Passing through the ruin entrance, the world twisted violently around Shura and Zeshi, followed by a brief sensation of weightlessness, before their boots sank slightly into warm sand.
As Shura slowly looked up, what greeted him was not some ancient underground tomb or palace that he expected but an endless stretch of desert beneath a dim red sky.
Broken stone pillars, ruined walls, half-buried towers, and collapsed courtyards were all scattered around, as though a mighty civilization had been swallowed by time.
Yet despite the desolation, the Astral Essence in the air here was thicker than in Bluewind City.
Shura slowly exhaled.
'This place… It's a cultivation treasure ground.'
Beside him, Zeshi, holding his hand, moved closer until she was practically glued to his side like a frightened kitten.
"We're already inside the ruin. You can let go."
His words startled Zeshi, who released his hand and stepped back.
"I-I know."
Shura gave her a long look but said nothing and swept his gaze across the surrounding dunes.
As far as he could see, they were all alone, with no sign of the other people anywhere.
"Looks like the ruin scattered everyone to different places," he said.
"That should be the work of the entrance formation. Father once mentioned some ruins deliberately separate entrants so they can't rely on numbers at the start." Zeshi agreed.
This suited Shura just fine.
'At least there will be less trouble this way.'
After randomly choosing a direction, he began moving forward cautiously, while Zeshi hurried to keep moving at his side, her eyes darting nervously.
The deeper the two advanced through the desert, the more the remnants of the past revealed themselves.
Collapsed archways, cracked stone roads, and even some buried statues whose heads had long since been eroded away.
Eventually, they came across a half-buried building sticking out from the dunes.
Although most of its walls had crumbled and weathered into oblivion, a few sections that survived still had some faded ancient murals carved on them.
Shura stopped before one particular depiction, showing a colossal chained dragon, coiled in struggle against a figure whose own body had been almost entirely erased from the mural.
All that remained of the captor was a single arm, and it was that detail that made Shura's eyes widen in disbelief, because the arm was disturbingly human, and etched into its skin were patterns, markings that looked terrifyingly similar to the tattoos covering his own body.
He couldn't be certain, as the mural was too worn and broken for a definitive judgment, but the similarity was undeniable.
On the other side, Zeshi was equally surprised seeing the chained dragon struggling, but she could only reluctantly leave and follow Shura, who had at some point resumed moving.
He moved in a single direction for quite some time, until the sand beneath him shifted unnaturally, and his body reacted before his mind did.
"Waaah—!"
By the time Zeshi cried out, Shura had already jumped twenty feet into the air like an arrow, seeing two gigantic, pincer-like claws burst out of the sand exactly where he had been standing a second earlier.
Boom!
Almost instantly, the ground exploded, and sand flew in all directions as the rest of the creature's body emerged.
It was a monstrous scorpion, nearly the size of a cart, covered in a dark red exoskeleton, and had a tail dripping with black venom.
"Blood Furnace beast! It's an initial-stage Blood Furnace beast!"
Zeshi's panicked cry attracted the scorpion, which screeched and lunged towards her.
Luckily for her, before the beast could fully adjust its angle, Shura twisted in midair and crashed down with a brutal kick to one of its pincers.
Bang!
The scorpion's body only sank slightly into the sand, and Shura's pupils contracted.
'Damn! It's too hard.'
He had just cursed in his heart when, in the next second, the beast plunged into the sand as though diving into water, disappearing entirely.
"It's gone! It just vanished!" Zeshi stammered in terror.
Shura landed lightly, and his eyes narrowed as he scanned the dunes.
However, there was no surface movement or sound, only the endless desert, making their situation dangerous because the beast could strike from anywhere, at any moment.
For a split second, Shura thought of smashing the entire area apart by force, but after one glance at the seemingly endless sea of sand, he dismissed the idea.
Even if his current body was monstrous, he was not that monstrous.
And although he couldn't beat an initial-stage Blood Furnace Realm Cultivator without external help, he felt that if he went all out, he could still beat an initial-stage Blood Furnace Realm beast, considering that beasts of the same realm were weaker than cultivators.
As he weighed their options, Zeshi's voice broke the silence.
"I'll be the bait."
"You?"
Shura turned to her, and she swallowed nervously but still nodded with a resolve that surprised him.
"It… it targets movement on the surface. If I walk out in the open, it will come for me. When it emerges, that's your chance to strike it down. Also, do you… have a weapon?"
The question made Shura's face twitch.
Weapon?
He was so poor that even buying enough Dust Shards for cultivation had been a struggle, so where would he get the luxury to own a weapon?
And even if he had one, it was useless, as only those who had stepped into the Tier-4 Heart Chakra Immortal Realm could bring external objects across worlds.
So he answered simply,
"No."
"Oh, then use this. It's a Grade-2 Blood Furnace weapon."
Blissfully ignorant of the bitter reasons behind his refusal, Zeshi rummaged in her storage pouch and pulled out a slender pink dagger
Shura took it, looked at its color, and held it for a single second before giving it back to her.
"No thanks."
"Why not?"
"I don't like pink. And if I accidentally snap it, you'll probably cry."
"…"
Zeshi's mouth opened, then closed, then opened again, like a fish gasping for air.
For some reason, she felt he wasn't being truthful.
Regardless, since he had rejected it, she could only put the dagger away.
In fact, the dagger's pink color was only one of the reasons for his rejection.
He truly felt that the flimsy piece of metal would instantly shatter against the scorpion's iron-like carapace.
More importantly, a part of him craved this fight, and he also wanted to know the true extent of his own monstrous strength.
"Then… be careful."
Without waiting for a reply, Zeshi took a deep breath and stepped out onto the open sand, slowly moving farther and farther from him.
Meanwhile, Shura remained where he was, arms folded casually, eyes closed.
To an outsider, he looked absurdly relaxed, but in reality, his senses were pushed to their limit, waiting and ready to act.
A few seconds passed, and just when it felt as if the scorpion had run away...
'There!'
Without a word, Shura blasted out and, in a single step, dove headfirst into the sand, intercepting the monster's ascent just before it could burst forth to capture its prey.
Caught off guard, the scorpion's body jerked in surprise as Shura crashed into its back from the side and drove a brutal fist straight into its armored shell.
Boom!