At the desert's edge, two figures in white robes walked out of a shop in the Wilderness Wanderers Camp.
"We left so early. I wonder how the other teams' missions went," the figure on the left said slowly, raising his head to glance at the setting sun. "Did they retrieve Bode's remains? If things went according to the original plan, they should have arrived by now."
"Their missions are their own business," the figure on the right said, lowering his head. "Whether they completed them or not, they're late now, and we can't wait for them. We still have a long way to go."
"Right." The figure on the left lowered his head and nodded slightly.
They stopped talking and trudged forward.
Standing atop the fighter jet in the desert, He Ao raised his head and gazed ahead.
A piercing cry swept across the distant sky, then swiftly faded into the distance.
To He Ao's right, the blazing sun still shone upon the golden sand.
Ahead of him, however, lay a vast expanse of blackness.
It was not darkness that swallowed light, but the appearance of a place the light had never reached.
The sunlight seemed to deliberately avoid that region-or rather, the sun was absent from it.
As the sandworm rapidly approached, He Ao could just make out the sky over that black region.
Faintly twinkling stars hung overhead, illuminating the sand below with exceedingly dim light.
It was as though a hole had been torn in the sky, leaving nothing but darkness inside.
There was no moon in that darkness, nor any of the stars familiar to this world. It looked like the starry sky of another world.
Clearly, this Lightless Land covered a vast area. What He Ao was approaching was merely its edge.
Yet even at