Separated by a wall, outside the door of the fortified private room, Lindbergh squatted under the no-smoking sign and lit a cigarette, boredly swiping his mobile phone.

The fruit phone in his hand vibrated for a while, and before he could click to confirm, the image of Aresta was projected from the fruit machine.

"I think you should kick the door open and yell, that pointy ear, who told you to do the reinforcement! Do you TM pay for it yourself, bastard, do you know how much it costs to strengthen once, you can't afford to pay it back for a lifetime as a part-time worker, idiot! Die for Lao Tzu!

Instead of squatting here like a wage earner, I'm ashamed to be a noble fruit machine. ”

After learning that the three Lindbergh masters and apprentices were about to go on a business trip to the dimensional fleet, Lord Aresta, the chairman of the school city and the garrison officer of the world, wanted to follow the "see the world". He had been training at the Alliance's headquarters for a while, but the Root Plane was disappointing, not even as advanced as his own world.

After promising great benefits, Lindbergh reluctantly agreed to take Aresta with him. Since the chairman of the board of directors did not have the means to communicate across the world, he put the core of his thinking into this elaborate fruit machine.

Of course, it's not that it can't be used as a mobile phone, Lindbergh has been using it to play Lianliankan just now.

Aresta himself came out of the screen, Lindbergh glared at him coldly, for a while, and snorted: "Lord Chairman, I took a risk to take you to see the world, you can enter the door of the Yuan fleet this time if you want to?" Stay in your phone honestly, lest the guards find out and smash you directly! ”

"You don't have to worry about this, Lord Hardwin has already spotted me just now, and she even said hello to me." The Aresta fruit machine exits the game interface and pulls out an unread text message.

Aresta, have a great holiday.

The first line of the text message reads, followed by the second line:

Laborious informed Colonel Huggins that he did not need to go back for the time being, and that he had a mission to run.

"Ahh She didn't have the courage to tell me to my face. Lindbergh bluffed and asked, "How did you become the dogleg of a dead old woman?" ”

"Don't say that, Lord Hardwin is a very attractive lady."

The Sith warrior continued to squint. But Aresta's respectful countenance, as long as he doesn't speak, it's hard for others to judge what he thinks. Lindbergh dropped the cigarette butt and scratched his head.

"Lao Ya, do you think I should kick the door open and calculate the enhancement cost with that ghostly elf?"

"It's not my opinion, it's a judgment based on your general pattern of behavior. I'm just surprised that you didn't do it, but squatted here and smoked. ”

"What is my general pattern of behavior?"

"It's clear that the stepmom model in children's books — limited to the treatment of Lucieu, of course."

"Lao Ya, you know so well, you were raised by your stepmother?"

The question silenced Aresta for so long that Lindbergh thought he really had it. But in the end, the chairman of the board of directors spoke.

“…… No, my mother is very nice, she is a respectable lady, in every sense of the word. But I don't want to discuss it...... It's been so long, so long ago that I just thought I had forgotten about it. ”

……

"Lao Ya, is your hometown cold?"

"What?"

"I asked, what is the temperature in your hometown, is it cold or not?"

Aresta paused for a moment.

"It seems that there is no special memory, it is a place with four distinct seasons, and the lake freezes in winter, but it doesn't seem to be able to support the weight of people."

"It's not cold." Lindbergh scoffed, and he lit a cigarette again, "My hometown of Acre, that's the real cold." ”

In Acre, every breath was rusty, the smell of blood oozing from the alveoli of the lungs.

When a shrill pop echoes in the snowfield, it represents the arrival of winter in Acre. The extreme cold froze the ice in the lake, and the crackling sound was incessant in the winter nights.

In the dead of winter in Acre, the sun only hovers around the summit for about four hours, so if you want to do something, you have to hurry. Otherwise, once the sun sets, the icy air currents will once again envelop the snowy fields, and no human can survive in such an environment.

The night before departure, I ...... and I Father, he would push the old sleigh into the house and do a thorough inspection. In cold areas, metal parts can easily fatigue and become brittle. If it breaks down halfway, in the vast and sparsely populated Acre snowfield, it is almost equal to death.

Pay attention to the tracks, which are easy to get stuck. That's what my father said to me.

I'm not quite sure that's what he said, and I'm not even quite sure if he's going to speak.

Almost every man in Acre is so reticent. When we were overhauling our snowmobiles, the men from the village came with their skins. Most of them were sealskins, and sometimes fox skins, which were thrown to Anna without saying a word.

Anna is my mother, she is blind and her eyes were gnawed out by wolves as a child.

27, she touched the skin, reported the quantity, and then used her nails to make a few marks on the small pieces of wood and handed them to the other party. When we bought the wine and gas from the town, they had to take their share with this little wooden sign.

27、24、19…… The only sound in the room was Anna's hoarse and shrill voice, occasionally crackling, it was a log in the wall, unbearable to the cold, cracking.

Only once, Anna gave a number.

7！

Suddenly, there was a disturbing commotion in the cabin.

That's a dangerous number, 7 furs in exchange for spirits and gas, definitely not enough for him to survive until the next sale.

In Acre, spirits and gas are more precious than food. Without food a man can last two weeks, or even three weeks, but without spirits and gas to keep it warm, one night is enough to turn a house into a frozen tomb.

When I met the bear, the guy was annoyed and stretched out his right hand, which didn't even have a finger on it, and I didn't kill it.

The man next to him hammered his chest, and then pulled two out of his own skin and threw them to Anna. Others will do the same thing, some with one and some with two.

14, Anna reported the number and rewrote a small wooden sign for him. This number can guarantee that he can live, and the people in the village cannot be less. Wolves are very sensitive to the number of people in a village, and if it falls below a certain number, they will risk attacking the village one night, and when the time comes, no one will survive.

Acre is home to some of the fattest seal colonies on the planet, but the snow is so hard that there are fewer and fewer people in the village, and by the time I can follow along, there are only 17 families left in Acre.

All the fur is tied tightly and tied to the back of the sled, and usually at this time, the pale dawn can already be seen in the east, and it will not be long before the temperature outside the house will slowly rise to the point where it is enough to live.

After the last service, the sled was refueled, and the supercharger seemed to be a little buggy all the time, so it usually took more than ten minutes.

My father and I would take advantage of this time to eat food. Severe cold can greatly deplete people's physical strength, so it is necessary to eat enough high-calorie food. Meat is not good, it is women's food, and the raw fat of the seal must be eaten.

My father and I would each eat about three kilograms of fat and drink one kilogram of spirits. This is the worst quality tapioca and even needs to be spit out while drinking it. But this is the best drink to ward off the cold, and the life of Acre is inseparable from it.

The distance between the village and the town is not very far, but the snowmobile is not very fast, and its tracks roll deep into the ice, making an ominous creaking sound, which makes people worry that it will break directly on the next ice ridge.

I sat in the back of the motorcycle, with my father in front, a strap-on leather in my back, and a rumbling engine under my ass. The engine burns gas, occasionally leaking a trace of heat.

The snowfield seems to be flat and endless, but in the white hell, it is very easy to become blind and disoriented.

Even with goggles on, it's best not to look around.

Although there are no roads in the snowfield, there are occasionally three or two clumps of fir trees erected there. I never understood why they chose to grow in places like this, where you can only see green for two weeks of the year.

These fir firs are the best signposts, and we follow them so that we don't get lost in the depths of the snowy fields.

When passing through a certain fir forest, the speed of the snowmobile will decrease. Under the two staggered and collapsed tree trunks, there was a small snow pit, and half a boot was frozen on the edge of the pit, like a strange embellishment.

Many years ago, an unlucky guy didn't rush back to the village before the sun went down. He may have been injured and lost time, or he may have simply lost his way. In desperation, he struggled to dig through the snow and frozen soil, hoping to bury himself from the bitter cold of the night.

He became a popsicle, and the wolves dug him out, and all he had to eat was half a boot.

He was his father's brother and Anna's previous husband. The motorcycle slowed down, and my father took the shotgun, fired a shot into the sky, boom, and continued on.

The town of Acre is behind a number of low mountain ranges, and before that, there are large fir forests. Maybe they kept the town out of the cold wind from the snowfields, or maybe it was because of the hot spring in the middle of the town. In the icy north, there is still a little bit of temperature in winter.

But this is not the end of seal fur, as many villages like ours send their fur here to collect. A dilapidated road then connected to the city, which in turn was transported by rail to the capital.

There, elegant gentlemen and noble ladies will decorate their next banquet with these furs.

There are four or five fur buyers in Acre, and Lea's family specializes in seal skins, and her shop is the fourth down the street, with a seal-shaped wooden sign hanging from the door.

The father nodded to Mr. Minki, removed the fur, shook hands briefly, and then began to count and confirm in person.

Leia, Mr. Minchi shouted, four cans of gas, two barrels of wine!

Here it is, Lena pokes her head out from behind the counter, four cans of gas and two barrels of wine!

Lena is Minchi's daughter and seems to be a bit older than me. She was wearing a long floral dress, her eyes were bright and shining, and she stared at me and said, what a stupid big man, hurry up and help the lady carry things.

I followed her into the warehouse and loaded the goods onto the sleigh.

He's a great guy, she said, but you're missing a pair of boots.

What boots? I looked down at my feet, and I was wearing a pair of sealskin boots, which Anna lined with fox fur, which was very warm.

A pair of boots, like the kind worn by a lively officer. Lea gestured. Black, knee-length.

Black, knee-length.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

With these last words, Lindbergh's story came to an abrupt end and fell into a long silence.

Aresta must have been astonished, he was an old fox who had experienced all too much, and was all too familiar with calamity and misery. Of course, he could discern what kind of ominous things were hidden in this seemingly dull story. He didn't understand why Lindbergh was talking to him about his hometown at this time.

"It's a good story......

In the end, Aresta didn't comment too much, and the two didn't say a word until Zoten tearfully pulled Lucieu out of the reinforcement room.

"Mr. Kobayashi! Smoking is forbidden here, so why squat on the ground like a gangster! A sucker! Give me a little bit of a teacher's awareness! ”