Earth's Greatest Magus

Chapter 3069: The Desert

After the battle against Parasite X and its spawns, Emery continued with his plan to scout ahead.

He took Soltz with him and brought him through the Waypoints closest to the Pardera planet.

However, the Waypoint didn’t deliver them cleanly.

The chaotic space surrounding the planets was the reason. Instead of bringing them directly to their destination, it dragged Emery and Soltz through a chain of smaller spatial distortions for several hours.

Unwilling to risk damaging his newly acquired Raven Ship, Emery chose to let their bodies endure the journey instead. Soltz followed his lead, relying on their formidable physiques to withstand the violent forces.

Dozens of wrenching pulls came in rapid succession, each one twisting the space around them further off course. The distortions grew increasingly violent before finally releasing their grip, spitting the two of them out into an open desert like fallen meteors.

The impact was bone-crushing, but their bodies were strong enough to withstand it.

The two slowly rose to their feet, their boots sinking into the golden sand.

"Where are we?" Emery asked, brushing the sand from his shoulders as he squinted against a sun that seemed almost too orange in a sky hazy around the edges.

The easiest answer would have been to reach for the Khaos Star Chart, but when he did, he found the same interference scrambling his reading of their exact position. The star points on the chart drifted slightly whenever he tried to focus on them, refusing to settle into the precise coordinates they should have.

Concerning.

For now, exploration made priority.

The chart’s best estimate placed them somewhere on the western continent, within one of the famous thirteen Yellow Mountain ranges.

Soltz studied the surrounding landscape for a moment longer before slowly nodding, a faintly wistful expression crossing his weathered face.

"I know this region." He turned in a slow circle, taking in the dunes properly. "I spent a few decades of my life out here, actually. Close enough to call it my hometown."

He pointed east, toward a horizon that looked identical to every other direction as far as Emery could tell.

"There should be a town that way. Around a thousand miles out."

Covering that distance would have been trivial with a few spatial gates strung together, but Emery chose to fly instead, using the time to properly survey the terrain for anything worth noticing. At both their cultivation levels, the flight itself would only take an hour or two, and there was value in actually seeing the ground pass beneath them rather than simply skipping over it.

The desert wasn’t empty, at least. Local wildlife made itself known more than once along the way—sand-colored serpents the length of small ships, burrowing creatures that revealed themselves only through disturbed dunes rippling in their wake, and, at one point, a flock of leathery-winged beasts that scattered the moment they sensed the two approaching. Smaller predators fled outright at the first hint of their combined presence, while the larger Desolate-tier beasts stood their ground out of simple stupidity rather than courage.

One particularly massive, scorpion-like creature even reared up to challenge them directly, only for a single strike from Emery’s blade to reduce it to scattered pieces of chitin across the sand. None of the creatures survived beyond that single exchange.

What bothered Emery more than the monsters, however, was everything else. There were no caravans, no watchtowers, and no sign anywhere along the thousand miles of open desert that anyone actually lived in this part of the world.

"It’s a desert, I understand that." He glanced toward Soltz midway through the flight, his voice carrying easily over the rushing wind. "But shouldn’t we have crossed at least some sign of actual people by now? Trade routes, waystations, anything?"

Soltz didn’t answer immediately, and when he finally did, the smile on his face looked forced, stretched thin over something he clearly didn’t want to say aloud.

"This stretch gets hit by major sandstorms three times a year. Maybe we’re just close to one of those periods. People clear out early when they can."

Neither of them fully believed it. The silence that followed said as much.

"We’re here," Soltz finally said some time later, his voice tightening around the words.

Emery’s Divine Sense picked out the shape of the city from thirty miles away—walls easily thirty meters high, unbroken and pale as bone, stretching for miles in either direction and enclosing what had to be one of the three largest cities on the entire western continent.

Valcrest City.

Soltz’s expression had already brightened at the sight of it, hope written plainly across his weathered features at the thought of returning to somewhere close to home after so many decades away. His pace quickened almost without him realizing it.

Emery’s Divine Sense, however, caught the wrongness first, a heartbeat before his eyes could confirm it.

There were no guards. Not a single one anywhere along the massive walls. No watchfires burned along the parapets, and there was no traffic moving through the enormous gates in the distance. They stood wide open, large enough to admit a small army, yet utterly and completely still.

"Let’s stop here."

"What? Why?"

"Mask your presence. We approach carefully from here."

Soltz looked ready to argue, his jaw already set, but he visibly reconsidered and fell in line instead, trusting Emery’s judgment even without understanding it yet. The hope that had brightened his face moments earlier slowly curdled into something more cautious.

What waited beyond the walls confirmed every one of Emery’s instincts.

A city built to house hundreds of thousands of people now stood completely empty. Wide boulevards, broad enough for a dozen carts to travel side by side, remained undisturbed except for the remnants of an ancient battle. Collapsed storefronts still had their goods scattered across the stones, while scorched facades bore the marks of something that had burned hot enough to blacken solid rock. Entire residential blocks had been reduced to rubble, as though something enormous had simply walked straight through them.

Scattered corpses lay where they had fallen, their remains so badly decayed that there was no hope of identifying who they had once been. A market square sat frozen in the aftermath of the destruction, its awnings rotted away and baskets of long-spoiled produce still arranged in careful rows, as if no one had ever returned to clear them.

There wasn’t a single living person anywhere.

Not even the scavenging vermin that a dead city should have attracted by now.

"What—" Soltz’s voice cracked slightly, echoing strangely through the empty streets. "What happened here?"

They pressed on toward the palace at the city’s heart, and the same devastation repeated itself on an even larger scale. Whatever battle had taken place here had ended in total destruction. Towers had been sheared clean through, entire wings of the palace had collapsed into sprawling fields of rubble, and the great iron gates had been torn from their hinges and thrown a considerable distance, as though whatever had come through them hadn’t even bothered to slow down.

There were no survivors left to explain what had happened. Not even the bodies of the defenders remained, as if those who had fought here hadn’t simply died but had been erased from existence altogether.

"Supreme Ilyndra governed this city." Soltz stared at the ruins in open disbelief, his voice tightening with each word as private grief settled over his features. "The Sunveil Sovereign herself... How does something like this happen to a city she ruled?"

Emery let out a slow breath, unease settling deeper into his chest with every passing second as each new detail added weight to a conclusion he desperately wanted to be wrong about.

He’d left Pardera more than three decades ago. Back then, the Scourge had only just begun pressing in from the northern territories, still a distant threat rather than an immediate one.

But between what he was seeing now and the Parasite X they’d fought only the day before, in an entirely different sector of the same realm, the conclusion wasn’t difficult to reach.

Pardera hadn’t simply struggled against the Scourge.

It most likely had fallen to it.

Whether anyone had actually survived that fall remained an open question. There was only one place left worth checking properly.

The capital city of Pardera itself.

If any resistance remained, that would be the place to find it.

"Let’s go."