Deep within the Death Sand Sea, heat waves warped the view, and rolling dunes gleamed with blinding gold beneath the fierce sun. Han Li wore an utterly unremarkable ocher cloak, his aura restrained to the Foundation Establishment Middle Stage, and trekked at an unhurried pace like any ordinary traveler of the sands. Rather than use an escape technique, he walked on the strength of his formidable body. Each step sank deep into the scorching sand, leaving faint tracks that the wind soon buried.
He pushed the Profound Yin Qi-Concealing Art to its limit. It not only perfectly concealed his Golden Core cultivation and the aura of his profound fiend power, but also imitated impure spiritual power fluctuations with a slight fire affinity that blended into the desert environment. Even a Nascent Soul cultivator would struggle to notice anything amiss without deliberately scrutinizing him with spiritual sense. He toyed with a positioning compass taken from a Black Fiend Cult member, its needle trembling faintly as it pointed toward the possible location of the Ancient Teleportation Array.
The brief, bloody counterattack three days earlier had not made him lower his guard. He knew full well that the Black Fiend Cult would never let the matter rest. Losing a False Core elder and two Foundation Establishment Late Stage elites would deal a considerable blow to any faction, let alone the Black Fiend Cult, which repaid even the smallest slight. By now, this seemingly boundless, deathly silent sea of sand was probably covered by a net stretching from heaven to earth.
His spiritual sense spread silently like the finest spiderweb. Though suppressed by the desert environment, it could still cover more than a dozen li in every direction. The faint scrape of sand grains, the moan of hot winds sweeping over dune ridges, even