Southern Invaders

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As Bing Xi Feng told me, there are two portals to the Spirit World at the south and north poles. Ten thousand years ago, the dark spirit Watu entered the human world from the Spirit World, followed by other spirits, including Bing Xi Feng herself, and Rawa, the light spirit who was Watu's eternal enemy. When Rava defeated Watu, she locked him up in the Spirit World, where almost all the spirits who had previously come to the human world also returned... but not all the spirits returned to their world, some of them stayed and lived in comfortable places. Some have chosen a swamp, some a lake, some a forest, some live in a volcano, and some at the poles, where the spiritual background is higher than anything else, because there are closed portals, through which still seeps a lot of energy from the Spirit World.

I couldn't say that Bing Xi Feng was able to teach me Ice Magic quickly, but a couple of her tips were useful. The first tip was to move smoothly, but to end the movement abruptly like a wing flap. And the second tip was about my attempts to subdue the local ice, which was already saturated with energy, I needed not to saturate the ice with my internal Qi, but to synchronise my energy with the energy that was already in the ice. This advice was the key to mastering any element at all, however, it is not easy to realign your energy, and if you do, it closes off access to other elements. Local mages adjust to one of the four elements, but after that they can't use the others.

However, all these nuances are solved by practice, you can learn to quickly readjust your energy, or adjust part of the aura, to a particular element. I now have just such a variant, the left side of the aura is tuned to fire, and the right to ice, but in the palace I could train only fire magic, so the left side of the aura developed, while the right ice on the contrary began to weaken. However, another disadvantage is that the more you divide your aura into different elements, the less results you can achieve in each individual elemental magic.

You're either a generalist who can do a little bit of everything, or you're a master of one thing at a time. The Avatar has all four elements, but he is strengthened by the spirit of Rava, which compensates for the Avatar's weakness, bringing his mediocre skills in the four elements to the level of a master. I don't have such a spirit, I will have a domain, but not for a long time, so for now I'd better concentrate on just two elements, which is what I've been doing. Right now I mostly need practice, lots of practice, practice will help me develop my aura, and learn to work better with energies directly.

At first, Bing Xi Feng annoyed me, she was too pompous for an ice hen, but when I started showing improvements in Ice Magic, she became less sarcastic, although she didn't like that I was training fire magic in addition to ice magic, At such times she would take the ice basket with fruit that I gave her as payment and fly to the top of the ice mountain where she had a nest, there she would eat the fruit in peace, and she wouldn't have to look at the fire she didn't like.

I still trained near the spirit portal, but I slept on the frozen ship, which, by the way, was not that far from the Southern Water Tribe settlement, so I sometimes saw the people of the Southern Water Tribe, and also noticed two little girls, who were definitely using Water Magic in their games, throwing snowballs at each other, which flew along quite complicated trajectories. Well, the Southern Invaders were doing their job well, and had slaughtered all the water mages in the Southern Tribe, apparently these two girls are the only mages here, and if the Southern Invaders do manage to attack the tribe, they'll just kill these two. Well, that'll be extra motivation for me the next time I run into Fire Nation ships.

Fully intact Fire Nation frigates take about two days to sail the distance from the Southern Invaders' naval base to the Southern Water Tribe, their base being somewhere in the Air Nomad Islands. After me, those frigates were in a pretty sorry state, now it would take them a week or so to get back to base. Somehow they could fix the ships en route, but they'd still need a proper overhaul of the propulsion system, and those repairs could still take a couple of months. Anyway, the Southern Invaders will probably be back in three or four months, and I'd like to meet them somewhere offshore rather than just off the coast of the South Pole, so I'll have to fly and patrol the coastal zone sometimes, maybe they have plenty of spare ships at their base that they'll switch to and come back in the next few days. But I think it's more profitable for them to wait for those three ships to be repaired and come here in large numbers.

Soon it was polar day at the South Pole, and I liked it less than polar night, because of the snow and ice reflecting the sunlight, it was too bright. During polar night, the southern lights illuminated everything perfectly, and were aesthetically more beautiful than the constantly blinding sun that will continue to shine here for six months in a row. As day came, the south began to warm up, the temperature rose by twenty degrees, it was minus seventy, it became minus fifty, it was at the very pole, on the outskirts of the southern continent, it became noticeably warmer.

In this world, the sun gives extra power to fire mages, and the moon, on the contrary, gives power to water mages. During the solstice, this effect of Fire Magic is at its maximum, and this was the day the Southern Invaders chose to attack the Water Tribe again... or rather, they were planning to attack on this day, but I had noticed them a long time ago, and began to prepare for battle with nine frigates and one Fire Nation battleship. The battleships were nearly four times the size of the frigates, held many times as many soldiers, and were equipped with heavy trebuchets and catapults that fired fire projectiles. The Southern Invaders are getting serious this time, and I didn't expect them to bring a battleship with them; they're less manoeuvrable than frigates, which is important when you're sailing on cold seas where there are often floating icebergs.

- Will I be able to stop nine frigates and a battleship? Even I wondered. - I said, standing on the ice floe and looking at the huge metal ships.

Over the past four months I had learnt to create fog out of the ice, it was more like a dense ice suspension, but it did its job of camouflage very well, you couldn't see anything at arm's length.

- Bing, can you give me a hand? - I started to create an ice fog, but my strength wasn't enough to cover all ten Southern Invaders' ships.

- One hundred fruits. - The ice phoenix named her price and immediately started creating ice fog without giving me a chance to bargain. Together with Bing Xi Feng, we encased all the ships in a white shroud, Bing herself would maintain this ice fog, and I would have to damage and maybe even destroy these ships.

After the last time, I was convinced that throwing a fire sphere down a chimney could do the damage I needed, so I switched to thermal imaging and started flying between the chimneys of the ships and throwing my fire gifts, which had recently become several times stronger and were effective against the battleships.

The ships began to explode one by one, and the blast waves dispelled the icy fog for a moment, as well as illuminating it with bright flashes of fire. The soldiers realised that this blizzard was not an accident, but a cover for sabotage, so the fire mages started firing their magic into the sky and to the sides, and the soldiers also used trebuchets with catapults, also firing in all directions, hoping to hit the enemy. This made my life a little more difficult, and Bing Xi Feng would have to fly more actively to avoid being hit by a stray projectile.

The soldiers couldn't understand how the enemy was attacking them, but since the boilers and turbines were exploding, they began to guard them more actively, but they couldn't control the chimneys, because the chimney was quite high and had the shape of a cylinder, so it was impossible to put a soldier there to guard it, not to mention that such a guard would simply be poisoned by the smoke.

This time I intercepted the ships quite far out to sea, and this time I decided to destroy all the turbines, let them then get to the port as they want, if the first time they did not realise that the south now can not be attacked, then let them now spend their time in the cold sea. And Bing Xi Feng took offence at them for shooting fire shells at her, and froze the sea and froze all the ships in ice.

- You owe me a thousand fruits. - said the ice phoenix, sitting on my right shoulder after our operation was over. Without Bing's control, the ice fog began to dissipate, and it became apparent what had happened to the ships, and they were frozen, and burning from the inside at the same time.

- No, it's too much, I only have half a thousand of them left somewhere, and I can't pick new ones, they've been out of season for four months.

- All right, I'll lend you a loan, you owe me half a thousand fruit. - Bing's help was really useful to me, so I could pay, - Wait, how are you going to pay me back for the magic lessons? - The bird asked.

- No way, I'll have to do without your instructions. - I folded my arms... and then I put my hands together and dived into the water, the fog was almost cleared and my flight would be very visible now, so I used a more inconspicuous swim.

Bing, having received her payment, flew off to the mountain, but returned a few days later, deciding to loan me out for the time being.

Spirits can live for tens of thousands of years, but for the ice phoenix, I was a kind of entertainment to dilute her long and monotonous life. For her, a human life span is like a year for a normal person, even if she stays with me my whole life, it won't be that long for her... that's assuming that I live as long as normal people, and I will live much longer, plus, in this world, the spiritual background is very rich, so strong mages often turn into spirits and continue to live in the Spirit World, so Bing and I can continue to be friends even after my supposed death.

After a while, I visited the battle site again to check on the Southern Invaders to see how the Southern Invaders were coping with the problems I had organised for them. And they had to send boats to the harbour for help, they can't repair that kind of damage themselves. There were wounded and dead soldiers in the explosions, but I honestly didn't care about them, they didn't come here for peaceful purposes, they came here to kill.... to kill men, women, children and old people. Well, these soldiers belonged to the Fire Nation, of which I have been a prince since birth... but I don't care about that fact either, I ran away from home and I don't care what nationality they are, if they are doing something I don't like, I will stop them, even if there are casualties on their part.

I think in a couple of weeks, or less, more ships will come here to rescue these ones, and they too can be put out of commission, there will be a certain cursed place where the broken ships of the Fire Nation will pile up.

I was an assassin saboteur in the last world before I became Emperor, there is something fun about being alone and disrupting the plans of an entire empire, when you defeat opponents who outnumber you in both numbers and strength. After defeating ten Fire Nation ships at once, I became even more convinced of the usefulness of magic, and I continued to train it with great zeal.

Bing Xi Feng, in addition to advising me on how to master magic, also told me some stories, mostly about the other spirits that were left behind in the human world. So she knew another spirit bird, he was the Spirit of Knowledge, his name was Wang Shi Tong, and he looked like a huge owl. Wang Shi Tong built a library somewhere in the desert, where he collected knowledge from all over the human world, the information was collected by his spirits assistants that visited the South Pole. I can visit this OWLs sometime, I mainly need knowledge about magic and the history of the world itself, because the palace library had too censored version of the history.

Also Bing told me about another spirit that calls herself 'Mother of Faces', she is a kind spirit that helps people. As her name makes clear, she can give a person a new face and personality, she resides somewhere in the Land of Fire. In contrast to this spirit, there is Koh the Face Snatcher, he is the son of the Mother of Faces, and unlike the former, Koh is an evil spirit who steals people's faces. He dwells somewhere on the north pole in the Sacred Forest of Spirits, in the middle of which is a closed northern portal. Actually, the southern portal is also in the middle of the forest, but Bing created a huge ice mountain above the portal and above the forest to hold and store spiritual energy. She also showed me the closed portal itself, it looks like a glowing blue sphere, and the spiritual background near the portal is really poorer than on top of the ice mountain where Bing has made her nest.

There is also a Spirit Oasis at the north pole, not far from the Sacred Forest, where two powerful spirits live, La and Tui, the Spirits of the Ocean and the Moon, they look like two black and white koi fish and live in a pond. The Northern Water Tribe was built around the Spirit Oasis, these two spirits help the Northern Water Tribe, and they are one of the reasons why the northerners are doing better than the southerners.

Bing Xi Feng herself had a brother Hao Feng Huang, he was a standard fire phoenix, he was currently residing in the Spirit World, but during the time he was in the human world, this fire phoenix had spawned offspring with ordinary birds, these offspring were less intelligent but had all the characteristics of a fire phoenix. Bing Xi Feng hated her brother, so she stayed in the human world, she was the only ice phoenix in the human world and in the Spirit World as well, she and her brother were unique spirits that appeared as the embodiment of the concepts of flame and ice, and as conceptual beings they were immortal, Bing and her brother could not be killed, they would be reborn after a while.

Actually, it would be interesting to visit the Spirit World, but the portals leading to this world were closed by the real Avatar, only he can reopen it... well, or I need to die to enter the Spirit World. Even next to a closed portal, there's plenty of energy that allows me to become stronger rather quickly, and in Spirit World, I can gain a lot of spiritual energy in no time, because that world is made up of it... but I think if I get too cocky, all the inhabitants of that world will try to kill me.

I still don't have a way to enter the Spirit World, and I'm satisfied with the energy that's seeping through the portal right now. I slowly built my ice castle over the portal, or rather changed the ice mountain Bing into a comfortable dwelling for myself, and by the next polar night the ice palace was ready. I placed my bedroom in the place of the highest concentration of spiritual energy, and this point was closer to the top of the ice mountain, it was from this point came blue-green polar glow. The other rooms and halls in the ice palace were also filled with this blue-green glow, so I didn't have to worry about the lighting inside the palace.

If my palace was just a boring mountain of ice during the day, then at night everything changed dramatically because of the polar glow coming from inside the palace, one could admire this fabulous view for a very long time.

Now, constantly being in this spiritually saturated place, my strength will grow even faster, and strength is not superfluous. The Fire Nation keeps sending their warships to the south pole, but now they mostly want to take their damaged frigates for repairs, but I know that once they are repaired they will be sent here again, so I don't allow them to be towed to the port. All the ships that came to the rescue suffered the same fate as the previous ships.

Eventually, the crews of these ships began to move into port in small groups on boats, something I didn't let any more boats through.... eventually the Southern Invaders had to return to port without the ships, leaving them hanging around at sea. They'll probably come back for them, but with a rather large fleet... although not soon, the Fire Nation seems to have active battles in the Earth Kingdom, and it's not profitable for them to spend resources to the south, especially when this expenditure does not bring any result, only more waste and loss of ships, and it's still unknown who attacked them. As an option, it was the Avatar, but he was not seen for almost a hundred years, but there was another option - it was some evil spirit that appeared from the souls of the killed people of the Water Tribe. In this world it sometimes happens, you can cut down a forest, then the spirit that lived in this forest will become evil, and will take revenge on those who harmed his forest. The Avatar is usually the one who deals with evil spirits, he's the bridge between humans and spirits, but for the Fire Nation, the Avatar is enemy number one. It's funny.