The sun was slowly setting below the sand dunes and the cool night air of the desert was coming quickly. Night stood over the corpse of the the alloc that he had been riding for the last couple days. For some reason, the camel-like beast had just randomly collapsed and died on him during his journey through the desert.

'Son of a bitch,' Night thought as he tried to figure out what his next step was going to be.

After thinking for a few minutes....there wasn't much thinking to do....his desert transportation died....now he had to walk. The main problem was that he didn't know where the fuck he was going and at this point....he was completely lost.

When he had started this trip into the desert, Night had idiotically assumed that he would have come across at least another oasis....or seen a caravan...or just found something.....besides sand. His original trip from Nazca City to Manco Town...only took around eight hours....how could he travel for days and not come across a single sign of life?

Thinking back, he realized that he had probably made a poor choice.

Six days ago, he had set out from ravaged Manco Oasis with two packs full of random supplies strapped to an alloc. The night of the slave rebellion.....After he had situated Grief and partially recovered from his injuries, Night had tried to contact the escaping slaves without any luck. Because he managed to find his satchel full of stuff after the mine building collapsed, Night still had the communication stone to send messages to the escaping slaves.

However, he couldn't get anyone to respond to his messages on the communication stone. He had tried contacting the freed slaves in the town for several hours before he left....and had even kept sending messages for the first two days of travel in the desert. He had hoped that he could meet up with the escaped slaves to swipe some of the supplies...and have at least a few calm days to plan the next stage of his adventure....but it seemed like that wasn't in the cards.

He could only think that he was out of range of the communication stone. The final base of operations for the escaped slaves was around 10 miles away from the town. He had never checked the allowable distance of transmittal on the communication stones...he didn't even think of the need to check.

Despite the fact that he was now lost in an unfamiliar place, his desert travels had been mostly carefree, but were completely lacking in the presence of anything.....but sand dunes. He didn't even have his usual company to talk to on his trip.

Misery was still laying down in some meditative type trance in Night's soul space. The night of the slave rebellion, she had said that she felt like she was going to breakthrough. But, she only seemed to be taking an extended nap after having a large feast. There had been no changes in the last couple of days and Night constantly wondered when Misery would wake up.

After the rebellion, Night had a slight panic attack after thinking that he had lost the Blood Stone for Misery's body when the building had collapsed on him in Manco Town. Although he managed to find the Blood Stone sitting among his other belongings, he was still very worried that he would loose the special red stone. The soul inscription on the Blood Stone was not that easy to make and he was now terrified to lose it.

During his resting moments of travel, he actually carved out a small space in his eye stone to house the fingernail sizes Blood Stone...if it was stuck in his eye he probably wouldn't loose it. The small blood stone also looked like a red pupil in the stone eye. Night thought it looked pretty bad ass when he looked at his reflection in his shiny dagger blade. However, Night had kept it still covered with the stupid eye patch....the sand kept getting around the eye when he left it uncovered.....he really hated sand.

As for his newest party member, Grief, she was still in her dream world waiting to gain enough soul strength to form a body. During these days of travel, there weren't even intelligent beasts to attack for the soul energy right now...the desert was just plain empty. Also, Grief didn't seem that interested in what Night had wanted to talk about at the moment....she was just too calm and collected...she was content to just be in the dream state.

So essentially, Night was alone in the desert.

Even his last company....the alloc that he had started to call Fred.....had just randomly given up and died. Night didn't know what the hell went wrong with the animal....he had fed it several times with no issue but he must have missed a key element to caring for the animal. The beast had been one of his lucky finds in Manco Town. After the slave revolt, Night had to scavenge for supplies in the mostly destroyed small town...those freed slaves surely seemed to be specialists in looting the town...only the bare bones of rations were left for Night to use.....after hours of searching he eventually managed to work up enough food and supplies to last about two to three weeks.

So after determining that he had no choose but to move on foot through the dunes, Night was standing by the beast's corpse and sorting though the supplies. From a weight standpoint, he could carry them all....however, he would look like a man carrying a horse in his back due to the physical size of the supplies.

Looking up from the dead camel beast's body, Night started to regret his decision to leave the small oasis town without a map. He had been very anxious to leave the town because he was worried that some support from Nazca City would arrive and hunt him down. While he felt good about his current strength, he wasn't that certain that he could take on a high level Demigod. His battle with the Level 4 Demigod had been quite difficult. If Misery hadn't helped him, he probably would have died.

So.....He took off on the journey without a map while thinking that he wouldn't have any issue finding another oasis...but he was wrong.

The landscape of this desert was very similar to pictures that Night had seen of the Sahara Desert on Earth. All it was waves of sand. The desert was extremely hot during the day but quite chilly at night. There was no shelter....and constant mirages on the horizon that gave him all types of false hope. At least, Night managed to navigate by following the direction of the orange sun. He knew he could walk in a straight line by following the sun....or at least that is the way it worked on Earth...he could have been walking in circles here and would have never known.

He had never really taken time to think over this world once he arrived. Since coming to this planet, most of his time was spent either indoors or in the mines. When he did explore, he explored at night. He hadn't had but maybe an hour or two to observe the daytime world since he arrived here months ago.

....he had even chosen the name Night for himself because of his proclivity towards the night itself.

However, that had completely changed now....he'd gotten more than a full view of daytime of the desert over the last couple of days.....he even thought for a second that he might have really died and was trapped in some perpetual hell...walking the same stretch of desert over and over again...these fucking mounds of sand all looked the same to him.

As he had done very frequently over his day's in the desert, Night focused in on the desert with his soul perception while standing besides the animal corpse.

When he promoted to a Demigod of Dream, he had seen a vast improvement in his soul strength. His soul perception could reach around 3000 feet.....that was a little more than half a mile. It had more than doubled from his previous level.

However, the extended soul perception didn't really do much good....he hadn't seen a damn thing but sand in last six days.

After scanning the area, Night sat down leaning against the dead beast and trying to hide in the bit of shade the body offered from the hot setting sun. Sitting there he started pondering over his environment....Night couldn't keep from wondering about the entire planet.

What had surprised Night was that his sense of time wasn't effected when he came to this world. It seemed to function on a daily cycle that was similar to Earth. However, based on estimates he had read about on Earth.....this planet was approximately 20 times greater in size than earth.

Recalling his limited information, he guessed that this world and its sun must have been of similar proportion to Earth's systems....just larger in scale. Maybe that is why the standard day functioned similar to Earth? Night wasn't sure but the scale was definitely a contribution to the conundrum. On this planet, Nibiru....The deserts were larger, the sun was larger, the planet was larger, the mountains were larger, the forests were larger...and apparently the beasts were larger!

Night became excited as finally found something besides sand with his extended perception.....and it was moving rapidly in his direction. From what Night could tell, the beast was a big snake...about 35 feet long....and it looked like a Sidewinder from the deserts of Earth.

'Shit, that's a big snake,' Night thought as he tried to develop a plan. The snake would arrive in about a minute or two.

Looking with his perception, he could see the beast. The snake had two small horns above its eyes and had small rough scales that look like the various shapes of desert sand. It moved rapidly through sands in the typical side-winding manner.

Night was trying to figure out how to handle the possible incoming attack from the snake. He had fought with smaller beasts like spiders and centipedes in the tunnels.....but they weren't this big or fast.

Night ducked behind the body of the alloc and hid himself in the little bit of shadow that was created by the dead body. He erased his life signs and watched as the beast came into sight.

The snake moved quickly forward towards the Alloc corpse and took a striking pose. In a split second, it struck at the dead alloc and latched onto it.

Night kept trying to figure out how the snake was going to swallow such a large animal, but then he realized his assumption about the animal was wrong.

It wasn't eating the alloc...it had latched on and was sucking out it's blood. The snake was undulating its body and appeared to be pumping the blood out of the alloc. The animal was like a hybrid of a leach and a snake.

'What a weird ass animal,' Night thought to himself as he tried to figure out what to do. He couldn't ride the snake thing. He could probably kill it when it was distracted with the blood feeding.....but attacking a potentially venomous snake at close range with a few knives might be risky. He honestly couldn't decide out what to do.

So, he just watched as the snake sucked and slowly inflated with blood from the alloc. This went on for a good 30 minutes before the snake finally let go. The snake had swollen up to roughly four to five times its original diameter.

Night kept trying to figure out how it was going to get away with such an awkward shape. It went from looking like a normal snake shape to looking like an overstuffed sausage. The snake beast curled up and started to undulate its body in a weird motion. Surprisingly, the motion caused the snake to start sinking down into the sand...right next to the dead alloc that had some of Night's supplies strapped to it. After a minute or two, the only part of the snake that was visible were the two hornlike projections that sat above it's eyes.

Night could sense the snake under the sand with his perception. It seemed to be hiding and waiting for something.

'It shouldn't be hungry. What the hell is it waiting for?,' Night questioned himself.

The sun was practically set at this point. Darkness was completely on the desert. Several moons were starting to shine overhead.

Night was actually afraid to approach the alloc for the remaining supplies. He had a feeling this snake was waiting for something. He didn't want to risk a fight with the snake just yet. Maybe he could wait until it went to sleep....then kill it easily in his soul space.

After about an hour after the sun went down, Night was still sitting on the other side of the dead alloc. The snake hadn't went to sleep yet.....it seemed to be in some weird trance like state.....but it wasn't sleeping.

While he was sitting, he noticed something else at the limits of his perception. Two people were walking around and arguing with each other. No.....they weren't people.....these two guys were demons.