"The farther east I go, the colder it gets..."
On the fifth day after parting ways with his three companions, Linsey sighed as he crossed a forest made up entirely of fir trees.
It was autumn now, so a drop in temperature was only natural.
But based on Linsey's three years of experience living in the Hidden Borderlands,
the temperature had fallen more over these short five days than normal seasonal changes should have caused.
Linsey could not help recalling Finn's research and warnings.
In recent years, the average temperature in the Hidden Borderlands had been steadily declining by small but consistent amounts.
"Is the environment's temperature naturally trending this way, or is something happening in the east that can affect the climate?"
Linsey murmured under his breath.
His destination was the border between the Black Mountain World and the Hidden Borderlands.
Thinking of the information he had seen on the treant's corpse,
Linsey naturally suspected that something had happened in the Black Mountain World, and that some change had spread into the neighboring Hidden Borderlands, causing the temperatures here to fall.
And if that guess proved true,
then an unavoidable crisis was likely right around the corner for the Hidden Borderlands.
After all, in the worst-case scenario,
he could even imagine that the dragon beast on Black Mountain intended to expand its territory and was preparing to strike at the Hidden Borderlands!
Over the years, people had often tried to cross Black Mountain.
The dragon beast entrenched there was a genuine high-level magical beast. Through such encounters, it would have had no trouble learning human language, nor could it possibly know nothing about the Hidden Borderlands! As he pondered this, Linsey emerged from the dense fir forest.
Before him stood a hill whose terrain suddenly rose steeply, thinning out