The Arctic Circle, above 66 degrees north latitude, marked the boundary between the northern frigid zone and the northern temperate zone.
Most of it was covered by the Arctic Ocean. It also included three-quarters of Greenland, northern Europe and Russia, and parts of northern Canada.
Because of the bitter cold, few kinds of life could survive within the Arctic Circle. Most plants were lichens and mosses, and trees were scarce.
In the Greenland Strait, between the Svalbard archipelago and Greenland, lay an unnamed island covering less than fifty square kilometers.
Beneath the knee-deep snow lay solid sheets of ice and permafrost. In the vast, empty expanse, the white stood out like the brightest point in a deep blue-black ocean.
A few snow trees native to the Arctic Circle leaned against one another, their branches laden with snow and linked by clusters of icicles. They stood like pagodas.
From high above, a single black dot stood out against the pale ground.
It was a burly, black-haired man with his hair loose around his shoulders. His marble-like, powerfully built torso was bare, and he wore only black trousers and high leather boots. Sunlight from the ice field glinted off his left arm.
Around his feet, a patch of black, fertile earth, several meters in radius, spread out with no snow or ice on it.
As people around the world gradually learned that the supernatural world existed—and that they might even encounter "new humans" among them, like lizards or birds, or super-soldiers trained by government or military agencies—
they grew ever more curious, pushing open the door to this magnificent new world and peering inside.
But long before then, intelligence agencies around the world, Mutants, and extraordinary beings had been passing around stories of a "tower" standing amid an endless frozen wasteland. Inside