CHAPTER 46: THE TEMPEST DJINN

The Crystalline Hive had been full of constant action. The Sunken City had been full of mystery and danger.

This place was just... empty. He also felt on edge. The emptiness felt unnatural.

Even for a Labyrinth, this was too quiet. It felt as if the world was holding its breath, waiting for something terrible to happen.

He thought about the new powers he had gained in the sunken city. He had bonded with the Water element.

He could feel its potential sleeping inside one of his micro-dantians, waiting for him to reach the next cultivation realm to awaken it.

He had also gained the Gills of the Void lifeskill. It was useless here, in this dry, waterless world. Still, it was good.

"Is this entire place just sand?" Rhys asked, breaking the long silence. He was getting tired of walking and seeing nothing but the same endless view.

"For now," Yuki replied. Her answers were as cryptic as always. Rhys felt a familiar wave of frustration.

"What does that mean?"

"It means the sand is not all there is," she said.

She stopped walking and pointed towards the horizon. Rhys looked in the direction she was pointing. In the far distance, he saw a dark shape.

At first, it looked like a low mountain range on the edge of the world. But it was moving. It was a solid wall of black clouds.

It was growing larger, and it was moving towards them with incredible speed. It was a massive hurricane.

A swirling vortex of black sand and dark energy. It was so big that it touched the pale sky. It moved across the desert like a hungry god, swallowing everything in its path.

The ground beneath their feet began to tremble. A low, rumbling sound reached them. It was the sound of a thousand storms at once, a deep and angry roar that shook his bones.

Rhys felt a surge of adrenaline. His boredom was gone, replaced by a thrilling sense of danger.

Yuki pulled him down.

She created a huge cage of ice around them. The hurricane was almost upon them. The wind was so strong it felt like a physical wall.

Even with the protection of the ice cage, it tore at their clothes and filled the air with stinging, flying sand that felt like tiny needles against his skin.

The sky turned black. The world became a chaotic mess of wind and noise. Rhys felt the immense pressure of the storm trying to crush him.

[System analysing...]

[The Tempest Djinn detected.]

[Bloodline: Tyrant.]

[Cultivation: Stage 1 (Peak).]

[Status: Deceased.]

[Description: This entity is a walking storm, the memory of an army of wind elementalists.]

Rhys rolled his eyes. A Tyrant? Nothing special, I have seen a Titan.

’Why the fuck is every dead monster wandering the labyrinth rather than resting eternally?’

The owner of this labyrinth had a strange kink, that was for sure. This Labyrinth was a graveyard of ancient, powerful beings.

The Titan Golem in the Ashen Plains. The Leviathan in the Sunken City. And now this Tempest Djinn in the Rolling Sands.

He finally understood where the Wind Element Ball he had found had come from. It was a piece of this creature’s very soul.

The crystal ant had somehow found a tiny piece of it and bonded with it, gaining its sound-based powers.

How had it reached the whispering caverns?

’Maybe there is another path.’

That was it. But the System’s next analysis was even more shocking.

[Cross-referencing energy signatures with previously analysed entities...]

[Conclusion: The Tempest Djinn is in a state of perpetual, instinctual flight. Its movement pattern is a direct reaction to the path of the Titan Golem from the Ashen Plains.]

Rhys felt his mind trying to process the incredible information. The two dead monsters were locked in an eternal, unconscious chase.

The Titan Golem walked slowly and unstoppably across its domain. The Tempest Djinn, a creature of pure wind and air, felt the heavy, oppressive presence of the Titan and instinctively fled from it.

Its path of escape created the hurricane. The hurricane was not hunting. It was running.

And in that moment, Rhys understood everything. The desert was not empty. The monsters were not gone.

They were just like him and Yuki. They were hiding. They were waiting for the storm to pass.

The storm raged for what felt like an eternity. Rhys and Yuki stayed hidden inside the ice cage. The wind and sand roared over their heads.

He could feel the ground shaking. It was like being at the bottom of an angry sea. Then, as quickly as it had arrived, it was gone.

The hurricane passed over them and continued its endless journey across the desert. The wind died down. The black clouds disappeared into the distance.

The pale blue sky returned. The desert was silent once more. But it was no longer empty. The landscape had changed completely.

The dunes had been reshaped by the powerful wind. Old dunes were gone, and new ones had been created. And from beneath the new dunes, the monsters of the desert began to emerge.

The sand all around them started to shift and move. A chorus of strange, chittering and scraping sounds broke the silence.

It was the sound of hundreds of creatures digging their way to the surface. Rhys and Yuki stood up. They looked around at the shifting sands.

They had survived the storm, but now they were in a nest of hungry monsters.

The creatures that emerged were like scorpions. Their bodies were made of a cloudy, semi-transparent glass.

Fine, white sand was visible inside their glass shells, swirling around like the sand in an hourglass. They had six sharp, glass legs and a long, curved tail with a sharp, pointed stinger.

Their pincers were like shards of broken glass.

[Glass Scuttler detected.]

[Bloodline: Ordinary.]

[Cultivation: Stage 1 (Low).]

[Description: A desert predator that lives beneath the sand. Its glass-like exoskeleton is brittle but very sharp. They are simple-minded pack hunters that attack any source of life they detect.]

The first Scuttler let out a high-pitched chittering sound. It was a signal. In an instant, hundreds of the glass monsters swarmed towards them.

The desert was no longer silent. It was filled with the sound of scraping glass and hungry clicks.

"There are too many," Yuki said, her voice calm but serious.

"Just a warm-up," Rhys replied, a grin spreading across his face.

He used Shadowed Dive. His body became a black blur, and he shot into the middle of the swarm. His dagger moved like lightning.

With every strike, a Glass Scuttler shattered into a cloud of sand and broken glass. He was a whirlwind of death in the centre of the monster pack.

Yuki acted at the same time. She did not waste energy on big attacks. She waved her hands, and sharp, black ice spikes shot up from the sand.

They impaled dozens of Scuttlers, freezing them in place before they could even reach her. The fight was a chaotic dance.

Rhys was the fast, close-range killer. Yuki was the long-range defender. They worked together perfectly. For every Scuttler Rhys killed, Yuki killed ten more.

But the monsters were endless. For every hundred they killed, two hundred more seemed to crawl out of the sand.

The ground was covered in broken glass and purple lifespan crystals, but they had no time to collect them.

’How about we run?’