Chapter Forty-Seven: Sand Whale

The mournful wailing rose and fell like weeping and lamentation. Though not loud, its reach spanned far, and the notes themselves were neither simple nor monotonous like the cries of ordinary beasts, but instead melodious and lingering. Taken on its own, the sound was beautiful—yet, if one listened closely, discerning its undertones, one would discover it was laden with pain, pleading, and utter despair.

From the outside, Katherine realized that the cave she had just entered was actually situated halfway up a mountainside. To call it a mountain was an exaggeration; it was more akin to a large hill, only about a hundred meters in diameter and several dozen meters high. The weather was clear: not a cloud in the sky. The first moon hung high overhead, the second had just crested the treetops, and the third was nowhere to be seen. Bathed in the cold, silvery moonlight, Katherine soon noticed something amiss. The color of the hill was starkly different from the earth beneath it.

The ground below was the familiar reddish-yellow of the steppe, tinged with brown, yet the hill’s color was a pure, brilliant yellow—almost golden in certain lights! Such soil was only found in the driest of desert landscapes. Though the banks of the Thanatos River were arid, they were nowhere near as parched as this.

Ling Mo strode away as if he hadn’t heard the wailing at all, but Katherine noticed the hill was trembling more violently than before. Even the cave she had just exited collapsed in on itself, while the wailing rose in pitch, turning sharp and hysterical.

Since earlier, Katherine had felt a vague hint of familiarity to the wailing, but the sound had been too faint to place. Now, with the cries clear and piercing, she closed her eyes, searching her memory. Suddenly, her expression changed dramatically. She turned to Ling Mo, her voice trembling as if she’d seen a ghost.

“Master, is that... is that a whale? That can’t be, can it?”

Ling Mo nodded. “Yes, it’s a whale’s song.”

“But… how could there be whales here?” Even with Ling Mo’s confirmation, Katherine couldn’t believe it. After wracking her brain, she recalled hearing a similar sound on an expedition to the Putrothos Islands in the Southern Ocean—white-whiskered whales, to be precise. She had blurted out the question without thinking, and to her shock, it was correct.

“These are no ordinary whales,” Ling Mo explained. “They are the legendary creatures of the Elemental Plane—the Sand Whale. Sand Whales live in the endless deserts of that plane, swimming and feeding in the ceaseless sands. They resemble the blue whales of the sea, and have similar habits—massive, yet gentle by nature. Their main food source is the billions of rock-scale shrimp dwelling in the shifting sands. Understand? Now, let’s get going. We’ve eaten our fill; it’s time to find a place to rest.”

“But…” Katherine hesitated, reluctant to turn away. Surrounded by the sand whale’s mournful cries, she found her own emotions inexplicably infected. A deep sorrow welled up inside her. She felt something cool on her face, and, reaching up, discovered tears streaming down—she had begun to weep without realizing it.

Embarrassed, she wiped her tears and sniffed. “Master, this wailing is so pitiful. Why does the sand whale keep crying?”

“It’s begging me,” Ling Mo replied. “Begging me to kill it.”

“To die? Even magical beasts can wish for death? Why?” Seeing Katherine’s tears growing more frequent, her face nearly awash, Ling Mo realized there was no point in leaving yet. He sighed, returning to the base of the hill. “You have good resistance to aggressive negative emotions,” he said, “but your defenses against empathic psychic resonance are pitifully poor. You’ll need to strengthen that in your training.”

“So you mean, this... this sand whale is wailing so miserably to lure me closer, so it can eat me?”

“No,” Ling Mo shook his head. “This sand whale is truly suffering, and its wish for death is genuine. But out there in the rainforests, there are other magical beasts with psychic resonance abilities—like dryads. Their psychic attacks are ineffective against single-minded magical beasts, putting them at the bottom of the food chain. But when it comes to humans, whose minds are more complex, their powers work frighteningly well, often bewitching people who then become their prey.”

At this, Katherine noticed a rare look of struggle on Ling Mo’s usually inscrutable face. To call it struggle was perhaps too strong—it was more a deep, hesitant indecision. She had never seen such an expression on Ling Mo before, and dared not interrupt, simply waiting quietly by his side.

Ling Mo’s hands clenched and unclenched, betraying his inner turmoil, while the sand whale’s cries grew ever more urgent and piercing. At last, he stamped his foot in frustration and snapped, “Enough! I hear you! You’ll get your wish this time!”

He turned abruptly to Katherine, his expression grave. “What you are about to witness may well overturn everything you think you know. As a martial heir, you’ll have to face such things sooner or later. Better to be forewarned.”

Katherine’s body trembled. For Ling Mo—a man of unfathomable power—to speak so seriously, she knew this must be a matter of enormous consequence. She felt a thrill of approaching some great secret, and forced a smile. “Master, don’t frighten me…”

“I’m not trying to scare you. Just watch.” Ling Mo crouched, touching the earth at his feet, a look of nostalgia and doubt crossing his face for an instant before being replaced with steely determination. When he rose, Katherine sensed a transformation. His presence expanded, vast and boundless, as if he alone stood astride heaven and earth.

It wasn’t an illusion.

Katherine stared upward, dumbfounded, as Ling Mo’s body swelled with impossible speed, in the span of a heartbeat becoming a colossal giant dozens of meters tall! He was the very image of himself, only magnified a hundredfold—broad-shouldered, the muscle of his upper body forming a perfect inverted triangle, his physique now so overwhelmingly powerful it was terrifying. The veins bulging on his arms were as thick as barrels. Most astonishing of all, the animal-skin shorts about his waist expanded along with him, fitting perfectly even at this monstrous scale.

Glancing at the dagger in her hand, Katherine finally understood—Ling Mo’s casual remark, “This is my tooth,” had not been a joke at all! When Ling Mo’s height matched that of the hill, he stopped growing, paused a moment, then opened his mouth and let out a thunderous roar!

It was obvious—the giant’s mouth formed concentric ripples in the air, the atmosphere vibrating like water, distorting the light. In an instant, a massive, solid column of compressed air, several meters thick, blasted forth with irresistible force and struck the hill.

No words could describe the cataclysmic sound. The hill crumbled like a child’s sandcastle, its stones and earth shattered into dust by the hurricane-force blast and scattered far into the distance. Amidst the swirling debris, Katherine’s keen eyes saw the battered flatstone scorpion, caught in the tempest, ground to powder before her very eyes.

Moments later, the dust settled. Where the hill had once stood, nothing remained—but what was revealed beneath was beyond anything Katherine could have imagined.

A gigantic whale, hundreds of meters long and over a hundred wide, lay sprawled across the earth.

It resembled the whales of the ocean in every respect—save that it was immeasurably larger. Its back was a brilliant yellow, tinged with gold, its skin semi-translucent so that one could see the slow movement of organs within. The belly was a pale, almost white yellow, even more transparent than the back. Its gaping jaws were lined with rows of plate-like whiskers made entirely of stone, and even its immense eyes were not organic but glistened like yellow gemstones.

The sand whale’s appearance was staggering in itself, but what shocked Katherine even more was the monstrous inkcap mushroom growing from its back, just behind its head where its sand-blowhole would be.

This inkcap was over ten meters tall, its cap reaching right up to the spot where the cave entrance had been. At the top of the cap was a cross-shaped fissure, from which countless smaller inkcaps sprouted—the very mushrooms Katherine had eaten earlier. Around the edge of the black cap, droplets the size of buckets hung, threatening to fall, and every time one dropped onto the sand whale below, it sizzled as if scalding oil had struck flesh, making the great beast shudder in agony and wail all the more piteously.

The thick stalk of the inkcap grew directly from the whale’s body, and from its base radiated countless tendril-like roots, burrowing deep into the whale’s flesh. Through the translucent skin, one could see that several main roots wrapped around the heart, lungs, and stomach; the thickest of them penetrated straight into the heart itself! Finer filaments threaded into every organ, some linking to the skin, others to blood vessels, greedily siphoning the whale’s vital essence.

The sight was strange and sinister. It immediately reminded Katherine of the bug-shaped cordyceps she had eaten before—fungal threads infiltrating the host’s body. The only difference was that the insect had been fully consumed, while here, a band of earth-yellow radiance shielded the whale’s brain, keeping the fungal threads at bay. The filaments massed against the thin barrier, unable yet to break through.