Boom!
Amid the explosive roar, the massive Puppet Demon City flew at breakneck speed. No one knew how long it flew before it reached an enormous desert.
This was a region where the Great Xiye Kingdom met the Great You Dynasty: a boundless desert, vast beyond measure, nearly half the size of the Five Domains and Eight Wastelands.
The sands of the great desert were like snow; Mount Yan, like a crescent moon. Such were the verses of the ancients. The desert was parched by day, yet at night the moonlight turned bleak, the temperature fell, and it became bitterly cold. Sandstorms frequently erupted across this desolate land. Vegetation was scarce, and there was scarcely any human habitation.
In the distant past, according to legend, the earliest Primordial Buddhist Sect had been born in this stretch of desert.
The Buddhist holy city—Kalinga, the sacred land where Buddhism flourished—also lay within this desert. The Buddha and his many disciples believed the world to be a sea of suffering, perhaps because this dry and hostile land was unfit for human survival.
In that far-off era, the desert had still contained vast expanses of oasis. According to certain Buddhist scriptures and records, the oases of that time were described as pearls scattered amid an endless sea of yellow sand.
Later, those oases dwindled more and more, and the people who lived in the desert grew fewer as well. From within Puppet Demon City, He Ping could sense the barrenness of this land. Even the heaven-and-earth vital energy in the air was less abundant than in other regions.
"The Myriad Dharma Alliance certainly knows how to pick a spot. They actually hid the headquarters of their alliance in this desert..."
According to what Xiao Qianhe had revealed, Jiang Lingxu, the alliance leader, had secretly