247 Ice Empress

"The Thunder element?" Barru asked, while looking bewildered. "I thought that the elements mandated in the natural law were only wind, fire, water and earth?"

"Let me briefly explain this to you," Argyll said, as he caressed Barru's bald head and spoke in a teacher's demeanor. "To become a Law Commander, one must first polish their concentration and their ability to sense things. When you're strong enough to manage these two capabilities, you can then try to sense the natural law, communicate with it, and steer it. Among these four laws, fire is the hardest to manage, as its powers are the strongest of the four."

He then held out his middle finger, but there was no sign of him doing any other actions. With a woosh, a small azure blue flame appeared on his finger.

"Say that I wished to command the flame... I would need to use my concentration to guide the fire element in the air, bringing it to myself. I would then need to resonate with it! It's about the same regarding commanding the water element. The thunder element is actually one of the streams of the Natural Law, but these elements only exist far within dark clouds, or during the brief moments when lightning strikes. Only first-class Commanders can somewhat sense those moments. "

As Argyll explained, he scattered the flames in his finger, then looked at the sky with a slightly lax gaze. "Because this type of element is too far from us, our concentration cannot extend to its great height. Therefore, the Law Commanders did not write this subject into any of the academic books. But, along the way, we have not given up in trying to sense this element, because its attack speed is faster than any of the laws on earth! This makes it more destructive than any of them, too!"

Barru interjected, "We could always wait until we capture the Wind Steering Bird. By that time, you could ride on it and conquer the skies! Then, you'd finally be able to sense and control the thunder element, right?"

"Not only would the Wind Steering Bird fly, which is an idea that even you, who's so stupid, could think of, why in the world wouldn't I be able to, also?" Argyll continued to look at him with disdain. "That element is too brutal, just like a lofty, immovable huge mountain. My concentration powers could not shake it. The long river of history has no shortage of precedents of Commanders, who reached the top of the mountain. They rode on birds to get near the realm of clouds, but due to their failure in commanding the thunder element, they were instead devoured by the element and burnt into charcoal!"

"Oh, so what do you think about the background of the young man with black hair? Why would he appear on this big, wild island?" Apparently, Barru was rather disinterested in learning about natural laws.

"I'm not sure. His clothes and carriage both looked very strange. I haven't seen such things before. But, he probably didn't come with malice as his intent. Thus, it's best we just leave him alone, catch the Wind Steering Bird, and quickly go home. There are still tons of things left to attend to there!" Argyll said.

"I want his mechanical car…." Barru said, his voice trailing off.

"Isn't that just a running piece of steel?" Argyll knocked the table solemnly. "Wait till we're back, and I'll let the Empire's blacksmith mold one for you. You can play around with that, go wherever you want, but any plans or schemed upon this man are out of question. Otherwise, I'll dump you here all alone!"

"It's still uncertain whether or not we could even make it back. I misplaced the compass, so how are we going to find the direction?" asked Barru.

"Hmm… let me think about it." Argyll stood up and walked into the bedroom, then took out a book, the title of which read The Adventurers' Discovery Volume. He then settled into a seat and started reading it.

"Goddamn it, Argyll, that monster is heading toward our direction!" Barru's loud voice came from outside the house. Startled, Argyll rushed out to the deck immediately.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

A black monster of an indiscernible species was tumbling toward the sailboat. Argyll had a sharp eye, so he soon discovered that the monster's claws clasped a grayish-brown box.

"What is it trying to do?" Barru was carrying a huge knife, as he kept a close watch on the electric eel.

"I'm not sure. Let's not be rash, as a monster that could emit thunder elements is definitely not one we could stand up against!" warned Argyll.

Bang!

In front of both of their astonished gazes, the electric eel threw the little box on the boat's deck. It used its front claw to point at the box, then pointed back to itself, gesturing for them to do an exchange.

After Argyll, who was completely bewildered, opened the box, he found that it contained about ten thin books, two packages of little red boxes that were made with some strong material, two exquisite-looking single-blade daggers and two items that looked like compasses.

The books were made with fine craftsmanship. The silk paper used within them was thinner, whiter, and even more fine than those he had ever used before. The words on top were written with fairly unsophisticated strokes, along with an equal bit of neat handwriting and sleek formatting. It only took a single glance for him to see that this was a very fine item.

"What metal has been used in making this small knife?" Barru, the weaponry fanatic, was completely shocked, when he saw a hole appear right after he had just taken the small knife and randomly poked the deck.

How is that possible? This is a blackwood deck, which has been soaked with oil!

Notwithstanding the fact that an ordinary person could not simply just chop it with an axe, how could it be easily pierced with just a dagger?

As Barru recovered from his shock, he decided to take the dagger and chop at his precious curved sword. After he did so, the back of his curved sword had clear traces of abrasions, whereas the dagger had remained completely intact and unscathed!

"This dagger is sharper than any daggers I have ever seen!" Argyll gasped. "The only negative thing is that the sheath and shank are too ugly looking! The former was made with hemp wood, and the latter was woven with a string. I will have to get the best blacksmith from the Empire to replace it with ivory carved with calico prints when I get back."

The two of them did not manage to find out what the red hard paper box was. But, when Barru curiously removed the thin film and aluminium foil on its surface, they discovered that there were 20 sticks, each wrapped with a white paper, containing some thinly shredded powder that came from a yellow plant, which had a spicy scent.

"This must be tobacco!" Argyll, who had once read about this stuff, lit up one stick immediately.

He bit on the filter and inhaled the fumes into his lungs. An unprecedented relaxing sensation expanded throughout his entire brain.

"The nobles liked to smoke these things back in the day," he said. "They'd dice a dried plant and put it into a silver-made pipe, but theirs tasted a hundred times more awful than this!"

As for those two navy diving watches, Argyll looked at their mirror surfaces and saw that they were fully engraved with symbols. Initially, he thought they were tools to be used by a wizard in fortune-telling, but he later realized that they were to be used to measure time.

.........

Looking at the items that the other party had sent over to exchange, Chen Fan didn't know whether to laugh or cry. There were only two books and about ten rubies and sapphires. They probably did not have anything presentable to give away, which could explain why they had used hard currency for the exchange!

When all was said and done, the exchange consisted of more than ten home appliance user manuals, two Stride diver's knives, two boxes of Zhonghua cigarettes and two watches, traded for these gemstones, which were at least worth a few million. All in all, it is an exceptional bargain!

The two books that the old man had given were written upon with some sort of oracle bone script and some letters, formatted in a geometrical rhomboid shape. Compared with the structure of a Chinese character, the script did not seem too complicated. However, it was still more aesthetically pleasing than Korean's squarish and framy characters!

One text was purely written in scripts, while the other was featured on a book with a cover made of brown packing paper, which was 15 centimeters long. It was a combination of illustrations and text.

The pictures in the book were all depictions of feral-looking wild animals, and as Chen Fan flipped through almost half of the book, he spotted the Night Leopard. It was an eagle, whose body was fully golden in color, coupled with a giant python with snowy-white scales.

Chen Fan carefully counted a piece of text in the illustrated book, and saw that there were a total of 530 words, of which only 40 of them was repeated. It did not look like phonemic characters, like those of the English language that contained a couple of alphabetical letters. Instead, its structure was somewhat like Chinese characters, as they were all pictograms.

The next day, Chen Fan arose really early. He first looked for the white giant python, then grabbed a Chinese dictionary to teach it some pronunciation. As he taught it, he tried his very best to find things that were relatable to the python, so that it could better understand what any new words actually meant.

The giant python's language system was like a baby's, meaning that it was as blank as a piece of white paper. In the process of learning a language, this had actually made the process easier than it was for most foreigners, who were learning Mandarin. This was because the foreigners were restrained by their mother tongue, making it extremely hard for them to master a brand new language.

What's more, the giant python did not have to get past the infant stage of learning how to speak. It could imitate every Chinese character precisely, so the only thing it really had to do was to learn a word's meaning.

"Red!" Sitting on a sunny beach, Chen Fan pointed to a piece of small red cloth, while pronouncing the word slowly and with great precision. He had cloths in seven or eight different colors by his side, all of which he was using to teach the giant python.

"Red!" The giant python lay lazily repeated, while sitting next to Chen Fan.

Not far from them where they were, a golden eagle that had already matured, flew up in the sky, chasing some clouds. It constantly spinned, thrust itself downward, and flew around above the surface of the sea, terrifying any fish that dared to come up to the surface to take a breath!

At this time, the giant python, which was practicing the pronunciation of words, lifted its head to look around to the left side of the sea. The common theory that snakes are short-sighted obviously did not apply here!

As for Mu Chen, all he could see was a moving little black dot. After waiting for two minutes, the little black dot gradually expanded, then slowly became deciperable as an image of an old man, who was wearing a purple robe.　

It was Argyll, here to purchase items. More precisely, he was here to look for this young man, so that he could buy a navigation compass from him!

His compass had been misplaced by Barru at sea. And, without a compass, he could not imagine how he could possibly make it back to his home!

He thought that surely the young man possessed such an item. This fact could be inferred from his sophisticatedly structured watch. In order to ensure the transaction was smooth, Argyll had consciously not brought Barru along, ensuring that the stupid fellow wouldn't spoiling things!

"Tsk… It's actually an adult Ice Empress?"　

After making a clear sighting of the white fortress, Argyll looked at the white giant python in disbelief, just as he had when Barru had managed to master the Natural Laws so quickly.

However, as he neared the young man with black hair, who was teaching the python to speak, his expression of disbelief froze and his body trembled...