Chapter 314: Death Sahara (6)

Another annihilation period was almost upon them.

Deep in the black desert, far underground where neither people nor creatures dared approach, a vast sunken funnel-shaped void opened like something out of science fiction, a sinkhole extending straight toward the earth’s core, as large as the Eye of the Sahara itself. [Read on RanaTranslations🌸] An ominous, terrifying black fog enveloped the entire chasm, and if you looked closely enough, you could almost make out something within the fog.

A dragon, vast as smoke and mist.

It seemed to have no physical body, like a dream or a bubble, capable of refracting seven colors in sunlight and dissolving into dense black fog within the Abyssal Insect’s toxic contamination. Then the next instant a pair of enormous crimson eyes opened within that dense fog.

No, not eyes. Only markings that resembled eyes closely enough to be mistaken for them. They sat on a tendril enormous as a sea monster’s tentacle, terrifying and immense. Tens of thousands of tendrils, each as thick as half of Baby Corn, erupted violently from the depths of the black sand, tearing through the black fog, tearing through the sea of sand, yet none of it could inflict any harm on the dream dragon.

If the black desert hadn’t swallowed their sounds, swallowed every vibration and disturbance, the entire black desert would have been turned upside down by the violence of this battle, and it would have drawn Wei Xun and Baby Corn’s attention immediately.

This silent fight was like a terrifying, ghostly meat grinder. Any living thing that strayed anywhere near it was simply destroyed.

But now another annihilation period was imminent, and this battle still had no resolution.

It was not the first annihilation period the Dreamchaser dragon had lived through. In fact, the reason he was trapped in the dream unable to wake was precisely because the moment he entered his alienated state and sank into dreaming, intending to fish colored spirit sand grains from the Sahara’s seventh layer, he had been forcibly dragged to the black desert instead, landing right next to the great Insect, which had been forcibly dragged there as well.

When the black desert’s annihilation period arrived, every candidate for authority over the Death Sahara’s token was drawn to the black desert. This had never happened before. Dreamchaser suspected the West District Butcher Alliance had obtained a partial Sahara token through some unknown means.

This was a critical turning point. The balance he and the great Insect had maintained over the years, both holding Sahara tokens, had been broken by a third person simultaneously obtaining a fragment, and that was what had triggered the annihilation period.

Dreamchaser had barely managed to get a message to Zhang Xingcang before losing all contact with the outside world. The great Insect had no real intelligence and assumed this was another trick by its longtime enemy the Dreamchaser dragon, so it had immediately attacked.

They had been fighting from night through to dawn, and from dawn through to now. Or rather, there was no true day or night in the black desert; the light was always dim and dark, and you could only gauge the time by temperature changes.

When Dreamchaser had first arrived, the black desert’s temperature was as low as minus fifty degrees. The temperature had since slowly climbed to a sweltering sixty degrees. Working backward from when he had entered, sixty degrees probably corresponded to around noon.

But the temperature had quickly started dropping again, and Dreamchaser believed this was connected not only to the time of day but also to the next annihilation period. The great Insect was fighting him with the frenzy of something deranged, and Dreamchaser wanted to settle this once and for all. He knew this most likely meant the West District Butcher Alliance would benefit from their fight, but Dreamchaser, with no way to leave, was more inclined to gamble everything on it and reclaim the Maria Butterfly fragment completely, seizing full control.

He had held the largest share of the Sahara token to begin with; the only reason he and the great Insect were evenly matched was because the great Insect had swallowed the Maria Butterfly fragment. Once he reclaimed that fragment, he would have an overwhelming advantage.

But the second annihilation period arrived faster than he had expected.

Dreamchaser’s situation was not looking favorable. [Read on RanaTranslations🌸] The dream dragon was an unusual alienated form; theoretically, Dreamchaser couldn’t even be certain whether it counted as an Abyss creature type of alienated form, or whether it warranted its own separate category entirely.

After performing Return to Zero, a Dreamchaser who had fully alienated into the dream dragon could temporarily abandon his physical body, which hardened into a crystalline diamond dragon egg. The true him, full of power, existed in a peculiar “dream” state. Not the traditional undead-type alienation, not a soul in the usual sense, but something closer to a classic horror film villain, the kind who, like Freddy from Nightmare on Elm Street, could enter people’s dreams after death and kill them inside their nightmares.

In a certain sense, Dreamchaser’s alienated form had a beautiful exterior with an extraordinarily terrifying core. In the early stages of alienation, his blood carried a powerful soporific ability; even Heaven-grade creatures fell into sleep upon contact. Creatures above the Heaven-grade, even if they didn’t fall fully asleep, sank into a drowsy, sleepwalking state where they couldn’t use their full strength.

Either they were killed by Dreamchaser while sleepwalking, or they fell fully asleep and were killed by a fully alienated Dreamchaser from inside their dream. Once Dreamchaser had infiltrated a person’s dream, no one could save that person. The most skilled Taoist priests, Buddhist monks, and Christian pastors were all helpless, because he carried not a trace of Abyss energy and bore no resemblance to any monster.

He was simply a nightmare that killed people.

But against a primitive creature like an Abyssal Insect, Dreamchaser couldn’t gain the upper hand. He and the Abyssal Insect had been locked in a struggle for years; the insect knew exactly how terrifying Dreamchaser was. When it swallowed the Maria Butterfly fragment, it had actually had an opportunity to evolve again, but the Abyssal Insect had abandoned intelligence, abandoned the development of richer emotions, abandoned the branch that would have led toward something more humanoid.

Its entire evolution went toward more primitive, larger, tougher, and more durable.

Had it possessed even a sliver of intelligence, it would have known this was not the time to fight Dreamchaser to the death and hand others a ready-made advantage.

But unfortunately, the great Insect was genuinely incapable of understanding any of that. The Dreamchaser dragon entangled with it was in an unusually suffocated rage.

In a fair contest, if this battle continued, the winner should still be Dreamchaser. The black desert’s annihilation period targeted life, and it had limited effect on Dreamchaser in his nightmare state; the Abyssal Insect could only endure it through sheer constitution.

Dreamchaser’s only weakness was the dragon egg. If he remained in his alienated state too long and couldn’t return to the egg in time, it would gradually lose all vitality and life; if the dragon egg died, he would be trapped in the dream forever with no way back. But with Zhang Xingcang present and the bond between them intact, as long as Zhang Xingcang kept the dragon egg close, Dreamchaser could theoretically maintain his alienated state indefinitely.

The only problem was that if the dragon egg was separated from him by too great a distance, such as Dreamchaser being in the Sahara while the egg sat in a real-world residence, the probability of Dreamchaser being contaminated, losing himself, and wandering the dream rose sharply. The dragon egg functioned as a coordinate for him.

But Dreamchaser knew Zhang Xingcang would bring the egg and come to find him. In fact, just a short while ago during the battle, the Dreamchaser dragon had experienced a sudden surge of strength and pressed the great Insect back, and Dreamchaser had known from that moment that Zhang Xingcang had brought the egg into the Sahara. He might even have entered the Latitude 30 Degrees journey itself, otherwise this feeling of freedom would have been impossible. Before that, Dreamchaser had been unable to use his full strength; he’d had to hold some back in reserve to ensure he wouldn’t lose himself.

But very quickly, Dreamchaser sensed something wrong.

He could no longer feel Zhang Xingcang’s relief.

At the same moment, he sensed that the West District Butcher Alliance people carrying token fragments had entered the black desert.

In that instant Dreamchaser thought of many things at once. Had the dragon egg been separated from Zhang Xingcang? The West District Butcher Alliance’s scheming? Had something happened to Zhang Xingcang? Had Zhang Xingcang been dragged in because of the dragon egg? Had the Lizard Duke’s people captured him?

Dreamchaser was suddenly burning with anxiety, to the point where he didn’t even want to fight the great Insect anymore. But the insect truly had no intelligence to speak of. It also sensed something threatening, something powerful holding a token fragment had entered this territory, and it concluded these newcomers must be the dragon’s accomplices.

It absolutely could not let the dragon escape.

The great Insect threw everything it had at this, and Dreamchaser, desperate to leave, made a momentary lapse and was struck by a splash of the great Insect’s contaminated blood. The blood passed through his intangible body, but the heavy mental contamination carried in it was another matter entirely; it eroded him. Dreamchaser was suddenly in serious trouble. He had to use more and more of his strength just to maintain his clarity, and this was a slow death.

As if that weren’t enough, the black desert’s annihilation period arrived as well. The Dreamchaser dragon roared with fury, and the roar was swallowed by the black desert. His voice was silenced, and he couldn’t even give Zhang Xingcang any kind of signal.

Faced with cascading crises, Dreamchaser forced his emotions down and stopped thinking about Zhang Xingcang, pouring all his rage into the great Insect instead. But the insect had its own primitive cunning; sensing the Dreamchaser dragon falling into a disadvantaged state and weakening, it curled up like an enormous roly-poly insect, its hardened, stone-like shell facing outward, and simply started stalling for time.

The contamination deepened with every passing moment. Dreamchaser could no longer leave. A wild, furious, out-of-control tide of emotion was battering his mind. No relief, no comfort. He was teetering on the edge of a manic collapse. He craved slaughter, thirsted for blood, and felt that only the death of the enemy or his own death could bring any of this to an end.

At this point he had completely stopped thinking about the Lizard Duke, stopped thinking about the dragon egg. He only wanted to kill and kill and kill.

A tremendous crash.

The dragon was no longer the crystalline diamond shape it had been; half of its body had turned jet black, its muscles seemed to be dissolving, exposing the terrible white dragon bones beneath, like something undead. Abandoning its dream state entirely, Dreamchaser, now made physical by loss of control, attacked the great Insect in savage fury. He nearly succeeded; the outermost shell of the Abyssal Insect was torn open by the Dreamchaser dragon through sheer force. But it was useless.

He had only torn through the Abyssal Insect’s outermost tendrils. He hadn’t reached its core at all. The Maria Butterfly fragment was buried in the deepest part of the Abyssal Insect’s body, and given the creature’s immense size, even purely passive defense would give the Dreamchaser dragon half an hour of ripping before he could get to it.

But the dragon couldn’t last half an hour. The turbulent, out-of-control emotions had him craving slaughter with an almost mechanical fury, tearing at the great Insect’s shell in a frenzied rhythm, and this only made him more manic.

How could it be this large?

How could it be this hard?

He didn’t feel like he was killing something. He felt like he was digging through a city wall. No feedback, no sense of release whatsoever.

Fragmented, frenzied emotions had taken over everything. Dreamchaser was nearly at Return to Zero. If he couldn’t kill the enemy, he would kill himself. Without Zhang Xingcang’s relief sessions, he was at the very edge of a catastrophic breakdown. He slammed into the great Insect again with savage, manic force, and the great Insect didn’t even resist, only continuing its defense.

Its small brain knew that the enemy was careening toward destruction in its own madness, that the dragon couldn’t cut through its body, not this time, not the next time, not in all the times after that, the outcome would always be the same—

The great Insect hadn’t figured out what had happened when it was nearly split in half. Why had the old enemy suddenly become so much stronger? The Dreamchaser dragon did not press the advantage further. In the next instant, in the split second before the annihilation period arrived, he seemed to have recovered his senses, and with a sudden sweep of his wings he shot into the air and left the battlefield at tremendous speed.

******

“What the—”

Wei Xun swore, which he rarely did, and felt momentarily stunned. He was still wearing the suit jacket draped over his shoulders, but the black jacket had changed color.

Nobody could have anticipated that in the moment just now, the Dreamchaser egg, which had seemed so affectionate and clingy and warm, had suddenly inhaled like a whirlwind when Wei Xun offered it more pure Abyss energy and sucked the black jacket straight in.

Wei Xun had no time to study what had happened to the jacket, because the next instant he felt an enormous, immediate sense of crisis hurtling toward him. Baby Corn, which had been holding him gently in its false mouth formed from tendrils, was abruptly sliced into eighteen segments, and Wei Xun found he could see where the threat was. A mass of black fog slammed into his body with ferocious force.

“Puppeteer?”

The next moment, an icy, bone-cold voice sounded inside Wei Xun’s mind.