One hundred and twenty-seven: Fifteen minutes remaining

When I first learned of Wagner’s whereabouts, I remained utterly baffled by his choice. This genius yet mad apothecary was fiercely determined to spread his perilous, lethal toxins across the entire continent; why, then, had he chosen to venture far away from densely populated cities, right into this isolated, snowy glacier wasteland? Through what possible means intended he to disseminate these poisons?

However, it was not long before I comprehended his purpose:

The Dawn River!

Yes, the Dawn River, the most expansive river basin on the continent of Falvi. Its nearly two-thousand-mile-long winding waterway flowed through countless forests, grasslands, plains, and basins, crossing the territories of over a dozen nations, nurturing millions of continental inhabitants of diverse races and bloodlines, and giving birth to the brilliant and glorious Falvi culture. This ancient and beautiful river was the most vital pulse of the continent, the river of life and the source of history for the entire civilization.

Yet, if my grim conjecture proved correct, and Wagner, this crazed and frantic madman, managed to find a way to utterly pollute the very source of the Dawn River with the devastating toxins in his possession, turning the entire river into a torrent pregnant with endless death—then this gentle water, which bore the civilization and history of the entire continent, would overnight transform into an irresistible, monstrous dragon. It would effortlessly shatter the ecosystem across the entire land, mercilessly drowning and devouring every living creature it encountered along its path until they were reduced to piles of dry bones, unable even to find the mercy of a quick death.

Therefore, when I heard the sound of gurgling water echoing from the fractured rock strata, my heart instantly tightened. Following the sound, I saw a massive boulder protruding from the distant mountain wall.

Unlike the dark gray shale ubiquitous throughout the mountain peak, this boulder was entirely reddish-brown, thick at the bottom and tapering at the top, shaped somewhat like a giant drop of water. Its surrounding edges still bore faint traces of having been scorched by intense heat. This certainly did not look like rock native to the Kokla Mountains; rather, it appeared more like—and I know how preposterous this sounds, but at that very instant, such an absurd thought crossed my mind—a gigantic meteorite that had fallen from the heavens into the Kokla Mountains, plunging headfirst into this cliffside and becoming deeply buried within it.

How could I conceive of such a foolish notion? Immediately, I scoffed at my own absurd thought. This was already the highest mountain range on the entire continent; how could any rock of such colossal proportions fall from somewhere even higher? Where had it come from, and how? Could it possibly be that a star from the heavens had fallen to the mortal realm? Such an idea was simply laughable. Even a clueless child would mock my wild imagination.

Regardless of where this oddly shaped giant boulder had originated, right beneath its incline, an obscured cave lay exposed. Even though I knew it was impossible, I could not help but imagine that this cave looked remarkably like the fissure left behind when a rock crashed through the mountain wall from high above. The sound of running water I had heard was faintly emanating from this very cavern.

"I have to go inside and take a look," I said to my comrades, pointing toward the cave entrance. "The mission I am meant to fulfill is likely right in there."

My comrades followed my judgment—may the Supreme God protect them, they made a wise decision, and the billions of living souls across the continent should forever be grateful to them for it—and, of course, to me.

Merely standing at the entrance of the cave, I felt a wave of damp warmth. There was no accumulated snow at the opening; instead, it was covered by vast expanses of ice. This ice sheet, of unknown thickness, was both cold and unyielding, as if it had existed there since the dawn of creation and had never once melted.

Because the interior of the cave was coated everywhere in frost and ice, sunlight filtered through layers of refraction, casting light deep into the cavern. Thus, although visibility was poor, we could barely make out our surroundings.

The walls inside the cave were adorned with icicles of varying lengths and thicknesses. Some had frozen into a hard, stark white, tightly fused with the surrounding rock, sharp and pointed like spears. Others appeared to be melting, occasionally dripping water droplets. The further we walked, the more humid the air we breathed became, and tiny icicles frequently detached from the rock face. Their crisp, clattering sounds echoed back and forth inside the cave, growing louder and louder. It sounded heart-stoppingly terrifying, as if the entire cavern might collapse at any moment.

I walked with trepidation, fearing that a slightly too heavy step might trigger a catastrophic avalanche. Yet my friends seemed to harbor no such worries. They admired the strange scenery along the way, occasionally uttering loud expressions of amazement:

"The scenery here is truly breathtaking!" Stringsong murmured in wonder, looking around from side to side, his eyes bulging almost past the rims of his glasses.

"The scenery here is fine, I suppose," Changsanjiao retorted sourly, "but the scenery on the mountain slopes is breathtaking too."

"What do you know?" Feyin chimed in with teasing sarcasm, "The scenery beneath a snowdrift is even more magnificent. Some people were so infatuated they refused to lift their heads..."

The Elven marksman, who suffered from severe acrophobia, had been dragged all the way up the Kokla Pass by Changsanjiao and me, each of us pulling on one of his legs. Thank heavens, inside the Kokla Pass lay an even more rugged terrain, filled everywhere with massive, jagged rocks and pillars of ice that obstructed our vision—primarily Stringsong's—preventing him from being terrorized by drops in altitude. This allowed the useless fellow, who had spent the entire journey shrieking in terror and shaking uncontrollably while plastered to the ground, to finally learn how to walk upright again.

It was no wonder the sights before him excited him so. The moment he closed his eyes, he had been in the cold tundra zone; the moment he opened them, he was greeted by karst topography. Such a stark contrast in scenery would feel novel to anyone. For the rest of us, who had witnessed the entire journey step by step, the visual impact was considerably less pronounced.

Perhaps recalling Stringsong's wretched behavior along the way, Wild-Goose Formation could not help but let out a soft, snorting giggle. The mocked Elven marksman nervously touched his pointy ears, lowered his head in utter embarrassment, and muttered defensively:

"I am an invalid, after all..."

"Shh..." Just as they were chatting lively, I abruptly lowered my voice to halt the commotion and pointed toward the front of the cave.

The dim walls deep within the cavern were suddenly covered with mottled traces of light. Red and blue light waves swelled and swirled irregularly, flickering incessantly as they refracted off the ice layers, illuminating the entire cave in a bizarre, otherworldly manner and exuding an eerie, sinister aura. Amidst the pulsing light, a hollow, rigid voice resounded in low tones, uttering countless chaotic and complex syllables that echoed against the cave walls. I could not understand a single meaning behind them, yet every syllable instinctively filled me with revulsion and a sense of malice. It felt as though an invisible, icy claw was scratching at my heart, giving me goosebumps all over.

An ominous dark cloud hung over my heart. I felt a spasm in my left chest and quietly drew my shield and sword, quickening my pace to move forward. Feyin and the others also sensed the abnormality and fell silent, following closely behind me.

Just as we rounded a bend, a tall figure came into view. His torso was draped in a massive cloak, and even his head was deeply concealed within the hood. The only parts of his body extending out of the clothing were his two hands. His hands were a rigid, ash-gray color, completely devoid of any trace of lifeblood, and in some areas, the flesh was corroded and broken, occasionally oozing a small amount of dark-yellow pus. His arms were stretched out horizontally, palms wide open, with his head tilted upward like a giant bat spreading its wings. Hovering in mid-air right in front of him was a pentagonal magic array, alternately emitting a sickly red and indigo glow. Embedded dead center in the magic array was a bottle of ash-gray potion—who could have imagined that this shabby vial, fashioned from the cheapest crystal shards, of exceptionally low quality in terms of shape, luster, and transparency, costing a mere five silver coins a dozen, and sealed with a moldy rubber-wood stopper, might contain what was perhaps the most dangerous and terrifying substance to have ever appeared in this world since creation?

A psychologically warped, mad genius scientist, and a vial of unimaginable, highly concentrated venom—if all this was not enough to shatter your resilient nerves and plunge you into desperate panic, then well, try this: there is a river here.

Yes, a river!

Perhaps your eyes would tell you that this is by no means a river. At most, it is a shallow, clear stream. It trickled slowly out from the western side of the rock wall, flowing eastward along the slope. This silent flow had persisted for who knows how many tens of thousands of years, the feeble currents abrading the ground billions of times until they finally carved out a short water channel in the hard rock—in truth, calling it a water channel was giving it far too much credit. At its deepest, it barely submerged one's ankle, and at its shallowest, it could not even wet the top of a foot. This trace of water, no more than ten paces long, was merely a brief stretch where an underground subterranean current occasionally surfaced.

Yet, this was indeed a river—not just any river, but the longest and largest river on the entire continent. If I was not mistaken, this might very well be the earliest point where the Dawn River broke the surface of the earth. Two thousand miles of magnificent mountains and rivers, five thousand years of brilliant glory, and the bloodline roots of billions of living creatures all took their very first steps from this short little stream.

Now... would the extinction of the world... also... begin from this very place?

"Wagner..." I stared fixedly at that distorted, misshapen face, letting out a low, hoarse roar. Whether out of anger or despair, I felt my entire body turn freezing cold, and the piercing chill, like a sharp icicle, stabbed straight into my heart and lungs. My blood seemed to have stopped flowing, and all the colors and objects around me lost their visual forms, leaving only that ugly back clearly reflected in the pupils of my eyes.

Had I arrived too late? My heart felt as heavy as a lump of ice—had his ritual of spreading the toxin already been completed? Was everything beyond redemption? Could this world, which had been bestowed with the boundless mercy and care of the Creator, be so easily destroyed at the hands of a madman?

This was all my fault!

I could not help but sink into deep self-reproach: along this journey, I had wasted far too much time, allowing him to slip away from my pursuit time and time again. On numerous occasions, I had even caught sight of his back, only for him to escape in the end. At bridgeheads, at ferry crossings, and even during the climb up the snowy mountains, I had missed far too many opportunities. I could have stopped all of this from happening much sooner, if only I had tried harder, just a little bit harder!

That is simply how things are; when you are acting, you always believe you have tried hard enough, but at the very final moment, you always discover that you never tried hard enough at all. Many irredeemable regrets in this world often stem precisely from this. And from this day forward, I did not know if I would ever have more opportunities for regret...

The chanting gradually subsided. He lowered his hood and slowly turned around.

"Ah..." Feyin let out a soft cry and subconsciously pressed herself closely against my back.

The emaciated apothecary from a few months prior had completely lost human form. His hair was entirely gone—in fact, his scalp was nearly gone as well, exposing large areas of white skull. His eye sockets were even more deeply sunken, not due to weight loss, but because the flesh surrounding his sockets had completely rotted away. His eyeballs were prominently embedded in their sockets, devoid of the slightest sign of life. Darkened veins stood out prominently around his pupils, having presumably coagulated into pus clots. Dark-yellow pus welled up from his eye sockets, trickling down his cheeks all the way to his jawline. His left cheek had suffered extensive corrosion, exposing black-purple gums both above and below in his mouth, while his right cheek retained a degree of integrity, though beneath the skin of his cheek, the faint traces of crawling maggots could be seen writhing...

"A woman is still a woman, scared even by this..." Seeing our Guild Master show rare signs of panic, Changsanjiao did not miss the opportunity to offer a scathing counter-attack.

"Who... who is scared? I just find it disgusting..." Feyin replied defensively out of shame and anger, though her feeble tone lacked any conviction at all.

"Stop putting up a front; scared is scared..." Stringsong mocked as well. "For someone with that little courage, you had the nerve to laugh at my acrophobia just now..."

"I am Wild-Goose Formation. Feyin is behind you..." Wild-Goose Formation looked at Wagner's face without changing her expression and ruthlessly exposed Stringsong's bluff: "If you really aren't scared, put your glasses back on..."

I could not join in the banter of my companions; I was merely filled with a desperate envy of them, envying their ignorance of the impending apocalypse. They only knew we had a difficult mission to complete, yet they likely did not understand what was transpiring right before their eyes, and thus they felt no despair. Indeed, ignorance is often a profound bliss; when you know more of the truth, you must often bear greater responsibilities and burdens, and you are broken by despair all the sooner.

The mutated or deformed mad apothecary slowly opened his mouth. His voice was hollow and rigid, devoid of the elasticity it should have had as a human being, sounding like the lingering echoes of a pebble dropped into a deep valley. Even so, it could not conceal the excitement and ecstasy in his tone. Though his eyeballs had completely rotted away, a rich, crimson glow flashed across the wounds in his eye sockets, revealing the fanatic's current state of mind.

"...You have finally come after all," he said. "This great moment that changes the world—I desperately wished for someone to share it with. Although you do not yet understand the magnificent significance of it all, history has bestowed upon you this incomparable honor. I have stolen the secret of ultimate evolution from the hands of the selfish gods, and today, I shall share eternity with the entire world. Right now, you may not grasp the immense meaning of all this, but one day, people will thank me. They will thank me for my unselfish and unrequited generosity, for my broad mind and supreme wisdom, and for leading them into the lands forbidden by the gods. And by then, you, too, shall be one of them..."

"...There is still a quarter of an hour left..." Wagner boasted to us excitedly, his rotting face growing even more ferocious with fanaticism. "...The magic array will complete its self-repair, and the billions of modified bacteria within this sacred potion will no longer fear the bitter cold. They will pour into this riverbed, giving the very first fish they encounter along their way a sacred baptism. A day later, the holy water will complete the ultimate transformation of all fish schools. Three days later, the first waterbird will swallow a lovely little fish. Five days later, a diligent young girl will come to the riverside to draw a bucket of water to drink at home. Eight days later, a group of farmers will use the river water to irrigate their crops. Ten days later, the river water will flow into a city's drainage system. Eleven days later, a cat will catch a mouse that has been altered by the river water. Fifteen days later, all the dogs in the city will go mad. Seventeen days later, the river water will flow out of the Winston Kingdom and into the territory of Dalanmuya... Do you know how many days it takes for the entire Dawn River to flow from its source to merge into the Comet Sea? Sixty-three days! Only sixty-three days! Sixty-three days later, stupid and inferior life signs will be completely erased from the continent of Falvi. Every soul will achieve an equal, fair, and thorough sublimation. The perfect world belonging to ultimate life will arrive. There will be no racial conflicts, no bloodline divisions, no disputes of interest, and thus no war and slaughter. Everything will be equal and harmonious, everything will exist for eternity, and every living creature will have endless time to learn, to evolve, and to create. We do not need gods! With eternity in our hands, we are the gods! Do you see it? A quarter of an hour from now, that infinitely beautiful world arrives. Do you see it? A quarter of an hour from now, we shall bid farewell to all that is ugly, despicable, and base; farewell to all panic, fear, and death; farewell to all that is foolish, dull, and vulgar..."

"...From human to god, from flawed to perfect, from inferior to divine, from the mortal realm to paradise..." The madman, who sought to forcefully cram all his grand wisdom and sentiments into the entire world, had been moved by the perfect future he described. He opened his arms and looked at us with deep affection and earnestness, like a loving father gazing upon his children. "...We only need to wait a quarter of an hour..."

A flash of brilliant light crossed my vision, and the quest log in my adventure diary abruptly changed:

"Eliminate the decaying fanatic Wagner within fifteen minutes, halt the spread of the toxin, and save the world!"

A wave of ecstatic warmth surged into my body. Never before had I felt so blessed simply for accepting a quest. The Supreme God above, merciful deities could not bear to abandon their devout children, and thus had granted me a chance to rectify my mistake. I swore to myself that I would not let it slip away this time.

Changsanjiao's impatient clamoring rang in my ears:

"He's finally done babbling. Let's go hack this bastard to pieces..."