The gray grit was rough and cold, scraping against his battered energy-form body with a faint rustling sound.
Ming Xin was like a heavily wounded, dying reptile, inching across the boundless, deathly silent desert toward that faint yet stubborn fluctuation.
Every movement tugged at the wounds across his body. Agonizing pain in both soul and body crashed over him in waves, nearly washing away the last of his consciousness.
Yet he clung on through his fixation on the aura of "Shadow Fiend" and his instinct to survive.
The distance was closing, though at an agonizingly slow pace.
The source of that fluctuation lay within the tallest, most twisted black shadow on the horizon.
It looked like the base of a colossal metal mountain that had been violently torn apart.
As he drew closer, he saw more clearly that it was not natural rock, but the severely rusted, collapsed wreckage of some supermassive construct.
Its design vaguely carried the simplicity and grandeur of the Eternal Watchers civilization, yet it was covered in savage cracks and pits as if corroded by powerful acid.
Its surface was blanketed in thick, contaminated rust stain that glimmered with an ominous dark purple light.
This was very likely a fragment of an Ark Heart-class facility that had crashed here, or some other large structure related to it.
That familiar fluctuation was seeping out from a pitch-black crack at the base of the enormous wreckage, half-covered by collapsed metal components and rocks.
The crack was not large, barely wide enough for one person to squeeze through sideways, and its depths were dark and profound.
It gave off a strong stench of rusting metal, along with a clearer fluctuation mixed with shadows and a faint trace of life.
Ming Xin stopped at the entrance, gasping as he cautiously