Agyhaazo was an oasis near the planet's equator, and a strange man had recently arrived there.
He could command a Horned Beast to haul supplies or monster corpses, and he also had a slave girl with him.
His methods were exceptionally brutal. The moment he reached the oasis, he launched a massacre. Even the local administrator, who was infamous for his ruthless methods, didn't dare criticize the strange man.
The strange man was naturally Dan Lei. After arriving in Agyhaazo and collecting the stellar-energy desert vehicle and various supplies purchased for him by the [Minghuo] Trading Company, Dan Lei drove straight out of the city.
Dan Lei knew full well that there was no way he could find a place to set up an array in a major city controlled by the IPC.
Although Dan Lei had earned a fair amount of money selling toy automatons on Luofu and was considered a wealthy man in Golden People Alley, he was nothing in the eyes of the IPC's network.
Agyhaazo might have been remote and of little value, but the [Agyhaazo Aventurine Case] hadn't just cost the Genius Society. More accurately, the Genius Society was simply the biggest loser among the many investors Aventurine had swindled.
So after the incident, the IPC had raked Agyhaazo clean as if exacting revenge.
The property prices in Agyhaazo's major cities had been driven sky-high by all sorts of investors, just so they could sucker a few unlucky fools into buying in.
So Dan Lei hadn't planned to spend much time in those cities. After downloading a map, he drove straight to the surrounding oases.
To Dan Lei, Agyhaazo's environment wasn't quite as harsh as people made it out to be. Both the Cloud Chant Technique and Hydro Magecraft could summon water directly from the air; they simply used more energy than usual.
As for food, with all the desert creatures crawling around, how could he possibly starve? To them, a small creature traveling alone in the desert like Dan Lei was the perfect meal. They'd be lining up to deliver it right to him.
For Dan Lei, the most troublesome thing was that he'd underestimated just how crazy the starship drifters in the lawless gray zones could be.
Can you imagine it? You're driving through the desert, listening to music and eating locally made, charcoal-grilled sandworm jerky, when suddenly you're ambushed by bandits!
These guys played dirty. To avoid triggering the high-energy detectors on high-end vehicles, they buried a metal plate in the sand, then timed it just right and used the simplest lever mechanism to flip the desert vehicle into the air.
Dan Lei said he'd been completely dumbfounded. After climbing out of the vehicle, he refined more than a dozen bandits into Magic Crystals on the spot, then made one of them lead him to their hideout and destroyed it.
But just as a hero who leaves the starting village will immediately find a clue or person to guide him onward...
Dan Lei also came across an unexpected windfall while destroying the bandits' hideout.
A local Agyhaazo girl named Ashley.
The frail girl, barely into her teens, had been branded as a slave by the bandits and sold from place to place. She'd traveled all the way from near the planet's equator to this area, close to thirty degrees north latitude.
The girl might have seen members of the Genius Society who had been active on the planet a few years ago. At a glance, she recognized that Dan Lei was different. The moment she saw him, she shouted in Galactic Standard,
"Sir! I know the legend of the bugs! Save me! I'll take you to them!"
Dan Lei immediately felt that fortune was on his side. Information about Propagation had been impossible to find, yet now it had practically fallen into his lap.
Then Dan Lei promptly hypnotized Ashley and questioned her about everything she knew.
It was just that Ashley knew far less about the Propagation bugs than Dan Lei had imagined.
The girl had never seen any Propagation bugs. She'd overheard members of the Genius Society discussing ancient legends with her grandmother, and what stuck with her was that off-worlders were searching for bugs and would trade food and daily necessities for information about them.
Still, the information Ashley knew about Propagation was somewhat useful. Her tribe had a legend that when a sandstorm covered seven oases at once, the temple of the Insect God would appear among them. If they made offerings at the temple, a new generation of children would come to the tribe.
Honestly, the myth sounded pretty convincing. The local people of Agyhaazo had never left the planet, so there was no way they could have made up such a legend.
A temple belonging to the so-called Insect God, with a ritual that brought about the birth of children—that fit the Path of Propagation perfectly.
Besides, the Genius Society wouldn't have deployed such vast resources based solely on a legend told by a single indigenous tribe. The surrounding tribes must have had more legends, and there might even have been more concrete evidence.
That was why the later [Agyhaazo Aventurine Case] had grown so huge.
But the entire planet had been scanned by now, and the supposed sandstorm must have been included in those scans.
The Genius Society hadn't found any temple of the Insect God, and the IPC must have already dismissed the legend as a rumor.
Still, Dan Lei thought it sounded interesting and decided he could go take a look.
A sandstorm that could cover seven oases meant those oases couldn't be too far apart.
On a planet where most of the surface was covered in wasteland and desert, the presence of oases meant the Ley Lines were active.
An area with seven oases was absolutely an ideal place to set up a Ley Line extraction array.
So Dan Lei took Ashley with him and had her guide him from memory. He'd take her home.
The rest of the journey went about as expected. What roads could a girl barely into her teens remember? She just led Dan Lei around in circles.
Fortunately, Dan Lei knew that no matter which way they went, heading toward the equator was the right choice, so they didn't end up going completely in the wrong direction.
However, along the way, the desert vehicle Dan Lei had bought for a fortune was ambushed and wrecked by a gigantic Horned Beast—a Horned Dragon from Monster Hunter with its wings removed.
So after defeating it, an irritated Dan Lei refined it into a familiar to use as a mount.
It had to be said that as long as it got enough to eat, a Horned Beast could travel across the sand faster than a desert vehicle.
It was also very good at digging. When night came, it could dig out a shelter in no time.
The only problem was that, as the apex predator of this land, it scared away all the "little animals" nearby, severely reducing Dan Lei's success at hunting.
Still, with its help, Dan Lei made it safely to the largest oasis in Agyhaazo's equatorial region recorded by the Jade Abacus.
Dan Lei had been out in Agyhaazo for some time and knew the most efficient way to communicate with people here.
So when he reached the oasis, he went straight after the faction of the first person who provoked him, killing his way through until the gang leader was dead.
That way, no one in the oasis would dare provoke a lunatic reaper who was completely alone.
As for whether Dan Lei might accidentally provoke someone he couldn't afford to offend—
All he could say was that not every place was like Luofu. Pathstriders were extremely rare in the universe.
Agyhaazo was a place the IPC had put to use after writing it off. And treasure hunters who came here were, to put it nicely, treasure hunters; to put it bluntly, they were scavengers.
The entire planet would be lucky to have ten Pathstriders.
And Dan Lei was no longer the same clueless Xiao Bai who possessed the Power of the Path but didn't know how to use it.
Dan Lei could already fight Yan Qing. He might have to think twice before claiming to be the strongest on the entire planet, but he could definitely make the top three.
Before you continue