Volume Dragon: Start by obtaining the Infinity Gems

Chapter 281 Sand Ming
Under the scorching sun, the air seemed to be burned into ripples. More than fifty sturdy Bedai barbarians dressed in animal skins, revealing their dark and rough chests, walked on the hot sand. They were accompanied by seven camels carrying a large amount of goods, forming a thin black line in the desert.

"Brother, drink some water."

At the end of the team, a skinny and short boy took out a water bottle from his waist, pursed his cracked lips, and handed it to a strong man walking in front of him.

The man waved his hand without even turning his head: "Drink it, Amu, brother is not thirsty."

The boy pursed his lips even harder, exerted force several times on the bottle cap, and finally put it back to his waist intact.

There is not much water left and he cannot waste it. He hasn’t had any water for two days.

But he knew that his brother would not drink his water, because he had his reasons for having to drink it.

The boy looked down at his palms, where dim fiery red lines extended all the way to his wrists.

The man turned around and looked at him gently, ruffling his black hair covered with yellow sand with his big hands: "Don't worry, Amu, my brother will take you away from here, and your illness will be cured."

The boy nodded blankly and followed the man's steps silently.

The boy's brother was not the only one who had not had water for two days. The entire escort team was almost at the end of their rope.

They were heading towards the most dangerous area in the entire desert. There was no oasis within a radius of hundreds of kilometers, and the team's stored water had been used up two days ago.

"Old Akbar! How far are we to the next place of life?" At the front of the team, the leading man shouted at an old man who was about to die, with an extremely fierce tone.

Old Akbar, a 73-year-old native of the desert, knew very well the cruelty and ruthlessness of these barbarians, and if his next answer did not satisfy this man with muscles as strong as steel, he would crush his head immediately.

"It's almost there. We will reach our destination tonight." Old Akbar said weakly.

Hearing that they would reach the Land of Life (the name for the oasis among the Bedai barbarians) in the evening, the man's violent anger finally subsided a little, and the hand holding the whip at his waist loosened.

"Damned little bastard. You weren't even born when I was battling the brass dragon!" Just as old Akbar was relieved that he had survived temporarily, the earth suddenly began to tremble.

"What...what's going on!" the man leading the team roared loudly.

The scorching sun baked the sand into a flowing glassy substance, and the Bedai people and their camel caravans suddenly fell into a paradox of fluid mechanics - the sand layer of a hundred meters in radius began to collapse counterclockwise without any warning. Experienced old Arbuckle was the first to discover the anomaly: the ripples caused by the sand lizards collectively drilling into the ground were evolving into an abyss that swallowed everything at a speed of 12 meters per second.

He didn't bother to play the role of a frail old man anymore. He threw away his crutches and ran away from the epicenter.

But others were not so lucky. Camel bells screamed in the center of the vortex, and seven dromedaries were sucked into the center of the earth along with a cargo box full of spices and bronze passes. The infrasound waves produced by the friction of sand grains made human eardrums bleed, and the leader's survival action of inserting a machete into the cracks of the rock layer actually accelerated the collapse of the sandstone base.

The quicksand at the edge of the vortex exhibits non-Newtonian fluid properties. The more the body struggles, the faster it sinks. Only Akbar, who escaped in time, and a few smart people who lay down in time escaped the death radius by the ejection force of the sand waves.

Wuermu sat stiffly on the ground, staring at the whirlpool in the distance, unable to speak.

Everything happened too fast. The moment the terrifying whirlpool appeared, his brother grabbed his collar and threw him dozens of meters away. He could only watch his brother being swallowed by the devilish abyss, just like the others who screamed and disappeared in the yellow sand.

"Brother." Wuermu cried softly, his heart aching. His brother was dead, and he was the only one left in the world.

He was so lonely, as if he had fallen into ice water. Even though he was surrounded by the furnace-like sun, he could not feel a bit of warmth.

The boy was so immersed in sorrow that he didn't notice the dark red lines on his palm, which were spreading through his wrist and towards his heart.

Old Akbar noticed the poor boy and limped over to him.

He looked at Wuermu who was just crying and said with some pity: "Poor kid, it's your first time seeing Sha Ming, right? You must be scared silly."

Old Akbar patted his shoulder, sat down beside him, and watched quietly as the whirlpool in the distance gradually calmed down.

When the vortex subsided, the exposed cross-section of the giant pit made the survivors shudder - the pit wall with a diameter of 80 meters was inlaid with honeycomb tunnels, and the silicates secreted by some giant creatures during digging were flashing in the sunlight.

The silver dragon tore through the clouds and descended at this moment. The air was cut into pieces by the vibration of the dragon's wings. Sand grains were suspended and reorganized in the shadow cast by the wing membrane, and geometric patterns as precise as crystal lattices spread across the sand.

The survivors raised their heads with trembling necks, and their pupils reflected the silver-scaled bodies that blocked out the scorching sun - the faint light flowing between the scales seemed to have melted the starlight of the entire desert into liquid.

"Giant Dragon"

Akbar's torn vocal cords squeezed out broken syllables, and the blood foam in his throat condensed into tiny red crystals in the sound waves. The dark purple vertical pupil of the silver dragon's iris suddenly shrank, and the gravel on the ground trembled synchronously with the expansion and contraction of the pupil, like a spot of light focused by an invisible lens.

"Human, what happened here?" Nemesis' breath blew air in the high temperature, and yellow sand flew all over the sky. The kneeling backs of the Bedai people made a crisp sound of bones dislocating, not because of the pressure of the dragon's might, but because of the biological instinctive stress response to the top predator - their eardrums were swollen and painful, and their eyeballs seemed to be squeezed out of their sockets, but they still stared at the traces plowed by the silver dragon's claws on the sand.

Only Akbar strained his memory of the confrontation with the brass dragon forty years ago, and his cracked vocal cords squeezed out a sound like the friction of gravel: "It is Shaming, the great dragon."

A hint of doubt flashed in Nemesis' eyes. What was that thing?
Old Akbar explained softly, "Legend has it that under the sand, there is a giant creature that no one has ever seen. It roams throughout Anauroch, and whenever it appears, a terrible vortex of death appears."

"Every time a whirlpool appears, it always leaves behind a bottomless pit. Some people want to explore the monster's body and enter the pit, but no one has ever come back alive. It is said that this monster is actually--"

Nemesis' tail tip knocked unconsciously on the bedrock, and the entire giant pit resonated. The silicides that fell from the honeycomb-like holes on the pit wall turned into a swarm of floating fireflies in the dim light of the dragon scales. When Akbar said "the explorers never returned", the crisp sound of crystal growth suddenly came from deep in a tunnel, as if some existence was laughing in the dark.

The horizon beyond the sea of ​​sand began to boil.

The sound of tens of thousands of scales rubbing against each other arrived before the black shadow. That was the frequency of death blown by the bone flute of the Ethiopian Lizardman.

Akbar's cloudy eyeballs reflected the spiny dorsal fins surging in the sandstorm - the dust raised by their charge formed a grinning skull totem on the sky, and the silver dragon's outstretched wing membrane refracted the afterglow of the sunset into seven hundred and twenty prisms.

Old Akbar cried out in horror: "Lizard people, it's the Ezebi lizard people!"

(End of this chapter)