Sand Sea Demon's Nest 14 "Magnetic Mountains?" My mechanical watch hasn't been working right for the past two days; it either stops dead or speeds up randomly. I thought the cheap thing had just broken down in the desert. Could it be that we're near those two magnetic mountains?

Anliman also recalled hearing tales of them: two Zaghrama sacred mountains, one red and one white, deep within the Black Desert, rumored to be the burial sites of ancient saints.

Shirley Yang added, "If two such mountains truly exist in the desert, then the Zidou Underground River might be blocked beneath them by the magnetic field. It could be too deep underground for us to find. I think we shouldn't focus all our energy on tracking the river anymore. If the legends and what the British explorer said are true, the Magnetic Mountains should be close. Mr. Hu, we'll need your Celestial Star Feng Shui skills again tonight. Don't forget our prior agreement: finding the lost city of Jingjue will earn you double the reward."

From the start, I hadn't been confident about finding the city of Jingjue. Hearing her say that, I could only agree to try tonight. If I could locate those Zaghrama Mountains, my fee would jump to twenty thousand US dollars. If not, we would have no choice but to turn back.

Truthfully, I couldn't say for certain if I hoped to find Jingjue. After hearing the story of the Jingjue Queen, a mysterious and alluring image had taken root in my mind, refusing to leave. The depths of the desert seemed to exert an invisible, magical pull on me. I wondered if Professor Chen, Shirley Yang, and all those exploration teams who never returned felt the same way I did.

That day felt exceptionally long. I wished I could shoot the sun out of the sky. I dug the sand pit deeper and deeper, yet couldn't feel a trace of coolness.

Even though a thick canvas sheltered the pit and we hid in the shade while our bodies lay in the sand hollow, it still felt like being roasted in an oven. Ye Yixin, being frail, must have been delirious from the heat. She started muttering nonsense in her sleep.

The others worried she had a high fever. When they touched her forehead, it was hot like the sand, making it impossible to tell if she was developing a fever. No matter how much they shook her, she wouldn't wake up.

We still had some water, enough for about five days. We also had two bags of preserved yogurt soup left, which we were saving for the last resort. At this point, we weren't reluctant to use it. I took out a bag and had Shirley Yang feed her a few mouthfuls before giving her some medicine.

After taking the medicine, Ye Yixin gradually calmed down, but she remained unconscious. She was likely suffering from acute dehydration, which was a serious problem. I gathered Professor Chen and the others to discuss the situation the archaeology team was facing.

There were essentially only two paths: one was to start heading back tonight. On the return journey, we’d have to rely on camel meat and brackish water from the sand hollows for the last few days. Even taking route eleven, there was no guarantee of Ye Yixin's survival.

The other path was to brace ourselves and continue searching for Jingjue. If there was a water source in the city, her life might be saved.

Professor Chen stated that the difficulties were immense. Although archaeological pursuits demand dedication, Ye Yixin was so young, and they were responsible for her life. The first path, while safer, meant returning without adequate clean water, making the journey incredibly arduous. The second path was riskier, but they were already near Zaghrama and had a sixty percent chance of finding Jingjue. Those ancient cities should all have underground water veins, though it was unknown if those veins had dried up or shifted over two thousand years. He asked everyone to state their views on what to do next.

Fatty spoke first: "My waistline has shrunk by two full sizes! If we head further into the desert, you guys can just call me Skinny from now on. I suggest we don't stop for a second. As soon as the sun sets, we turn back. Maybe we’ll have half a life left if we do."

Hao Aiguo and Sa Dipeng, being more cautious, also favored turning back.

In contrast, more people believed that trying to find Jingjue, despite the risks, was worth the attempt. After all, they had endured such hardships and paid such a high price to get this far; they truly didn't want it all to be in vain. They also hoped to find clean water in the ruins to save Ye Yixin. Returning and drinking brackish water would be difficult even for the healthy, let alone for her in this severe condition. Turning back was tantamount to sentencing her to death.

Shirley Yang, Chu Jian, the Professor, and I shared this view. Aside from the unconscious Ye Yixin, only old Anliman hadn't expressed an opinion. Everyone's eyes turned to him.

If his opinion was to turn back, it would be a perfect four-to-four split. However, Anliman was the guide, and his decision held considerable weight on this matter.

I turned to old Anliman: "Old man, you must think this through carefully before you speak. Your words affect Ye Yixin's life. What do you think we should do now?"

Old Anliman puffed on his pipe, narrowed his eyes at the sun, and said, "Me? I naturally follow the will of Hu Da. There is only one sun in the sky, and only one almighty true God in the world. Great Hu will guide us."

I pointed to the sky: "Then please ask quickly! What is the Elder Hu Da saying?"

Anliman tapped his old pipe, tucked it back into his belt, took out the tattered blanket, and began praying with sincere reverence. He cupped his palms inward toward his face, reciting verses from the Quran. His expression was devout and solemn, completely unlike his usual shrewd and cunning demeanor.

He mumbled incantations we couldn't understand. As he kept reciting, Fatty grew impatient and asked, "Say, old man, are you ever going to finish?"

Anliman opened his eyes and smiled, "Great Hu has already given us the revelation." He then took out a five-fen coin, showed it to everyone: the side with the character meant to press forward, and the side with the image meant to return the way they came. He asked Professor Chen, the oldest among them, to toss it into the air. The result would be the will of Great Hu.

The group was speechless, half-amused, half-dismayed. Was this how Great Hu delivered his decrees? Professor Chen took the coin and tossed it high into the air. Everyone looked up at the spinning metal. The sunlight was blinding. As the coin fell, it landed edge-on, stuck upright in the sand.

It was an alignment that might happen once in a hundred thousand tosses. Anliman shook his head repeatedly, his face etched with frustration. He had forgotten that this was the Black Desert, abandoned by Great Hu. How could Great Hu possibly guide their path now?

As we were scratching our heads in wonder, we heard Shirley Yang exclaim, pointing into the distance, "My God, are those the Zaghrama Mountains?"

The desert was vast and empty, stretching for a thousand li to the horizon. In the direction she pointed, there was a faint black line at the edge of the world, barely discernible from afar unless one looked closely.

We quickly fetched the binoculars and adjusted the focus. A black mountain range lay across the endless yellow sands like a motionless black dragon, severed in the middle with a pass, matching the features recorded in the British explorer’s notes exactly.

Last year, Shirley Yang's father led an expedition searching for Jingjue using these very clues. Had they seen this sacred mountain? If they had reached this point, what did they encounter? What caused them to disappear without return?

The thought sent a shiver down my spine despite the scorching sun, but the feeling was quickly overcome by the atmosphere of excitement. After a perilous journey, they had finally found the gateway to the ancient kingdom of Jingjue at the very last moment.

However, Anliman had once mentioned that the Black Desert held a dreamlike place prone to mirages, illusions meant to lure people into the abyss of death. Were the twin sacred mountains they now saw real?

On second thought, they probably were. Mirages in the desert were caused by the refraction of light, displaying strange, bizarre scenery that rarely existed in the desert itself. This black mountain range, however, had been mentioned more than once by various sources, suggesting it was absolutely real.

Since they were close to Jingjue, they could set off after dark. But the information they possessed was extremely limited, mostly derived from inference and scattered legends. The only reliable evidence was a blurry black-and-white photograph. Whether they could find Jingjue, or whether such a city even existed, remained uncertain. Perhaps it was all just rumor exaggerated over time—that's often how legends began.

On the Korean battlefield, MacArthur once said, "At the beginning, we thought we knew everything, but later we realized that the truth was we knew nothing." I felt that way now.

Had the ruins of that royal city not been reburied by the sand? Would there be water inside? Was the tomb of the Jingjue Queen within the city or elsewhere? Were there mountains of treasure inside? What exactly was that monstrous queen? Would she still pose a threat to outsiders after her death? Did Shirley Yang's father and his team really die inside the ancient city of Jingjue? Could their remains be found? What did those foreign explorers encounter inside the city? All these remained unknowns to us.

Sand Sea Demon's Nest 15

As evening fell, the archaeology team set off toward Zaghrama.

As the saying goes, you can run a horse to death just by looking at the mountain. They fixed their direction and walked until the middle of the night before reaching the mountain pass. The moonlight was like water, making the desert resemble a vast, silent ocean. Within this sea of sand, the Zaghrama Mountains rose and fell, composed entirely of black stone, becoming more distinct the closer they got.

Calling it a mountain was perhaps less accurate than calling them two massive blocks of black rock. Each giant stone measured about several dozen kilometers in diameter, only exposing a shallow ridge in the sea of sand; the larger portions were buried underground. Perhaps beneath the surface, the two stones were actually connected, and the pass was merely a fissure in the massive rock formation.

This black stone contained magnetite. Although the average content wasn't high, it was enough to interfere with precise navigational instruments. We also felt the metal objects on our bodies gradually growing heavier.

The moonlight provided no reflection off the black rock. The area inside the pass was pitch black. Except for the still-unconscious Ye Yixin, everyone dismounted their camels and proceeded on foot. I warned everyone to keep their eyes sharp; walking through the mouth of this devil’s lair required absolute vigilance.

Anliman and I led the way, with Fatty and Chu Jian covering the rear. Shirley Yang and the others remained in the middle to care for Ye Yixin. The team formed a single file line and slowly entered the valley.

The ancients considered this place a sacred mountain, said to house two saints. This was likely myth, but from a Feng Shui perspective, it truly commanded the landscape, its energy absorbing everything. The black mountain body was like two black dragons guarding the entrance. Burying saints here might be fanciful, but if the tomb of the Jingjue Queen truly lay beyond, it would be entirely plausible.

The Taklamakan is the world's second-largest shifting desert, and as desertification advances, the desert mass is gradually moving south, causing the sacred mountains, once buried deep in the sand, to be exposed again.

The moon reached its zenith, making the north-south oriented valley darker than the five fingers could see. We advanced slowly, sinking one foot deep, then the other. The further we went, the more uneasy we became. Could they truly find the lost city of Jingjue outside this valley? If they found the city, would the water source still be viable? The greatest worry was Ye Yixin’s condition. Her acute dehydration required large amounts of clean, cold saline solution. If they didn't find a water source within three days, her life would surely be lost in the desert.

Our watches had all stopped. We had no idea how long we had been walking. By instinct, I estimated dawn should be approaching soon, when suddenly the camels’ breathing grew heavy, and their demeanor became noticeably agitated.

Old Anliman quickly whistled and shouted, using every trick he knew to calm the herd. His nineteen camels were all prime males, robust and selected as the best of a hundred. They hadn't acted this way even after days in the desert.

The darkness surrounding them, coupled with the camels’ panic, intensified the fear among the team members. Shirley Yang, worried Ye Yixin might be thrown off, quickly helped Hao Aiguo lift her down from her camel.

I called Fatty over, asking him to take on the extra burden of carrying Ye Yixin. This valley was too strange and not a place to linger; they needed to get out quickly.

Fatty was quite willing. Ye Yixin weighed little to begin with; having been exposed to sun and water scarcity in the desert, she was now little more than skin and bones. Besides, carrying a beautiful girl wasn't a bad thing. He hoisted Ye Yixin onto his back as if she were a child, repeatedly urging Anliman ahead to move faster.

However, no matter how Anliman tried to drive them, the camels stubbornly refused to move even half a step forward. Old Anliman started getting superstitious, muttering again that perhaps Great Hu didn't want them to proceed and they should turn back immediately.

With the exit of the valley almost in sight, the others were unwilling to retreat. The team descended into chaos. Shirley Yang said to me, "Could there be something ahead frightening the camels? Let's fire a cold flare ahead to light the area up and see what we're dealing with before deciding."

I agreed from the front, took out a signaling cold flare, lit it, and threw it ahead. It illuminated a small section of the valley ahead: dark stone walls on either side, thick yellow sand on the ground, silent and utterly devoid of vegetation. There was nothing unusual in sight.

I then stepped forward a few paces and threw a second flare. The area lit up, revealing a person sitting on the ground in the distance. We walked over and saw a man wearing a white robe, his head wrapped in a sand-proof turban, a pack on his back, motionless. It was a dead body.

Everyone was startled. Finding a corpse or desiccated body in the desert wasn't surprising, but this one was different. The deceased was a man, his mouth covered by a turban, exposing only his eyes, which were staring fixedly at the sky—a death without closed lids, perhaps because he died too quickly to shut them.

The time of death couldn't have been long ago, possibly within the last few days. The exposed skin was only slightly withered. The strangest part was that his flesh was blue-tinged, emitting faint blue light under the flare's illumination.

Several people tried to crowd closer, but I held them back. This manner of death was too bizarre; they shouldn't approach. Chu Jian suddenly shouted, "Brother Hu, look! There’s another corpse here!"

The skin on my scalp prickled slightly. Two dead bodies in a row—could there be more? I casually threw a few more cold flares, brilliantly lighting up the surroundings. Sure enough, there were more than two bodies. On the ground nearby, four male corpses lay sprawled or slumped over.

These deceased wore identical attire and died in the same manner: eyes wide with terror, their deaths unnatural. Scattered on the ground were several Soviet-made A-47s and some backpacks.

I drew my entrenching tool as a weapon for defense and picked up one of the rifles. The chamber was loaded. Damn it, who were these people? Poachers in Xinjiang usually used foreign Remingtons or Type 56 rifles procured from the military. How could they have Soviet A-47s? Could these be the grave robbers who were after the stone artifacts?

I opened one of the backpacks and found quite a bit of military-grade yellow explosive marked with Russian script. I estimated these munitions had flowed into Xinjiang from Afghanistan and were acquired by these robbers to blast open ancient desert tombs. It wasn't surprising. But how did these heavily armed individuals die inexplicably in this valley?

I used the barrel of my gun to lift the turban from the face of the male corpse sitting on the ground. He had a wide mouth, seemingly caught mid-scream before death. I didn't want to look further. Regardless of who they were, the best course of action was to leave this mountain valley, which seemed like a burial ground, immediately. The explosives might be useful later; I picked up the backpack containing them, preparing to order the group to leave.

At that moment, Hao Aiguo walked out from the group: "It doesn't matter if these people were tomb robbers. We can't just leave them exposed here. Let's carry them out of the valley and bury them. Whenever I see people left to rot in the wilderness, I’m reminded of those comrades who were sent down with me to the clay kilns for re-education. Those comrades died miserably, without even a tattered straw mat to wrap their bodies in... Sigh, I really can't stand seeing this..." As he rambled, he moved to lift the male corpse sitting on the ground.

I was truly alarmed now and rushed over, yelling to stop him: "You damned bookworm, you have no idea what you're doing! Don't touch these bodies!"

But it was too late. A strange snake suddenly shot out of the mouth of that male corpse. Its scales glittered, and it bore a black fleshy crest on its head. About thirty centimeters long, the snake coiled and struck directly at Hao Aiguo’s face.

Hao Aiguo had poor eyesight, and even if he hadn't, his reaction time wouldn't have been fast enough. In that split second, desperate to save him, I didn't have time to think. I swung the entrenching tool in my hand and chopped down, slicing the snake in half.

Hao Aiguo fell back onto the ground, trembling violently, and managed a strained smile at me: "Th-that was too dangerous! Thank goodness..."

Before he could finish his sentence, the severed half of the snake’s head whipped up from the ground with the speed of an arrow released from a bowstring, biting down hard on Hao Aiguo's neck. I had relaxed when I saw the snake cut in two, but I never expected such a sudden attack, leaving me no time to intervene.

Hao Aiguo's face froze. A gurgling sound came from his throat; he tried to speak but couldn't. His skin instantly turned dark blue. He sat perfectly still, dead.

Everyone in the group was stunned. Professor Chen's vision went dark, and he collapsed. Before I could mourn Hao Aiguo, I felt a sudden chill on the back of my neck. I turned my head to see an identical strange snake somehow coiled onto my shoulder, faintly hissing and flicking its tongue. Its entire body contracted slightly backward, its mouth opening, and its body arching, clearly preparing to strike me. This creature moved too fast; at this close range, evasion was impossible.

Only Fatty in the group knew how to shoot a gun, but he was carrying Ye Yixin and had no weapon in his hand. This entire turn of events had been too sudden; the others were equally unprepared. Cold water seemed to splash over my heart. Damn it, I thought, old Hu was going to die here today and never see the morning sun again.