Desert Rhapsody - Chapter 39

Chapter 39

Jiang Yuan had thought she would have to put in some effort, but things did not seem to be unfolding the way she had imagined. Bandits demanding ransom usually would not become this hysterical at the sight of a messenger, nor would they usually travel so far. The place chosen for the exchange was bizarrely remote. Whatever secrets lay behind it, she understood that her current task was to stall for time and help Abal get out of danger. She had brought a bow, arrows, and a saber at her waist, and not so she could hunt something to eat along the way. From the very beginning, she had planned to count Abal as combat strength. The bandits were beside themselves with terror, pointing at the corpse and roaring, “Who is this old man? How did he die? Did you kill him?!”

“I don’t know,” she said coldly. “I don’t know him. When I found this place, that camel was carrying him, and it walked right past me.”

The answer was terrifying-far more terrifying, in fact, than any effect Jiang Yuan had expected it to have. She was even shocked to discover that someone was trembling so hard he had wet himself. …Wasn’t this the kind of excuse only an idiot would believe? The sound of wind behind her grew louder and louder. Jiang Yuan stood still, but everyone saw the horrific scene: the corpse lying among them was suddenly swallowed by sand rolling up from the ground.

The black sand stood out in stark contrast even at night, and in the firelight it looked like a river of black mud. Jiang Yuan thought she had seen wrong, but one of the bandits fell to the ground and began to scream. …The black sand climbed over his body, and at a clear, eerie speed, dragged him whole into the vortex. His body was twisted apart. Inside the clothes that were ripped upward, pale ribs were stained with blood and gleamed.

For two or three seconds, no one reacted. Dead silence fell; even breathing stopped. What broke it was another man’s abrupt cry as Abal snapped his neck. He climbed onto the lead camel and shouted across the distance at Jiang Yuan, “Jia Nan, the stone!”

Without thinking, Jiang Yuan rushed toward them, but the bandit leader opposite her was faster. He bent, snatched up the gemstone, then straightened with a vicious expression. “Come on!” he roared. “Try coming over here!” He brandished his curved blade at her, forcing Jiang Yuan into a standoff. She could only watch as he clutched the gemstone and retreated, step by step, until he bumped into a camel, scrambled onto it in a panic, and fled wildly into the darkness.

“Ah-” Another bone-chilling scream rang out from the other side, an unmistakable warning. The screaming bandits charged at Abal without a shred of reason left, trying to seize a mount and escape with their lives. From his higher position, Abal yanked the reins and charged toward her while cutting people down, knocking over everyone he touched. He bent from the camel and reached out. Jiang Yuan reached back and took his hand, and he hauled her up onto the camel’s back.

Jiang Yuan had never dreamed she would be racing through the Ghost City in the middle of the night. More accurately, she was fleeing for her life on a galloping camel. The ground was rugged and hard, covered in desolate sand. The stone city’s buildings stood one after another, ruined and bleak, buried by history. They really should not have disturbed its peace. At least, that was what Jiang Yuan thought. She did not know what this place was. It could only be a dream of time; if luck held, people thousands of years later might still be able to preserve it. …She thought this while accidentally knocking loose several chunks of sandstone as she wrenched the camel through a sharp turn, her shoulder aching from the collision.

The thought lasted only an instant. The howling wind behind them and the terrifying cries allowed her no time to consider anything more. The moonlight could not illuminate their surroundings at all. Shadows blanketed the earth. Those who could not keep up screamed behind them. The gale whipped up the sand, raising a riot that devoured the weak. If you looked up, you could see the sky overhead looked matted and furred, the moon tinged with blood as it looked down on the Ghost City. She shouted into the wind, “Which way?” Her ability to remember and identify directions was not as good as Abal’s. She could feel him behind her. He quickly glanced back, and immediately, pain shot through the right side of her waist. The rescued Governor of Bakum had turned around again and was loosing arrows behind them with fierce force.

With a sharp whoosh through the air, followed by a scream behind them, the other party’s mount wailed and collapsed to the ground. One after another, the pursuers crashed into a heap. Abal burst into loud laughter. The smugness he still managed to convey through the raging wind made Jiang Yuan want to kill him. His archery was as good as his blade work. His hand reached under her arm and tugged the camel’s reins, his bloody wound brushing against her clothes. Two young, strong camels were still following behind them. He reminded her, “Get down. Switch camels!”

With two people riding one mount, their speed naturally slowed. But that strange sand took time to swallow people too, and the wounded could hold it off for them from behind. Jiang Yuan shouted, “I can’t stop it!” Her stomach, cinched tight beneath her clothes by her belt, burned with pain. Abal seized the reins together with her hand, his grip mixed with sand and sweat and so strong it felt as if he would crush her bones. His other hand reached over too, and he pulled with her. The camel was forced to circle a stone pillar once, then a second time. Finally, in pain, it stopped and simply bleated, burying its head in the ruins.

Abal said calmly, “Get down. Change camels!” The screams behind them were drawing closer and closer; calling them the summons of death would not be an exaggeration. They cut the reins from this camel, and then he helped Jiang Yuan onto another. Its head was buried in the sand, so with a single push she could climb up. From above, Jiang Yuan looked down at him and said, “I don’t think this is the way out.” The ruined walls around them were growing more and more magnificent. The giant pillars built from stone blocks and the painted statues that flashed past from time to time all showed that this was probably not an exit route. The dead were watching them. For an instant, Jiang Yuan saw a deep, narrow passage, stairs rising straight upward, and in the dimness, the deceased staring at them.

She blinked. The illusion flashed past and vanished. In the hazy light, she saw Abal grin. “That’s right. It isn’t,” he said. “But I am heading outside!” He could still laugh. He drove his blade into the camel’s haunch. The camel shrieked and scrambled to its feet in panic. He pulled out his dagger and stabbed again, then neatly flipped up to land behind Jiang Yuan. This was a dromedary, forcing them to press tightly together. The stench of sweat and blood assaulted Jiang Yuan’s nose. The bow and arrows took up space, so he threw them aside. The camel staggered forward and began to flee for its life. The sandstorm swept to their feet like the surging River Styx, swallowing the previous camel whole.
They kept sprinting through the night, and soon they could no longer hear even a single scream. It did not feel much better than when they had been running for their lives before. In this megalithic city that belonged to the dead, only the camels’ breathless, wretched cries remained. Before long, they switched to another camel, dragging the reins so the first one could barely follow behind. But not much later, both camels knelt on the ground in terror and refused to take another step.

When Jiang Yuan slid down from the camel, she had the feeling that the entire city was looking down on them.

There was nowhere for them to run.

The buildings before them loomed in shifting silhouettes. All around them stood man-high boulders, stacked into increasingly magnificent stone pillars that clearly had nothing to do with the city gate. There was no point thinking about that now. She said, “What about the sand?” She even felt as if she could not speak too loudly, afraid she might disturb the Devil beneath the earth. To think she was actually using the word Devil now.

Abal lowered his voice as well. “I don’t know.”

After running for half the night, he was already injured and running out of strength. She had not rested properly either; stars swam before her eyes, and she was on the verge of collapse. To hell with the sand. They slaughtered the injured camel, cut off some meat, then supported each other as they stumbled onward, one step sinking deep, the next shallow. After a while, Abal suddenly stopped. He seemed to look around in the darkness, as if he could no longer tell where he was. Jiang Yuan heard him ask by her ear,

“Did you see that just now?”

She remained silent. He was silent for a moment too, then said, “Let’s find a place first.”

A place was easy enough to find. Any building that had not yet collapsed would do; they could curl up inside for warmth. Their frantic dash had left them covered in cold sweat, and the Gobi was much colder at night to begin with. When their skin brushed against each other’s, both of them were icy cold.

What they had seen was indeed the same place: a long, narrow passage, as though it led to the underworld. Abal briefly told her what had happened along the way and about the gemstone, and only then did Jiang Yuan learn for the first time that the gem had come from a tomb robbery. Memphis. A tomb. A ruby. If it had not been pried out of a pyramid, she would swallow the gem whole. So was this a case of thieves turning on thieves?

Fuck. If that was really what had happened, then Jiang Yuan, who was sitting here exposed to the elements, having gone through countless dangers and still forced to run for her life in the middle of the night, felt profoundly, sincerely, and extremely pissed off.

Abal said, “Lift up your clothes.” She paused, then did as he said without expression. Neither of them could see clearly; it was too dark. Jiang Yuan felt his fingers, gritty with sand, brush over her stomach. She instinctively flinched, because the burning sensation surfaced all too clearly again. In the darkness, Abal asked, “Do you feel anything?”

She pressed a hand to her forehead. She was already dizzy, and now she felt even dizzier. She took a deep breath, feeling as though in the silence, her heartbeat could leap right up to her ears. “What difference does it make if I feel something?” Abal said, “I feel it too. Here.” He paused for a while. “This can’t be some contagious disease, can it?”

Jiang Yuan said expressionlessly, “I’ve never heard of any contagious disease that makes your skin turn transparent so you can see your internal organs. If there is one, it’s probably terminal.”

After seeing that man-eating black sand earlier, who would still think this was a contagious disease? What kind of contagious disease could swallow people out of thin air? “So it’s a curse, then.” Jiang Yuan said coldly, “Looks like a curse. The curse of the pyramids is famous enough.” …It was not that hard to accept, considering how she had come here in the first place. Abal laughed in the darkness, as if he was not afraid at all, and not the least bit guilty for dragging her into this. “The two of us getting cursed together is pretty romantic, isn’t it?” He pushed her. “Go. Hurry.”

Jiang Yuan jolted in alarm. “Abal?!” This was the first time she had called his name since they met. Abal repeated, “Go!” He shoved the knife and meat into her hands and tried to push her away. Jiang Yuan swatted him off on instinct, then straightened and reached for his legs. Abal said, “Are you stupid?” The sand was flowing, wrapping around her hand and his lower body. Jiang Yuan paused, then said calmly, “Looks like it’s too late.” Her hand was caught with him, unable to pull free, so they could only sit down and lean against each other. She heard him sigh in the darkness. “From the first time I saw you, I knew you were a stubborn idiot.” She shot back, “Same to you, you greedy bandit chief.”

Strangely enough, waiting for death did not feel that unbearable. Maybe it was because they had been running wildly all this time and she still had not quite come back to herself. He leaned close to her and whispered, “I have an idea. Why don’t you consider doing it with me, and then, like every woman who has a man by her side before she dies, you can die here fulfilled and happy?”

If Jiang Yuan could have grabbed the knife and butchered him, she would have done it long ago. Her answer was to kick him. He laughed and let the momentum carry him onto the ground. Jiang Yuan could not react any further, because the hallucination came again. She was walking through a tunnel, climbing upward the whole way, the narrow stone walls seeming ready to crush a person to pulp. At last, she reached a flat summit, a wide open space. Heaven and earth were dim, and a stone statue that pierced the sky lowered its head to look down at her, as if it wanted to grind her into flesh and blood. On its chest, the gemstone was as red as blood.

She could not move. Her body had been swept into a whirlwind. All she could feel was Abal holding her hand. He watched her in the darkness, or perhaps he could not see her either. Reality and illusion wove together until she could no longer tell what was real. The sand rolled up to his chest. She could feel him disappear, the strength in his hand suddenly loosening. When the spiral of sand wound up to her neck, one final sentence lingered in the air.

“Thank you for coming to save me, my dear Jia Nan.”

Sleep, sleep.

Thank you to the little angels who voted Overlord Tickets or watered me with nutrient solution~

Thank you to the little angel who watered me with nutrient solution:

Eat Apples, 10 bottles;

Thank you all so much for your support. I will keep working hard!