After a thousand unhurried years.
The Scorching Sun hung high overhead.
Amid the golden desert where yellow sand filled the sky.
Roland Deschain, now frail with age.
No longer young as he had once been.
Now looked like an ordinary white male in his fifties.
Though that face ravaged by Suffering Torment remained etched with resolve, the wrinkles on his skin and his graying hair all showed that he was beginning to falter.
Even with his unusual bloodline and the Kai Fu Gong he practiced to prolong his lifespan, the endless years of hardship had still caused an air of decline to rise from him.
However.
His deep blue eyes still shone with a peculiar brilliance, sharper than the gaze of the keenest hawk, as though they could see through the human heart, making others afraid to meet them directly.
The destruction of his homeland, the deaths of his parents, the loss of his beloved, the successive deaths of his friends...
Had long since forged him into a block of hardened iron.
Never again would he be as rash as before.
At this very moment.
He was pursuing someone he had tracked for many years.
A man in a Black Trench Coat.
Ma Teng Broadcloak.
The man who had committed adultery with his mother, then plotted to make him kill her by mistake, leaving him burdened with the sin of matricide.
Furthermore.
Jili's destruction and the death of Roland's father—Steve—were also inextricably linked to that man.
The hatred between them.
Could not be washed clean even by pouring out all the waters of the five lakes and four seas.
Yet the reason he had persistently tracked Ma Teng for so many years was not solely for revenge. The foremost reason was the Dark Tower—the responsibility he bore as The Last