The winter on the Kamchatka Peninsula was exceptionally long. After the snow, the sky was azure and bright, like a boundless sea. And the snow-blanketed open field, joined to the endless Ice Sea, was like pure white clouds. The sky was sea, the earth was cloud—this was the Kamchatka coast in winter.
Between cloud and sea stood the towering white snow mountains in the middle of the peninsula. And below the hills where those snow mountains stretched down to the shore were dozens of sturdy log cabins, even more half-underground pit huts, and three longships frozen against the coast along with dozens of small boats, together forming a sizable harbor camp by the sea.
This was the Kingdom's divine South Mountain Port, the second Kingdom harbor on the Kamchatka Peninsula, and also the main winter camp where the Samurai led by Zuwaro and the Far North tribes lived and concentrated their efforts. In truth, this was already the southernmost end of the Kamchatka Peninsula. From the end of the southern coastline, as long as one crossed the icebound strait that was only a little over twenty li at its narrowest, one would reach the northern large island of the Kuril Islands, the later Severo-Kurilsk.
A cold icy wind blew across the strait. The Main God's Hummingbird Banner hung from a fir tree outside the South Mountain Port camp, frozen into a perfectly straight shape. In the eyes of the local Mountain Tribe, the longship Sea Tribe that used "some strange little bird" as its totem were therefore often called the "Bird Tribe."
"Blessings of the great bird's Main God! We were able to keep so many deer herds this year all thanks to the Black Stone brought by those two big ships! Too bad this precious fuel grows less with