Under Soldier Willy's lead, the group set out along the Road of Abundance and Kingdom Main Road toward the family fief known as "Hearth City." The roads beneath their feet were streets and highways from the original shelter city, but years of neglect had stripped them of their former splendor and made them extremely difficult to traverse. The broken concrete had buckled upward, exposing the artificial earth beneath. The pitted roads looked as though they had never been repaired, and walking over them meant constantly stumbling between deep and shallow steps, making them barely different from wilderness trails. Nangong May struggled quite a bit on such terrain. She even wondered whether it would be easier to transform into her water-snake form and crawl, but when she remembered how Vivian had sent the locals running in terror just by conjuring some ice, she suppressed the urge to suddenly sprout a tail more than three meters long. Still, she couldn't help complaining. "By the way, are all the roads around here this hard to travel?"
"Hard to travel?" Willy lowered his head to look at the road. "Oh, it's certainly no match for the magnificent roads of High Tower Kingdom. After all, this is just a poor, remote region. Neither Iron City-State nor High Tower Kingdom would send anyone to maintain the roads in a place like this."
"You two... 'countries'—why are you at war? What deep grudge do you have against each other?" Hao Ren asked awkwardly.
Willy blinked. "Why? Winter is about to arrive, so we must ignite the flame at the end of the world. The souls of those who die on the battlefield are the fuel for that flame. The Four Great Kingdoms have never gone to war because of hatred. I thought that was common knowledge."
Everyone