The transition from the Fenwood to the Blighted Sands was not gradual; it was a scar on the face of the world. One step was on damp, black soil, the next on cracked, crimson earth. The air, once heavy with moisture, became a thin, abrasive heat that stole the water from his lungs. The symphony of life was replaced by the whisper of wind over dunes.
For another man, this would be a death sentence. For Kael, it was merely a change in methodology. The memories of his 3rd life, the one spent as a desert scavenger, rose to the surface, sharp and clear. He knew how to read the subtle patterns of the wind on the sand to navigate, how to find the sparse, thorny bushes whose roots stored bitter but life-sustaining water. He moved at night, resting during the peak of the sun's fury in the shade of rock outcroppings. His Adamantine-forged body, already resistant to hardship, endured the extreme temperatures with a grim efficiency.
His journey was a silent meditation. He encountered the desert's native dangers—Sand-Skulkers that erupted from beneath his feet, which he dispatched with brutal, decisive blows, and Glass Vultures that circled high overhead, whose shadows he learned to avoid. These were not challenges; they were simply variables in a known equation.
After three weeks of this solitary trek, a smudge of darker colour appeared on the horizon. As he drew closer, it resolved into the high, sandstone walls of a city, shimmering in the heat haze like a promise of salvation. Oasis-Khem.
The sight of it did not bring relief. It brought a cold, flat calm. He walked through the same gate he had been dragged through as a slave a hundred lifetimes ago. The same cacophony of the marketplace greeted him, the same smell of spice and leather. The city was unchanged, a permanent monument to his past failure.
But he was not the same. He was not a desperate boy seeking a patron. He was a weapon, honed and patient, on a mission. He moved through the crowd with a purpose that parted the chaos around him. His eyes, ancient and cold, saw everything. He saw the corrupt city guards extorting merchants, the desperation in the eyes of the slaves, the arrogant swagger of the low-level cultivators who served the city's masters. He saw the entire ecosystem of power he had once tried to join. It now looked pathetic, a squabble of ants on a hot stone.
He went to the arena, not as a worker, but as a spectator. He stood in the cheap, sun-baked seats and looked down at the blood-soaked sand. He saw a young fighter, full of rage and desperation, being cheered by the crowd. It wasn't Joric, but it could have been. Another cog in the machine.
He felt a ghost of his past self—the boy who died of thirst in a lightless cell, betrayed and forgotten. He felt the phantom pain, the rage, the despair. He acknowledged it, studied it like a scar, and then discarded it. That boy was dead. He had died 135 times ago.
Kael's business in Khem was simple. He traded the silicate hides of several Sand-Skulkers he had slain to a weaponsmith, not for a sword or spear, but for reinforced leather bindings, a water-purifying stone, and detailed charts of the deep desert. He used his knowledge of the city's underbelly to find the one merchant who dealt in reliable information, a man he remembered from his past life. For the price of a single, perfectly harvested Glass Vulture feather—useless to most, but a key alchemical component for a specific desert poison—he confirmed the location of the Sunken Necropolis of Al'Khar.
"It is a cursed place," the merchant warned, his eyes greedy but fearful. "The sands have claimed it, and the dead are its only citizens. To go there is to seek your own grave."
"I have seen my grave before," Kael said, his voice flat. "I am not impressed."
He left Oasis-Khem the next morning without a second glance. He did not feel triumph over his past. He felt nothing at all. The city was just a place, a memory, an irrelevant stepping stone on his path. He now had the tools and the heading. His true destination lay deeper in the corrosive emptiness of the Blighted Sands.