Boar Tail Bay lived up to its name. Towering cliffs surrounded it on all sides, and patches of unmelted ice and snow could be seen everywhere.
Cliffs hundreds of meters high stretched endlessly to either side, seemingly without end. Only in the middle lay a narrow bay, winding inward like the curled tail of a wild boar. Traveling several dozen li along the bay led to a gently sloping stretch of wilderness where ships could dock, allowing people to enter the Odin Icefield from there.
The Western Continent had already entered early summer, but the gales blowing from the heart of the Odin Icefield remained bleak and bone-piercingly cold. Thus, the gray-brown wasteland along the icefield's fringes was dotted everywhere with pristine white snow. Yellow-green moss and small shrubs with extraordinarily tenacious vitality struggled to grow here, while great herds of yellow sheep, gazelles, reindeer, and other icefield creatures came and went, lending a trace of life to the desolate land.
A crude "building" that could only be described as a pigsty stood crookedly at the entrance to Boar Tail Bay.
It was a roughly half-man-high enclosure built from mud, stones, weeds, and branches. Several cellars had been dug haphazardly inside, with roofs of unknown material thrown over them, barely forming earthen dens fit for people to live in.
More than twenty pigmen sprawled lazily in the mud, grunting as they stared at the sky and quietly waited for mealtime to arrive.
They wore tattered leather armor, while rust-covered weapons lay tossed carelessly in the distance. Rather than soldiers, they looked more like a pack of refugees. But they were, after all, pure-blooded beastmen, and their combat strength was in fact a notch above that of ordinary human warriors.
Big-headed, broad-eared, and powerfully built, pigmen were infamous the world over