The cultivator's hands still trembled when she left the town. Even if she tried her best not to think about her heinous acts, her body remembered. A snapped neck left quite the impression as it would seem.
But biting her hands off was not an alternative, so Aloe just continued walking.
That was all she could seem to do nowadays.
Her mind was a bit dizzy from the lack of sleep, but she pressed herself even harder than in previous days as now there was a definitive lead of her whereabouts out there.
Which made it all the more stressful having to walk normally for an hour so no one would see a petite woman moving as fast as a dweller. She compensated the wasted time with an hour of recovery, but one couldn't truly rest whilst moving.
What she could do whilst moving, though, was infuse the Blossomflame. Or rather, donning the flowing stance and pouring a bit of vitality into the hot seed with her Forced Growth technique. She made it in bursts, putting an adult's worth of vitality into the seed and then switching back to recovery to refill her reserves.
Whilst wielding the regeneration stance, her vitality recovery speed was nothing short of staggering. It made her mouth water imagining how fast she would restore her vitality in the future when her reserves were big enough to boost any stance to rival one of the older sultanzade.
Having said so, all this vitality shuffling wasn't exactly the best for her rumbling and agitated brain.
Fortunately for her headache, having plenty of water and food meant she could be more lavish with her breaks. Until now, Aloe had ignored the effects of haste in her body, but they were too obvious to continue doing so.
The speed stance accelerated the body, but that meant also tiring and becoming hungry faster. If she was traveling multiple days per day, then she would need to eat the appropriate food for such displacement.
Which she hadn't done.
Her rations had been too limited, and most of the time, her worry had been with water rather than food. After all, most people died of dehydration in the desert, not starvation.
Not that she had had much meat before, but now she was nothing but skin and bone. Most of her meat had been on her thighs – which had been rather flabby from sitting around all day – and after striding for these many days, not much, if nothing at all, remained of that fat.
She didn't care that her backpack was heavy, even if it became heavier when she was donning haste, because that food was going to disappear soon.
For the first day since her departure from the town which she hadn't bothered to learn nor ask the name, Aloe ate as much as she could to recover some meat. She ate like three kilograms of cured meat in total around the whole day, which looked like a lot when she was probably hovering over the forty-kilo mark herself now, but she had found no difficulties devouring everything.
Her most prodigious feat of strength in her escape could have not been fighting two assassins or running for days without end, but rather fighting off her mortal starvation by sheer willpower alone and then eating slabs of meat with a weakened stomach.
As she took more breaks for that first day and also left the town proper rather late, the fugitive scribe didn't march as long as the previous days. Also, she took way longer to eat during the breaks.
"Tomorrow I should make it to the Whistling Sands." She commented before going to sleep.
That night, she slept better than she ever had before. Yes, she was sleeping outdoors. Yes, she was being pursued. But having a sleeping bag, pillows, donning the recovery internal infusion, and being exhausted from trotting all day made wonders for one's sleep.
It needed to be said that Aloe's bar for 'quality sleep' was rather low.
With the first light, she woke up, tidied up her backpack-sized camp, and left for the horizon.
It really helped that her destination was just beyond the sun. But it was also grueling for the first hours of the day as she could honestly see nothing.
The arrival to the Whistling Sands was not a sudden change of biomes like how she had been told with second-hand stories, but rather a very slow transition where there desert got less rocky and the sand color shifted from cream-slash-electrum to white.
If peering at the normal sunlit sand was already hurtful, the white sand of the Whistling Sands was nince as worse.
Aloe honestly didn't understand why the place was called 'Whistling Sands' in the first place. It just looked like a whiter section of desert.
That was until the wind blew.
The cultivator's skin filled with goosebumps as her ears were filled with a cacophony of voices. Some whistling, some singing, some shouting.
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"What?" Aloe stopped in place and donned toughness by reflex, but try as she may, she didn't find anyone kilometers around her. And she had used acuity too.
She stood still for a handful of minutes, and no matter what direction she peered, there was no hint of civilization. Yet her ears heard the song of the desert very clearly.
"What witchery is this?" Said the woman with knowledge of three distinct arcane arts.
By now she was absolutely sure that there were no people around her, not even animals. Not that they were exactly common where she was walking from and to. Then as she sat down to rest after having been standing up for this long like a dimwit, her acuity-enhanced ears tingled.
"Wait a minute," she led her head to the ground as she noticed something.
Her hands and body caused a lot of interference, mainly because she was blocking the wind, but her boosted sense of hearing still caught the sounds.
"It's the sand." Aloe stood up in realization. "The sand is singing! What in the nine hells!" She threw her arms in the air in a mixture of bewilderment and euphoria. "How is this possible?"
Unable to comprehend what her own ears were hearing, Aloe skied down the dune she was currently standing and rushed for another one, only to find that this pile of sand was also making sounds.
"Okay… I know get why they call them the Whistling Sands, but honestly… how the fuck?" For a moment she forgot that she was a fugitive in a race against time.
The situation was too mystical to ignore it. She had only believed that such magical things couldn't be seen in nature outside her Evolution.
"The sand can't be evolved, can it?" She honestly pondered the notion, for in her mind, any other alternative made no sense. "But sand is not alive, it cannot be evolved right?"
Aloe grabbed the sand on the ground, not to evolve it as in any case it would have been already evolved, but to check for signs of vitality.
Considering her knowledge of vitality had progressed significantly and she could sense vitality at a distance, Aloe doubted that was the case, but she tried doing so nonetheless.
"Nah, it's inert as normal sand. I can't even find a grain of vitality here. Heh, grain." She chuckled.
As much as part of her brain wanted to stick around and decipher the secrets of the whistling sand, Aloe knew she should stop toying around and continue with her march, as much as she dreaded the path.
She found solace in the fact that in a few days she would be in Loyata. Now that she was on the Whistling Sands, only the Ridged Highlands separated her from freedom.
At first, the sounds of the sands were mystical and even endearing. After spending this much time traveling alone, the whistles of the desert almost felt like company. But it didn't take long for that positive mindset to fade away as she got a headache from the sounds.
Whenever a gust of wind passed by, the sounds devolved from a song without harmony – but a song nonetheless – to a primal screech. And she didn't enjoy being screeched at from all directions.
Not only the sounds were loud, but also oppressive. They triggered her fight or flight response, and after being alerted so many times, her body no longer felt urgency.
Which highly scared her.
If she wasn't on alert, anything could surprise her. And she was more blind than ever as the refracted sunlight seared into her eyeballs.
After finding the only big enough rocky formation to make camp in the afternoon, Aloe pondered if she should rest for the day there. That was the only solid number of rocks she had found, so that had her worried. If she didn't find another formation for the rest of the day, she would either need to sleep on the sand or continue marching during the night.
Neither of those choices were good.
But in the end, fear had won out. She still was too close to that city, town, or whatever for her liking. She wanted to get as far away from her deeds as possible, even if running away from them wouldn't undo them. But it would keep her alive.
She had quite the feast before leaving. The cultivator finished one durum she had bought on the town's bazaar but didn't quite get through it yesterday, and had almost a full wheel of cheese with some pita. Her fresh water was getting to the point that it could be called fresh no longer, but that didn't matter to her, water was water.
Once full, Aloe continued with the sun directly shining on her back.
Having a satiated stomach did wonders for her throbbing headache, now nothing more than a mild migraine.
This journey was going to be the death of her.
Or that was what she constantly thought. A hurting body was feasible, she had had one for months, a hurting mind not so much. She hated this ever-repeating cycle of rest-headache, rest-headache, but there was nothing she could do to solve it.
Marching was, quite literally, the only way forward.
The problems started at twilight.
The worst of her fears came true. Well, not the worst. The worst would have her either dead, enslaved, or with her legs useless again at a minimum. But her earlier suspicions proved to not be unfunded.
There was no rocky ground anywhere in sight.
It didn't matter if she went to the tallest dune and used acuity, Aloe could not sight any solid land. No bedrock, no boulders, no arches, not even gravel. Nothing at all.
Just an endless sea of white.
She almost straight up puked when night came by and her hopes had been extinguished.
She now had two alternatives: sleep on the sand and risk a monster attack when she was sleeping, or continue marching on the night and risk a monster attack she may be able to see coming.
Dealing with so many hypotheticals wasn't a thing she enjoyed at all, but between bad and worse, Aloe chose the safest option and continued walking.
The night was cold and the wind was weak enough that the sands only whistled instead of singing, but that only made it worse. More ominous. Made her more anxious. If it wasn't because the moon shone with all her might today, Aloe might have given up altogether.
More than once she thought of switching to acuity to see better through the darkness of the night, but then she would be easy prey.
For whatever or whoever that considered her prey.
Paranoia and anxiety mixed into one another in an ebb and flow, she didn't know what emotion she was feeling any longer as she raced across the dunes, her head snapping to a side every time she heard something, only for it to be a gust of wind that had taken a horrifying note by the sand.
For the first time in her escape, Aloe felt mentally exhausted. She saw danger in every shadow and dune. Everything was horrendous and horrifying.
Then she saw it.
The silhouette of a person.
But as a cloud cleared from the moon, light shone on that person to reveal red skin instead of a dark one.
Aloe stopped on her feet out of horror. Real horror.
The 'person' before her finally saw her and they smiled. It was a smile that was engraved in her mind, one that no human being could perform. One that moved almost as high as the eyes and showed many sharp teeth. She had been fed stories about them, so even if it was her first time seeing them, Aloe recognized the entity before her.
A djinn.