Chapter 311: Death Sahara (4)

The instant he landed and felt the ground vanish beneath him as his Half-Life Daoist mount disappeared, Wei Xun invoked the rule to block the Agency’s observation and pinned the Mutual Aid Alliance badge to the inside of his clothes.

Zhang Xingcang had said whoever was holding hands would land in the same place, so something had clearly gone wrong. He and Dreamchaser had ended up together; maybe it had something to do with both of them having opened Latitude 30 Degrees journeys?

But Zhang Xingcang was Dreamchaser’s Tourist. It didn’t seem right for him not to be with Dreamchaser.

Wei Xun patted the Dreamchaser egg. The shell was smooth and beautiful, warm to the touch, still carrying Zhang Xingcang’s body heat. It gave off a faint glow even in the dim surroundings, shimmering like a magnificent gemstone.

This wouldn’t do at all; it was far too conspicuous. The first priority in an unknown location was to keep a low profile.

Neither clothing nor a bag could conceal the diamond egg’s radiance. Wei Xun experimentally rolled it through the black sand, but the shell was so smooth that no sand adhered to it, and the glow actually seemed brighter afterward.

“This place is very dangerous.”

With the Agency’s observation blocked and no one around, the ferret that was Tong Hege could finally speak. His expression was grave.

“I can feel a sense of total stillness pressing in on everything. The longer we stay, the more it feels like even thought itself is beginning to slow.”

Wei Xun took out the butterfly Yin-Yang Butterfly had given him, and found it limp and faded, completely unable to reach Yin-Yang Butterfly on the outside. The thread of connection he shared with Half-Life Daoist also gave no response at all. He tapped on the Dreamchaser egg shell; he could not reach Zhang Xingcang either.

Only the gold-red feather he had plucked from An Xuefeng’s wing still gave off a faint glimmer. Wei Xun tried sending some information to An Xuefeng through it, received no response for the moment, and put it away.

Was it the peculiar environment of a Latitude 30 Degrees journey, or was it specific to this black desert?

“This should be the core zone of the Death Sahara.”

From what Wei Xun knew, the Death Sahara as explored so far had nine layers in total, moving outward from the safest to the most extreme: gray sand on the outermost layer, then yellow sand, orange sand, pink sand, red sand, crystal sand, the colored spirit sand grains on the seventh layer, metallic sand on the eighth, and white sand on the ninth.

Whether nine was the absolute limit was unknown, and despite the number of layers explored, the area surveyed within each layer wasn’t large and still contained many dangerous and unexplored zones, so the overall exploration progress was not particularly high.

Among the known explored layers, there was no black sand.

But Wei Xun knew that Dreamchaser’s Sahara token was precisely a handful of black sand. He had seen it with his own eyes back at the Butcher Alliance.

This black desert was either a deeper layer beyond the ninth, or it was a special layer that only someone possessing the Sahara token could enter. Perhaps holding any Latitude 30 Degrees token was enough to gain access; otherwise, Wei Xun couldn’t explain why he had ended up here.

Zhang Xingcang should have known about this, though. The business of landing together by holding hands should have been reliable. For Dreamchaser to have ended up here, either his own will had been extraordinarily strong, or someone had deliberately arranged to lure him here.

“The West District’s Butcher Alliance summoned the Dreamchaser egg here.”

Wei Xun thought this was highly likely. He had heard that the West District’s Butcher Alliance also held partial fragments of the Death Sahara’s token. The A-4 Infected individual?

The Infected was affiliated with the West District’s Butcher Alliance, and if they had truly lured Dreamchaser here intending to deal with him, S-2 the Lizard Duke was probably present as well.

No sense of immediate danger yet, but danger could arrive at any moment. The luminous Dreamchaser egg in this dim desert was about as subtle as a beacon.

“So, keeping a low profile isn’t going to be an option.”

Wei Xun was pleased by the realization. He got to work producing his assets.

Without Return watching, and without the livestream for the moment, he could let himself run free.

Tong Hege watched as Wei Xun shook things out like the Monkey King rattling fur from his coat, and out came an entire arsenal.

Baby Corn, noticeably fatter than before, burrowed into the black sand to clear a path below. Tens of thousands of Mutated Evil Ghost Insects surged after it. Several hundred Mutated Demonic Bees took to the air and fanned out in all directions to scout. The Perished Ming Token appeared in Wei Xun’s hand, Mutated Flames igniting around it: the Phoenix Fire, the True Fire of Samadhi, and the subtlest of them all, the Colored Demonic Flame, tucked in behind the glowing egg. The young dragon finally got its chance to stretch; it circled once and then draped itself over Wei Xun’s shoulders like a noodle, eyeing its surroundings with open curiosity.

Boss Maggot’s cocoon sat cradled in Wei Xun’s hand. He kept feeling as though Boss Maggot was on the verge of hatching, but it simply refused to emerge. The sensation was exactly like holding back a sneeze, and he had no idea what it was waiting for.

“Older Brother, we’ve made it to the black desert.”

Wei Xun opened the golden nanmu wood urn last and released the Nezha Spirit. [Read on RanaTranslations🌸] The Nezha Spirit emerged as a floating red sphere, bearing absolutely no resemblance to the strange bird form from before. Its acting was exceptional; it immediately started playing confused, going “what’s going on,” “who are you,” “where am I,” pretending not to know Wei Xun at all.

Once it confirmed no one else was around, the Nezha Spirit dropped the act entirely.

“Little brother, there’s nothing fun here at all.”

The Nezha Spirit rose a little higher. Unlike the Dreamchaser egg, it didn’t shimmer at all; it understood perfectly the art of keeping quiet and doing things effectively, and it quickly took on a dull, dusty appearance that blended into the air around it. Before long, the Nezha Spirit grew excited.

“Oh, something fun is coming! Little brother, look over there, there are several really enormous lizards!”

Enormous lizards? Several of them? The Lizard Duke’s magical beasts?

Wei Xun looked in the direction the Nezha Spirit indicated and saw nothing but rolling black dunes. [Read on RanaTranslations🌸] What the Nezha Spirit could see in the distance was on a different scale from what Wei Xun could see. He asked directly:

“Good brother, how far away are the lizards?”

“One of them seems to be heading our way. Let me check, if we just stand here and it keeps up that pace, it would take it about a quarter of an hour to reach us.”

The Nezha Spirit cracked its knuckles eagerly.

“No idea if lizard tastes any good. But this place is so barren.”

In a vast desert with no food in any direction, the Nezha Spirit had developed a keen awareness of the importance of storing provisions.

“Brother, go scout further and see where those big lizards are coming from.”

Wei Xun said, and the Nezha Spirit flew outward.

“It really is the West District’s Butcher Alliance pulling strings behind this.”

Tong Hege’s brow was creased.

“Wei Xun, it’s coming back to me now. The core contamination of the Death Sahara is stillness and strangeness; thought grinding to a halt.”

Every Latitude 30 Degrees journey had its own distinct contamination tendency. The madness of the Sun was about worship and exaltation; the Death Sahara’s contamination was precisely what Tong Hege described. Put simply, it was something like a particular kind of dream. When a person was extremely exhausted, sometimes they had a dream where they were utterly convinced they were awake, that they had gotten up and gone about their day, done many things, only to snap back and realize they were still asleep.

This kind of dream could sometimes feel like sleep paralysis, impossible to wake from. Sometimes it brought a suffocating anxiety. The thought-stillness of the Death Sahara worked the same way.

The longer you stayed here, the heavier the contamination, and the more your perception would drift out of alignment with reality. When facing an enemy, you might be convinced you were fighting for your life, that you had killed them, only to snap back and find yourself standing exactly where you had been, having not moved at all. The enemy, meanwhile, might have taken the opportunity to deal you a fatal blow.

That was thought-stillness.

As for the “strangeness,” it was a separate thing. Stillness referred to sound: every sound in this place gradually disappeared. Sounds from the environment itself, and sounds from anyone who entered. Sound was a critical reference point here. When you could no longer hear your own heartbeat or the sound of your breathing, it was time to leave the Death Sahara immediately.

What “strangeness” meant specifically, Tong Hege couldn’t remember. He told Wei Xun everything he did know.

From above, under the Nezha Spirit’s watch, the enormous lizard was drawing closer. But Wei Xun stayed put for now. After a few minutes, Baby Corn’s tendrils surfaced through the black sand, and Wei Xun began receiving its intelligence report.

Was there anything particular about this black sand? Were there any dangers beneath it?

Baby Corn, however, was ecstatic.

Father, Father, happy, Corn so happy!

Baby Corn was reacting as though it had come home. The environment here was even more comfortable to it than the Abyss. Of course, this comfort applied only to Baby Corn itself; the Mutated Evil Ghost Insects it had brought along with it started dying in bizarre ways the moment they went more than a meter below the sand surface, and Baby Corn promptly swallowed the rest of the insect army into its body before more could perish, keeping the vast majority alive inside itself.

Suited for Abyss Insects to live in; dangerous below one meter; no danger inside an Abyss Insect’s body. Not only that, but Wei Xun noticed Baby Corn was far too excited, to the point where it seemed to have lost the ability to speak coherently. It squeaked and chirped frantically, waving tendrils at him for a long time before managing to make itself understood:

Corn, Corn feels so tiny. There is something great, something so great, under the ground, so, so great!

Baby Corn’s sense of “great” referred to size. It communicated that this great existence was bigger than a hundred times a hundred times a hundred of itself, and that this black desert was essentially resting on the back of this great being.

Something that enormous could be lurking under the black desert? Even Wei Xun was startled for a moment, before his mind immediately jumped to the creature deep within the Sahara that had consumed Dreamchaser’s butterfly fragment.

Could this great being be that creature?

It made sense. If this black desert could only be entered by those possessing a Sahara token, the great Insect being here wasn’t strange at all.

But Abyss Insects belonged in the Abyss. Why would there be Abyss Insects inside the Death Sahara?

Something was forming in Wei Xun’s mind. He kept listening as Baby Corn stumbled through its explanation: aside from this colossal Insect, the depths of the black desert were home to hundreds upon thousands of mid-sized Insects, and Baby Corn, having molted once and consumed enormous quantities of earth, was among the larger specimens by Insect standards, ranking somewhere in the top ten for sheer size.

It is great, but, but nothing is as great as Father!

Baby Corn rubbed up against Wei Xun in a show of loyalty. [Read on RanaTranslations🌸] Admittedly one of its tendrils was taller than Wei Xun, but fine, Father’s greatness was not measured in height. Then Baby Corn quietly added something: Father, the Great One, the Great One down below, is sending orders to everyone, wants, wants to eliminate these enemies.

Baby Corn had been born absorbing ***’s Abyss energy and possessed special abilities for concealment; even the great Insect below had not detected it. The directive had the quality of a broadcast, the Insect method of communication being particular: within a shared earth, the largest entity’s instructions propagated downward to every Insect smaller than itself. Information flowed from higher to lower, with no way for lower to transmit upward.

The great Insect’s broadcast had reached Baby Corn as well. Its tendrils traced patterns in the sand until it had drawn the shapes of the “enemies,” and though the drawings were somewhat grotesque, with Baby Corn’s accompanying description Wei Xun managed to identify what they depicted.

One glowing great dragon, and a cluster of stick figures.

The great dragon was engaged in battle with the great Insect, and any other Insects that approached the stick figures died. The great Insect’s primary directive to its subordinates was to eliminate those two categories of enemies.

“The great dragon fighting the Insect… is that Dreamchaser in his dream state?”

Wei Xun remembered Zhang Xingcang saying that Dreamchaser was submerged in a dream he couldn’t wake from, and that one part of the reason was the intruder’s suppression while the other was Dreamchaser himself trying to use his dream power to reclaim the butterfly fragment and take full control of the Death Sahara.

So, the Dreamchaser in the dream was fighting the great Insect, while the great Insect simultaneously directed its subordinates to go kill the West District Butcher Alliance and Werewolf Alliance members?

Wei Xun specifically asked whether any of the human enemies required special attention, but Baby Corn said no. He checked the livestream and found that two of the seven camera splits were on Half-Life Daoist and Zhang Xingcang, who had apparently ended up together. The other five were also all on the East District’s people; there was still not a single West District presence on camera.

Either the West District had their own rules for blocking the Agency’s observation, or they simply hadn’t entered yet.

The group of lizards and stick figures were probably magical beasts and various puppets. They could serve as scouts for the Butcher Tour Guides but wouldn’t appear on the livestream.

Whatever the case, the Dreamchaser egg trap had been sprung, and the West District Butcher Alliance would almost certainly be entering this space soon. Wei Xun hadn’t found a way out of here, and carrying the glowing Dreamchaser egg made hiding effectively impossible. The depths of the Death Sahara were full of danger; of the Demonic Bees sent out to scout, barely a dozen had made it back.

He had to seize this window of time. This was his opportunity. Since keeping a low profile was useless, he would go so far beyond low profile that the enemy would think twice before coming for him.

In the space of a lightning flash, Wei Xun made his decision.

“I’m not going to be Wei Xun anymore.”

“Tong Hege, Yu Hehui left you plenty of fox spirit energy, right?”

“That’s right.”

Tong Hege understood the intent at once.

“Who do you want to become?”

Yu Hehui had anticipated that Wei Xun would inevitably cause trouble and had deliberately given Tong Hege a generous supply of fox spirit energy. Energy that could make Tong Hege appear as a ferret could just as easily disguise Wei Xun as someone else entirely, and when it came to disguise, a Heavenly Fox was absolutely the foremost expert.

“Whoever would naturally be with Dreamchaser, it has to be Zhang Xingcang.”

Wei Xun said with meaning.

“And Zhang Xingcang just happens to be on the livestream right now. Who would ever expect there to be two of him?”

The fact that they had sent lizards and puppets in here meant the West District Butcher Alliance had been inside before and had probably established some kind of temporary base. In a journey as dangerous as an Unsolvable Latitude 30 Degrees run, building a safe point before pushing further in was standard practice for exploration.

Sure enough, the Nezha Spirit returned from scouting with excellent news; it had found the lizards’ origin point, a safe zone shaped exactly like an overturned bowl.

“There are so many good things in there, I can already smell them!”

No wonder the Nezha Spirit had abandoned its earlier ambitions of roasting the great lizard. There were far better prizes inside the base. No matter how well-hidden a safe point was, it couldn’t escape the Nezha Spirit’s notice.

That was all Wei Xun needed to know.

“Let’s go, brother. We’re going to raid it.”

The Wei Xun who had taken on Zhang Xingcang’s appearance smiled, cradled the Dreamchaser egg, and slipped into the hollow “mouth” formed by Baby Corn’s curled tendrils. He had Baby Corn transmit a coordinated attack directive to the other insects, signaling a joint assault on the enemies. At the same time, he asked the Nezha Spirit to transform into a tortoise.

Zhang Xingcang had four great clay guardian statues; Wei Xun had seen them with his own eyes when he visited the Abyss Bell. Only the Black Tortoise remained for Zhang Xingcang now.

The Nezha Spirit transformed into a great tortoise; the young dragon shifted form and coiled across its back; fox spirit energy completed the disguise. The resemblance was genuinely convincing.

Five minutes later, the West District Butcher Alliance’s safe point was overrun by a vast wave of Insects, and the “Zhang Xingcang” who had been smashing and seizing everything in sight inside the base with a great Black Tortoise trampling nearly a hundred puppet lizards beneath it held the glowing Dreamchaser egg in one arm and met the West District Butcher Alliance’s lead vanguard with a cold smile.

Since S-2 the Lizard Duke was too powerful to have squeezed through yet, these vanguard fighters were no match for the Nezha Spirit, and Wei Xun was free to perform magnificently.

How dare he stand here holding Dreamchaser openly like that! Zhang Xingcang had completely lost his mind!

“I’ve been gone so long, it seems people have forgotten what the name Zhang Xingcang means.”

He said it with calm indifference, fingers extended like a blade. The moment he swept his hand down, the great Black Tortoise rolled forward in a crushing advance. A Tour Guide in a silver-purple cloak went wide-eyed with fear and threw himself to the side at the very last instant, barely escaping, only to find the dragon coiled on the tortoise’s back snapping open its jaws and spitting out a black-green sharp knife.

The knife drove straight through the Tour Guide’s skull. The ferocious contamination it carried gave the already injured and weakened man no time to trigger Return to Zero or shift into his alienated state before his existence came to an end.

“Remember this. The one who killed you was Zhang Xingcang.”

Amid laughter, “Zhang Xingcang” dove into the insect swarm and sank beneath the sand. The timing was perfect; the moment he disappeared, a vast black net dropped silently into place where he had been standing. One step slower and he would have become the net’s prey.

Moments later, at another Butcher Alliance safe point built deep in the black desert, several Tour Guides in silver-purple cloaks knelt on the ground, reporting to the figure above them.

“We’ve been deceived.”

One of them said coldly.

“The Zhang Xingcang in the red sand on the fifth layer of the Sahara shown in the livestream is someone else in disguise. He and Dreamchaser are both here.”

“Suppress this information.”

A soft, cold male voice sounded, sliding over them like a snake crossing skin. Every head was pressed firmly to the ground; no one dared look up at the figure at the top.

They could only see his monstrous, terrifying shadow.

“You know what to do.”

“Yes!”