Chapter 439
2021-01-06
Chapter 439 things have reached a dead endThe Wall will not fall down, this is a seemingly Surprisingly, in fact, there is little hope for the southern expedition.
In the shadows outside several hundred meters, the new chief Cold God priest watched the easily captured castle and the ghoul army that was still magnificent at first glance, listening to the despair of the living. Begging for mercy and screaming, but the heart is extremely heavy.
He inherited nearly half of the magic power from the Night King and the crucial position as the "Magic Connection Center" for all priests, but he did not inherit the connection with Cold God.
This statement is inaccurate. In fact, he does not know whether the former Night King has the ability to "actively communicate with Cold God" - after completing the identity change, he briefly sensed a The existence of the higher-level power also received the only and last instruction from Him: to abandon the original strategic goal of granting land and Wall, and proceed to the south.
He was puzzled by this command, but unfortunately he failed to get any response to the inquiry, and he could no longer sense the existence of Cold God.
It's simply because the gap from Gorge's magic power is too far away, resulting in poor signal communication... They made a final blow to the south, made one last mess in the human world, and burned the last value of existence?
The chief priest didn't know, and couldn't ask.
It seems wonderful to bypass the invincible Night's Watch forces and go directly south, but there is a fatal problem: every move of the Cold God priests consumes energy.
Maintaining a hypothermia suitable for action, condensing "Xuanbing" weapons and shells, using Magic to assist in killing enemies, and converting corpses into ghouls after winning... All these actions and operations are required to actively. Priests are not perpetual motion machines, ghouls are not performing biohazards or zombie world wars, and no resources will automatically snowball!
...
After retreating one day and one night from Queenscrown, the remnants of the Cold God priests and the dead trek south along Kingsroad to the nearest North Castle and winter settlement - Umber The home's territorial core, the last Hearth.
What finally made them relax a little was that the castle was incredibly poorly prepared for their arrival: not only did the inhabitants of the wintering town outside the city wall not evacuated, but the defenses of the defenders were also rudimentary. The monotony was so monotonous that the priests couldn't help but suspect that it was a trap: aside from a little bit of grease and asphalt, whose burning properties were completely incomparable to Wildfire, only a few frozen fire arrows could pose a threat until the ghouls climbed the wall Entering the castle, most of the living soldiers with the roaring Giant pattern painted on their chests are still resisting with ordinary steel iron weapons.
In the end, this battle became the victory of the First Stage "kill more than death" after the ghoul army crossed the canyon and entered within the wall. The surrounding civilians, members of House Umber and soldiers gathered in the last Hearth for the winter. A total of more than 4,000 people were spared, and the ghouls lost less than 1,000.
In addition, the corpse in Hearth finally no longer has the strange Fire Attribute magic power that came from nowhere!
One good news after another, but is it really a victory? The High Priest was skeptical, because he was now faced with an unprecedented embarrassing situation - there was not enough magic power to turn slain enemies into ghouls.
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Cold God priests came from the Lands of Always Winter until they crossed the canyon and invaded southwards for more than five years... During such a long period of time, they Of course, it is not "going for seven seasons" as the joke said, but quietly preparing for this war.
When they were north of the ice wall, the main difficulty they faced was "not enough qualified corpses": in the last ages beyond the wall, the creatures that have survived and died are countless, but the ones that can be transformed into ghouls are not enough. There are only a few of them, and the reason is that the use of Undead Magic to resurrect the dead is not as unconditional as humans think.
To sum up, priests must consider at least two aspects when casting "resurrection" and creating ghouls.
One is worthy of resurrection, and the other is that it can be resurrected.
Although a smaller creature requires less magic power to transform into a ghoul, it is a unit after all, and the transformer needs to work hard to contact the control before it can act... And this control quantity, According to the mental strength of the priest itself, there is an upper limit ranging from several thousand to tens of thousands - which means that the corpse must have the value to be transformed: such as sufficient size, suitable structure for combat, and the ability to use weapons and tools, etc. ...to be selected. Under such conditions, animals that are too small in size and birds that cannot fly after ghoul transformation are first excluded. Most of the herbivores with inflexible body structures and no fangs and claws also have to stand on one side, so that they can eventually enter The only candidates on the list are Giant, humans and medium and large predators.
Even if the candidate range is clear, it still does not mean that you can become a ghoul as long as you are in the list: although the cold Magic that enters the corpse can replace the neural system to control the behavior of the ghoul, the ghoul's activities rely on it. The main thing is still the muscles that the body already has. This means that: only those who meet the conditions can be transformed into ghouls - cremation into ashes is naturally not good, and after death, the skeletons that are eaten by carnivorous and scavenger animals and only empty skeletons can not be saved, only freshly killed skeletons Dead and well-buried corpses that are not completely decomposed can be transformed into ghouls.
These two limitations are the reason why the Night King and more than a dozen priests have been running around and fighting for many years, but they have only collected more than 100,000 ghouls in total.
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Beyond the wall, the priests almost impossible to convert to reach the upper limit of the number of ghouls, so the requirements for corpses are often very low, as long as they are barely satisfied There are two major conditions, even if it is damaged and unbearable to look at, it will inject magic power and become a part of the magic connection network, occupying a place in the controllable puppet... If you meet a better target, you will even be afraid of losing money. Chase and kill yourself. But today, they are faced with the perfect corpse that is full of castles, fully armed, fresh to the point of body temperature, but caught in the dilemma of "can't get enough magic power to transform", what an irony!
The further south you get from the Wall, the weaker you're affected by its repressive force field, but the same - the farther the priests are from Sebei, where magic power is plentiful. If the magic power recovery speed is 100 at beyond the wall, and 1 at the south side of the Gorge gap, then it is 0.5 at Queenscrown -- and at this distance, the Lands of Always Winter is thousands of miles away and separated by a complete Wall. The North Castle in 2009 is only a measly 0.1...and even this has been reduced to an unbelievably poor stat, and it can still continue to decrease as time goes by going south and missing the Cold God Power Peak period.
The new chief can roughly judge: two to three days further south, the concentration of cold magic power that penetrates through the Gorge gap will be reduced by half again - which will completely fall below the amount they can maintain to maintain body temperature. The life and death line of consume magic force speed. Once the speed of absorbing energy from the outside world cannot keep up with the consumption of maintaining body temperature, the Cold God priests will become extreme challengers for breath-hold diving... When the magic power stored in the body is exhausted, they will Enter the state of "consuming the body to continue life". By then, let alone Ice Armor, which is impervious to sword and spear, Ice Sword, which is no stronghold one cannot overcome, and Magic, which can make Wildfire unburnable, priests may be so weak that a torch, a bucket of warm water, To the extent that it can "burn them to death"!
Crossing that red line, they don't need anyone to do anything, and they will slowly die out by oneself.
Waiting for the magic power to be restored in the Safety Sector, wouldn't this kind of dilemma be solved? This is true in theory, but things are not that simple. The huge overall strength and home field advantage of the human world make every moment of staying and waiting quench your thirst, not to mention that there is a group of Night's Watch in hot pursuit!
That's right, with the bankruptcy of the plan to raid and capture the Wall and the sudden launch of the great killing tool by the human side that cannot be solved but can only be evaded, everything becomes funny: more than ten thousand ghouls are actually only A fraction of the number of living people chased and fled in a panic.
Now, the new High Priest faces a tougher choice than Night King's "attack on Nightfort or Queenscrown": continue to be chased by Night's Watch and flee south, cross that dangerous line to the place where the magic power is depleted Waiting for death, or turning back and fighting the chasing soldiers to the death, and how much chance of victory for the Cold God side in the desperate situation?
In short: wait to die or fight hard?
Any intelligent life would choose the latter, but unfortunately as the three dragons return to join the Night's Watch, this latter also becomes a dead end.
Waiting for death or courting death, this is a choice that cannot be made.
If Night King was still alive, what would he choose?
…
While thinking about it, another priest approached it and asked in ancient terms what to do with the nearly five thousand fresh corpses.
It's not without reason to ask this question - the new chief priest who inherited most of the legacy of the Night King is the only one with sufficient magic power among all the priests. In fact, he still has enough to transform tens of thousands of ordinary people. Ghoul's magic power.
However, he still has the ability to cast transformation spells, which means that he is also the only one that can threaten the existence of dragons.
The multiple-choice questions "escape" and "courting death" have not been completed yet, and another proposition is placed in front of the chief priest: the precious magic power he still retains is the part used for transformation Ghouls, or keep it all for dragons and Night's Watch?
Imitating the thinking mode of the dead Night King, after a few minutes of long deliberation, he thought of the only possibility of turning defeat into victory: the dragon + Night's Watch chasing combination is invincible, but what if it can be used? The way to induce the two to separate, one by one to solve the immediate urgent needs, and then slowly recover in the north of the safety red line - when the magic power is full again, then whether it is going south to massacre the unprepared North hinterland residents, or go back to the Wall Touch try one's luck, at least the hope of life is a little bigger!
"We will rest here to restore the magic power, and wait for the black clothed people to catch up before we set off." The chief Cold God priest said in a voice like a cracking glacier, "Let each priest choose the transformable corpse by himself. Turn the strongest equipment into puppets and take away the ordinary ones. As for me, I will leave all my strength for the next battle.”
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(end of chapter)