"Today is your sixth day since arriving in the Shadow World."
"Although you've achieved a little, you aren't happy. News has arrived that the neighboring Bliss Kingdom has suffered defeat after defeat."
"You know you can't remain lost any longer."
Cat Boss spoke to Lanchi while curiously pawing at a music box. A tense little tune began playing from it.
The sometimes lingering, sometimes uninhibited strings carried a sense of anxiety. The elusive melody was like a lonely person dancing through the mud, searching for light in the darkness.
It was deep into the night at Lanchi's home in Jerusalem.
He sat alone behind an old-fashioned wooden desk, surrounded by densely packed books.
Many pieces of magical engineering equipment sat before him. What drew Cat Boss's attention most was a glow-tube timer. Its tube emitted a saturated orange-red light, like magma illuminating the numbers, giving it an especially mysterious air in the dim room.
The timer's faint hum echoed through the quiet room, seeming to remind them of time slipping away.
"It really is time for me to leave Jerusalem."
The desk lamp cast an angled light across Lanchi's face. His expression was solemn, his eyes bright, and his gaze seemed to pierce through the snowy plains in the north.
Over the past few days, the Honing Empire had not only launched a frontal assault on the neighboring Bliss Kingdom. According to the intelligence he had received, its special agents had also infiltrated the Fuklo Kingdom and Edith Kingdom to the east and west.
Lanchi himself could have guessed as much.
Although the Land of Eternal Night in the Northern Snowy Plains, where there were few daylight hours year-round, was not a strategic location in the historical sense, it was a blessed land for the Blood Race.
The nights there