At the northern edge of Loren Continent, the brand-new port city of Northport had already begun to take shape. Though it would still take time before it became a truly prosperous transportation hub, this important city, which had gathered the Empire's most advanced technologies and received immense support in resources and manpower, was already beginning to reveal the grandeur it would possess in the future.
Along the long coastline, broad, straight port avenues ran east to west. Piers cast from reinforced concrete and enchanted with permanent magic extended northward from the dock district, thrusting straight out into the sea. Large-scale breakwater installations had been built around the shallow offshore waters, forming broad zigzagging seawalls beyond the harbor. Numerous rune-topped spires also rose from the seawater on either side of the seawalls, and wherever their rune-light reached, the sea surface within the harbor was calmed even further.
These were all technologies from the sea monsters or naga—if humans had researched them on their own, who knew how long the Magic Industrial Technicians and craftsmen in charge of building Northport would have needed to explore everything from scratch.
On the other side of the harbor stood Northport's urban architectural complex. Aside from its crisscrossing roads, wider and straighter than those of ordinary cities, the greatest feature of this "border city" at the northernmost edge of the human nations was the tall towers scattered throughout its districts. These towers rose among the buildings, their surfaces covered not only in faintly glowing rune plates but also in countless metal pipes extending from within. The upper ends of those pipes connected to enormous Magical Devices, while their lower ends stretched into the surrounding city districts and toward heat-source factories built into the towers' foundations. These ubiquitous towers and pipelines together formed Northport's ingenious, immense thermal