Edge of the Apocalypse
Chapter 969: The Three Great Fierce Grounds

The empire's territory was vast, and there were many dangerous places. However, there were three of them who were the most vicious, and they could be divided into north, south, and two by region. There were two vicious lands in the south. One was the Blood King's Cemetery in the Dead Valley behind Sardinia, the trade capital, and the other was the Dark Land to the northeast of the Iron Spear Territory. The Northern Vicious Realm was the basin known as the Devil's Throat.

The fierce names of the three great fierce lands were widely circulated in the empire, but the dangers of the three fierce lands were different.

The Blood King Cemetery in the Dead Valley was known as the most ferocious place. Although it was not the oldest, and although this vicious land could be traced back at least two hundred years, the Blood King's Cemetery was definitely the most dangerous. It was precisely because of the existence of this fierce land that the empire set up a so-called ancient investigation committee. It was all because of this fierce land that it was actually a Celestial Ruins.

Back then, they discovered that this ruin was a well-known adventurer team, but only one member of that team managed to escape from the Dead Valley. News of the Blood King's Cemetery came from the survivors. Over the next seven to eight years, adventurers had constantly entered the valley, but only one or two out of ten were able to survive. Over the past ten years, more than a hundred adventure teams had permanently been buried in that valley. There were no more than a thousand adventurers who had become fertilizer for that valley. Thus, that nameless valley was crowned as a dead man.

After that, the empire's gaze finally focused on the existence of this fierce land. When it learned that it might be a Celestial ruin, the empire set up an investigation team, which was the predecessor of the ancient investigation committee. In the next ten years, the imperial army moved into the Dead Valley, making this valley and the Blood King's Cemetery a forbidden area. In the following research, shocking news kept coming out.

The investigation found that the Blood King's Cemetery was a pyramid-shaped maze building. The deeper one went underground, the wider the area of the maze would be. Moreover, there were terrifying and tyrannical relic creatures on each floor of the maze. The adventurers who had been buried in the Blood King's Cemetery were only able to enter the fourth floor of the underground maze. After the empire entered the army, the number of layers of the labyrinth that had been broken increased by leaps and bounds.

In just three years, the Imperial Army had advanced to the tenth floor of the Blood King's Cemetery. However, behind this rapid advance, it was at the expense of numerous white bones. Immediately after, due to the invasion of the Shadow Duchy, the empire could no longer continue to send troops into the bottomless pit of the Blood King's Cemetery and could only seal it off. And after that, it did not restart.

Over the next hundred years, the empire's research on the Blood King's Cemetery was also intermittent. Until this generation's Emperor Tangerio, after listening to the advice of the former Prime Minister, simply released the ban on the Blood King's Cemetery and opened it to all adventurers. Moreover, the empire had provided corresponding supply points in the maze of the first ten floors that had been opened in the cemetery, so that adventurers could rest and recuperate while exploring the maze. Not only did the empire open the cemetery for adventurers to explore, it also did not prohibit adventurers from bringing out what was found in the ruins. However, if the adventurer was willing to hand it over to the empire, he would receive a corresponding reward from the empire.

To this end, the investigating committee also set up a special identification team to give adventurers the value of the ruins in exchange for the corresponding reward.

As a result, the empire didn't need to invest too much troops in the Blood King's Cemetery, and it could continuously recover the ruins and antiquities. As for the adventurers, if they found anything in the Blood King's Cemetery, they would usually gain both fame and fortune. There were even quite a few new adventurers who used the Blood King's Cemetery as a springboard for their lives. After becoming famous in the cemetery, he immediately transformed into a mercenary group. There were countless examples of this.

Of course, since the Blood King's Cemetery was ranked as the most vicious place, it wasn't a waste of its reputation. The death rate in this underground maze had always been high, but there were still a large number of adventurers who could not resist the temptation to become famous overnight and rushed into the Blood King's cemetery one after another.

If the dangers of the Blood King's Cemetery lay in the tyrannical and terrifying remnant creatures, then the evil of the Devil's Throat lay in the terrain.

The north is cold.

When you cross the Oselina, you will find a marked difference in temperature between the north and the south. Everyone who lived in the north knew that autumn and winter would be especially long in the four seasons of the year, while spring and summer would be very short. Millennia-old glaciers can be seen everywhere in the north, especially near the imperial capital of Oliska. Especially the Ice Star Harbor, which was close to the imperial capital. That harbor city was built on a layer of ten thousand years old ice.

After crossing the Oselina River, there was a city that was almost known to business travelers, and that was Frost Wind City. Frost Wind City was located near the Frost Ridge Valley. After the ice and snow melted in the north, due to the effect of the air current, the cold current would continue to flow southward. When passing through the cold ridge valley, due to the special landform of the valley, it would form a cold wind that blew unceasingly, so Frost Wind City got its name.

Even Frost Wind City, which was the closest to the Oselina River, was still like this, and the coldness in the north was not hard to imagine.

However, it was in this place that the Devil's Throat was located.

The Devil's Throat was a basin, but the difference between this basin and the plains was astonishingly large. Moreover, the center of the basin was a magma zone, and it was always hot because of the geothermal heat. As a result, white smoke curled up from the Devil's throat all year round. This was the result of the collision of the basin's heat flow and the cold air of the plains. In the basin, there was only a sliver of natural danger that could be crossed.

In the last dark land, there were as many bandits as a feather among the mountains and rivers. The internal forces were divided, and the situation was complicated.

The Bailey Empire was loose in its management of all parts of the country. Otherwise, it would not have allowed the lords to compete for power. In the war between Lords, only the citizens would suffer. In the beginning, the Land of Darkness was nothing more than a dangerous mountain forest, a place where ferocious beasts roamed. However, as time passed, more and more of the people who had been displaced by the war hid in the darkness, and the Thieves began to multiply.

Even now, there were at least a hundred bandit groups of all sizes in this lawless and dark land. Back then, the "Fire King" that Hoey had besieged and exterminated came from the Dark Lands. Normally speaking, not to mention the empire, even the lords of the territories adjacent to the Dark Lands would definitely not tolerate such a den of thieves at their own doorstep. However, after so many years in the Dark Lands, no one had cleaned them up. On the contrary, a few large bandit groups were operating vigorously.

Therefore, if it was said that there was no relationship between the Lords and the nobles in the Land of Darkness, no one would believe it.

Generally speaking, business travelers would rather take more detours than pass through the dark lands. However, some beast hunting groups or short-distance caravans would choose to enter the Dark Lands. Of course, when they passed, they had to pay poll tax to one or more bandit groups, which had become an unwritten rule in the Land of Darkness.

As time passed, some people who could not survive in the territory and did not dare to really do that life-threatening business would gather at the edge of the Dark Land and extort business travel under the banner of a certain group of thieves. However, these fellows didn't dare to harm their lives. Most of the time, they stared at the small caravans. There were even times when the merchant caravan had a strong guard and had to do the cowardly turtle without saying a word, not daring to jump out to intercept it.

To these fellows, the big shots of the forces in the Dark Lands would usually turn a blind eye. However, if those fellows stepped across the realm, they would have to endure the calamity of annihilation. Therefore, a pair of clever eyes was especially important to the people who lived on it. This pair of eyes wanted to distinguish which caravans could eat, and also to know where the invisible boundaries were in the Land of Darkness. Only in this way would he be able to preserve his job without being suppressed by the real villains.

Abel's eyes were like this.

Abel was only fourteen years old this year, but he had been a scout for the Thieves' Dark Spear for four to five years. The name of the Thieves sounded mighty, but those dark spears were simply crude wooden spears made from sharpened black wood. Using this kind of black wooden spear as a weapon could only frighten people. When Abel was ten years old, war broke out in his territory. His father took him to the dark lands and died of illness. Abel had become an orphan. Fortunately, Birick, the leader of the Thieves, had taken him in. "I can't raise you in vain," the frightening-looking, but actually dying-cowardly old man said to Abel. "Everyone will have their objections, so you have to work too, kid."

As a result, the ten-year-old boy had to play all kinds of roles on the edge of the Dark Lands. Like some lost boy, some homeless orphan or something, to get sympathy from the caravan. After joining the caravan, he would be responsible for observing the size and number of the caravan, so that Old Man Birick could consult it and decide whether to extort it or not.

It had been four years.

Abel, who had already grown into a tall and thin youth, no longer needed to rely on sympathy to obtain information about the caravan. Now, he relied more on his own eyes. As long as one looked at the size of the caravan, one could roughly estimate the number of people in the caravan. From the tracks left behind by the wheels, one could tell the weight of the cargo, and so on. It could be said that the Dark Spear had been able to take root in the Land of Darkness for four years, and Abel had earned most of the credit.

The number of times the youth had misjudged someone in the past four years could be counted on his fingers. As for the invisible boundaries that changed from time to time in the Land of Darkness, they could not escape his eyes.

At this moment, Abel was hiding in the crown of a black tree, biting on a green grass core that had just grown out, counting the amount of copper coins he had saved with his fingers. When the war broke out, the enemy lords' troops charged into their small village on the border. The war came so suddenly that Abel's house was torn apart. He still remembered the panicked and frightened expression on his sister Mina's face when she was separated by the crowd.

Every time Abel thought of that little face that was flushed by the flames of war, he couldn't help but clench his fists.

He believed that Mina was still alive, and as long as he had enough money to save for the road, the youth would leave the Land of Darkness.

When he heard the sound of horse hooves, Abel's eyes lit up and another business came!