy reserves. With 'Glacial Fracture' and the continuous maintenance of the 'Extreme Cold Domain,' it used up about seventy percent in total." She paused and added, "Given my current level and attributes, I can only perform a clear-out of this scale at most once a day."

Qin Chuan felt a little more balanced only after hearing "the consumption is high."

If she could cast it infinitely, what point would there be for anyone else to play?

"But it should be enough to handle the upcoming city defense battle." Jiang Ruoxue cast her gaze into the distance, where a faint dark line stretched across the skyline. "That should be the city. This city is our defense target, let's keep moving."

After walking for about an hour, the changes in the terrain became increasingly obvious.

The hills gradually leveled off, and the grass was replaced by gravel and hard soil.

Then they saw the city wall.

Qin Chuan was the first to stop.

He had been walking just fine, but suddenly he was nailed to the spot, as if someone had cast a binding spell on him.

Lin Yan stood at the very back, his gaze slowly moving upward from the base of the city wall.

His neck craned higher and higher; the top of the city wall was nearly two hundred meters high. The top of the wall merged with the gray-yellow sky, like a black pillar reaching to the heavens.

The city wall was black; sunlight hitting the wall did not reflect or bounce elsewhere, but was swallowed bite by bite by the wall itself, like a hungry black beast.

The surface of the wall was covered in rugged textures and massive carvings: scenes of Giants and human soldiers fighting, scenes of the wall standing unmoved despite being struck, and scenes of countless soldiers standing on the wall, firing guns and cannons down at the base. Every relief carving was heavily worn, some only retaining blurred outlines, but that sense of oppression transcending time still rushed toward them.

The thickness of the wall was at least fifty meters by visual estimation; this was not a wall, but a mountain range built from stone. The wall body was not vertical, but tilted slightly inward, forming a huge trapezoidal structure, with the thickness at the base being twice that of the top, like a black beast crouching on the earth.

Every fifty meters, there was a protruding arrow tower. The walls of the arrow towers were even thicker than the main city wall, and the firing ports looked like rows of staring eyes, densely packed on the tower body, with some firing ports still extending rusted cannons.

At the very base of the city wall, countless huge rocks and fragments were piled up. Some rocks were embedded with long-rusted metal shards, and some fragments were as large as a house, scattered at the base of the wall, mostly covered by weeds and vines. Those vines were as thick as pythons, climbing up along the cracks in the wall, only gradually thinning out after climbing more than ten meters high.

Qin Chuan muttered: "The fuck... is this something humans could build?"

Shen Xin's voice also lowered a few degrees, carrying a sense of awe that rarely appeared in her: "It doesn't look like architecture, it looks more like... a mountain. Someone flattened an entire mountain and built this wall."

Lin Yan remained silent.

His gaze swept from the very bottom of the wall to the very top, and then back down from the very top to the very bottom. Many things flashed through his mind.

He thought of something he had never truly seen.

The alloy barrier of the Safe Zone.

He had lived in the Seventh Safe Zone since he was born; for eighteen years, he had never stepped outside that barrier. Seen from the inside, the barrier was a towering metal wall that connected seamlessly with the alloy dome overhead, wrapping the entire Safe Zone into a huge sealed can. The sky he had seen was not the sky, but blue skies and white clouds simulated by artificial light sources on the dome, and even the wind was filtered.

He didn't know what that barrier looked like from the outside.

But now he seemed to understand a little.

This black, ancient city wall built of stone, and the alloy barrier of the Seventh Safe Zone, were essentially the same thing.

One built of stone, one cast of alloy. One was a product of the firearms era, the other a miracle combining technology and the extraordinary.

But their significance was the same.

To block the things outside, to protect the things inside.

"What are you thinking about?" Jiang Ruoxue had walked up beside him without him realizing it.