Chapter Eighty-One: History

In the midst of the yellow sands, there was nothing at all. He lifted a foot and stepped forward, one pace at a time, into the dunes.

The sand was loose, yet it still held his weight without issue. He had gone only a few steps when, suddenly, a figure emerged slowly from the passage behind him.

It was a man, and his body was unnaturally stooped.

His face was aged, and when he looked at Chen Qing, his expression was one of dreadful hatred.

Chen Qing looked at him, his own countenance shifting strangely.

Who was he? I seem to know him. I seem to have plotted against him.

Who was he?

He fixed his eyes on the old man before him and suppressed the unease in his heart.

“Who are you?” he asked.

The old man opened his mouth and spoke a name that did not belong to this city.

“Lise Natt.”

He looked at Chen Qing and asked in turn, “How will your rite fail?”

“Fail?”

Chen Qing frowned, thinking hard.

Fail? How else could this rite fail, other than losing oneself and being unable to leave?

He fell silent for a moment, and just as he was about to speak, he heard a soft chime in his mind.

“What is fraud?”

He listened as that voice spoke again in his mind. He looked at the man before him, hesitated, and swallowed back the words that had not yet been spoken.

“I need to forget something.”

“What do you need to forget?”

“I don’t know.”

He shook his head, but after two or three seconds, the scene around the old man began to twist. He hurriedly looked away and saw the yellow sand beneath his feet slowly creeping upward, already wrapping around his calves without his noticing.

Alarm rose in his heart, but when he focused again, the sand was once more lying quietly beneath his feet.

Chen Qing frowned and looked at the old man. “Aren’t you coming?”

The old man shook his head, seeming to grit his teeth as he slowly retreated into the darkness behind him.

Who was he, really?

Chen Qing asked himself in a low voice. Then he turned and continued walking forward.

After a few steps, he began to see the world collapse. The yellow sand whirling through the air grew strangely heavy. It could no longer dance; it fell straight down, striking the ground with the crisp clash of metal against metal.

“What is happening?” he murmured.

The scenery around him dimmed in an instant.

As though the sun had switched off a lamp, the world within the sands fell utterly silent, and the desert became pitch-black.

He sensed the direction from which he had come and turned about. Using the faint light behind him as a lighthouse, he kept walking forward with his back to it.

After several dozen steps, the darkness around him changed in an instant.

He felt a trace of warmth arise in the blackness, growing tender, and then he turned and saw four people on the sand.

They were seated around a campfire, speaking in fits and starts.

But were they truly talking? The manner of their speech seemed wholly perfunctory, as if everything were said only for the sake of filling the silence.

“Where did he go?”

One of the four asked.

“He should already be gone, right?”

“He can save us! He can do it!”

The speaker pointed at himself, his expression full of panic.

As soon as those words fell, the four figures vanished from the darkness of the sand.

Chen Qing rubbed his eyes and looked ahead in confusion. Only after confirming that they had truly disappeared did he continue forward, numb and silent.

“What on earth is going on...”

He had the feeling that something in this ascension rite had changed.