Chapter 439: The End of the Road

The Great Wall does not fall, this is a seemingly unexpected, but in fact there is little hope for the south.

The new Chief Chill Priest was in the shadows a few hundred meters away, looking at the castle that had been easily taken and the army of ghouls that were pouring into it, which at first glance was still spectacular, and his heart was extremely heavy as he listened to the desperate begs and screams of the living.

He inherited nearly half of his magic and vital status as the "center of magical connection" for all priests from the Night King, but he did not inherit the contact with the cold god.

This is inaccurate, and in fact, he does not know if the previous Night King possessed the ability to "actively communicate with the god of cold" - after completing his identity change, he briefly sensed a higher level of power, and received the only and final order from him: to abandon the original strategic objectives of the land grant and the Great Wall, and to head south.

He was puzzled by the command, but unfortunately he didn't get any response to his inquiry, and he couldn't even sense the presence of the cold god anymore.

It was simply because it was too far away from the magic gap in the Grand Canyon, resulting in poor signal and communication interruption...... Or has the cold god actually given up on them, so he simply gave the order to go south and left them to fend for themselves, just asking them to make a final wave of impact to the south, make trouble in the human world for the last time, and burn the last value of existence?

The chief priest didn't know, and he couldn't ask.

Bypassing the invincibility of the invincibility of the Night's Watch and heading south may seem wonderful, but there is a fatal problem: every move of the Priests of the Cold God consumes energy.

Maintain a hypothermia suitable for action, condense "Ice" weapons and shells, cast magic to help kill enemies, and transform corpses into ghouls upon victory...... All of these actions and operations must be carried out on an active basis. Priests aren't perpetual motion machines, and ghouls aren't acting out Resident Evil or World War Z, and no resources will snowball out of their own accord!

......

After a day and a night of defeat from Houguan Town, the remnants of the Priests of the Cold God and the dead trekked south along the King's Road to the nearest northern castle and winter settlement, the core of Amber's domain, and finally the Hearth.

What finally relieved them was that the castle had prepared for their arrival with incredible care: not only had the inhabitants of the town outside the city walls not evacuated, but the defenders' defenses were so shabby that the priests could not resist the suspicion that they were traps: apart from a few grease and asphalt that could not be compared to wildfire, only a handful of frozen rocket arrows posed a threat, and when the ghouls climbed the walls into the castle, most of the living soldiers with the Roaring Giants painted on their chests resisted with ordinary steel and iron weapons。

In the end, this battle became the first victory of the ghoul army after crossing the canyon into Sene, and more than 4,000 civilians, members of the Amber family, and soldiers gathered in the last Hearth City to spend the winter, and none of them were spared, and the ghouls suffered less than 1,000 losses.

In addition, the corpses in the last Fireplace City finally no longer have that weird fire attribute magic that came out of nowhere!

Good news after another, but is it really a victory? The High Priest was skeptical, for he was now faced with an unprecedented embarrassment - there was no magic to transform the enemies he killed into ghouls.

***

It took more than five years for the priests of the cold gods to come from the land of eternal winter until they crossed the canyon and invaded the south...... For such a long time, of course, they did not "go for seven seasons" as ridiculed, but quietly prepared for this big battle.

On the north side of the ice wall, the main difficulty they face is "not enough qualified corpses": there are countless creatures that have survived and died outside the Cypriot for thousands of years, but only a very small number can transform into ghouls, and the reason for this is that the use of necromancy to resurrect the dead is not as unconditional as humans think.

In summary, there are at least two aspects to consider when priests cast spells to "resurrect" and create ghouls.

One is worthy of resurrection, and the other is that it can be resurrected.

The smaller the creature, the less mana it takes to transform into a ghoul, but it is still a unit, and the transformer needs to bother to contact and control it before it can act...... And the amount of this control, depending on the strength of the priest's own mental strength, has an upper limit ranging from a few thousand to tens of thousands - this means that the corpse must have a value that can be transformed: such as being of sufficient size, suitable for battle, able to use weapons and tools, etc...... will be selected. Under these conditions, animals that are too small and cannot fly after ghouls are excluded first, and most herbivores with inflexible bodies and no sharp teeth and claws have to stand on one side, resulting in only giants, humans, and medium-large predators that can finally enter the shortlist.

Even if the list of candidates is clear, it still doesn't mean that you can become a ghoul just by being on the list: although the cold magic that enters the corpse can replace the nervous system to control the ghoul's behavior, the ghoul still rely mainly on the muscles of the body. This means that only those who meet the conditions can be transformed into ghouls - cremation to ashes is not possible, and skeletons that have been eaten by carnivores and scavengers to empty shelves in the Ragnar Wilderness after death are also irretrievable, and only freshly killed and well-buried corpses that have not yet been completely corrupted can be transformed into ghouls.

These two restrictions are the reason why the Night King and a dozen priests have been scattered and fought for many years, but in total they have only gathered more than 100,000 ghouls.

***

When outside the fortress, it is almost impossible for the priests to convert into the upper limit of the number of ghouls, so the requirements for corpses are often extremely low, as long as the two conditions are barely met, even if the mutilation is unsightly, they will inject magic into a magical connection network, and occupy a place in the controllable golem...... When encountering a better target, he will even hunt down in person without fear of a discount. But today, it is ironic that they are faced with perfect corpses full of castles that are fully armed, alive and even body warm, and fall into the dilemma of "not being able to use enough magic power to transform"!

The farther south you go, the weaker the effect of its suppressive field becomes, but the same - the farther away the priests are from the cold mana of the north. If the mana regeneration rate is 100 when outside the fortress, 1 on the south side of the Grand Canyon gap, then 0.5 in Houguan Town, and at this northern castle, thousands of miles away from the Land of Eternal Winter and separated by the Great Wall, there is only a pitiful 0.1...... And even if this is an incredibly pitiful statistic, it can still continue to decrease as the time goes south and misses the peak of the Cold God's power.

The new Chief could roughly tell: two or three days further south, the concentration of cold mana seeping through the gap in the Grand Canyon would be reduced by half again—this would completely fall below the life-and-death line of the mana speed they needed to maintain their body temperature. Once the speed of absorbing energy from the outside world cannot keep up with the consumption of maintaining body temperature, the cold priests have become extreme challengers in breath-holding diving...... When the mana stored in the body is also exhausted, they will enter a state of "consuming their body to continue their lives". At that point, not to mention invulnerable ice armor, indestructible ice swords and spears, and magic that can make wildfire incomprehensible, the priests may be so weak that a torch or a bucket of warm water can "scald them to death"!

Crossing that red line, no one needs to do anything, and they will slowly die out on their own.

Isn't it possible to solve this dilemma by waiting in the safe zone to recover the magic? Theoretically, this is true, but things are not that simple, the huge overall strength and home advantage of the human world make every moment of staying and waiting is a drink to quench your thirst, not to mention that there is a group of night watchmen chasing after you!

That's right, with the bankruptcy of the plan to raid the Great Wall and the sudden launch of a large killing weapon that the human side could not solve but retreat, everything became funny: more than 10,000 ghouls were chased and fled by only a fraction of their own number of living people.

Now, the new Chief Priest faces a more difficult choice than the Night King's "attack on the Long Night Castle or Houguan Town": should he continue to be chased south by the Night's Watch and cross the danger line to wait for death in a place where the cold magic power is exhausted, or should he turn back and fight to the death with the pursuers, so that the cold god's side can have a few more chances of winning in a desperate situation?

In short: wait for death or desperately?

Any sapient life will choose the latter one, but unfortunately with the return of the three dragons to join the Night's Watch, the latter has become a dead end.

Whether to starve to death slowly or to die a painful death is an impossible choice.

If the Night King was still alive, what would he choose?

......

As he pondered, another priest approached it and asked in the ancient language what to do with the nearly five thousand fresh corpses.

It's not for nothing that the new Chief Priest, who has inherited most of the Night King's legacy, is the only one of all the priests who still has enough magic power, and he still has enough magic power to transform tens of thousands of ordinary ghouls.

However, he still has the ability to cast transformation spells, which means that he is also the only one who can still threaten dragons.

Before the multiple-choice questions of "fleeing" and "desperately" were completed, another proposition was placed in front of the chief priest: should some of the precious magic he still had left to transform the ghouls, or should it be kept all for dealing with dragons and the night watch?

Imitating the mindset of the deceased Night King, after a few minutes of long consideration, he thought of the only possibility that could still turn defeat into victory at the moment: the dragon + night watchman's chasing combination was invincible, but if he could use some method to induce the two to separate, one by one to solve the immediate urgency, and then slowly recover on the north side of the safety red line - when the magic power is full again, whether it is to go south to massacre the unprepared inhabitants of the northern hinterland, or to go back to the Great Wall to try his luck, at least the hope of life is a little greater!

"We'll rest here to regain our mana and wait for the men in black to catch up before we set off. The Chief Chill God Priest said in a glacier-cracking voice, "Let each priest select the corpses that can be transformed by themselves, and turn the strongest and best equipment among them into puppets and take them away, and leave the ordinary ones behind." As for me, I want to save all my strength for the next battle. ”

——