Although the vast sea of sand stretched for over twenty million kilometers, at a glance it seemed like a yellow hell devoid of life and impossible to cross. Yet for a landing craft cruising at supersonic speed within the atmosphere, conquering this forbidden wasteland took only a dozen minutes or so.
In fact, it had taken nearly half an hour. While passing through the middle of the desert, Yu Lian had spotted enormous remains scattered near a dune and asked to land so he could take a look.
The broken remains were so huge that each shattered shell, if flattened out, could have covered a whole football field. Yet there was not a trace of anything inside those black shells—not flesh, fiber, bodily fluids, or any other biological tissue.
This really was how Shalli's insect descendants operated: they wasted nothing. If most of the Erakos sandworms' shells weren't as hard as battleship armor and already imbued with occult properties—making them impossible for the insects to digest for now—they probably wouldn't have spared even those.
"The Chancellor's Office spent over a billion gold dragons bringing these sandworms here," Miss Naelhana said regretfully. "Unmodified originals, the true native sandworms. There are only a handful of successful cases of raising them on other planets throughout the Empire, and now they're all gone."
Many years ago, the Erakos sandworm had been considered sacred by the locals, even worshipped as a deity. It would never have been reduced to livestock. So the Empire had spent centuries spreading Twelve Things to Know About Raising Sandworms throughout the universe. It was telling everyone: I can damn well raise dragons, so what's a mere insect?
The sandworms successfully raised on other planets in the Empire, such as the ones Yu Lian had encountered on Gumea, had all undergone