Chapter 282: Sand Resonance

Under the scorching sun of the boiling sand sea, the air seemed to be burned into rippling cracks. Over fifty hulking Beidai barbarians clad in animal skins exposed their dark, rough chests as they walked on the scorching sand, accompanied by seven camels laden with cargo, forming a thin black line across the desert.

"Brother, have some water."

At the rear of the convoy, a skinny, short boy fished a water flask from his waist, dabbed his cracked lips, and handed it to a sturdy man walking ahead of him.

The man waved his hand without turning his head: "You drink, A Mu, Brother isn't thirsty."

The boy pressed his lips tighter, squeezed the flask's cap a few more times, and finally placed it back at his waist unharmed.

Water was scarce; he couldn't waste it—Brother hadn't drunk water for two days.

But he knew Brother wouldn't take his water, because he had a reason he couldn't refuse.

The boy looked down at his palm, where dim, fire‑red lines stretched toward his wrist.

The man turned, gave him a gentle look, and ruffled his sand‑caked black hair with a large hand: "Don't worry, A Mu, Brother will take you away from here; your illness will heal, too."

The boy nodded dumbly, silently matching the man's stride.

It wasn't only the boy's Brother who hadn't drunk water for two days; the whole escort party was nearly at the point of exhaustion.

They were entering the desert's most perilous zone, where no oasis existed for hundreds of kilometers, and the water stored with the convoy had been exhausted two days earlier.

"Old Akbā'ěr! How far is the next Life‑Place?" the leader at the front shouted at a dying old man, his tone extremely fierce.

Akbā'ěr, a 73‑year‑old native of the desert, knew all too well the barbarians' cruelty. If his answer failed to satisfy the man whose muscles were as stout as rebar, he would crush his own skull on the spot.

"Almost there—just about there. Tonight we can reach the destination," Akbā'ěr said weakly.

Hearing that they would arrive at the Life‑Place (the Beidai barbarians' term for an oasis) by night, the man's raging anger eased a bit, and his grip on the whip at his waist loosened.

"Damn brat. Back when I sparred with the Bronze Dragon, you weren't even born!" Just as Akbā'ěr breathed a sigh of relief at surviving, the ground suddenly trembled.

"W-what's happening!" the leader roared angrily.

The blazing sun turned sand grains into a flowing glassy substance; the Beidai people and their caravan suddenly fell into a fluid‑dynamics paradox—sand layers within a hundred‑meter radius began collapsing counter‑clockwise without warning. The seasoned Akbā'ěr was the first to notice the anomaly: the ripples raised as sand lizards burrowed en masse descended at 12 m per second, morphing into an abyss that devoured everything.

He could no longer play the frail old man, discarded his cane and bolted toward the direction away from the epicenter.

The others were less fortunate; the camel bells emitted a dying shriek at the vortex's core, and seven single‑humped camels along with cargo boxes loaded with spices and bronze passes were sucked into the earth. Subsonic waves from sand friction caused human eardrums to bleed, and the leader's man, thrusting a curved blade into a rock fissure to survive, only hastened the sandstone base's collapse.

At the vortex's edge, the quicksand behaved as a non‑Newtonian fluid: the more a body struggled, the faster it sank. Only Akbā'ěr, who fled in time, and a few clever ones who lay flat and rode the sand's slingshot force escaped the death radius.

Wu Ermu sat rigidly on the ground, staring at the distant vortex, unable to speak.

Everything happened too fast; the moment the terrifying vortex appeared, his Brother grabbed his collar and hurled him dozens of meters away. He could only watch helplessly as Brother was devoured by the demon‑like gaping abyss, just like the others who screamed and vanished into the yellow sand.

"Brother," Wu Ermu whispered, crying, his heart thudding dullly; Brother was dead, and he was the only one left in the world.

He felt so lonely, as if dropped into icy water; even surrounded by a furnace‑like sun, he sensed no warmth.

The boy, immersed in grief, paid no attention to the dark‑red lines on his palm, which slowly crept across his wrist toward his heart.

Akbā'ěr noticed the pitiful boy and, limping, hurried to his side.

He looked at the weeping Wu Ermu with a hint of pity and said, "Poor child, this is your first time seeing Sand Resonance, huh? You're scared stiff."

Akbā'ěr patted his shoulder, sat beside him, and quietly watched the distant vortex gradually calm.

When the vortex subsided, the exposed giant pit cross‑section sent shivers through the survivors—its eighty‑meter‑wide walls were lined with honeycomb tunnels, and siliceous deposits secreted by a massive creature's digging glimmered in the sunlight.

A silver giant dragon tore through the clouds at that moment, descending. The air was sliced into fragments by the frequency of its wingbeats. Sand particles hovered and reassembled in the shadows of its wing membranes, precise lattice‑like geometric patterns spreading across the sand.

The survivors' necks trembled as they lifted their heads, pupils reflecting the silver‑scaled body that shielded the blazing sun—its inter‑scale glow flowing like liquid‑melted starlight of the entire desert.

"Great Great Dragon"

!

Akbā'ěr's torn vocal cords spat broken syllables, blood‑foam in his larynx solidifying into tiny red crystals within the sound waves. The silver dragon's irises, swirling violet, snapped shut; the ground's sand and gravel trembled in sync with the pupils' contraction, like light focused by an invisible lens.

"Humans, what is happening here?" Naimi Xisi's breath stirred currents in the heat, yellow sand swirling everywhere. The Beidai people's kneeling backs cracked like misaligned bones—not from Dragon Might's pressure, but from a primal stress response to a top predator—their eardrums throbbed, eyes seemed ready to burst from their sockets, yet they stared fixedly at the silver dragon's claw marks on the sand.

Only Akbā'ěr, tightening the memory nerves from his confrontation with the Bronze Dragon forty years ago, forced his cracked vocal cords to emit a sand‑grit‑scraping sound: "It is Sand Resonance, the great giant dragon."

A flicker of doubt crossed Naimi Xisi's eyes: what was that?

Old Akbā'ěr explained softly: "Legend says a gigantic creature, never seen by anyone, roams beneath the sand of Eno'ok. Whenever it appears, a terrifying death vortex follows."

"After each vortex, a bottomless pit remains. Some have tried to explore the creature's body by entering, but none have returned alive. Supposedly, the monster actually—"

Naimi Xisi's tail tip unintentionally tapped the rock slab, causing the entire giant pit to resonate. Siliceous fragments fell rustling from the honeycomb holes, turning into drifting firefly swarms in the dragon‑scale glow. When Akbā'ěr mentioned "explorers never return," a crisp sound of crystal growth echoed from deep within a tunnel, as if some entity laughed in the dark.

The horizon at the far side of the sand sea began to boil.

The roar of tens of thousands of scales rubbing arrived before the dark silhouette—a death frequency blown by the Esebi Lizardmen's bone flute.

Akbā'ěr's clouded eyes reflected the spiny dorsal fins churning in the sandstorm— their charge raised dust that formed a skeletal totem against the sky, while the silver dragon's outstretched wing membranes refracted the sunset into a 720‑facet prism.

Old Akbā'ěr shouted in terror: "Lizardmen, it's the Esebi Lizardmen!"

(End of Chapter)