Giuseppe Caproni's beard was covered with ice slag, and he was trembling on his knees, drawing crosses.

Witness a volcanic eruption for the first time, and the sky is covered with volcanic ash as it turns from day to night in an instant. The sound of the explosion was like the artillery fire of a world war, and it literally wiped out countless divisions and regiments. The boiling magma melts thousands of years of snow, either into smoky steam or into floods and mudslides that rush from the mountaintops to the coast.

Li Longsheng sneezed more than a dozen times in a row before he uttered his first sentence: "This is how the desert terrain of Iceland is formed. If the lava flows here, we'll have to jump back into the ice. ”

Chanko knelt in the snow, trying to find a temporary religious belief: "Are we all going to burn to death?" ”

"I've visited the ruins of Pompeii." The Italian Caproni could not understand the Chinese dialect and said to himself, "1,800 years ago, Mount Vesuvius erupted, and the ash buried the entire city, and the whole city was spared. To this day, there are thousands of remains beneath Pompeii, mummified in volcanic ash and in the form they were at the time of death. ”

He crouched down and hugged his shoulders as if he had become a volcanic corpse.

The eruption became more and more intense, like countless ancient Roman trebuchets and Skoda giant mortars, throwing huge fireballs outward. Some smashed large craters on the coast, while others fell directly into the sea, melting large swaths of ice.

The snowflakes turned black, but they were actually debris of volcanic ash, and Anna's curly hair was full of dirty dust. The air was filled with the smell of sulfur, as if a million rotten eggs were breaking at the same time, and everyone was on their knees coughing. It just so happened that the camp where the airship had made a forced landing was nearby, and Chanko rushed to the wreckage of the pod, rescued several gas masks, and quickly put them on everyone. Many volcanic eruptions cause deaths not from burial and magma, but from air poisoning such as carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, sulfur dioxide, and methane.

They found clothes and blankets from the old camp and took off their wet clothes, wiped them clean and put on new ones.

Ouyang Anna doesn't care about the difference between men and women, in the icy and snowy North Pole, if she changes her wet clothes one minute later, she will die one minute earlier. She stripped herself naked, exposed naked to the sea of ice and the volcano. Volcanic ash spreads all over the sky, causing a heavy haze effect. Others can't see her spring. Anna quickly wiped herself and changed her clothes, especially her long hair, otherwise she would catch a cold every minute, and she would be sentenced to death here. She was determined to survive no matter what, in order to be buried in Qin Beiyang in the crater.

Everyone finds flashlights from the camp to illuminate the pitch-black volcanic world. Hand in hand, they stood beside the sea of ice, ready to meet the blazing magma that swept away everything. Two Catholics, Caproni and Ouyang Anna, recited Bible prayers in Italian and Chinese, respectively. Anna held Qi Yuanshan in her left hand and Li Longsheng in her right hand, and on both sides were tall and good-looking men. She felt hot in her left hand and cold in her right hand.

The volcanic mudslide swept in and extinguished right under their feet. The vast area of the island has allowed the magma to cool faster than it flows, forming large expanses of gray magmatic rock. Several large fireballs flew over and luckily passed by them. Black ash replaced white snow and covered the entire island, submerging to the knees, and if you stood inland, you would be wiped out.

Did we survive?

Anna did not dare to take off her gas mask, fell to her knees in the desert of volcanic ash, and wept bitterly. Don't know if the toxic gas has dissipated? The eruption has stopped, and I don't know when the long night that obscures the sky will pass? The temperature continues to drop, but fortunately there is smoke billowing from all over the island, bringing in geothermal energy to temporarily protect against the cold. They lit the rest of the camp, including the wreckage of the airship's airbags, but the best fuel, burned them all to the fireplace, and spent the most miserable night.

Qin Beiyang and the town's tomb beast Nine Colors, together with the Viking Valhalla and the giant wolf Fenrir, have no chance of surviving......

The next day, countless seals and whale carcasses were floating on the surface of the sea, all of which had died from the volcanic eruption. Qi Yuanshan and Caproni caught a lot of dead seals with hooks. They relied on raw meat to feed their hunger, and five of them survived.

In the long night, Anna heard someone crying loudly, it turned out to be Qi Yuanshan. He didn't want to shed tears in front of the girl, but he didn't hold back after all. He was missing Qin Beiyang and regretted that he couldn't save him at that time.

Ouyang Anna touched Qi Yuanshan's hair: "Don't cry!" You're a man. ”

She didn't cry, she looked back at the black volcano, and said to herself—our pleasure is so short-lived.

Then, she kissed the jade ring on the middle finger of her left hand, as if reminiscing about Qin Beiyang's lips.

A week later, the clouds cleared and the sun rose over the North Pole. The entire island has completely changed, the original snow-capped has become a black magma desert, and the conical crater has revealed its original appearance of a thousand years ago.

They could not live forever on this desert island, and sooner or later they would have to die of disease and starvation, as Sir Franklin's expedition had done more than seventy years ago, and be buried in the Arctic tundra wasteland and mummified. The Four-Winged Angel Tomb Beast that saved everyone from the crater has sunk to the bottom of the sea, and no one can catch it. If there is danger again, it is impossible to have good luck this time.

Li Longsheng sat on the shore of the ice sea, watching the sunset on the Arctic Ocean, and missed the river and sunset of Cambridge very much. He still wondered if what he saw in the Vikings' tombs was real. The statues of the great gods in the Viking Valhalla all acted like tomb beasts, almost killing their intruders. In the end, the great battle between the giant wolf Fenrir and Odin - Ragnarok.

None of the above has ever happened, has it? It's a collective hallucination and conjecture of the big guys, or a dream.

Suddenly, Li Longsheng saw a ship appear in his field of vision.

Rubbing his eyes, he was sure that this was neither an illusion, nor a conjecture, nor a dream.

The ship is close to the island, the newest icebreaker, flying the Norwegian flag. Li Longsheng woke everyone up, and Caproni fired the airship's distress flare, burning the last few tents, and escorting all hope of survival.

The icebreaker spotted them.

Seven days ago, the Arctic volcanic eruption affected the weather in most of Europe, and the ash drifted over Norway and Scotland to block the sun, turning midsummer into late autumn.

The Norwegian government sent an icebreaker deep into the Arctic Ocean in search of the source of the volcano and accidentally discovered the island – a miracle that Anna and Caproni prayed for day and night.

Five survivors boarded the ship, and at their insistence, the Norwegians salvaged the Four-Winged Gravemon, which fortunately fell close to the shore at a depth of no more than five or six meters.

Two days later, the icebreaker returned to Oslo, the capital of Norway. They were greeted by the city's inhabitants and the news media from all over Europe, and the King of Norway even awarded five men medals for their bravery in the polar expeditions.

Of course, no one dared to admit that they had unleashed the giant wolf Fenrir, causing Ragnarok and destroying Odin's Viking Valhalla......

As for the Four-Winged Angel Tomb Beast, everyone said that it was a modern artifact, and that all of them were Chanco - if the secret of the Tomb Beast was revealed, it might attract the French military again, or people with bad intentions.

Giuseppe Caproni himself flew a plane from Oslo across the continent back to Rome. Once again, he became an Italian national hero, as he declared that he had reached the magnetic point of the North Pole. Seven years later, Caproni, with Mussolini's support, once again flew across the North Pole in an airship, reaching the North Pole for the first time and dropping an Italian flag.

Chanko stayed in Europe, where he moved to Germany to study flight design, always taking the Quadus Tomb Beast with him.

Li Longsheng returned to Cambridge University and continued his research in theoretical physics.

Qi Yuanshan returned to China with Ouyang Anna, took a boat through the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean, and returned to Shanghai in autumn.

When the ship sails into the Huangpu River, the buildings on the Bund gradually become clear in the morning mist, like the gods and giants of the Viking Valhalla. Anna closed her eyes, a tear rolled down her cheeks, Qi Yuanshan, who was dressed in a Beiyang military uniform, squeezed her hand tightly, and said in her ear: "It's home." ”

She replied lightly: "No, this is my purgatory." ”