The sudden end of the season of mad sand had already struck the locals as extremely strange. A few bold souls risked venturing around the desert’s outskirts and soon discovered that the once-aggressive native creatures were no longer attacking people much. Even ordinary humans could now set foot in the desert without immediately being eaten.

At night, distorted red light appeared across the clear desert sky. It looked somewhat like an aurora, yet also resembled cracks smashed into the very canopy of the world. No one could tell whether the red glow was shining upward from the ground or seeping in from somewhere beyond the sky.

After some time, the red light began forming vague shapes. These shapes were beautiful but highly abstract.

Later, those shapes gradually sharpened. There seemed to be mountains, buildings, rivers… It was like a mirage.

No one knew what was happening. From a place...