Episode 1: The Sand-Face Cable-Devourer

Night in the Taklamakan Desert. The grains of sand were colder than shards of ice.

In the thermal imaging lens of the Eagle-Eye drone, the desert—which should have been dead silent—was coming to life. It was not the natural rise and fall of wind-blown sand, but hundreds of thousands of yellow grains swirling and condensing around the mineral exploration cables, as if pulled by invisible threads. When the feed was transmitted back to the monitoring screen in Tribe S's temporary camp, the duty technician's hand trembled. His thermos crashed to the floor, spilling goji berry tea that seeped into the army-green carpet in a dark stain.

"What the hell is that?" someone cursed in a hushed voice.

On the screen, the grains of sand had already coalesced into a face.

It bore no human contours; the jawline was sharp as a blade, and the eye sockets were two swirling vortices of sand, opening and closing as they gnawed at the insulation wrapping the cables. The high-frequency camera captured even more horrifying details: every single grain of sand was squirming like maggots burrowing into rotting flesh. The outer rubber of the cable was ground to dust, exposing the copper core within.

*Bzzzt—*

The screech of electrical current tearing through the air exploded from the earpieces, mingled with the agonizing screams of the drilling crew. The sound did not resemble a simple shriek of terror; rather, it sounded as though something was being forced down their throats. Half of it was a plea for help in Chinese—"Save me"—while the other half was in obscure, tongue-twisting Old Turkic, sounding like fingernails scraping against a rusted iron pot.

"Captain! The cable has been... it bit through it!" A crew member's voice suddenly pitched higher, thick with tears. "There's something crawling in the sand! So many hands—"

It cut off abruptly.

The monitor instantly dissolved into static, leaving only the final frame frozen on the screen: protruding from the mouth of the sand face was half a length of bloody cable, while at the edge of the lens, a hand caked in yellow sand gripped the drone's landing gear in a death clutch. The grains of sand slipping through the fingers spelled out a twisted symbol against the night sky.

Silence fell over the camp tent, save for the hum of the external air conditioning unit, drawing the air dry and cold.

"What's the panic?"

A deep voice cut through the silence. Chief Williams swept aside the tent flap and walked in, his combat boots making no sound on the carpet. His left eye was dark brown, while his right eye was fitted with a silver-gray cybernetic eye. At this moment, the aperture of the mechanical eye was focused on the monitor, slowly contracting into a vertical slit like the pupil of a desert viper.

"Nothing but a static phenomenon whipped up by a sandstorm," he said, tapping the sand face on the screen. "I'll give you ten minutes to recall the drone, then send a squad to investigate."

"But Chief," the technician who had dropped his cup stammered, "the signal is dead, and that sound just now..."

"Sound?" Williams curled his lip, revealing a glint of metal teeth. "The wind in the desert can mimic your dead mother wailing at her own grave. You don't even have that much common sense?"

He turned toward the console, his fingers sliding rapidly across a virtual keyboard to bring up an encrypted file. The words "Project Sand Scorpion Totem" glowed red in the darkness, accompanied by a 3D holographic rendering of the geological structure deep within the Taklamakan. A blue energy mass pulsed like a heart fifty meters below the surface.

"We have waited thirty years for this day," Williams said, his mechanical eye glowing faintly, casting light over the hideous scar on his face. "My old man died in these sands for this very thing. Now that it has awakened, you want to back down because of a few grains of sand?"

No one dared to answer. Outside the tent came the roar of engines starting; the off-road vehicles of the second drilling team were warming up. Their headlights pierced the darkness, illuminating the silhouettes of distant sand dunes like crouching behemoths.

"Tell them," Williams said without looking back, "locate the energy source. Bring back the core if they live, and if they die... let them be fertilizer for the sand."

—

At that same moment, a hundred kilometers away in the temporary camp of Tribe X.

Amu, a scout of the Sand Keepers, tossed the last piece of dried camel dung into the bonfire. Sparks crackled and burst, casting flickering shadows across his dark, weathered face. A few herdsmen gathered nearby. One of them, a white-bearded elder, was humming an ancient tune. The lyrics were strange and tongue-twisting, seemingly singing of phantom caravans in the desert.

"What are you singing?" Amu asked, throwing a dry branch into the fire.

"The 'Ballad of the Crying Sand,' passed down by our ancestors," the old man said, taking a drag from his pipe, which was crafted from an antelope's leg bone. "They say back in the Republican era, a caravan got lost in a sandstorm. Ever since, whenever the black wind rises, people see their camel train walking on the sand. The cargo boxes on the camels' backs are filled with nothing but bleach-white bones."

Amu frowned. During his patrol this afternoon, he had indeed found something unusual around the herdsmen's tents—not the prints of wild beasts, but a series of strange hoofprints. They looked like they belonged to camels, yet they left scale-like patterns in the sand. More bizarrely, the compass he carried had spun wildly, its needle pointing directly toward the camp of Tribe S.

"Where is the High Priest?" Amu stood up, brushing the sand off his trousers.

"Over there, watching the sand," someone gestured with a chin toward the edge of the camp.

Lu Chen was indeed watching the sand.

He sat cross-legged atop a sand dune, his back straight as a black iron spear thrust into the earth. The moonlight fell upon his face, revealing a scar on his left temple that stretched from his brow bone down to his jawline—a mark left ten years ago when he had dragged someone from the clutches of a sandstorm. Wearing no protective gear, he plunged his bare hand into the sand, palm turned upward, as if waiting for something.

The jade pendant at his waist was burning hot.

It was a piece of ancient, earthy-yellow jade, carved with a totem that was hard to identify as either dragon or serpent. It was said to be an heirloom passed down through eight generations of Tribe X's Sand Keepers. Normally, it was no different from a common stone, but whenever "something" awoke in the desert, it would grow as hot as a branding iron.

Just like now.

With his eyes closed, Lu Chen could "hear" the movements within the sand—not the howling of the wind, but a subtler, clicking sound resembling bones grinding together. It propagated through the layers of sand from the direction of Tribe S, like countless insects crawling underground.

"High Priest," Amu's voice sounded behind him, tinged with hesitation. "The song Grandfather and the others were singing... they said the caravan in the sandstorm would manifest..."

"It's not manifesting," Lu Chen said, opening his eyes. His pupils shone with striking brightness in the night. "The sand is 'remembering' things."

He slowly withdrew his hand. The grains of sand on his palm were arranging themselves in a bizarre fashion—not in a scattered pile, but forming something like script, or perhaps a totem. The jade pendant grew even hotter, nearly searing itself into his flesh.

"Tell everyone," Lu Chen stood up, brushing the sand off his clothes with swift, decisive movements. "Pitch the tents behind the windward rocks. Do not light any fires tonight, do not speak, and above all—"

He paused, directing his gaze toward the camp of Tribe S, where headlights flickered like will-o'-the-wisps.

"Do not look back at the shadows in the sandstorm."

The moment the words left his mouth, a dark wind suddenly whipped up in the distance. It was not a naturally occurring sandstorm, but a pillar of sand spinning close to the ground. The color was so dark it was almost black, and at its peak, one could faintly discern... countless hazy human silhouettes shifting.

The jade pendant hummed, releasing a low resonance. Lu Chen looked down and saw the totem on the jade come to life. A pale golden light seeped from its grooves, casting a symbol onto the sand—identical to the twisted symbol captured in the drone's final frame.

The sandstorm was drawing closer.

Faint wailing echoed in the wind, half in Old Turkic and half in Chinese, sounding exactly like the agonizing screams from Tribe S's monitors. Lu Chen gripped the scimitar at his waist. Its hilt, crafted from the leg bone of an old camel, was carved with the protective wards of Tribe X.

He knew that tonight, the sand would begin to devour.

And the "energy source" that Tribe S prized so highly was no mineral deposit at all—

It was the desert's thousand-year-old bones, awakened.