The sand changed color.
From regular yellow-orange, it had now fully shifted to orange sand. And that sand stretched for nearly 10 kilometers uphill in front of Alex.
It had taken him 2 days to come here, but he had done it.
He had finally arrived at the Sand Wall.
The large stretch of sand slope appeared like a mountain from far away, but this close, it was just something he had to climb. He had no clue why the slope was this large, and just how much higher the sand was going to go, but to reach the Inner desert, he had to cross this sand wall.
Alex thought of flying straight to the top, but because the monsters around this location were supposed to be stronger, he decided to test his strength with them and see just how much stronger they actually were.
He had been walking for just a few minutes when the sand shifted and a large scorpion beast appeared from within the orange sand. It was much larger than any beasts Alex had seen before, so he prepared to fight it.
He brought out his sword and with a sudden dash, he charged for it.
Alex fought the beast for a few seconds, gauging its strength. Based on his understanding, the beast was physically as strong as the Extolites he had fought. But because it had no sapience, it could do nothing with its strength.
So despite how strong it was, Alex managed to defeat it in a few attacks.
Alex cut apart the scorpion and took away its blood. He then took away its beast core and Sunheart. With it being such a strong beast, Alex wondered how many of these he would have to kill to improve his blood aura.
Surely not that many.
As he continued walking, in half an hour, he reached halfway up the sand wall, meeting another beast. To his surprise, this beast was slightly stronger than the last one.
This time, he had to kill it using his Endless Severing Strike to cut it in half. That drained him a little.
Once Alex took away the beast core and Sunheart from the beast, he continued on.
As he reached closer to the top, no more beasts appeared at all, which surprised him quite a bit. From what he had heard, the reason why people didn’t come close to the Sand Wall was because it would be teeming with strong beasts.
And yet, he had only seen 2 the whole climb.
‘Do they only come out at night?’ he wondered. But beasts with Sunheart didn’t come out at night. Only regular beasts did, and the ones he had heard about were clearly beasts with Sunheart.
‘Was that old information, or just plain wrong?’ Alex thought. When he reached the top, he finally got his answer.
It was neither.
Standing at the top of the Sand Wall, Alex looked down below at a scene of carnage before him. The level of sand remained at this height now, only slightly heading down far in the distance.
But right before him, dead beasts littered the sand. Corpses piled on top of one another, the orange sand dyed red from their blood.
There was no movement among the beasts. No sound. All that was there was the soft howling of the wind at the top of the Sand Wall and the thick scent of blood.
Alex slowly flew up, trying to see more. As he did, he came to realize that there was in fact a valley right before him. Just a little ahead, the land sloped downward, creating a valley. And yet Alex could not see that valley at all for it was filled to the top with corpses.
‘How many beasts died?’ he wondered. It reminded him of the time when he came out of the spatial anomaly in the sky and had to fight so many beasts to leave.
‘But it is daytime. These beasts should all have Sunhearts,’ Alex thought.
He couldn’t fathom what had to happen for so many beasts to die. His best guess was that two beasts had started fighting and more had come out to fight as a result.
‘Everything is dead,’ Alex thought, his eyes slowly gleaming with happiness. This was all for his taking.
Sunhearts and beast cores were one thing, but to collect the blood aura from this many beasts was not something Alex could miss out on.
“I can’t let all of this go to waste,” he thought and immediately walked toward the corpses. He climbed through the bodies of the many, trying to get toward the center where the blood would have gathered.
He wished the blood didn’t seep into the sand too much and actually pooled enough for him to draw from it. As he arrived at the center, Alex started moving the corpses away to get further below.
But when he pulled the very first corpse, only half of it came off, the other half remaining intact.
Alex looked at the corpse with a frown. He checked on the location where the beast had been torn into two, and to his surprise, it hadn’t been torn at all. Instead, it had been cut in half.
A perfect cut.
The world spun around Alex suddenly, completely beyond his understanding. As it spun, his vision spun along with it until he saw his own body and the severed neck.
“Huh?”
His vision dimmed and Alex died.
A new head grew from where Alex’s neck had been severed. As his vision returned, he saw his head falling down through the cracks in the corpses.
“What the hell—”
The world spun again and this time, Alex had been cut from his chest.
His body regrew once again from the portion that had the dantian. As soon as Alex regenerated, he turned in the direction where he had been attacked from.
As he did, his neck was cut again, his head flying off.
And as it did, he saw the figure far away.
A woman with white skin and black hair.
Death.