1544 Snowheart City

Alex teleported directly to Snowheart City, along with his elders and other guards that had been provided to him. He walked out of the building to find an entourage waiting for him there.

The many people there greeted him, along with the woman at the center of them all. The Ivory Queen. 

Song Meifen wore a white dress that day, with the only color seen on her body the black of her hair and the reddish pink of her lips. Her smile was one that seemed to brighten everyone's day, and she directed it at Alex.

"I am honored to have Your Majesty finally visit us," the woman said with a bow.

"I'm happy to have met Queen Song again," Alex said.

The woman smiled. "You should have come earlier, Your Majesty," she said. "You truly made us wait."

"I would've come earlier, but… " Alex shrugged. 

The woman said nothing. She understood the meaning of his silence.

The barrier.

They got onto a carriage that took Alex and the rest to the palace. Alex looked around the city.

Large curved spires of ancient buildings filled the view wherever Alex turned. They were all of uneven sizes, giving a sort of harmony that usually came with chaos.

 

The colorful buildings filled both sides of the straight, wide road with giant trees growing on either side. Snow fell from the sky, coloring the land white. Where there was a lava vein, the snow melted, trickling to the side of the road, disappearing somewhere.

Newsboard hung in the sky, announcing his arrival in Snowheart City, as it always did wherever he went. The people on the road stopped and bowed toward the carriage. They couldn't see who was inside, but they knew of it already.

There were no mountains in sight. That was usually a normal occurrence for him. Wherever he went, no matter the Northern Continent or the Gold Kingdom, it was true that where there was snow, there were mountain ranges nearby.

However, in the Ivory Kingdom, most of the land was flat, except for a single mountain range in the east, and that was far enough away that the buildings easily towered over it to Alex's vision.

There was a calmness to this city that he hadn't seen before in any of the other cities he had been to before.

"I asked the Emperor about the barrier," Alex said. "But he told me that it would be better if I heard about it from yourself, Queen Song. Would you mind telling me everything in detail?" 

The Queen nodded. "Of course, your Majesty," she said. "But… there's really nothing to tell. There was a barrier that stopped us from moving out, and then after two years, it wasn't there anymore. That's it."

Alex looked at the Queen and tried to discern if there was any untruth to the statement. If there was, she had managed to hide it well. Alex couldn't sense any lies.

"Who created the barrier? Do you know?" Alex asked.

Queen Song shook her head. "As I said, it suddenly appeared one day. We do not know who or why it appeared," she said.

Alex fell into a thought. Did the Immortals do everything in secret, leaving the mortals confused as to why they did or what they did? However, it wasn't as if the Immortals had done everything on their own. They had contact with the humans.

In fact, they had contact with the Queen herself, albeit maybe not directly.

"When the barrier appeared, you were the one that sent out a message that said that no one would have to worry about you in the barrier, correct?" Alex asked.

"Yes, I did," the woman said.

"Why?" Alex asked.

Queen Song looked at him as if he was asking the most obvious question. "To… let the outside world know we're fine. So that they didn't worry about us," she said as a matter of fact.

Alex nodded. "That makes sense," he said. But that wasn't where he was going.

"How did you know that was the case?" he asked her. "How did you know you were safe? A random barrier had after all appeared out of nowhere."

"I knew," the queen said, her voice trailing off a bit. "I just knew…" Her eyes turned sharp suddenly. "You are asking me the same questions his Royal Majesty did when I met him half a year ago. There's something wrong with my explanation, isn't there?"

Alex nodded. "Can you not tell yourself?" he asked.

The queen shook her head. "It feels obvious what I'm saying. It's as if nothing else should be the truth," she said. "I remember the Emperor asking me how I even got the message out as all communication was locked out."

"I was going to ask the same next," Alex said. "How did you do it?"

"I used the talisman to message outside," the woman said, sighing to herself. "Please don't ask me where I got it from. I couldn't answer the Emperor too."

"Yep!" Godslayer spoke from Alex's mind. "Some immortal messed with her memories."

"They can do that?" Alex asked curiously.

"Yeah, it's a simple hallucination trick. You have memory-erasing pills, don't you? This one is simple manipulation. Although…" Godslayer thought for a bit. "To mess with the mind of someone in the Saint Soul realm, that person can't have been a simple Immortal."

"What counts as not a simple immortal?" Alex asked.

"Someone that has learned a specific spiritual technique to mess with someone's memories," the spirit said. "Erasing is easy, but manipulating so that the person isn't aware that their memories are missing is hard. So, it must have been someone talented in such an art."

"I see," Alex said.

"Yeah," Godslayer said. "It's that or… a Divinity."

Alex gulped in surprise. "A Divine realm cultivator?" he asked.

"Their spirit is usually very strong and as a result, they can do things that normal people would find impossible without learning any technique," Godslayer said.

"I see," Alex said softly. He couldn't help but fear which one this was. And on that of that, he couldn't help but worry about whether they had left or not.

"Pills can't do this?" Alex asked, hoping.

Godslayer thought for a bit. "Maybe," he said. "Pills can do many things and I only know of a few. But, it is more likely what I said is true."

Alex nodded. He had to consider all the possibilities.

"Have you found any abnormalities in the people's daily life?" Alex asked. "Any changes that don't make sense?"

"None so far," the queen said. "We haven't exactly settled back to normal since the barrier only lifted half a year ago. People are still trying to find normalcy and catch up on everything they missed."

"Some people are complaining that they missed their only chance at going back home too," she said.

Alex nodded. That was a compromise he had to make to go back to the Central continent. He had hoped everyone would have come out of the barrier half a year before they left, but alas it lasted for another year.

There was nothing Alex could do at that point. Still, it did feel bad that if he had waited half a year longer, they would have all come out.