Freddy knew that crossing the Northern Spine mountain range would be a challenge.
But boy did he underestimate it.
Before he even set off on his journey, he got some clothing more appropriate for the weather and filled whatever space there was in his dimension ring with bottles of oil. Oil was both the densest in terms of calories and the cheapest source of food, allowing him to stockpile enough calories to last him over a month.
There was no way for him to possibly run out.
Right?
The human mind was terrible at judging scale past a certain point. Obviously, the mountain range was quite far, but how far could it possibly be? A day of walking, maybe two?
It took him 24 days of hiking just to reach the base of the mountain range.
During just those 24 days, he experienced so much suffering that, by the end, he was plagued by constant thoughts of giving up and turning around.
He thought he knew what it meant to be pushed mentally and physically. He had been woefully ignorant of just how much worse it could get.
First, eating nothing but oil was a terrible idea; his talent couldn't heal the explosive diarrhea out of him. At one point, he started snacking on tree bark to give at least some solidity to his stool. Some solidity he got, as well as a week of constipated agony that nearly made him physically tear the solid chunk of wood out of his stomach.
While he had spectacularly misjudged the distance, that wasn't the only reason his journey took so long. The real issue was the snow, which ranged from knee-high at the shallowest to deep enough to fully sink into.
Adding his incredible weight to the equation only made the situation worse.
He had expected to run into animals, but that only happened once when surrounded by a pack of hungry wolves. He took care of them quickly enough.
It was so damn hard to catch even a blink of sleep. The wind knocked him out of tall trees, and he would wake up buried in the snow if he tried sleeping on the ground. The despair drove him to get desperate, and eventually, he figured out somewhat of a solution. If he carved out a small space in the deeper parts of the snow, where it was packed enough to keep its shape, he could stay relatively warm and catch some rest.
But this wasn't a perfect solution.
Around two weeks in, an extreme rainstorm struck, and he woke up with a flood of freezing water washing over him. His talent couldn't heal the cold away. Not even his undeath could save him if he was frozen solid. His brain would be destroyed by the formation of ice crystals.
Needless to say, having to suddenly do panicked jumping jacks in the dead of night in the slushy snow while frigid rain bathed him—just to stay warm enough not to die—didn't do any favors to his mental state.
Just when he thought nothing else could catch him off guard, something utterly bizarre happened—he suddenly grew a full beard.
It was impossible to describe his confusion once he first noticed the layer of thick stubble. What the fuck could possibly cause that!? He wasn't a hairy guy. Not even his private area was all that bushy. Suddenly finding himself growing not only a beard but thick hair all across his body was a surprise, to say the least.
Did he pass some sort of sharp threshold in biological age? Did the cold do this somehow? Did his new face alter his psychological state so much it was reflecting on his body? Maybe a late reaction to Vitality's influence?
Eventually, after much pondering, he believed he knew what was causing this—it was the Adaptive Water Body technique.
Adaptive Water Body worked in mysterious ways. Its effect was mild but broad. It could help him adapt to new circumstances by affecting the way water moved in his body, and because it helped with the cold, he used it liberally. It likely transported extra nutrients to his hair follicles to help him cope with the intense cold. Frankly, it didn't really help much.
He always wanted some facial hair, so he didn't mind the beard... but the rest of it? He was becoming one bushy motherfucker. Especially down there.
Throughout his path to the mountain, his food reserves were rapidly dwindling. He had vastly underestimated the number of calories he would be spending.
When he finally found himself standing at the foot of the mountain 24 days in, he had already used 80 percent of the oil.
He would have to hunt for food from that point. Thankfully, some animals were around, mostly winter birds, that he felt relatively confident in catching. It would be great practice for his latent Hydraulic Throw.
While he missed more times than he'd like to admit, he eventually caught a giant eagle. Thankfully, he had a lighter, so he could at least cook his food. It was still pure ass—it was gamy and tough as leather.
But it kept him going.
With his willpower at its limits, he decided to spend a few days in a nearby cave just to relax and let himself rest. His talent kept him physically well, but it could only do so much for his mental state. He kept hunting and drying meat to stock up on food during this time.
He had no idea whether he was drying it properly, but even if it went bad in his ring, he wasn't going to die of food poisoning.
It didn't take long for him to continue his journey. Looking up from the mountain's base, it was tough to estimate how far up he'd have to climb. It didn't seem that bad, but he knew better than to expect it to be easy.
Yet still, his journey up was more hellish than he anticipated.
First, going uphill was obviously harder. The further up he went, the more the slopes turned into sheer cliffs, which were, to add insult to injury, glazed over with a sheet of solid ice, likely from the recent rainfall. He tried avoiding the cliffs and going up the slopes instead.
Terrible idea.
The first avalanche he got caught in nearly ended him right then and there. Banged up and buried under tons of snow that had packed into solid ice, he had to rely on his superior strength and makeshift tools of blood to pull himself out, and it still took him nearly half a day of digging to make it back to the surface.
On his second attempt, he went up the cliffs.
Terrible idea.
Once his eyes finally melted and reformed into usable sensory organs, he felt a semblance of relief. He had made it to the other side of the mountain. But it was a cloudy day, and the fog made it hard to see down the Northern Belt.
But as he slowly made his way down, the clouds scattered, giving him a clear view. It was the middle of the day, but the sun was just barely reaching his back over the tall peaks behind him. He slowly lowered himself and sat into the snow as he took a deep breath and scouted the path before him.
It was very different from looking down south.
Once again, he found his breath taken away, but rather than pure awe, the sight inspired a feeling of anxiety and insignificance.
And a deep, primal fear.
Tall, jagged mountains were scattered throughout the whole horizon, with snow and ice covering every inch that he could see, barring a bit of ocean he spotted far to the east. He couldn't tell where the Northern Belt ended and where the Frozen Wastes began, but given how much more mountainous the region became the further out he looked, he estimated that the furthest point he could see was unfathomably distant from any human settlements.
"Wow..." he muttered unwittingly, swallowing hard at the thought of what might be living there. The region right beside the Northern Belt was poor in ether, but the closer one went to the center of the Frozen Wastes, the thicker it became. Even five-stars would struggle to reach all the way to the center.
There were stories of giant monsters—powers that could threaten the most valiant of mankind's defenders—living deep in the Frozen Wastes. The only thing that kept them from coming this way was the poor ether density and low quality of prey.
Shaking his head, he took his thoughts off such subjects and focused on the area close to the base of the mountain. From what he could see, there was quite a trek to the nearest settlement, but with the goal finally in sight, he felt his spirits rise and his legs tremble in excitement.
Thankfully for him, it was much easier to tumble down the side of a mountain than it was to climb up.
By the end of the next day, he was eating wolf meat at the base.
After another two weeks, which felt like a vacation compared to what he had gone through before, he finally stepped on an asphalt road.
He immediately fell to his knees and broke down, weeping tears of pure joy. He hadn't been keeping an exact track of days, but that had taken ages to finish, roughly around three months.
Three fucking months. He thought it would take days.
Now that he was so close to civilization, he finally allowed himself to relax a bit. Soon enough, it would all be over.
But actually, it took him another week of walking to get to the closest settlement. Throughout that time, not even a single vehicle passed the road he was on, which likely meant this was a path that took through the border, which he now guessed had to go through a tunnel or something.
The roads were thankfully inscribed with simple runes that kept the snow off, sparing him having to wade through more of that white shit.
After finally reaching a settlement, he was relieved but also somewhat perturbed. He got a peek into the town from a nearby forest, and what he saw shocked him.
The streets were relatively well maintained. The buildings looked new and clean. There were kids with backpacks walking around.
For moment, he thought he might have accidentally swapped directions and gone the wrong way, but that obviously wasn't the case.
This place looked so ordinary. He didn't know what he expected, but kids going to school alone wasn't high on the list. From the rumors, he expected to enter a lawless zone of rampant banditry, but the stories were likely more than a little exaggerated. And that made sense.
People had been living here for a long time; just because there was a lot of crime, that didn't mean that it was a freakin' anarchy.
And that posed a problem.
His clothes were in absolute tatters. Holes and tears were present in every article, and wire made of his own blood was the only thing keeping it all together. He smelled like shit. Add the messy beard and long hair, and he looked like an absolute hobo.
He had a change of clothes in the storage ring. It was the jeans and white T-shirt. He had no shampoo, but he could create some water and wash the gunk off his body.
So he did that. He was about to throw the tattered clothes away, but his little skeleton companion interrupted him.
"Don't throw the clothes away," Bloodshed said.
"Huh? Why not?"
"Check the Netherecho."
With a raised eyebrow, Freddy complied. What he saw there shocked him.
His clothes had turned into a bona fide cursed item. It wasn't fully formed, however. It had merely accumulated a lot of aura, mostly of frost and water ether. At this point, it was just a raw material that still had to be processed to become a true cursed item.
"Holy shit," he said as he chuckled. "At least I got something for all that work. Thanks for telling me, chief, I'd have never thought to look."
"I live to serve you, Master."
"Yeah, yeah," he said with a chuckle. "I love you too."
While his hair and beard were still messy, he could only make them look worse by cutting them himself. After an extra round of washing and pulling out random chunks of debris, he looked clean enough.
With a final look at himself on a polished ice surface, he scoffed. Hairy, bulky, and honestly kind of scary.
What a different person he had become.