Time passed quickly. The long, bitterly cold winter finally came to an end, and the entire northern grassland seemed to awaken from slumber, bursting back into vibrant life.
After lying dormant through the winter, the earth gradually warmed. The land that had once been buried beneath ice and snow slowly revealed its true face.
The grass seeds that had quietly lain hidden in the soil long before winter arrived sensed the warmth of spring returning to the land. One after another, they began to stir and sprout.
Time quietly entered April. Spring had returned, and all things revived. In this warm season, the Great Fish River and the Blackwater River also underwent changes—their surfaces, once as solid as rock beneath thick layers of ice, finally began to thaw.
At first, only small patches of ice near the riverbanks cracked and gradually broke away from the main sheet, drifting slowly downstream with the current.
As temperatures continued to rise, the cracks grew more numerous and wider until they finally connected, leaving the entire ice sheet covered in crisscrossing fissures like a shattered mirror.
Under the sunlight, those cracks glittered brilliantly, as though nature had bestowed a unique ornament upon the rivers. Gradually, the broken ice fully separated from the sheet and floated across the water, colliding and scraping against one another with clear, pleasant sounds.
When Victor first saw the sight, he worried that the Great Fish River might suffer an ice flood. But he quickly realized he was worrying for nothing. The Great Fish River flowed slowly and lay in low terrain, so such a thing would hardly happen. The large ice floes simply drifted into the sea and melted.
Throughout the winter, development in the territory had not stopped. Victor used the season to train the literate Freemen he