The journey to the southern towers was far from smooth.
After leaving the relatively "familiar" desert wreckage zone, the terrain beneath his feet began to grow increasingly bizarre.
The sand was no longer merely grayish-brown, but mixed with large amounts of dark red crystallized grains that resembled congealed blood clots. They made an ear-grating rustling sound beneath his feet.
They also left shallow footprints that gave off faint heat and a bloody stench.
The air was no longer filled solely with the scent of rust and dust. It now carried a sickeningly sweet odor, like rotting nectar mixed with ozone.
This change in environment seemed to have bred different kinds of "residents" as well.
At the edge of a dried ravine riddled with enormous cracks, Ming Xin encountered his first real challenge.
They were not aberrants, but something more abstract and more bizarre—"energy lifeforms," perhaps.
Strange entities formed from Chaos pollution, Geomantic Energy, and perhaps even fragments of lingering emotions.
They looked like masses of ever-changing, semi-translucent dark red gel. Some were as small as washbasins, while others were the size of houses.
Within the gel flickered unstable violet-black Energy Cores, along with shadows of what looked like frozen faces of agony or twisted limbs.
They had no obvious attacking organs, nor did they move by crawling or flying.
Instead, they "flowed" and "slid" across the ground, through the air, and even along rock walls like mercury. Their speed shifted unpredictably, and their paths were impossible to track.
Ming Xin initially tried to go around them, but these "gel monsters" were exceptionally sensitive to life energy and Order fluctuations.
When he was still a hundred zhang from the ravine, the largest mass of gel suddenly "turned" and surged toward him like boiling, viscous blood!
At the same time, the other