Chapter 598 - The Yellow River II

The scene felt like something torn out of a madman's subconscious, not so much a place as a revelation that had decided to wear the shape of one. The ground did not change its nature so much as its skin. The desert that had run smooth and dry as sifted flour arrived here and flinched. It recoiled the way a horse balks at a scent it knows is wrong, as if denying, with a kind of terrified dignity, any blood tie to what lay ahead. The very grains seemed to press their faces away from the threshold, and the wind that had dragged thin songs over dune-crests arrived and fell silent as if it had remembered the name of the dead.