The sand hit before he could finish the word.
A dense, scorching curtain swallowed the world whole. It slammed into his face, his hair, his eyelids. Forced its way into his collar and slid down his back, sticking to sweat like glue. It scraped across his cheeks and packed itself between his teeth.
He tasted minerals. Heat. Dryness so intense it felt like it was peeling the inside of his mouth.
He spat. Coughed. Wiped his eyes with shaking hands and only made it worse, grinding grit into his lashes.
"Shit. Shit. SHIT."
His own voice sounded small. Pathetic.
Something deeper than instinct screamed at him. Not from his ears. From somewhere older. A primitive alarm that existed before language, before thought. The kind of signal that didn't bother explaining. Just one word.
Run.
The two colossi locked in battle behind him didn't need eyes to sense an ant crawling too close. A sand golem the size of a fortress. A deathworm at least fifteen meters long, its segmented body whipping through the air with every strike. The shockwaves from their collision rolled across the desert like artillery fire.
The good part? Neither cared about him. He was background noise. A grain of sand in someone else's apocalypse.
The bad part? There was nowhere to disappear. Flat dunes stretched for kilometers. No cliffs. No walls. No ridges. Just open exposure in every direction.
If either of them decided he was worth even a lazy swipe, there wouldn't be enough left of him to identify.
Breathe.
He forced air into his lungs. The sand scratched all the way down, like inhaling powdered glass.
Okay. Calm down, Yan Ye.
The system wouldn't drop me somewhere with a zero percent survival rate on my first day...
Right?
...Right?
His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth.
The quest said survive three hours. That was it. He didn't need to win. Didn't need to explore. Didn't need to fight. Just keep breathing until the timer hit zero.
Simple. Not easy.
Distance. That was the only variable he could control. Put as much sand between himself and that battlefield as possible.
But where? Every dune looked identical. Beige death under a merciless sky.
BOOOOM.
The sound snapped something inside his head. He didn't think. Didn't calculate. His body chose for him. He turned and sprinted in the exact opposite direction of the fight, legs pumping before his brain fully processed the decision.
Fuck it. Just run.
For a few seconds, hope whispered that maybe this would work. Maybe if he ran far enough, the desert would forget he existed. Then reality corrected him. The ground kept trembling with every distant impact. The vibrations traveled through his bones like a drumbeat. Behind him, the golem and the worm exchanged blows that sounded like the sky fracturing.
He didn't look back. Looking back was how prey died.
Sand dragged at his shoes. Heat crawled up his calves. His breath came out ragged and uneven, already too dry.
Two kilometers in, his lungs started screaming.
Three kilometers, and his throat burned so hard he tasted iron.
He kept going. Stopping meant thinking. Thinking meant panic.
Around five kilometers, his body finally revolted. His legs turned to rubber. He stumbled once. Twice. Then collapsed face-first into the sand like someone had cut his strings.
For a long moment he couldn't even roll over. Just lay there, cheek pressed against scorching grains, dragging air into his chest like it was rationed.
His ribs ached. His heart pounded so hard it felt like it might bruise his insides.
"System," he croaked.
A translucent blue panel bloomed into existence above him.
Main Panel / Quests / ??? / ??? / ??? / ...
The Quests tab pulsed faintly. He tapped it.
Limited Time Quest
Survive for 3 hours in the Ruins of Zarathen
Time Remaining: 2 hours 23 minutes
Reward: ???
Failure: Death. (It should be obvious.)
A laugh clawed its way out of his throat. Dry. Brittle.
"Wow. So considerate."
The panel didn't react.
He was about to close it when he noticed something. Ruins of Zarathen was highlighted. Like a link.
He tapped it.
Ruins of Zarathen
Located in the world of Zarathos. The Ruins of Zarathen are the remnants of tens of thousands of years of a civilization that dominated the world for many eras. But that civilization came to an end with the arrival of a catastrophe...
...
Death Rate: 99%
His finger froze mid-air.
"...Ninety-nine?"
That has to be long-term statistics. Years. Decades of accumulated data.
Not three hours.
There's no way that means—
The sand beneath him moved.
Not distant tremors. Not echoing impacts. Directly under him. Violent. Rhythmic. Like something massive was sprinting through the earth.
His breath stopped.
The desert bulged in the distance like it was inhaling.
Then it split.
Something exploded upward, dragging an avalanche of sand behind it like a cloak.
And it kept rising.
And rising.
And rising.
His mind went completely blank.
A deathworm. Not the one fighting the golem.
This one was different.
Its segmented body tore through the sky, blotting out the sun. Sand cascaded off its sides in roaring waterfalls that crashed back into the dunes hundreds of meters below. The air turned into a screaming haze. It just kept climbing, segment after segment after segment, an armored column of flesh so vast it looked less like a creature and more like the earth itself had decided to stand up.
His pupils shrank so hard it hurt.
That's not a monster. That's a natural disaster with a spine.
Then it stopped ascending. For half a second, it hung there. Coiled in impossible mass against the white sky. A shadow that covered the desert from horizon to horizon.
Then it dropped.
Straight down.
Too fast.
It fell like a spear driven by a god's hand.
The worm vanished beneath the surface.
Fourteen seconds.
Fourteen seconds where his brain refused to function.
Then—
BOOOOOOM.
The impact detonated across the desert. The shockwave hit him like a truck. His teeth clacked together. His ears rang so violently the world went silent for a beat.
And then he saw it.
A wall of sand. An advancing tidal wave of dust and debris, racing across the dunes, swallowing everything in its path.
Coming straight for him.
Fear took control.
His legs, the same ones that had failed minutes ago, snapped into motion. He ran. No thoughts. No plan. Just movement. Adrenaline burned through every muscle fiber. Somehow he was faster than before. Faster than he had any right to be.
It didn't matter.
You can't outrun a moving desert.
In less than three minutes, the wall slammed into his back.
The world disappeared.
Sand struck like a physical object. His body was thrown forward and driven into the ground hard enough to rip the air from his lungs. For a horrifying instant, he thought the worm had targeted him.
It hadn't. This was just the aftermath.
Just.
Sand packed into his mouth, his nostrils, his ears. It pressed against his ribs. His limbs. It stole space. Stole air.
He tried to cough and inhaled grit instead.
No. No no no—
He twisted his head and jammed his forearm in front of his face, creating a tiny pocket. The sand wasn't solid rock. It shifted. Loose. Suffocating. Alive.
He could breathe. Barely. Each inhale came with grit. Each exhale tasted like blood and dust.
He lay there, buried, heart hammering violently. Waiting. Waiting for something else to hit.
Minutes crawled.
Time reduced itself to one command.
Breathe. Don't move. Don't waste air.
A childhood memory flickered. Face shoved into a pillow during some stupid prank. Vision sparking with panic. That same panic clawed upward now.
He crushed it.
Not here. Not like this.
Eventually the pressure lessened. The sand settled into something heavier but manageable. Like a suffocating blanket instead of a tomb.
He flexed a finger. It moved.
Fifteen minutes before he freed a hand. Five more before he forced himself upright, coughing and spitting like an animal.
The air was still thick with dust. Everything looked gray. Muted.
His voice was shredded. His shoulders throbbed. His thighs burned. His ribs screamed every time he inhaled.
But one thought cut through everything.
Get farther away. As far as possible. He staggered forward, using the sun as orientation. Not running anymore. Just a miserable half-walk, half-drag of a body that wanted to quit.
Fear kept him upright.
Five minutes moving. Thirty seconds bent over, wheezing. Repeat.
The pattern became its own kind of rhythm. Move. Breathe. Don't think about the thing beneath the sand. Move. Breathe. Don't think about the fact that you're walking across the surface of a world where something that size lives underneath you.
He thought about it anyway.
If that thing decided to surface again right here, right now, I wouldn't even be a stain. I'd be a rounding error.
Move. Breathe.
Eventually the sand under his feet changed. Less compact. Less alive.
In the distance, shapes pierced the dunes. Jagged silhouettes. Broken structures half-swallowed by centuries of sand.
Ruins. Real ruins.
His throat tightened with something dangerously close to relief.
He'd crossed some kind of border. At least eight, maybe ten kilometers from where he started. Far enough that the tremors from the battle had faded to nothing. Far enough that his bones stopped humming with that massive presence.
Boss area. That's what that was. A hunting ground. The domain of something ancient.
He crouched behind a cracked slab of stone and dragged a trembling hand over his face.
Okay. What now?
The sky above carried circling shapes. Vultures. Or whatever passed for vultures in this world. Predators circling meant prey below. Prey below meant life. An ecosystem.
He checked the timer.
Less than an hour left.
Two options.
One: stay here. Wait it out. Area seemed relatively clear. If something approached, he could run. Worst case, retreat back toward the boss territory. He doubted anything with half a brain would willingly chase him there.
Two: explore. This was the ruin of a civilization that had dominated an entire world for eras. There had to be something buried here. Manuals. Weapons. Artifacts. Something.
Option one was smart.
Option two was what any protagonist worth reading about would do.
He stared at the ruins.
Then laughed softly.
"Fuck it."
The words left before caution could object. He stood and moved toward the structures. Slow. Careful. Eyes scanning every shadow, every gap between stones, every patch of sand that looked too smooth.
Thirty minutes passed.
Thirty minutes of holding his breath. Thirty minutes of pressing himself behind broken walls and crumbling pillars.
No glowing manual. No legendary blade half-buried in sand. No mysterious old man waiting to hand him a cultivation technique.
Just creatures.
The first one he recognized because he'd wasted too many hours on ARK back on Earth. Arthropleura. Except this one was longer than a car. A living armored train. Dozens of legs moved in eerie synchronization. Its segments rose and fell like a wave. The dry clicking sound it produced crawled under his skin and stayed there.
Then giant mantises. Human-sized. Frozen like statues until something smaller wandered too close. He watched one strike. The movement was so fast his eyes couldn't track it. One second the prey was there. The next, it wasn't.
Scorpions taller than his hip, their stingers curved overhead like loaded weapons.
Fire ants bigger than his palm, marching in disciplined lines that parted around obstacles with military precision.
Those were the familiar ones.
Others were worse.
Two reptilian beasts prowled near a collapsed structure. One resembled a salamander, except molten lines glowed beneath its skin like cracks in heated rock. The heat radiating off it warped the air. The other was built like a komodo dragon. Bulkier. Heavier. It moved with the confidence of something that had never been on the wrong end of a food chain.
And then the hyena-shaped thing.
Its ribs showed through patchy fur. But parts of it were stone. Shoulder. Jaw. Half its spine. Fused into the bone like the desert had tried to claim it and only got halfway. It turned its head.
Its teeth weren't animal teeth. They were weapons.
He backed away slowly enough that his knees trembled.
The good part: most of them hunted alone. The bad part: alone was still enough to kill him instantly.
He avoided anything that looked faster than him. Mapped escape routes before stepping near any shadow. Never risked drawing attention from more than one predator at a time.
And still, three times, he almost died.
Once, a scorpion burst from the sand right next to him. He threw himself sideways and slid down a dune on his ass while its stinger hissed past his ear, close enough that he felt the air move against his skin.
The stone-hyena caught his scent behind a broken pillar. Its jaws snapped shut on the stone where his shoulder had been a half-second earlier. The rock cracked like brittle bone.
Each time, he ran.
And each time, something strange happened.
The moment he crossed a certain point, an invisible line he couldn't see or feel, they stopped.
Not slowed.
Stopped.
The scorpion twitched at the boundary, then retreated. Like it had bumped into a wall that didn't exist.
The hyena paced. Snarled. Then turned back as if pulled by a leash.
Territories. Borders. Rules.
They don't cross into each other's zones.
Useful knowledge. Potentially lifesaving.
But fragile. Because those borders weren't labeled. They weren't marked. And one wrong step past an invisible line he couldn't see would put him inside something's hunting ground with no way out.
The timer ticked down. Less than thirty minutes.
His frustration grew with every empty corner. Every ruined chamber that held nothing but sand and silence. Every structure that had been stripped clean by time or something worse.
Nothing.
No treasure. No inheritance. No miracle. No reward for almost dying four times in the last two hours.
I came here because protagonist logic said there'd be something. And there's nothing. Just monsters and sand and the overwhelming sensation of being the dumbest person on two planets.
He crouched behind a half-buried pillar, chest heaving, sand crusted around his eyes and in the creases of his neck.
The timer read twenty-six minutes.
Twenty-six minutes. And then he'd be teleported back to his apartment with nothing to show for this except ruined clothes, sand in places sand should never reach, and the knowledge that a 99% death rate wasn't a joke.
Unless.
A thought surfaced. Stupid. Dangerous. The kind of thought that got people killed in exactly the situations he was currently in.
He swallowed.
"What if..."
His voice came out barely audible. Scraped raw by sand and dust.
"What if I kill one of these monsters?"