While Lin Qi and his group were turning the Fourth Abyss upside down, the bitter winter had already taken command of the Odin Icefield.
Howling white gales swept across the ocean, blotting out sky and earth. Wherever they passed, mountains and rivers were buried beneath Mystic Ice, while the sea froze solid to its depths. The Five Great Linked Islands, closest to the Odin Icefield and situated northwest of the Gallic Empire, had also become a vast expanse of snowy white.
What a terrifying winter it was. No other color could be seen across the five enormous islands. White was the supreme ruler here, like a tyrant that had utterly wiped out every variegated hue, leaving only that glaring white—the color of death.
The rivers had frozen. The lakes had frozen. The mountain ridges had frozen. Even the towering trees on the Five Great Linked Islands, so thick it took more than ten people to encircle them, were sheathed from crown to root in thick ice.
On the largest of the Five Great Linked Islands, the great island known as the Beast Divine Prison, a majestic temple blanketed in ice and snow sprawled across the summit of a peak at the island's southernmost tip like a giant python. Across the sea, it overlooked the northwestern waters of the Gallic Empire.
Outside this ancient temple, whose style was rugged and bold, lay a square several miles long and wide. Twelve Beast God totem pillars stood along its edges. Atop each pillar sat a massive brazier over ten meters across, where blazing flames surged with savage fury, vaporizing the falling snow from far away into billowing clouds of white mist.
Tens of thousands of orc warriors, clad in crude yet immensely heavy metal armor and all standing over three meters tall, stood