73: Chapter 73 The Desperate Southern Kingdom...

Dry, hot winds swirled with grit across the border's Gobi Desert. The sandy soil beneath their feet, which should have been a year-round hardened crust, began to tremble slightly without warning!

The sand began to cave in!

—The grains of sand by their feet started jumping frantically. Cracking patterns exploded outward like spiderwebs beneath everyone, emitting crisp "crack-crack" snapping sounds!

Before they could even react, the entire ground suddenly lurched downward. The sand layer, like a punctured water skin, poured into the fissures with a rushing sound, revealing a bottomless darkness below in an instant!

Wenger turned pale with fright at the sight. He instantly summoned a magical treasure and barely managed to pull up the several people around him...

The instructors in the other teams also reacted quickly, protecting their respective teams one after another. This prevented those without the ability to fly from falling in...

The roar was deafening as the ground within a hundred-meter radius collapsed. Amidst the surging waves of sand, rock pillars several meters thick snapped from underground, falling into the abyss with ear-piercing cracking sounds. The kicked-up dust instantly blotted out the sun, dyeing the sky a murky yellow...

The originally flat Gobi was torn open by a hideous giant pit. The sand on the pit walls continued to slide down. Within the rolling smoke and dust, one could see massive dark shadows slowly writhing at the bottom. Accompanied by a dull pulsation like the beating of drums, a foul wind carrying the scent of blood rushed straight up from the abyss!

The screams of the crowd instantly pierced through the wind and sand!

"How could an Ant Queen's nest appear here!" a blonde man in the Storm Country team shouted, looking at the bottomless dark abyss, nearly breaking down.

The faces of the others had also turned extremely grim at this moment...

Every one of them wore an expression as if facing a formidable foe!

They all knew what this collapse of the sandy ground represented!

Sure enough, in the next moment, countless thumb-sized Sand-Devouring Ant Beasts gushed out like a black torrent, scrambling to be first.

These ant beasts were pitch black all over, their carapaces hard as iron. Their heads bore drill-like sharp teeth, and while their limbs were short, their explosive power was staggering. The moment they hit the ground, they began to grow at a speed visible to the naked eye, turning into half-man-high hideous ferocious beasts in the blink of an eye.

They had no eyes, locking onto prey solely through smell and vibration. They crawled densely over the four walls of the deep pit, making a terrifying "rustling" sound...

This was the border of Nanxiu Country. Behind this city wall lay a buffer zone nearly a hundred miles wide, and behind that buffer zone lived countless citizens of Nanxiu!

Although this country also had border defense teams, they were still far inferior compared to the Dragon Country. Even the Dragon Country might not necessarily be able to withstand this surging beast tide, let alone this relatively backward nation...

The only defense their border could rely on was the landmines and bombs scattered throughout that nearly hundred-mile buffer zone...

As expected, after gnawing a gap in the city wall, the surging swarm of ant beasts charged straight toward the buffer zone...

The deafening sound of exploding bombs, mixed with splashed-up soil, turned the entire buffer zone into a sky filled with yellow sand, leaving behind countless deep craters on the ground...

But the power of those bombs could, at most, only kill commander grade beasts and heavily injure Monarchs...

Against this surging beast tide, it was merely a drop in the bucket and served no real purpose...

In the first city behind the buffer zone, Nansha City, many people had already discovered this terrifying sight...

At the same time, the city's alarms tore through the sky.

The clamor on the streets suddenly froze, followed by an explosion of hysterical screams!

The shoulder pole of a peddler walking at the very front fell with a "clatter." The baskets full of porcelain smashed onto the cracked ground, shattering into a floor of cold glints.

He didn't care to pick them up at all. His face was as pale as paper as he stumbled backward wildly. However, he was tripped by the loose sand, falling miserably to the ground. His hands scrambled for the gravel on the surface, sand stuffing under his fingernails, as a terrified roar squeezed out of his throat: "The ground is collapsing! Run!"

Several merchants traveling together in the middle of the group fell into even greater chaos. Someone was knocked down by a panicked companion and rolled directly toward the edge of a fissure. He used both hands and feet to claw at the ground, half his body hanging in mid-air. His shrill wails made one's eardrums ache:

"Save me! Someone save me!" The person next to him tried to reach out to pull him, but was lurched by the force of the collapse. They could only watch helplessly as he grabbed a handful of shifting sand and fell into the darkness with a scream.

A woman holding a cloth bundle was so scared her whole body went limp. She gripped the wrist of the child beside her so tightly her nails almost embedded into the child's flesh.

The child burst into loud sobs, terrified by the commotion, but the woman didn't even have the strength to comfort him. She just stared with bloodshot eyes at the expanding deep pit, her teeth biting her lip until it bled, her body trembling like a leaf in the autumn wind.

Others were scared out of their wits by this sudden natural disaster, running aimlessly over the cracked ground. The sand beneath their feet continued to sink, each step splashing up large amounts of grit. Someone, in their frantic flight, crashed directly into a broken rock pillar, falling to the ground with a bleeding head, their struggles appearing soft and powerless.

The city's high-rise buildings were nothing more than fragile toys in front of the ant beasts...

Hundreds and thousands of ant beasts climbed up the exterior walls of the buildings, the barbs on their limbs embedding into the glass curtain walls and steel gaps. They gnawed at the exterior tiles and concrete, causing massive chunks of building debris to fall from high above, splashing dust as they hit the ground.

The chaotic cries, the falling sand, and the snapping of rock pillars merged into a mess. The aura of despair, like the dust itself, instantly enveloped the entire city.

The ant beast tide that had crawled out of the deep pit in front of the genius teams was still moving through the buffer zone...

But countless small pits had already appeared in Nansha City, and countless ant beasts had already emerged there!

This did not happen suddenly!

This was fundamentally a premeditated monster invasion targeting Nanxiu Country!

From the current scene, it was very likely that the underground of Nanxiu Country was already a hollowed-out nest for the ant beasts...

Looking at the distant Nansha City about to fall, Wenger's eyelids drooped. He felt that what he had done was like that of a clown...

The ridiculous thing was that they were actually preparing to explore the nest of the Desert Overlord...

It turned out they had long been standing within the trap built by the Overlord Ant Queen for the entirety of Nanxiu...

The people around him were already the top geniuses of each country, but now they were entangled by the ant beast swarm. Although everyone's strength was great and a single strike would inevitably turn a pile of ant beasts to ash, given such a massive number, even if their weapons smoked from use and their spiritual energy was exhausted, it wouldn't have any impact on this gargantuan beast tide...

An insect plague...

The most terrifying of the four great natural disasters...

A thick sense of despair welled up in Wenger's heart. In the midst of such a monster calamity, he couldn't see even a tiny glimmer of hope for Nanxiu Country's survival...

"Where did Chu Ran go?"

To the side, the remaining four members of the Dragon Country team were currently back-to-back, carving out a small area where they could stand amidst the beast tide, though the sandy ground beneath them still risked collapsing at any moment.

From the moment the ground first began to cave in, Chu Ran had disappeared.

He had not appeared until now...

While fighting, Mu Zhiyu frantically scanned the surroundings with her peripheral vision, but she couldn't find Chu Ran's figure. A trace of anxiety and worry appeared in her eyes.

Of the original forty-plus people present, only thirty-odd remained. Several had already fallen into the bottomless black abyss because they hadn't reacted immediately when the ground collapsed...

Wenger glanced behind him and noticed that the Nanxiu team was also missing someone—it was Kendi, who had just been knocked flying earlier.

The patch of sand where he had fallen earlier had now caved in. If nothing unexpected happened, he was likely dead or missing...

The surviving geniuses around them were all covered in wounds. Wenger could see no hope in their eyes...

And true enough, what would it matter even if they luckily survived this wave of attacks?

Could they really break through this beast tide that spanned nearly a thousand miles?

It was just a matter of dying sooner or later...

"Chu Ran! Chu Ran!"

Despite their voices being hoarse, the members of the Dragon Country team were still incessantly calling out that name, which made Wenger somewhat irritable.

"We're all going to die, can't you say a few words less?" The captain of the Storm Country team looked at Mu Zhiyu and the others, speaking irritably.

Mu Zhiyu turned her head, her eyes narrowing as she stared at him, and asked in confusion:

"Who said we'll definitely die?"

...