Chapter 26: Encountering a Sand Flow
Ji Fan’s feet moved rapidly forward, his blade slashing wildly. The spider in front of him was instantly cut in half and fell to the ground with a thud.
Ji Fan’s heart rejoiced. These things didn’t seem that difficult to deal with.
He didn’t pause and turned to kill another spider that was pouncing on him. Although he couldn’t accurately kill the mutated beast every time and occasionally needed to strike twice, these few attacks undoubtedly boosted Ji Fan’s confidence.
Two hours later.
The speed at which the spiders emerged from the sand slowed down considerably, and the number of mutated beasts on the ground was visibly decreasing.
Jiang Ning stared blankly at the ground for a while. The tops of her shoes were shallowly sunk into the soft red gravel. Blue liquid dripped continuously from the blade of the light sword in her left hand.
The spider’s blood contained a copper-based pigment. When the hemocyanin combined with oxygen, it would present a unique blue color.
The blue blood dripped into the sand and was quickly covered by the sinking sand around it, as if it had never existed.
When Jiang Ning came to her senses, she suddenly felt her feet sink. A crack suddenly appeared in the sand within a one-meter radius of her, and the gravel was slowly flowing downwards.
Not good!
Alarm bells went off in Jiang Ning’s mind.
An excessive number of mutated beasts crawling out from underground in a short period of time had caused the sand to loosen, and the ground was sinking.
She wanted to run, but it was too late.
The speed of the ground sinking was accelerating.
Jiang Ning activated the psychic energy in her body, wanting to fly into the air like Li Xiang. She tried several times in her mind but to no avail.
As expected, it still didn’t work.
A wave of disappointment washed over Jiang Ning.
Not far away, Ke Lai had her energy light cannon on her shoulder, squinting one eye and aiming ahead, wanting to end the battle with one last shot. But she found that the ground in front of her was actually collapsing. She used the high-power scope on the energy light cannon to take a closer look and saw a person whose waist was already half-sunk in the center of the collapse.
“Jiang Ning!” Ke Lai immediately put away the energy light cannon and rushed over.
Everyone’s gaze turned in that direction.
Jiang Ning remained calm, not daring to move her limbs, afraid of sinking even deeper.
“Don’t go over there,” Black Pearl pulled Ke Lai, who wanted to go over. “You won’t be able to help if you go over. You’ll just sink in yourself.”
“Then what do we do? Do you want me to just watch her get buried in the sand?” Ke Lai’s tone was agitated.
Black Pearl didn’t speak. Ke Lai scanned the faces of the others one by one. The silent expressions of the crowd had already told her the answer.
“She’s a lost cause. It’s just her own bad luck,” Scarface sighed and shook his head.
It wasn’t that he had any deep hatred for Jiang Ning. As someone from the slums, he even had a bit of sympathy.
But that’s how people from the slums were. They had long entrusted their fate to luck. Who wasn’t risking their lives to earn money?
“Right, we can still call for rescue,” Ke Lai remembered the newly added guards in the uninhabited zone.
“Li Xiang,” she called out to the dazed Li Xiang.
“Oh, I’ll call right away!” Li Xiang was very familiar with this. He opened his Star Brain and entered the number for the rescue hotline.
‘Beep, beep—’
The phone rang twice and was connected.
A look of joy appeared on their faces.
But the next second, the range of the collapse expanded again. Everyone felt their feet sink, and their bodies fell downwards.
‘Ah—’
Hot gravel poured into their clothes, and their skin instantly felt scorched. This wasn’t the worst part. Sand from all directions continuously enveloped them.
Their ears, their mouths…
Were all filled with a lot of sand.
After an unknown amount of time, Jiang Ning gradually regained some consciousness.
She felt a strong light constantly enveloping her eyes. Jiang Ning’s brow slowly furrowed. She moved her body slightly, and she felt something constantly falling from her clothes.
Her eyelashes trembled, her eyelids wrinkled, and her eyes squinted open a crack.
A dazzling light shone down from a circular hole above, while the surroundings were pitch black.
Jiang Ning raised her hand, wanting to block the strong light, but she touched a handful of sand instead. Her consciousness suddenly became completely clear.
The ground had collapsed. Shouldn’t everyone have been buried in the sand underground?
This place was…
Jiang Ning sat up, patted the gravel out of her clothes, and looked up at her surroundings.
The opening of the cave was at least a hundred meters away from them. The collapse range at the opening was still quite large, and fine gravel was still falling. In contrast, the sand and soil structure inside the cave wall was much more compact.
The height inside the cave was not too oppressive. Jiang Ning stood on the ground with about two heads of extra height. There were two dark tunnels in the cave that led to unknown places.
This cave didn’t seem to be naturally formed, but rather dug out by those insect-type mutated beasts.
With the sand as a buffer, her body hadn’t been hurt too much.
But what about the others who had fallen with her?
“Hello, is anyone there?”
“Hello?”
In the silent underground cave, a few faint male voices came from the electric current.
Jiang Ning carefully identified his position, walked to a sand pile, squatted down, and started digging with her bare hands.
After a long while, she finally saw a human hand in the sand.
The voice was coming from the Star Brain on this hand.
Jiang Ning brushed away the sand on the Star Brain’s screen. The interface had been showing that it was in a call, and the communication number was a rescue hotline.
Jiang Ning lowered her body and got as close to the Star Brain in the call as possible. “Hello, a sand flow has occurred in the Insect Star area of the western suburban uninhabited zone. The five of us are trapped underground. Requesting guard rescue.”
The voice from the Star Brain was intermittent, and it would occasionally freeze. Jiang Ning repeated it twice.
The screen kept showing a weak signal prompt. Jiang Ning held up the hand with the Star Brain and continuously searched for a signal. The next second, the voice from the Star Brain also disappeared. Jiang Ning took it back and looked.
Great! The connection was completely cut off.
Jiang Ning was silent for a moment and continued to dig.
After digging down for an unknown amount of time, a human face finally emerged from the sand.
Jiang Ning brushed away the sand from his nose. The next second, the owner of that face snorted twice and opened his eyes.
Jiang Ning and the wide-eyed Li Xiang looked at each other.
“Holy crap! Jiang Ning, you’re a pervert!” Li Xiang’s eyes widened. He wanted to retreat, but his body couldn’t move.
He looked at his half-buried body, his mouth moving faster than his brain. “You buried me?”
Jiang Ning: “…”
“No,” he suddenly realized. “We’re not dead?”
“If you’re okay, you can dig yourself out. I have to find the others,” Jiang Ning stood up.
Compared to the others, she and Li Xiang were lucky. But if they delayed any longer, she didn’t know if the others would suffocate from being buried in the sand for too long.
She had to find the remaining people quickly.
But there was so much sand underground, and the others didn’t have a Star Brain in a call like Li Xiang to locate them. Where should she start looking?
On the other side, the awakened Li Xiang struggled to pull his left foot out of the sand and sighed to himself, “If only Brother Yan Zhou were here. He would only need to activate his psychic energy to easily sweep all this mud to the side.”
Psychic energy!
Jiang Ning caught the keyword. The broken string in her mind snapped back into place. Her ability was useless, but she had psychic energy! Psychic energy could identify the magnetic field fluctuations of surrounding life forms. It was more than enough to find a few people!
She immediately released her psychic energy, and instantly, all the energy fluctuations in the cave were in her view.
The energy fluctuations in the two tunnels were too large for her to ignore. She took a deep look in that direction. The dark cave was like an abyss, as if it wanted to swallow anyone who looked at it.
Jiang Ning quickly retracted her gaze and carefully identified the magnetic field fluctuations in the cave she was in.
Besides the strong fluctuations around the standing Li Xiang, there were also a few scattered patches in the pile of sand on the ground.
Jiang Ning noted the locations, told Li Xiang, and then quickly took out a shovel from her nano-ring. It was a good thing she liked to throw things into her nano-ring; this thing finally came in handy.
Jiang Ning and Li Xiang were busy digging for nearly an hour and a half and finally dug out the remaining four people from the sand.
“Can your ability heal?” Jiang Ning asked Li Xiang.
Li Xiang hesitated and nodded, his expression a bit unnatural. “But I used up too much psychic energy when I was attacking the mutated beasts. I probably don’t have enough now.”
He only had D-rank psychic energy and couldn’t afford to use it up.
“Unless there’s a spirit tool that can help me recover some psychic energy faster,” Li Xiang lowered his eyes, his voice getting smaller and smaller.
He knew this was wishful thinking. How could there be a spirit tool in this place?
“A spirit tool…” Jiang Ning pursed her lips.
She happened to have one of those!
Without another word, Jiang Ning took out a petal-shaped spirit tool from her nano-ring. This was the one Ke Lai had given her before. It wasn’t of much use to her now, so she had kept it in her nano-ring.
Jiang Ning tossed the petal spirit tool into Li Xiang’s arms and said, “Try this and see if it works.”
Li Xiang looked at the thing in his hand in shock. “You-you have this!”
“Ke Lai gave it to me,” Jiang Ning replied nonchalantly.
“You’re just giving it to me like that?” Li Xiang looked at her with a complicated expression.
It must have taken Jiang Ning a lot of effort to get a spirit tool like this. She had F-rank psychic energy and must be counting on this spirit tool to raise her psychic energy level. And now she was just giving it to him like that!
“Didn’t you say you could recover your psychic energy with a spirit tool?” Jiang Ning looked at him, puzzled.
With psychic energy, couldn’t he heal the few unconscious people on the ground?
A stone that was useless to her could save four people. Was there even a choice?
“Heal as many as you can. Don’t force it,” Jiang Ning thought for a moment and added, “Heal Ke Lai first.”
Li Xiang glanced at her, understanding the friendship between Jiang Ning and Ke Lai. If it were him, he would definitely save his best friend first too.
However, what Jiang Ning was actually thinking was that one spirit tool couldn’t recover much psychic energy. Besides, Li Xiang only had D-rank psychic energy. It would be a problem to even save one at a time. Prioritizing waking up Ke Lai could provide him with more spirit tool support.
This was undoubtedly the best choice.