Mt. Dragonends Chapter 5: The Third Human, Werewolf I woke up with a chill penetrating the mountain"s surface. For a short while, I was a bit absentminded, having just woken up, but after looking around at my surroundings I soon came to my senses.
The white snow that covered the world deeply piled up more and more, creating an incredibly thick layer of it on the surface.
The base of my mountain was completely buried – up until around the knees if I were to convert it into how it would feel as a human – and the heavy snow pressed together to become a layer of ice. It was probably about 1000 metres thick.
No way?! Could things change this much over the course of a short nap? Didn"t the long rainfall just finish creating the ocean? Isn"t the Earth having too many sudden changes in environment???
In my dumbfounded state, Sahela who had been dozing on top of my crystal core that had reached the size of a semi-trailer suddenly raised her head and gave a delighted smile.
"Milord, good morning."
(Ohh……how long was I asleep for?)
When I asked that, Sahela thought for a bit and then started to fold her fingers as she counted. She used both hands, bending and extending her fingertips, then ran out and started to use her toes, until she ran out of toes to count, and then started to write out calculations on the stone wall of the room that my crystal core was in. The wall"s surface was soon filled with numbers, and once she used up the portion of the wall that she could reach with her short height, Sahela started to write on the floor. Iya, this is far too long. This isn"t just one thousand or two thousand years we"re talking about here. I overslept.
Around the time when the floor had also become covered in numbers, Sahela raised her head and spoke full of confidence.
"According to Milord"s count that [when the sun falls, that is one day, and 365 days make one year], you have been sleeping for 3,579,980,000 full years and 11 days."
(Hogeh-)
This isn"t just at the level of "oversleeping"!
Am I stupid? Why did I sleep that much? No, it"s true that I was tired and d.a.m.n drowsy, and I wanted to sleep! This is driving me crazy!!
When the fact that I woke up spread amongst the dwarves and mermaids, both the races gathered and had a Good Morning Festival. The dwarves travelled through the underground tunnels linking the major mountains throughout the world, while the mermaids went upstream through the mountain"s underground water routes to come in from the deep sea.
The only ones who knew me when I was awake was the first dwarf Sahela who didn"t have a lifespan, and the mermaid"s patriarch Lorelei, who also did not have a lifespan. To almost all the dwarves and mermaids, Mt. Hororyuu was simply an old mountain that their race"s heads wors.h.i.+pped.
That is why when they heard me talk, they were absurdly surprised. Several people were so shocked that they fainted. You"re overreacting~! -is what I felt, but when I thought about it carefully, it"s as though a mythical G.o.d that they thought was fictional unexpectedly appeared and started to speak to them familiarly. Of course they"d be surprised.
Amongst the events that happened while I was asleep, the best were chosen to be left behind as legends. Several tens of storytellers took turns in reciting them to me all night long as I appreciated the offerings that came out without pause. They included things like masonry created by the dwarves, peculiar rocks that the mermaids picked up from the deep sea, and a dragon statue created from piecing together various vividly-coloured rocks like a puzzle.
From what I heard, it seems that over the 3.5 billion year period that I was asleep, they had divided them into one thousand-year intervals, and kept only the most approved work from each thousand year period as an offering to show me when I woke up.
Though there was only one object for every thousand years, it was 3.5 billion years after all. Even if you divided it by one thousand, it turned into exactly 3.5 million offerings. Majority of them had started to decay from weathering, becoming trash, and while only several tens of thousands of them remained, it was still a lot.
The Good Morning Festival continued for a whole seven years. I used the power of the crystal on the offerings so that they would not decay, and created a large hole that reached the skies inside the mountain to act as a treasury and carefully lined them up. Eventually, I wanted to have the stories compiled in writing to be left behind.
And then, when the festival ended, I announced the creation of a new race.
The offerings and stories hardly touched the pure white world aboveground. I wanted a new race that would travel the world of ice and collect stories.
According to the storytellers, the Earth had been covered in ice since just a few hundred years ago.
The Earth"s temperature had been going down bit by bit for a few hundred years, and as it decreased, the polar region"s glaciers expanded proportionally. The glaciers were pure white, and white was the colour that reflected light the best. Since it reflected light, it also meant that it was bad at absorbing heat.
Once Earth was completely covered in white glaciers, the heat from sunlight alone was incapable of melting it. Thus, the Earth was plunged in whiteness, and the unmeltable silver world was completed.
According to my knowledge from my previous life, the state of the current era matched the "s...o...b..ll Earth" hypothesis.
As the greenhouse gas methane decreased, the temperature also declined. Thus, the spreading glaciers lead to a super long, super large-scale ice age. A freezing era where everything is covered in ice and snow will continue for several tens of thousands of years during this time.
I want to know what will happen aboveground during Earth"s ice age in real time. I"d like someone who could go onto the snowfields in my stead to gather information, as I cannot move freely.
There were blizzards all over the flat snowscape, as well as avalanches in the mountainous regions. You could see the stars, and there were also meteors. The snowfield had its own sorts of changes.
However, since the dwarves hated the cold, they do not want to go out into the snowfield. They dug tunnels around the magma pools found deep underground in mountains all over the world, and lived a simple life snugly in the underground cities that they had built up.
The mermaids had cold resistance, but as expected, if they were exposed to a chill of -50°C, they would turn into ice sculptures and die. And to begin with, if there isn"t any water, they can"t survive. If there was at least a river, it"s not like they couldn"t survive, but since those don"t exist on the snowfields, it would be impossible.
As such, I wanted a new species that could go out onto the snowfield.
The new race has to be adapted to the world of ice and snow.
First, they"ll need fur to endure the cold winds and blizzards.
Since I"ll make it so that they can survive by sc.r.a.ping off some ice and eating it, they"ll need st.u.r.dy teeth that can bite through the ice shavings.
In order for them to be able to get back to the surface if they fall into crevices, like the chasms found in glaciers or snowy valleys, it would be better if they had a good jumping power and climbing ability.
So that they don"t end up tripped up by the snow or sinking into it and getting buried, it would be safer to make them lighter.
Thus, the third human became a werewolf.
Clad in an ashen pelt, possessing sharp fangs, it was a nimble wolfman with high physical abilities.
Its stature was slender and tall, and its wolfish face was both frightening, yet lovable. Naturally, it also had a tail.
Like usual, I created a single werewolf with a perpetual lifespan, and made it the group"s head. He was a male werewolf, Lycan-kun.
Lycan led the werewolf pack and travelled the silver world, and then told me of the world"s happenings that they observed.
According to them, it seems that strictly speaking, the world wasn"t actually completely covered in ice and snow. Hot springs welled up on the surface of volcanoes, and near them, the ground"s surface could be seen. Inside of the warm water, wild green algae and small creatures like plankton continued to live on.
There were times when the eruptions that occasionally occurred created temporary lakes as well.
According to Lorelei and co., there was also life left in the underwater world as well.
On the dark ocean floor in the depths of the sea, there were holes that bubbled out hot water. Warmed by geothermal heat, it was a hot spot that spurted out hot water containing heavy metals and hydrogen sulphide at several hundreds of degrees Celsius. There were tiny, tiny microbes that were able to survive due to the geothermal heat, consuming the ingredients that gushed out from the hot water spouts.
Life is hardy. When I thought about how those tiny living beings would eventually become humans, I felt deeply moved.
Now then.
The Earth"s ice age did not continue on forever.
Volcanic activity released smoke containing large quant.i.ties of gases such as carbon dioxide and methane. The volcanic eruptions over several tens of thousands of years led to the acc.u.mulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, gradually increasing the Earth"s atmospheric temperature.
Once the atmospheric temperature exceeded the freezing point of water, the ma.s.sive ice layer that exceeded 1000 metres in thickness will melt little by little.
The long ice age will end.
And then, the moment the ice age ended, we barged into a h.e.l.lish era in which tsunamis whose heights were in the 1000 metre range and super-large tornadoes that could destroy small mountains occurred basically every week.