“The people who choose to only follow the true path of cultivation have strong Techniques but weak bodies,” Einen said, “so we’ll take advantage of that.”
He gave Hadjar a small bottle. Hadjar didn’t need an explanation.
“It’s an antidote to the poison.”
Well, okay, he did need an explanation.
“The effects of it have already worn off.”
“The effects of what I added haven’t.” He seemed to grin again. “I spent a lot of time around pirates, slave traders, smugglers, and thieves and I learned a couple of their tricks. The bowl from which everyone drank Karissa’s poison was coated in a special medicine.”
“Medicine?” Hadjar asked.
“Yes,” Einen nodded and pointed at his blue amulet. “It didn’t let me use anything poisonous. But medications are a different matter. The farther we walk, the more our companions will become thirsty, until their throats are so dry that they won’t be able to speak.”
Hadjar mentally twitched. What kind of medicine was this that made a person so thirsty?
“It’s a medicine meant for gastric cleansing,” Einen explained like he’d read his friend’s thoughts.
Barely stopping himself from laughing, Hadjar looked at his friend in a new light. This bald monk, prone to philosophizing and serene contemplation, was actually a rogue.
“Tell me what happened, Hadjar.”
“What do you mean?”
Einen turned to his interlocutor and made an incomprehensible hand gesture toward the sky.
“After you woke up, you stopped saying ‘gods and demons’. As far as I could tell, that used to be your favorite curse. So, tell me, what happened?”
Until recently, Hadjar would’ve been shocked to hear the usually silent Einen talking so much, but now he’d gotten used to it. In fact, the bald man was rather talkative if he was discussing an interesting topic.
“I recently found out that mentioning... those creatures makes them strong-”
Hadjar didn’t get to finish his explanation because a powerful explosion of energy and Glen’s cry interrupted him.
“Protection!” The Baliumian roared, unsheathing his saber that was glowing with golden light.
The waves of light radiating out from the blade created a dome of light in front of Glen. However, that didn’t help him. A pillar of sand struck his golden shield, shredding his protection like simple cloth. Glen was flung a dozen yards through the air and struck the ground hard. A trickle of blood ran down the Baliumian’s lips as he wheezed.
“Damn,” Hadjar muttered.
Glen was apparently out of the fight for the foreseeable future. With the internal injuries he’d received, he wouldn’t be getting up anytime soon.
“Karissa!” Ramukhan shouted, brandishing his glowing staff in front of him.
Hadjar gripped the hilt of his blade as he witnessed something that he’d only heard about in the tales of the passengers back at Rahaim’s caravan. Right in front of their squad, a dune came to life. It rose as the sand moved as if it were alive. In some places, it condensed and absorbed the light from the sun and sky, turning blue, looking almost like silk and brocade, not sand.
Ten seconds later, a sand spirit stood in front of the squad on cloven feet, with its arms, which were clad in blue silk sleeves, spread out. It was something that couldn’t be described as a beast or a human. The first of its kind Hadjar had ever seen.
It wore a blue caftan and golden greaves. Beneath its hood, however, it had no face, nor even a body. Or rather, it didn’t have the usual kind of face and body. Instead, its flesh consisted of relentlessly shifting sand.
“Tar li’sah’oni burags baram!” Its voice, which was like the roar of a sandstorm, boomed out.
“What did it say?” Einen asked.
“I don’t know.” Hadjar shrugged and charged it.
Chapter 383
It was unlikely that a creature with friendly intentions had just tried to send one of them to his forefathers. Glen’s current condition clearly demonstrated the spirit’s hostility. Hadjar wasn’t going to try and negotiate with a creature that had almost killed a strong practitioner.
Blurring into the shadow of the Seven Ravens, Hadjar appeared behind the creature. During this time, starting from an indistinct, sandy shape, it condensed into a huge, 6’6 monster. However, that didn’t make the spirit any weaker. Rather, this had the opposite effect. The power emanating from it before had been equal to the power of a cultivator on the verge of becoming a Spirit Knight. And now its aura was as mighty as a real Spirit Knight’s.
Rushing forward, Hadjar used the fifth stance of the ‘Light Breeze’ Technique.
“Rustle in the Treetops!” He said, using up nearly a quarter of his energy supply.
Stopping behind the creature, Hadjar slashed down with his sword. His blade left a trail of black fog behind. The blow, which had absorbed his energy and his knowledge of the Sword Spirit, was so strong that a blue crescent was launched from the edge of his blade. Merging with his real blade, it intensified the attack. The attack, which forced even the ones who weren’t its target to hold their breath, still couldn’t hurt the spirit. Moreover, the creature didn’t even turn around. Hadjar’s sword got stuck in a wall of sand that rose up from the ground. It was like the one Shakh had used. Except the spirit’s sand wall was so dense and strong that Hadjar’s attack not only got stuck in it, but was even partially reflected back at him.
Sensing that something was wrong, Hadjar dodged to the side. During the maneuver, he saw a crescent of sand fly out of the wall and, after cutting off some of his hair, strike a 30ft dune behind him and... cut it in half. Well, Hadjar had really gotten stronger.
The lull in the fight didn’t last long. The wall began to tremble and turned into a scorpion stinger, which tried to strike Hadjar directly in the chest. Its speed was so great that it turned into a brown lightning bolt. If not for the ‘Rustle in the Treetops’ stance, an extra hole would’ve appeared in Hadjar’s body.
A dragon-sword formed in the air, blocking the stinger. It hit the stinger, but couldn’t slow it down, and instead just deflected it to the side, changing the stinger’s trajectory so it struck the same dune from before. The stinger drilled a hole three feet in diameter through the dune without any difficulty and kept going for another two hundred feet.
“Retreat!” Karissa cried.
She didn’t have to tell him twice. Turning into the shadow of the Seven Ravens, he hurried back, launching blue crescents at the spirit to delay it as he did so. The spirit simply ignored all his attacks. They dug into its ‘clothes’ but didn’t harm its sand flesh. Hadjar’s strikes were able to leave small cuts on the strange spirit’s clothes, but then they would simply disappear inside the sand body.
Karissa, uttering something in a language unknown to Hadjar, swung her hands over her flying book several times. The pair of shadows that wore fiery robes flew out of its pages. Flying over the sand, they left behind strips of glass due to how hot they were. They began to circle around the spirit, which obviously didn’t like this new development. Sand sabers appeared in the creature’s hands, which it used to carefully fight off the figures. Karissa grew paler with every blow that nearly struck her shadows. At some point, her nose started bleeding.