The silence in the Dead Zones wasn't just 'quiet.' It was a presence. A heavy, suffocating thing that pressed in on you, made your ears ring, and felt like it could choke the soul right out of your body. Back in Nocturnal Shadows, the constant hum of energy, the chatter of data, the thrum of a few hundred million hearts beating at once—that was life. Out here? Jack shit. No living breath, no energy waves, not a flicker of warmth for the wolf's senses to grab onto. His nose was completely useless.
Yin Lie stood on the edge of a crystalline coast, the salt crunching under his boots with a sound like grinding bone. It was enough to make your skin crawl. The moon hung overhead, huge and cold, stretching the shadows of the skeletal ruins into long, leering shapes. This place had been stripped bare.
He checked the device in his hand. Forty-eight miles to the destination. A two-day walk, probably. He pulled his hood tighter against a strange wind that had no scent, only the taste of dust and an emptiness he couldn't name.
His own powers felt twisted out here. The wolf was going stir-crazy, a caged beast pacing inside him, desperate to lash out. With nothing alive to sense, it was blind, forced to rely on eyes and ears, and it was pissed. The ice, though, was right at home. This place was its natural state: a world of slow entropy, bleeding energy on a one-way trip to absolute zero. He could feel it settled deep inside him, a steady well of strength, like finding a sliver of familiar comfort in this frozen hell.
But the Keystone… that thing was pulling a new trick.
In the city, it had been background static, a constant hum that frayed his nerves. Out here, in the absolute silence, it was a clear, ringing bell. It wasn't just sitting in him anymore; it was tasting the air, sensing something deep in the earth. His third sight, the world of energy flow, was no longer a chaotic mess of lines but a map. He could see faint ley lines shimmering beneath the salt, a dormant circuit board connecting the entire landscape.
Old man Chen Gu's words echoed in his head: She... is a psychic nexus.
This dead land was her sphere of influence, or maybe the scar left by the First Wave Project that studied her. He wasn't just walking. He was stepping into her domain. The Keystone was a compass needle, shivering with anticipation, guiding him 'home.'
He started walking, following the brightest of the shimmering lines only he could see. For hours, the only sound was the rhythmic, unnerving crunch of his boots on the salt. The landscape was a hypnotic nightmare of white plains and black shadows, designed to drive a man mad. He was a speck of dust, crawling across an impossibly empty world.
He was so focused on the energy lines beneath his feet that he almost missed the change on the surface.
A flicker of movement in his peripheral vision. He froze, his city-honed instincts screaming. He scanned the horizon. Nothing. Just the endless, glittering salt. The wolf sensed no heat. His ears heard no sound.
He took another step, and the ground vibrated.
Then, with a sound like a thousand panes of glass shattering at once, the salt flat around him exploded upward.
What burst from the ground wasn't an animal. It was a nightmare of crystal and silence given form. Six of them, each the size of a large wolf. Their bodies were faceted, translucent carapaces that shimmered with a cold light. They moved on long, spider-like legs with a skittering speed that made his skin crawl. They had no eyes, no mouths, only pure, predatory intent.
Crystal Crawlers. Ghosts of the Dead Zones.
His city tricks were useless here. They had no body heat, made no noise, and were perfectly camouflaged. They hunted by vibration, and his every footstep was like ringing a dinner bell.
One of them lunged, a scythe-like claw of sharpened crystal arcing for his throat. The blade could shear steel. Yin Lie threw himself backward on pure instinct, the claw slicing the air an inch from his face.
He shot an ice spike from his palm. It hit the crawler's carapace with a pathetic *tink* and shattered, leaving only a faint scratch. Their shells were harder than steel.
He was surrounded. Brute force was a dead end. He needed another way.
He closed his eyes, shutting out the physical world and embracing the nauseating three-way vision.
Wolf's Sight: Pitch black. Useless.
Ice Sight: He could see the land's structure, the crystalline lattice of the salt, the faint fault lines in the crawlers' bodies—the gaps in their armor.
Keystone Sight: This was the key. In the world of pure energy, the crawlers couldn't hide. They were voids, absolute black holes of consumption on the energy map, greedily sucking in the faint ambient power around them.
He could see them. Really see them.
His eyes snapped open, the three visions merging into one terrifyingly clear battlefield in his mind. He didn't form another spike. Instead, just as he had in the archive, he slammed his palm flat on the ground. He wasn't injecting cold; he was injecting a high-frequency pulse of it, a dissonant chord. He felt the frequency of the salt flats and sang back in a voice of absolute zero.
The effect was instantaneous. A high-pitched, grinding hum filled the air, and the ground trembled violently. The crawlers let out silent screams, their bodies convulsing in agony as their crystalline armor began to crack. Their movements became clumsy and slow.
He had turned their hunting ground into their tomb.
While they were disoriented, he moved. The wolf gave him speed, the ice gave him a weapon, and the Keystone gave him perfect aim. He was a reaping shadow. He no longer attacked their hard shells. He formed ice needles thin as hair and, guided by the Keystone's sight, plunged them into the energy voids at their joints.
One. Two. Three… The Crystal Crawlers collapsed, one after another, dissolving into shimmering dust.
Silence returned, heavier than before. Yin Lie stood in the center of the kill zone, breathing hard, a gash on his arm weeping blood onto the white ground.
He stared at the glittering dust that was all that remained of the monsters. This place wasn't dead. It was just alive in a way he couldn't comprehend. Everything that survived here was built for the silence, evolved to hunt without the senses he knew.
He was the intruder. The anomaly. He had just announced his presence to whatever else lurked in the deep quiet.
He tore a strip from his shirt and bound his arm, his jaw set. His eyes, now burning with a harder resolve, looked toward the horizon, where the energy lines converged. This journey wasn't going to be a simple walk. This dead land would demand a price in blood for every step.