The Record of Unusual Creatures

Panda Novel

Vivian summoned a swarm of bats. Overlooking the surrounding terrain from a high altitude, she quickly found the area that appeared on the surveillance footage. It was the ruins of a battlefield on a riverbank. Though it was some distance from the main battlefield of Vigrid, the condition there still looked terrible. Vivian believed that this was the place where the Twilight of the Gods started: the jötnar, those from Muspell, and the various demons from other spaces came to Asgard through the Bifröst here.

The heroic Heimdallr fought the invaders here, but the gatekeeper eventually died with Loki.

The small battlefield lay between two huge triangular tentacles as if caught between two small mountains. Surveillance footage in Valhalla matched the features of this area, but Hao Ren found no signs of human activity.

“No smell,” Lily sniffed around the ground and then returned to report to Hao Ren. “I’m sure nobody has been here for at least three months. But there are traces of human activity. Some equipment on the body has been taken away, while some items have old and new cuts.”

“It sounds like ‘battlefield scavengers’,” muttered Y’zaks, “and it’s been more than two thousand years. Could there be so many people survive?”

“I can’t believe how they survived the deadly magic radiation to this day.” Vivian shook her head. Then she suddenly caught sight of something not far away, and she raised her head and stared blankly over there.

Hao Ren looked at the same direction and saw the largest tentacle rising from the end of the earth ahead, stretching all the way to the sky. The huge tentacle was covered with a layer of gorgeous crystal, with a ringlike crystal door at the end of the crystal. The door kept spinning while flickering lights leaking from it: it must be the legendary “Bifröst”.

In front of this fragmented crystal bridge, there was an extraordinarily tall figure standing proudly against the sky.

It was a thick-haired Asgard soldier. He was wearing the Aesirian alloy armor. His whole body was covered with wounds and the armor on his chest was deeply sunken: this was his fatal wound. Standing in front of the Bifröst, the soldier leaned forward as if he was ready to pounce, and did not turn until the moment of death. Behind him, a cracked lance stuck into his waist. This was how he maintained standing at the last moment of his life.

The soldier’s face had been severely weathered over two thousand years, but it was incredible that his body had not been completely decomposed. He had simply become a mummified corpse in the wind as if the task of guarding the bridge still lay on his shoulders and made him resist the grinding of time.

“Heimdallr… The whole Aesirian Garden is down but you haven’t,” Vivian came to the soldier and said softly.

“Admirable.” Galazur put her hands on both sides of her body, leaned forward slightly, and paid tribute to the soldier. She did not know who Heimdallr was, but as a golden dragon warrior, she saluted the soldier’s determination to fight.

Vivian pointed to another direction and said, “Then that’s Loki. His body was torn apart, poor thing.”

A rather large body of a man lay in front of Heimdallr. He had unusually large bones and the size of the body was a lot larger than the normal Aesirian. The body was torn apart, its torso falling ten meters away but its head fell at the feet of Heimdallr.

“Loki was a descendant of the jötnar. At first, he was not so evil, but then he grew more and more. It was thought that the evil blood drawn from the giant within him was gradually awakening, but I now suspect that he only went mad by touching the sap of Yggdrasil in the Niflheim region. Nidhogg, the black dragon spent years in Hel nibbling at the roots of Yggdrasil. The blood of the Firstborn polluted a third of Hel and soaked through the mountains, all the way to the water of Niflheim. Loki went to investigate the water problems of Niflheim and acted a little abnormal after he came back.

“You know Heimdallr well?” Hao Ren asked curiously.

Vivian shook her head and said, “Not really, but he impressed me. Heimdallr was a dull guy, and very inflexible. He guarded the door meticulously, and even though I was a friend of Odin’s, he stopped me in front of Bifröst more than once. But other than that, no one can match his bravery and loyalty.”

Lily scratched her head and asked, “Why do I suddenly feel that the otherworldlings in northern Europe are the good ones, and the demon hunters are actually the bad ones?”

“Whether it is decency or villain, there will always be heroic ones, regardless of faction,” Vivian said, shaking her head gently. “Here you will lament the bravery and tenacity of the Nordic gods in the past, but if you go back to that era and look at the living environment of mankind at that time, you will lament the ruthlessness and selfishness of Odin and his followers. There’s no right or wrong about the war of genocide. The mythological era had experienced ups and downs, and the end result is that human beings and the otherworldlings exchange their living space. And humans are the real aborigines of the earth while the otherworldlings are only a group of foreign visitors, so in the end, the world still belongs to humans. In this process, the demon hunters, whether willing or not, have played the role of ‘liberating mankind’. So from a human point of view, they become the masters of justice.”

Nangong Sanba walked around Heimdallr’s body and suddenly found something. “Oh, look at this!”

Hao Ren went over to check the situation. Nangong Sanba found a pile of small offerings, just a few meters away from Heimdallr. Several stones were stacked together in a regular pattern, with pottery jars and rusty spear tips on them. These inconspicuous things were almost indistinguishable from the ruins of the surrounding battlefields. They realized that it was a small altar after a careful observation.

The data terminal immediately flew over and checked. “The age… The last record was a hundred years ago.”

“Someone was mourning Heimdallr.” Hao Ren and Vivian exchanged a look. “Certainly not that crazy Valkyrie,” he said.

“It could be the battlefield scavengers,” Y’zaks said, looking up at Bifröst, “they came through this door.”

After leaving some surveillance probes on the battlefield ruins, Hao Ren and the rest of them set foot on the unusually large tentacle of the Firstborn (or, the branch of the ‘Yggdrasil’), and Bifröst extended under their feet.

In the ancient Norse mythology, the Bifröst was a long bridge built by light extending from the Aesirian Garden. The Aesir cast the bridge with rainbow clouds and incredible power to connect the road between the human world and Asgard. But in fact, the spatial rifts connecting different spaces had existed and were created by the branches of Yggdrasil before the Aesirian Garden was established. Bifröst was a stabilizing device that solidified these spatial rifts and opened and closed it manually. The Aesir used this way to establish the closure and inviolability of their kingdom and bound the order of the Nine Worlds.

On the Twilight of the gods, the army of giants and monsters stormed the Bifröst entrance at Asgard’s end, and Loki destroyed the restraints that had been used to protect the portal. So after a serious overload, the Bifröst was destroyed and the crystal trail broke into thousands of pieces. The teleportation portal at the end of the bridge could no longer be shut down and maintained in a semi-open state permanently.

The ring gate at the end of the crystal walk was huge which looked like it can accommodate a large airbus. Numerous components of the portal were running continuously in the air, making a loud rumble. Vivian came to the gate and threw in a small bat, explaining to the surrounding people, “There is only one Bifröst in Asgard, but it can lead to all eight other different spaces. By changing the way the ring rotates, the gate can be mapped onto the paths of several other kingdoms. If the guard of Bifröst, Heimdallr, dies in battle, the mapping relationship of Bifröst will be immediately disrupted and solidified.”

Hao Ren frowned. “That is to say, now we cannot determine which kingdom is on the other side of the teleportation portal or the exact location of any kingdom?”

Vivian sighed. “Odin’s left eye is inlaid with a gem that reflects the true path of the Nine Worlds and restores the control of Bifröst after Heimdallr’s death. What I had in mind was that when I got here, I would first find Odin’s body, and then explore the different spaces one by one with the power of the gemstones and find the Ymir’s spaceship. But now we don’t know where Odin is, so we’ll have to find him world by world.”

Then Blood Mist floated out of the teleportation portal and turned into a bat on Vivian’s hand.

“The situation on the other side of the portal is not good.” She frowned. “I don’t think anyone could have survived there.”

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