But no matter how closely we looked, there seemed to be nothing remarkable there. At first, we remained wary of quicksand, but eventually, we discovered the sand layer was incredibly stable.

Daxiong spun around a few times on the spot, scratched his head, and declared, "This is strange; everything here seems perfectly normal."

I nodded, squatted down, and began to dig into the sand layer to see beneath. Daxiong held his pistol ready, standing guard for me.

I carefully scooped away the sand, bit by painstaking bit. After digging down perhaps half a meter, a dark object suddenly appeared before my eyes.

I gasped in shock, a cold sweat immediately breaking out on my forehead. I turned to Daxiong and whispered, "This looks like a human head!"

Daxiong rushed over for a look and let out a sharp intake of breath himself.

The object buried in the sand was generally spherical. The hairs were only an inch long and very sparse. Its skin was dark green, desiccated, and covered in wrinkles, yet it possessed no discernible facial features—it was profoundly horrifying.

Daxiong, bolder than I, after a moment of stunned surprise, drew the dagger from his waist. He scraped away the fine sand covering the object's 'head' and poked it with the tip of the blade. A stream of thin, greenish, viscous fluid immediately seeped out from beneath the skin.

We stared at it for a while, then Daxiong burst out laughing. "Comrade Xiao Nie, are you completely losing it? That’s just a withered cactus! As a biologist, how could you miss that?"

I leaned closer and couldn't help but be surprised; it really was a cactus!

I remarked that this was highly unusual. There are no native wild cacti in the deserts of China; they are only found in the deserts of the Americas and Australia. Could it have been transplanted here artificially? And if so, by whom?

Furthermore, the size and shape of this cactus were too eerily similar to a human head, especially the spines, which were twisted due to desiccation, making them look remarkably like human hair.

Since we lacked the proper tools on hand, we couldn't dig any deeper, so we decided to return and figure things out later.

Daxiong and I packed up our gear. Checking my watch, it was already past one in the morning. We started climbing back up the dune, preparing to make our way back.

Reaching the crest of the dune, Daxiong couldn't resist looking back one last time. He froze instantly, nearly tumbling backward down the slope in fright.

I asked him what was wrong, but he didn't answer. He told me, "Wait for me here a moment, something's wrong down there."

Having rushed out in the evening, I hadn't remembered to put on my glasses, so when I peered down the slope, I could only see darkness.

Daxiong slid halfway down the dune and stopped, looking around the spot where he had paused.

From a distance, I faintly heard him mutter, "Damn it, impossible..."

Seeing him remain rooted there, I felt compelled to slide down and see what the commotion was. Just then, I saw Daxiong pull his pistol from his lower back.

Pop-pop! Two sudden gunshots tore through the silence of the night sky, and my whole body jerked.

Daxiong fired twice, then scrambled back uphill using all fours, shouting frantically back at me, "Run! That thing is climbing out of the pit!"

I hesitated, finding it unbelievable, and instinctively took a step back. My foot landed on the yielding sand of the dune, I lost my balance, slipped, and started tumbling down the other side.

I felt a dizzying disorientation, spinning an unknown number of times before finally coming to a stop.

The moment I steadied myself, I saw Daxiong rolling down toward me like a ball of flesh. I quickly sidestepped, narrowly avoiding him.

I rushed over to help him up. Panting heavily, he managed to say, "Go! Go now! There are too many of them—I don't know what kind of ghastly things they are!"

With no time for further thought, we bolted across the desert.

But after running only a few steps, we heard a muffled thump not far ahead, and a plume of yellow sand shot up more than two meters high.

Daxiong urgently grabbed my arm, gasping for breath, "Hold it! Something's not right."

We stood still, sweat beading on our foreheads, but the area around us suddenly grew quiet again.

Daxiong looked back over his shoulder, and I heard him whisper lowly, "Oh God, we're done for!"

I turned to look back too and saw dark, writhing shadows moving across the dune behind us—countless, dense shapes.

They moved with a lizard-like gait, but their form resembled a human shape, albeit with very long tails. They were large, and on their backs were two white spots resembling eyes.

These creatures moved incredibly fast; some even rolled down the slope. The nearest one was less than twenty meters away.

Seeing those things rapidly crawling toward us, I tugged at Daxiong's sleeve and urged, "What are you waiting for? Shoot!"

Daxiong made a shushing gesture, telling me to be quiet, then turned his head to scan the surroundings, murmuring, "Don't you feel it? There's movement under the sand—a massive one right beneath our feet. If you move, or even make a sound, we’ll be swallowed just like those camels..."

Hearing this, I managed to calm my breathing and focused on sensing the vibrations in the ground.

Indeed, I felt a faint, almost imperceptible tremor rising from beneath my soles. Though subtle, it was far too substantial for anything small.

I inwardly wondered: What was it? A giant snake or a scorpion? Perhaps a colossal earthworm? How could such a massive creature exist in this food-scarce desert? What did it eat?

As these thoughts raced through my mind, the back of my shirt grew soaked with sweat.

By then, the swarm of lizard-like things had rushed to within five or six meters of us. A foul odor, like crushed vegetation, washed over us.

I whispered to Daxiong, "Let's run. Staying here is just a question of who eats us."

Daxiong signaled me to wait, then pointed ahead.

Looking forward, I instantly became startled, for those humanoid-lizard things had stopped exactly five meters in front of us and lined up shoulder to shoulder.

At that moment, I saw clearly: these were not people, but indeed enormous lizards. It was only because their heads were relatively small, their faces shorter than typical lizards, and their necks long and slender that they gave a vaguely human appearance. I had been misled by preconceived notions.

But even as lizards, they were extraordinary. First, lizards of this massive size are exceedingly rare; even the world’s largest Komodo dragon wouldn't surpass them in bulk, and there are no such large lizards within Chinese territory.

Based on my knowledge and experience, I could not classify which family these lizards belonged to.

But watching the countless spines on their heads erect, I realized the cactus we had dug up earlier must have been one of these creatures—and that fool Daxiong had poked its 'head' with a knife.

Lizards are cold-blooded. They are generally more active during the heat of the day and typically hibernate in the sand at night, as the ground retains some warmth.

Unless severely provoked by an external force, these cold-blooded animals usually wouldn't attack people at night. We had clearly run into the worst kind of bad luck by digging one up.

The group of lizards hissed, the white patches on their necks swelling slightly, perhaps as a warning, or perhaps expressing anger. They surrounded us but kept a cautious distance.

We were trapped. I recalled descriptions from typical novels where, upon encountering a strange creature, the protagonists often escape because its natural predator suddenly appears, leading to a fight that allows the heroes to slip away. While this trope is cliché, it isn't without merit.

Every species has a predator, and they must coexist in the same environment—it is the law of nature: predator and prey.

If there truly was some colossal creature beneath the ground, and it preyed on these lizards, I couldn't imagine what else it would eat to sustain itself.

However, reality seemed to diverge from fiction. The lizards waited only a moment, then one particularly massive specimen let out a high-pitched cry, and the others immediately charged.

Hearing the scratching sounds of countless sharp claws tearing at the sand, and watching the multitude of dark shapes surge toward us, my scalp nearly exploded. I couldn't worry about anything else; I grabbed Daxiong and we fled.

As we ran forward, I kept hoping the behemoth underground would suddenly erupt and engage the swarm of giant lizards in battle. But after we ran more than twenty meters, there was no further sound from beneath the earth.

It was then I remembered something my mother had told me: when encountering fierce animals in the wilderness, never try to outrun them; two legs can never beat four.

Just as I thought that, a sticky object shot out from behind and wrapped itself around Daxiong’s neck.