Just as Li Wei had said, when the blizzard was about to strike, Garvin and the little one, Luo Jiali, rested in Yartar for nearly a day and a half before setting off again on Zelandia's specialty—an eight-legged alchemical bicycle. They passed through Triboar and Red Larch, crossed Goldenfields, and finally caught sight of his hometown—the towering walls of Water-Drawing City.
It was a lofty wall stretching from the city's southern end to the northern edge of the City of the Dead, also known as Trollwall.
It had earned that name because it had originally been built primarily to defend against troll invasions.
Below it lay cliffs more than a hundred feet high. The wall stood along those sections of cliff that attackers could climb, running all the way along the city's edge to Troll Tower, also called the North Tower, before turning back toward the southern seashore. It had rendered tremendous service during the founding of this northern coastal city.
Yet few truly knew the history of this great city. It had a history of more than a thousand years, and back then, the North was indeed nothing more than the Southrons' contemptuous name for it:
The Barbaric North!
In that era, most of the North was still blanketed in vast, towering ancient green forests, inhabited by Dwarves, goblinkind, and elves. A small number of primitive human tribes were scattered along the Sword Coast, living by hunting and fishing. Southern merchants came by ship in spring and autumn, gathering here to trade jewels and metal tools—or the occasional usable weapon—for furs.
As the forests were cut down year after year, pushing ever farther from the coast, some tribes began spending most of the year there, farming the land cleared from the felled woods.
One chieftain named Nimo instructed his