Chapter 29: 1 The Wonderful Life of Nagaros

Chapter 29: 1. The Wonderful Life of Naggaroth

After a week of sailing, the three-masted square-rigged ship arrived at Kalond-Kar.

Kalond-Kar, the Tower of Despair, also known as the Gate of Slaves. This city stood on the edge of the Sea of Sorrows, perpetually battered by fierce winds, freezing rain, and tsunamis.

What unfolded before Dakus's eyes was a staggering sight. Through his spyglass, he saw numerous writhing slaves hanging from the black walls of the cliffs. Dustan said coldly that these slaves were disobedient ones who had been cursed by sorcerers; they would spend their final few hours in despair before becoming food for the Harpies.

Day and night, the wails of despair echoed through Kalond-Kar, for the sorcerers of this city delighted in fusing the souls and bodies of slaves together. Trapped between life and death, these wretches would wander the streets of Kalond-Kar, pleasing the city with their agonizing cries, trembling lamentations, and exquisite imagery—and they, too, would become food for the Harpies.

How could anyone sleep at night here?

Upon the spires within the city, countless Harpies nested, circling or diving through the sky. The superstitious Druchi believed the Harpies were a symbol of good fortune for the city; if they ever left, the city would fall to its enemies in less than ninety days. Living in this city, the Druchi commoners had to walk along the edges of the roads, constantly wary of Harpies diving down at any moment.

There was a reason Kalond-Kar was called the Gate of Slaves: it was typically where the Black Arks concluded their raiding missions to settle their cargo. Thousands of various races died while crossing the vast, boundless ocean to reach Kalond-Kar, suffocating in the holds of ships or being tortured to death to entertain the Black Ark pirates—and even those were considered lucky.

The true misery only began when the slaves were finally unloaded onto the frozen docks, for there was no escape from Kalond-Kar!

At the docks, slaves were brutally driven out and whipped; those who fell were trampled to death. Unlucky souls whose chains broke were skinned on the spot and tossed into the Sea of Sorrows. These forms of entertainment were met with frantic applause from the watching Druchi, who threw stones to trip the panicked slaves and incited them from the sidelines, hoping to provoke a riot so they could swarm and massacre them en masse.

Slaves brought to the Dark Plaza were roughly inspected and sorted by age and gender. After a portion was weighed out as tribute to the Sorcerer-King Malekith, the subordinates of the slave traders would swarm in to divide the rest among themselves. These slaves were destined to work to death in the dark rocks of Hag Graef or the gem mines of Golond, to perform hard labor in the dungeons and kitchens of various cities in Naggaroth, or to be sold directly as sacrifices to Khaine.

Overlooking the city were the slave traders' manors, grand estates decorated with the crushed bones of dead slaves. These "white-glove" elites rarely left their comfortable mansions, only being lured to the rain-drenched Dark Plaza by news of immense value. A captured Asur was of such high value that slave traders would trade their own wealth, or even their own families, to obtain one to please the nobles behind them.

The city also housed auction houses, where slave traders engaged in grueling haggling to satisfy the greed of captains and Black Ark admirals, ensuring substantial profits.

The Admirals could return satisfied, but the captains often failed to get the profits they expected, knowing that many Khaine assassins lurked in the crowds, quietly waiting for commissions from the slave traders. To the captains, leaving Kalond-Kar with a small pouch of sovereigns was better than never leaving at all.

However, none of this had anything to do with Dakus, as this city maintained an unfriendly, competitive relationship with Krak-Kar, particularly regarding beast mastery.

Dakus had no intention of selling goods here. He intended to cross the Sea of Sorrows, pass through the Straits of Dim Light, enter the Sea of Malice, and return to Krak-Kar—for that was his home.

Ironically, while the ships of Krak-Kar and the Black Arks rarely visited Kalond-Kar, the elites of Kalond-Kar had to go to Krak-Kar to commission ships, and they certainly had to go there for the repair and maintenance of Black Arks. Kalond-Kar could only repair standard vessels, as it rained year-round and lacked timber for shipbuilding.

Dakus continued to watch the city through his spyglass with curiosity.

The breakwater of Kalond-Kar was approximately five kilometers long, constructed from stone quarried from the towering mountains surrounding the city. The nobles of the city had pooled vast sums of money to hire a group of dwarf slave-sculptors to carve the stones at the base of the breakwater into the shapes of slaves, letting the tense, dying sculptures rise and fall with the freezing tides.

For thousands of years, the breakwater had been known as Nera-Vol, the Great Lament. When slaves arrived at the city and saw such lifelike statues, they would let out terrible wails, believing this to be their future fate.

The nobles never grew tired of this joke.

"Whose Black Ark is that one?"

Dustan answered without even looking, "Young Master, that is the *Divine Malice*, of the House of the Fallen Heart."

"And that smaller one over there?"

"Young Master, that is the *Ultimate Oblivion*."

Truly magnificent creations!

After the defeat in the Civil War, Malekith's plan to use magic to undo the Vortex of Ulthuan had failed. The magic rebounded to Naggaris, causing cataclysmic destruction; the city where the House of Hellfire was located was also shattered. Malekith and his followers used their remaining magical strength to weather the ensuing storms, using magic to transform these crumbling cities into Black Arks that could sail upon the sea. Subsequently, Malekith and his followers fled Naggaris, crossing the vast ocean toward the desolate Naggaroth.

At that time, there were over twenty Black Arks. Five of them crashed onto the coast, becoming the current Druchi cities. The *Malicious Temple* of the House of Hellfire survived and is still in use today. These massive floating fortresses of the sea varied in size, with the longest reaching five kilometers and the smaller ones around two kilometers.

Capable of carrying tens of thousands of Druchi warriors and slaves, sorcerers and beastmasters summoned sea beasts from the deep ocean and built fortifications upon the Black Arks. According to Dakus's knowledge, the House's *Malicious Temple* was equipped with black dragons, war hydras, and abyssal sea monsters, and could even summon sea dragons to assist if necessary.

Today, fewer than half of the original Black Arks remain. Through five thousand years of change, some have sunk due to combat, some have run aground on the coasts, and others have been pulled into mysterious dimensions.

In Dakus's view, the progress of the Black Ark manufacturing plant in Krak-Kar was agonizingly slow; it took eight hundred years to produce a single two-kilometer-long Black Ark, and the stone required for construction had to be brought all the way from Hag Graef. But other Druchi did not see it that way; to them, eight hundred years was merely the span of a single generation.

Dakus suddenly thought of a place. If possible, that place could mass-produce Black Arks in a short amount of time.

(End of Chapter)