After three days of climbing, Fisher and Valentina are getting closer and closer to the location suggested in the Ice Scroll before, I have to say that the place where the Phoenix Species lives is really not something that ordinary people can climb up, and this thousands of meters deep and continuous mountain range even Fisher, who is now about to reach the eleventh rank, feels a little difficult.

However, because the Schwali scholar Balzac had planned the route to the top of the mountain for them in advance, the journey was always smooth, along the way he and Valentina passed through many primeval jungles deep in the snow-capped mountains, saw several magical creatures unique to the Sema Snow Mountain, and found many ruins built by subhuman races in the past.

After all, the phoenix species has existed thousands of years ago, so after years of erosion, these ruins are either completely covered by wind and snow or completely turned into ruins. One of the most common ruins is an upward staircase, which is divided into several steps, each with a giant staircase two meters high, and the other used by ordinary humans.

It is not difficult to speculate that in the past, when the phoenix species existed, the subhuman races under the snow-capped mountains relied on these ladders of different sizes to climb for several days and nights to worship the phoenix, but unfortunately now these ladders have been completely abandoned, and there are very few who can help Fisher and Valentina.

"Fisher... Ha... Ha... Look aside... It's a cloud, you can touch it with your hands. ”

As Fisher and Valentina got higher and higher, and the air above them became thinner, Fisher didn't feel anything at all, after all, he had experienced ten times more uncomfortable breathing in the water than here, but Valentina on his back had been panting, and he had to open his mouth for a long time to say a word.

She reached out to flick the cloud next to her, and then slowly withdrew her hand, although it was impossible to grasp the cloud in her palm, she still happily hugged Fisher's neck, and then she turned her head to look around at the mist-wrapped surroundings, and then she said in surprise,

"Wait, are we about to get to where the scroll says?"

Fisher nodded, his pace still steady,

"If Balzac's route is fine, we will soon be at the foot of the plane tree."

"Hurry up, I heard that even a well-equipped mountaineering team will have to climb Sema Snow Mountain for at least half a month, and you didn't have any equipment and took me with you to arrive in three days..."

Valentina reached out and pinched the muscles on Fisher's chest with some surprise, and then withdrew her little hand with a slightly ruddy face, if it weren't for Fisher's obvious biological characteristics, and occasionally looking at herself would show that kind of eyes that wanted to eat herself, Valentina really wondered if he was a person in mechanical disguise.

"That's not it, this stinky boy is almost eleventh rank, and he can drag your human-made train with one hand, and your little body is probably not enough for him to stuff his teeth."

"Emhat..."

Valentina blushed and glared at Emhart, who began to say suggestive words again, but the book sir yawned and didn't want to pay attention to her at all, or Fisher opened his mouth to make this square book stop and stop talking, Valentina probably has a basic understanding of many of the terms they say in the past few days, such as "rank" or something, at this time she suddenly remembered and asked,

"By the way, what rank have you been talking about these days, I want to ask, how many ranks are there for the phoenixes?"

Emhardt's body swelled with golden light, and then said to Valentina,

"If you don't count other abilities, it's probably in the range of the ninth to twelfth order, which is about the same as the whales in the sea, and a little higher than the dragon races in the Southern Continent. However, the Phoenix King and her three children may be of the mythical rank, otherwise I really can't imagine how they can defeat the Chaos Seed, could it be because of the few holy relics given to them by the Holy Descendants? ”

Valentina opened her mouth, and then she knew in her heart that Fisher was already as powerful as the legendary phoenix, so if she was a phoenix, would it be possible for her to become more powerful in the future...

After all, she didn't want to keep Fisher carrying her back like this for the rest of her life, and she wanted to be stronger, at least not as useless as she is now.

However, Emhart seemed to see through Valentina's thoughts, and he smacked his lips and added,

"Well, the rank is an artificial consideration set by ancient humans to avoid danger, and it is actually very imprecise, because the higher the rank of a creature, the less contact it will have with humans, and their evaluation of these races is very ambiguous, and they can only divide them into a rough one according to the level... Moreover, I don't know if a half-breed like you can reach the same rank as the phoenix race, if the half-breed can be the same rank as the phoenix, it stands to reason that the people of the Turan family should not be able to catch the descendants of the moon princess..."

"We're here."

Just as Emhardt was thinking, Fisher's footsteps suddenly stopped, causing him to sway into the air, and he shook his head to look ahead, only to see that the cloud they had walked had reached the highest point of a mountain peak, and in front of the highest point was covered with gently swaying clouds, turning the faintly visible mountains in the distance into shadows that were difficult to distinguish the exact shape.

At the highest point of the mountain peak in front of him, several huge rocks seemed to fall from the sky dome through the mountain peak in front of him, and there were some man-made ruins that had long been ruined by time and covered by wind and snow, but from a distance, the ruins were quiet, looking quite mysterious, and it seemed that no one had arrived here for a long time.

"Is that the entrance to the scroll mark, there seems to be a building there, but it's been destroyed..."

"Let's go check it out."

Fisher carried Valentina on his back and walked to the front of the mountain, because the altitude here was too high, the wind blowing around her was so strong that Valentina couldn't open her eyes, and even Emhart, who was floating in mid-air, was about to be blown into a windmill, so they had no choice but to lean closely against Fisher, who was standing still in the wind, and approached the ruins in front of them little by little.

"These buildings are so big, this broken door alone is ten meters long... But it doesn't seem to be a building built by the phoenixes, it should be another race. ”

The closer you get to the building in front of you, the bigger it becomes, and Valentina suddenly speaks as she glances at the dilapidated stone building in front of her.

Emhart still had some questions, but Fisher nodded,

"Well, I've seen the snowflake castle built by the Moon Princess, and although I feel that the fortress built by the Moon Princess combines the construction techniques of many other races, that sense of grandeur should be unique to the Phoenix species... The architecture here is too rough and the materials are all stone, which indicates that the race that built it was limited by the terrain of the snowy mountains, and it was built by the races below the snowy mountains, possibly by the troll species. ”

Emhart glanced at Fisher, who was speculating, and then at Valentina, who was on his back in agreement, and suddenly asked,

"Wait, Fisher, when did you carry me to Snowflake Fortress, I've been with you all day, how come I don't know?"

Fisher was watching the building and didn't have time to respond to him, but Valentina on his back winked at him, smiled evilly and whispered,

"It's a secret between me and Fisher."

"Your mother..."

Emhart retracted into Fisher's arms with a dark face and decided not to pay attention to Valentina, the deflated appearance made Valentina can't help but cover her mouth and laugh, she found it particularly interesting to play tricks on this little book friend, no wonder Fisher took him with him every day.

Fisher ignored the two of them at this time, he just frowned and looked at the ruins of the building in front of him, as if he smelled a familiar fragrance...

"Renee..."

"Huh, what Renee?"

Valentina poked her head warily, for her Nari was not very good, and she could not tell whether Fisher was pronouncing a name or a word, but she looked over Fisher's shoulder, only to see a few smears of snow on the ground and a lot of broken rubble and artefacts.

“... Do you smell anything? ”

"Scent?"

Valentina sniffed carefully, then shook her head, she looked at Fisher with some concern, and said,

"I... I don't smell anything, do you smell it? ”

“... No, it could be that I have a nose problem. ”

Fisher wasn't sure if he was hallucinating again because of the Soul Supplement Manual, but at this moment, he could always smell a very familiar scent in the thin air, the kind of fragrance Fisher had only smelled on one person, and that was Renee.

I had asked her what kind of perfume she was wearing, and she was very embarrassed to say that it was "a beautiful woman's body fragrance", and Fisher was quite speechless at the time, but he firmly remembered this fragrance...

Even if Fisher wasn't even sure if the smell was a hallucination, he still moved somewhat uncontrollably in the direction where the scent might have come from, and he carried Valentina on his back towards the depths of the ruins, and on the snow-covered road next to him, he could occasionally see several corpses that had turned into white bones, and they were still wearing the robes of the Kado Witch Society.

This is the expedition that Carlo said before, it was this group of people who brought back a black hair of an undead witch here, and they just smelled a surging fragrance of Renee, is this a bait caused by a hallucination in the brain or is it really something?

"Fisher, look, there seems to be a staircase there, and this ruin has a basement floor."

Just as Fisher was approaching the edge of the cliff, Valentina, who was also looking around on his back, suddenly saw a staircase leading to the ground next to a stone pillar that ran through the peak.

"Fisher... Are we going down? ”

"Well, there's nothing up there, if there's a way to the troll colony, it's going to be here. I can see the road clearly in the dark, and that's okay. ”

Valentina nodded obediently, hugged Fisher tightly, seemed to be a little afraid to look at the coming darkness, Emhart also shrank his head a little nervously, he was not afraid of the darkness, otherwise he would not dare to run into the demon abyss alone, he was just afraid that a Baimon would suddenly come out from below...

Everyone before and after the book became nervous, and Fisher's heartbeat increased slightly, but not because of fear, but because of the faint fragrance, he began to feel that what he smelled was not a hallucination, but that there was really a clue about the missing Renee below.

With an inquiring mindset, he steadily descended into the darkness that no one had set foot on for a long time.

"Step! Trample! Trample! ”

The staircase was long, and Fisher didn't take a step before the echo of the soles of his shoes hitting the stone bricks under his feet kept coming, and Valentina couldn't see anything but the darkness, but Fisher could see the structure beneath the stairs.

Below was a very large room, but it was very empty, with only a platform protruding from the center, and on the ground below that there were many bones, whole and loose, and of all races...

The ones with the obvious wing structure were obviously the blue bird species, the snow fox species with fox-shaped heads, and the rest of the races, even humans, sheep people, and several races that Fisher did not recognize...

"Fee... Fisher, why don't you go, you... Do you see anything? ”

"Well, I saw a lot of bones lying on the ground, I think the five clans who wanted to go to the Sycamore Tree back then, except for the troll species, but they didn't make it in, and they died here... The troll species are denying access to the sycamore tree, including the Six Clans, and they even go so far as to kill trespassers. ”

"There must be a reason why the troll species did this, maybe it was an order from the phoenix?"

Valentina speculated, and Fisher nodded in agreement, and then walked forward over the bones all over the ground, the lingering fragrance at the tip of his nose became more and more obvious, and over the raised platform stained with dry blood, Fisher suddenly found that there was an extremely long passage behind this room, but it was clear that there was a cliff in front of it just now, why was there a road after reaching the ground?

Fisher took a few steps forward with some confusion and found that there were many frescoes painted on both sides of the passage in front of him, on which an old mythological story was depicted.

It is said that a long, long time ago in the northernmost part of the world, farther north, there was a huge tree, that tree is so huge, so much bigger than the world, the shackles of space have no meaning in front of its eyes, if you stand on that tree, you can walk from the northernmost part of the world to the southernmost part of the world with a single step.

That tree had stood at the far end of the world since the beginning of the world, when the world was quiet, as if it were the only thing in the world. Until one day when the sun went down, a very strong dragon came from the far south, and although the dragon was strong, it was less than one-ten-thousandth the size of the giant tree.

"I am greater than the earth, I am nobler than the sky, although you have great power, you can't shake me in the slightest, so go back to the place where you came from and avoid comparing with me."

】

This angered the dragon, and he slammed the tree with all his might, burning its trunk with the flames that burned in his mouth, to no avail. His majestic power is useless in front of trees larger than the world, which makes people laugh. The dragon fled to the laughter of the tree, but the dragon did not give up, and he thought of a brilliant way to take revenge on the arrogant tree.

He drilled a deep, deep hole, deeper than the world, and there grew the roots of a giant tree.

"I can't shake your trunk, but your most important roots are so fragile that I'm going to bite off your rhizomes and bury them where even you can't find them, and you'll be tormented by the loss of something important."

So he hated and bit off the rhizome of the giant tree, then flew to the top of the world and threw it with all his strength to a place that even he didn't know, and flew away with a smile and never came back, leaving only the anxious giant tree to search for its rhizome all over the world.

The myth comes to an abrupt end, because the last mural no longer tells the story of the giant tree and the evil dragon, but a group of bird-like creatures with huge wings fall on a strange mountain range, under which a picture is drawn exactly like the rhizome of the giant tree, and the mountains that grow on that stem are also extremely strange, they mingle, jump, disconnect and connect with each other, as if space has been divided, and it is difficult to distinguish the specific meaning.

Below, the epilogue of the myth is written in the ancient northern language,

"The rhizomes smashed into the ground by the dragon splashed up the towering mountains that cut through the sea and land, nourishing sacred minerals and forging the unbearable cold of living beings; It wasn't until a long time later that another noble master flew in from afar with his wings outstretched, settled here, and recreated their own legend. ”

Fisher frowned and looked at the mural in front of him, and suddenly seemed to understand something, he walked step by step towards the corridor in front of him, which should have been a cliff, and the deeper he walked into the corridor, the fewer and fewer traces of those bones, until after a long walk, he saw a hall at the end of the corridor that was exactly the same as when he came, and in the center of the hall, there was also an upward staircase.

It's just that unlike when I came, someone on the ground has engraved another line of crooked ancient northern script with some kind of huge sharp object.

"Those who do not enter the foot of the plane tree will die."

Fisher squinted at a line of writing on the ground, then raised his eyes to the long staircase leading to the top, the sunlight outside shining through the snow.

On both sides of the staircase lay a lot of bones, but unlike the bones in the hall before, the bones here were in a miserable state, either pierced by some kind of giant object or completely cut in two, and on the top of that staircase, there was a human skeleton pierced by a giant lance.

Wearing a kado mountaineering robe and mouth wide open, the skeleton seemed to have experienced some kind of extreme pain when he was dying, and Fisher guessed that the person in front of him might be the former president of the Witch Society's disappearance, and the reason why the Witch Institute didn't find him through the corridor behind them for so long only meant that the corridor leading to here was not visible to everyone.

"Fisher, in the hands of the bones... It seems to be holding something. ”

Through the ever-brightening sunlight outside, Valentina could see her surroundings as well, and she glanced at the bones that had been pierced by the lance, and suddenly delicately noticed that there seemed to be something underneath the bones.

Fisher frowned and stepped forward, turning the bones over, revealing the items he had hidden beneath him, and it turned out that the former president of the Witch Research Society was holding a small frame, and he picked it up, only to find that a strange oil painting was painted on it.

The content of the oil painting is simple, just the back of a black-haired woman whose face is not clear in a white background, the woman sits in a dignified posture and has the same appearance as a human being, but it makes the viewer feel at a glance that the object of the painting is not a human being... I don't know if it's an illusion, but when he picked up the painting, the faint fragrance on the tip of Fisher's nose was a little stronger, but when he tried to explore it again, he couldn't smell the familiar smell again.

I don't know what paint is used in this oil painting, which makes the picture extremely bright, but the overall brushwork is distorted and disorganized, and a beautiful picture is cleverly constructed in the brushstrokes that seem to be chaotic, and Valentina is amazed, but Emhart in Fisher's arms screamed all of a sudden, and quickly jumped out of Fisher's arms and shrank into the corner of the hall.

"Ahhh Fast! Get that thing out of the way! Woo~"

"What's the matter, Mr. Shu, do you see anything?"

Valentina looked at Emhart, who was suddenly very frightened and shrunk into the distance, not knowing what shocking things he saw in this painting, Fisher also turned his head to look, only to see Emhart's square body trembling in the corner of the room, gasping for a long time before he could speak, but even the words were a little intermittent,

"Bye... Bye..."

"Worship what?"

"Bymun! I know this guy's tastes and brushstrokes, and this painting was painted by that guy! ”

"Huh?"

Valentina didn't know who Beamon could make Emhardt so frightened, but looked at Fisher beside him with some confusion, only to see that he raised his eyebrows after hearing Emhardt's words, and then picked up the painting again and looked at it carefully, this painting has nothing special from top to bottom, let alone its confusing content.

But when Fisher turned the frame over, he suddenly saw three lines of Old Northern text on the back of the frame, from top to bottom, writing the name of the painting, the meaning of the painting, and the person who gave the painting.

"The Princess of the Moon"

"As a reparation for the loss of etiquette in the celebration banquet, it was presented to the phoenix species, hoping to get the forgiveness of the moon princess who left the table. Please tell the King of the Phoenix to convey to her on my behalf: I have returned the ten humans who were wagered as a joke, and apologize to the Moon Princess for my inappropriate jokes. ”

"Demon Baimeng~"