Trickster Hunter.

Chapter 508 Sandstorm

"No." Sun Hang gently flicked the amulet hanging under the rearview mirror with his finger. "I'm just guessing. Any resemblance to actual events is purely coincidental."

"Heh, fine, if you won't tell me." A deep roar of a four-cylinder engine came from the communication channel, and Yang Qiaoxi's motorcycle suddenly accelerated, instantly widening the distance between itself and the off-road vehicle.

"Is it angry?" Sun Hang turned to look at Zhulong.

“No, that’s just her temper.” Zhulong shook his head and stepped on the gas. “After all these years, she’s still the same.”

“I’m even more interested in your past stories now,” Sun Hang said. “Let me make it clear, I’m not being nosy, I’m just bored on the road and want to find something to talk about to pass the time.”

"You want to hear it?" Yang Qiaoxi's voice rang out again.

"Yes," Sun Hang replied affirmatively.

"To put it simply, it can be summed up in four words."

"Which four?"

"Indulge and abandon."

"Wow." Sun Hang deliberately drew out his words, "Tell me more about it."

“Sure, I’ll pay extra.” Yang Qiaoxi’s tone held a hint of a smile.

“Zhulong, you choose,” Sun Hang said. “Will you tell me yourself, or will you pay Boss Yang to tell you this story?”

"Why should I pay?" Zhulong asked, puzzled.

"There's no way to use a card in this desolate area, and there's no cell phone signal to transfer money. Besides, I remember that according to Boss Yang's rules, she only accepts cash, right?"

Yang Qiaoxi: "Hmm."

"What a pity, I never carry cash, so I'll have to use your money." Sun Hang looked at Zhulong with a smile. "Anyway, I'll reimburse you after the mission is over... oh, I mean after we get back from Egypt."

Zhulong smiled helplessly, stepped on the gas again, and closed the distance between himself and Yang Qiaoxi's motorcycle slightly. He shook his head: "I have no money and no story."

Sun Hang: "What a heartless and ungrateful man."

“Yes, yes,” Yang Qiaoxi immediately agreed, but the next second, her tone suddenly changed, “Slow down! Turn around!”

"What's wrong?" Sun Hang looked at the distant mountains. The sun was still a short distance from the valley, and it was clear that they had not yet reached the "turning point".

“Sandstorm.” Yang Qiaoxi’s tone became extremely serious. “I can smell the sandstorm.”

Sun Hang used his mind-reading ability on Yang Qiaoxi again, but failed to glean any useful information.

This kind of thing is called experience. Experience is different from skill, and it's difficult to express in concrete words. Just like a fisherman who has lived by the sea for most of his life, he can tell how long it will take for a storm to arrive by smelling the saltiness in the air and feeling the temperature of the seawater. For people like Yang Qiaoxi, who are extremely familiar with the Gobi Desert, the premonition of sandstorms has long been ingrained in their instincts.

"Follow me, don't fall behind!" Yang Qiaoxi's motorcycle drew a huge circle on the Gobi Desert before turning and heading in another direction.

Zhulong immediately turned the car around and followed.

"This isn't the way back to Longcheng," Sun Hang frowned. "Aren't we going back to Longcheng?"

“It’s too late,” Yang Qiaoxi said. “We’ll be caught up by the sandstorm before we even reach Dragon City.”

"Then where are we going now?"

"stone forest."

"Are you sure the Stone Forest can block sandstorms?" Sun Hang asked doubtfully. "A strange phenomenon that can even change the terrain, I don't think the Stone Forest would be a safe haven."

“The stone forest she mentioned is also a strange object,” Zhulong said in a deep voice. “It is an environmental strange object, numbered Geng 857 ‘Desert Stone Forest’. There are many stone forests in the Gobi Desert of the Hexi Corridor. Currently, a total of 187 strange objects have been identified as environmental strange objects. Because the meme sequences are completely consistent, these strange stone forests distributed in the Gobi Desert are considered to be the same kind of strange object.”

“That’s right,” Yang Qiaoxi said. “Although I don’t know why, sandstorms on the Gobi Desert will deliberately avoid these stone forests. The two have always kept to themselves. People who make a living here know that if you encounter a sandstorm and can’t avoid it, you should find the nearest stone forest. If you are lucky enough to find one of the 187 strange stone forests, you can survive.”

"What if we're unlucky?" Xue Yue, sitting in the back, clung tightly to the back of Sun Hang's chair and asked.

“Then there are no ifs.” Yang Qiaoxi twisted the throttle to the floor, and the motorcycle’s speed soared to nearly 200 kilometers per hour. The dust kicked up behind the motorcycle created a smoke wall that was taller than an off-road vehicle.

Less than two minutes after the two cars made their U-turn, Sun Hang felt a distinct tremor coming from under his backside—this tremor was not caused by the vehicles traveling at high speed on an unpaved road, but by the ground beneath the wheels vibrating violently.

A rapidly approaching, oppressive memetic aura was so strong that even a casual infected person could sense it from kilometers away without needing to be particularly perceptive.

It was as if the end of the world had come.

Sun Hang glanced at Xue Yue, whose face was deathly pale, in the back seat, and said, "You felt it too, didn't you?"

Xue Yue nodded vigorously: "It's so scary."

"It seems that having an infected person in the team is quite useful, at least they can sense the approaching sandstorm from several kilometers away," Sun Hang said.

“It’s no use. By the time the infected can feel the sandstorm, it’s too late to escape, unless there’s a stone forest nearby where they can hide,” Yang Qiaoxi said.

"How long will it take for us to be caught up?" Sun Hang asked again.

“It can take anywhere from a few minutes to a dozen seconds.” Zhulong gripped the steering wheel tightly, his expression serious. “The speed of a sandstorm is constantly changing and cannot be accurately estimated.”

How far away is the Stone Forest from us?

"It's just ahead!" Yang Qiaoxi said through gritted teeth, "We'll be there soon!" The two cars were already traveling at 240 kilometers per hour, which was the limit of the controllable speed on this road. Any faster and the bumps in the road would be enough to throw the whole car off the road.

Ten seconds later, a sizable stone forest appeared directly in front of us, and at the same time, the sky suddenly darkened.

Sun Hang and Xue Yue turned around at the same time, only to see that the sandstorm that blotted out the sky was like a wall thousands of feet high, crashing towards them like a tidal wave!

Zhulong glanced at the rearview mirror out of the corner of his eye, then drove without saying a word. The veins on his hands, which were gripping the steering wheel tightly, bulged, and a faint chill permeated the car.

"It's alive!" Yang Qiaoxi shouted, and the motorcycle plunged into the stone forest, performing a 360-degree drift to bring it to a stop.

With a screeching sound of tires, the SUV came to a stop less than a meter away from the motorcycle, and the huge inertia pressed Xue Yue firmly against the back of Sun Hang's seat.

Sun Hang jumped out of the car and looked around. Generally speaking, it takes hundreds of millions of years for natural stone forests to form. First, limestone is deposited, and then the earth's crust moves to lift the deposited limestone to the surface, exposing it. Finally, it is eroded and cut by rain and wind over many years to form this unique landscape.

But the stone forest in front of him was different. To Sun Hang, it felt like a plant that looked like a stone, growing out of the ground.

The rock texture of the stone forest itself is significantly different from that of the ground strata. Moreover, obvious cracks can be seen at the base of these stone pillars and stalagmites. The surface strata in this area should have been a whole, but during the "growth" of the stone forest, they were crushed by enormous forces, resulting in the appearance that Sun Hang and his group see now.

The sandstorm did not continue its pursuit, but instead turned a corner about 500 meters from the stone forest.

The sandstorm carried by the sand even pounded against the outermost stone pillars of the Stone Forest, producing a series of eerie and dense sounds, but the sandstorm ultimately did not penetrate into the Stone Forest area.

"See that?" Yang Qiaoxi raised her eyebrows at Sun Hang after taking off her helmet. "Shilin is a sanctuary for us people who make a living in the Gobi Desert."

Sun Hang walked around the nearest stone pillar and could feel a slight memetic fluctuation inside the pillar—but compared to the sandstorm's deafening noise that threatened to shake the sky, the stone forest's memetic reaction was quite restrained.

High emotional intelligence is described as being reserved, while low emotional intelligence can be described with one more word: weak.

“I’m curious why the meme response of the stone forest is so weak, yet the sandstorm avoids it?” Sun Hang said thoughtfully. “Although the world of strange creatures is very different from the natural world we are familiar with, I think the rule of the survival of the fittest should not change… Judging from the sandstorm’s ‘sudden stop’ behavior just now, it seems to be very afraid of these stone forests.”

“Everything has its counter.” Zhulong gently patted a stalagmite that had just “grown” from the ground and was already more than a meter tall. “While the strength of a meme can represent the raw power of a monster to some extent, there are many peculiar relationships between monsters beyond raw power…”

"for example?"

"Sigh, if I could figure out the relationships involved, I wouldn't be a hunter." Zhulong sighed and laughed, "Wearing a white lab coat and doing research in the lab is better than risking my life out here."

"Why worry so much?" Yang Qiaoxi glanced at Sun Hang. "There are good and bad monsters. At least these monster stone forests haven't done anything to harm humans so far. On the contrary, they've saved many lives—based on that alone, I believe they belong to the 'good monsters' category."

“That’s true.” Sun Hang glanced at Xue Yue, seemingly casually.

Xue Yue circled around the gaps in the stone forest a few times, then shook her head at Sun Hang: "I can't feel... I can't feel any trace of emotion."

“It’s normal not to feel anything. Stone Forest is an inanimate object… Most non-biological monsters do not have self-awareness, so of course they have no emotions,” Sun Hang said.

Xue Yue nodded, then moved next to Sun Hang and whispered, "But I still feel a little uneasy... after all, these things are all strange objects."

Sun Hang couldn't help but find it amusing. Even an ordinary person like Yang Qiaoxi wasn't afraid of ghosts, yet Xue Yue, a ghost with bug-level abilities, was afraid of other ghosts...

This is like a grown man who isn't afraid of even seeing a bull-headed or horse-faced demon, but the illegitimate daughter of the King of Hell is so scared by a hanged ghost on the roadside that she shrinks her head into her shoulders.

Sun Hang secretly decided that he would have to find a way to train Xue Yue's courage when he had the chance... But then again, fear, tension, and timidity should all be considered negative emotions in humans, practically Xue Yue's little snacks. However, when Xue Yue felt afraid, Sun Hang couldn't see any shadows cast by the materialization of negative emotions on her...

Is this what they mean by "a doctor cannot heal himself"?
"Can we go out now?" Sun Hang asked.

“No, that won’t do,” Yang Qiaoxi shook her head. “If you leave the Stone Forest now, there’s a high chance the sandstorm will come knocking on your door.”

"This sandstorm even has an automatic target acquisition function?" Sun Hang was slightly surprised.

"Didn't you notice that you haven't seen any living things along the way? Neither animals nor plants?" Yang Qiaoxi asked in return.

“Now that you mention it, I really didn’t see it… This Gobi Desert is so desolate, the kind of desolation that has no life at all.” Sun Hang nodded.

He didn't see even a withered bush along the way.

"Do you know what this sandstorm is called among the mercenaries and hunters in Dragon City?"

"Gobi Desert Cleaners?" Sun Hang said.

"You already know that, so why are you asking so many questions?" Yang Qiaoxi glared at Sun Hang.

"This is what I just read from your head," Sun Hang muttered to himself.

“The Strange Sandstorm has a unique characteristic: it is attracted to life forms on the Gobi Desert,” Zhulong explained to Yang Qiaoxi. “Once the Strange Sandstorm is generated on the Gobi Desert, it will automatically seek out the nearest life form within its perception range. The higher the life form’s strength, the more likely it is to become the sandstorm’s priority target.”

"With so many people in Dragon City, why doesn't the sandstorm attack the city?"

“There is a sophisticated shielding system outside Dragon City that can block the perception of life forms within the city by sandstorms,” Zhulong continued. “In addition, when a strange sandstorm is detected approaching Dragon City, all city gates will be closed immediately, and no one will be allowed to leave the city until the sandstorm leaves.”

"What about Yumen? Yumen doesn't even have a garrison, so it's impossible for it to have the same kind of shielding system as Longcheng, right?"

“Yes, Yumen doesn’t have it.” Zhulong nodded.

"What if a sandstorm comes?"

“Take shelter in the nearby stone forest, or split up and escape… The sandstorm will only target the group with the highest survival rate, so the others will be safe.” Yang Qiaoxi shrugged and said nonchalantly, “And the group with the highest survival rate are usually experts. They will carry the sandstorm away from Yumen and then try to hide in some stone forest… Of course, if they don’t have time to hide, they can only pray that they will be luckier in their next life. In our slang, this is called ‘when the sky falls, there are tall people to hold it up for you.’”

(End of this chapter)