Chapter 399

In the northwest of the continent on the main plane, a new nation had appeared.

This nation was called the Northwest Republic. Its name was strange, and so was its location.

It lay within the famous Ash Forest. Its predecessor had been the renowned Void Mask Amusement Park, the little-known Four Northwest Towns, and a cluster of frontier villages.

Ash Forest was a well-known forbidden zone of life. Thin negative energy filled every corner of it, silently corroding everything—there, whether tools, livestock, or people, all "went bad" especially quickly. Solid iron would become brittle in just one or two weeks; painstakingly crafted furniture would break down in four or five days. As for people... one could not find even a single ordinary person over thirty there. Without special means of resisting negative energy, an ordinary person would grow weak and die after merely two or three days in the wilderness.

Ash Forest naturally had inhabitants as well. They were desperadoes who had nothing left to lose but their lives. Relying on the power of gods, they carved out one pitifully small patch of living space after another, planting barely edible vines and struggling on like weeds by the roadside. But even so, Ash Forest would often bare its savage claws and fangs at them. After night fell, monsters, undead... all manner of terrifying things would come swarming in and attack them.

Most terrifying of all was the skeleton tide that erupted in Ash Forest every Polar Night. Countless armies of skeletons would madly attack every living being. Even sturdy walls often could not withstand the uncountable skeletons' all-night onslaught. Often, after a Polar Night, the fortunate survivors had not even caught their breath before receiving the bleak news that a nearby village had been breached, leaving not a man, woman,