Kay was in luck. Or perhaps, after enduring so much misfortune since arriving in the Sand World, his luck was finally turning. The first apprentice corpse he found belonged to a quasi-mage—Krobb, the very one he remembered.
It was Krobb who'd gone on a rampage near the portal, attacking anyone in his path, forcing Kay (who'd been carrying Lina) to detour. That stray elemental bolt that had hit Kay? It might well have been Krobb's doing.
Now, Krobb was just a corpse—broken, unrecognizable from his earlier fury. His eyes were wide, filled with sand instead of pupils. Most of his body was buried under the dunes, only half his head sticking out.
Kay was no stranger to dead bodies or specimens; Krobb's corpse didn't faze him. To save mana, he didn't use magic—instead, he used his Acid Staff as a shovel, digging into the sand.
He didn't know how long he'd been unconscious, but his Acid Staff was fully recharged now. He hadn't had time to study Lina's black crystal bracelet yet; for now, he relied on his own gear.
Kay spat a mouthful of blood-stained saliva onto Krobb's shriveled skull. After all his effort, his only reward was a broken half of a staff—one that looked more advanced than his Acid Staff, with far more intricate runes. It might even have been a formal magical tool… but broken, it was worthless.
Krobb's body was gone from the chest down; only one arm remained. No wonder Kay found nothing. The quasi-mage had deserved his end, but Kay still felt a flicker of frustration. He lifted the broken staff, ready to hurl it away—then stopped. It was still decent wood. Even if it couldn't channel magic, it could replace his Acid Staff as a digging tool. With a sigh, he tucked it under his arm and kept searching.
He'd wanted to explore the valley's center, but his gut told him to wait until his wounds healed.
Three days of searching turned up over a dozen apprentice corpses, most buried in sand—no survivors. The sand and elemental chaos had ruined most of their magical artifacts; only a few were usable, and their mana was nearly drained. Kay wasn't sure if he could repair them.
His own losses stung too: his pale mask—his first ever magical item, a trophy—was shattered. He kept it anyway, hoping to fix it someday. Most importantly, he'd only found seven Elemental Orbs—far from enough to activate Moses' handle.
With his body and mana mostly recovered, Kay finally headed for the valley's center. He activated his Invisibility Cloak—his ring's earth shield was worn, but the cloak still worked. The funnel-shaped valley kept the sun out, so it was cool—too cool, almost. As he descended to the bottom, a faint chill brushed his skin.
Then he saw them.
Countless yellow worms, writhing in the sand—nothing like any species he'd ever seen. Their bodies were smooth and flexible, but their heads and tails bore jagged, tooth-lined maws. They were eating sand—dry, nutrientless sand. Some were barely ten centimeters long; others stretched several meters. And beneath the surface, he suspected, were even larger ones.
"Sandworms," he muttered. Fitting, for the Sand World. But they didn't just eat sand. Scattered among the worms were tattered black robes—Menzoberranzan's apprentice uniforms. No bodies, no blood. Only robes.
Then his heart raced: next to the robes lay twenty or thirty red Elemental Orbs. The sandworms couldn't digest them. Their saliva melted cloth and sand, but the Orbs were untouched.
Kay itched to rush over—until a sandworm the size of a tree trunk squeezed out of the swarm. It was the queen, easily ten meters long. And it was heading straight for him. Behind it came a tide of smaller worms, plus two more sandworms—three and four meters long.
"They can see through the cloak?" Kay froze. As the queen and her swarm moved, he glimpsed a vast underground cavity beneath them—endless sandworms, possibly even bigger ones.
He ran. Brute force wasn't his style; smart mages used strategy. He'd taken down a saltwater crocodile as a low-tier apprentice by planning—he'd do the same here.
The sandworms slowed their chase. They could see through his invisibility, but their range was limited. Now: how had they found him? Smell? Heat? His mana?
"Heat," Kay said, slicing open a two-centimeter sandworm with a scalpel. He stood at a crude table made of dirt and sand, surrounded by sandworm specimens. Twenty days had passed since he'd first seen the swarm; his research was slow, thanks to the harsh conditions.
He'd confirmed two things: sandworms tracked heat, and they feared water. He poured a vial of water onto the live sandworm. It twisted and screeched, its maw snapping. Two minutes later, it melted into a yellow, acidic slime. Kay dropped a splinter of wood into it—hiss—the wood turned to black charcoal instantly. Its corrosion matched his Acid Staff.
"What kind of creature are you?" he murmured. No wonder they ate sand—their digestive power was terrifying.
Keeping sandworms alive was impossible. They chewed through test tubes in minutes. The ones on his table were fresh-caught. He'd also learned their weak spot: a small area behind their maws. A single pinprick there, and they went limp.
He finished preserving the specimens, then frowned. He needed those Orbs—but he couldn't take on the swarm, not with the queen and her giants. His only chance lay in one thing.
He pulled a large, gray iron canister from his spatial ring. (Simplified Magical Cannon).Three shots. His last hope.
Boom!
The explosion echoed through the valley. The cannon's power shocked Kay—one shot wiped out two-thirds of the sandworm swarm he'd lured over, and triggered a partial collapse of the valley's center. Not just from the cannon— the sandworms had hollowed out the ground.
The ten-meter queen roared, then split in two. She wasn't dead, but she couldn't chase him. Kay had planned to use two shots; instead, he grabbed the Orbs and fled, stowing the cannon back in his ring. It was powerful, but slow to reload and clumsy—useless against mages, but perfect for mindless creatures like sandworms.
"A hundred of these… even the Dean couldn't survive," he muttered, shivering at the thought. He shook off the fantasy, clutching the Orbs tightly.
From deep underground, a deafening roar erupted. The queen hadn't been the true ruler. The of writhing bodies filled the air. Kay didn't stop to wonder if they were native to the Sand World—he just ran.
Outside the valley, the sun blazed, searing his skin. Kay stood for half an hour, gripping Moses' black handle in one hand and the Orbs in the other. No pull. No portal. Dizziness washed over him—from dehydration, or despair.
He stared at the three suns, his chest hollow. "It can't be… Mentor wouldn't lie to me."
Moses hadn't lied—but spatial magic was profound, far beyond the grasp of most. Among all magical disciplines in the Wizarding World, spatial theory stood as one of the most advanced. Crafting a spatial ring required minimal spatial knowledge, something any competent alchemist could master. But bridging two planes? Unlocking deeper spatial secrets? That was beyond ordinary mages, let alone apprentices.
Mages who mastered spatial magic were called "Spatial Mages"—rarer than elemental mages, coveted by every Holy Tower and magical organization. Menzoberranzan, in the Underdark, had no true Spatial Mage. If it had, Moses—an alchemist—would never have had to tinker with so many artifacts to stabilize and widen that spatial rift.
The reason Kay couldn't return via the black handle? He was in the wrong place. He needed to be near the old portal's location to link the handle to the magic altar in Shadow Valley (in the Underdark). And even that relied on one critical condition: the altar hadn't been destroyed. Without it, the handle (the key) and Elemental Orbs (the power) were useless—there'd be no "door" to open.
Kay wasn't stupid. After a month of numbing despair, he finally pieced it together.
"Zorro and the others spent half a year just pinpointing the generator's location," he said, excitement rising. "You can't connect to the Wizarding World anywhere—you need the right spot. I don't know how to calculate coordinates, but I can find where the portal used to be!"
Kay was twenty-one. In the Wizarding World's human villages, he'd be married with children by now. Most of this year had been wasted in the Sand World. Once, his skin had been pale—from the Underdark's gloom, or maybe just his natural complexion. Now, the man who emerged from behind the dunes was tanned, his jaw stubbled and unkempt.
He'd started growing facial hair at sixteen, but back then it had been faint fuzz, barely visible in the Underdark's shadows. Here, under the triple suns, it had grown thick and coarse in a year. The past month of despair and exposure had left him too drained to care about his appearance. He didn't even notice how weathered he looked—all he felt was the spark of hope reigniting.
Humans needed purpose to keep going. In the Dark Mage Academy, Kay's purpose had been survival. Now? It was returning home.
Finding a way didn't mean the path would be easy. Where exactly had the portal stood? The desert stretched endless, no landmarks, no terrain to guide him. But despair didn't break him—not this time. He clenched Lina's black crystal bracelet and stepped into the vast sand.
The Sand World would be Kay's first, unforgettable trip to another plane. Even when he grew stronger later, he'd never forget its searing heat, its harshness, the lessons it taught him about his own weakness. Those memories would drive him to climb higher, to unlock the secrets of the Astral Sea and elemental magic.
Half a year later.
A man in tattered black robes trudged through the sand. The sky was dim—Kay knew the Sand World's night was coming. Nights here came once every fifteen days, and he'd learned to read the light. He'd lived here for over a year.
Night brought coolness and silence, a respite from the day's heat. He built a crude fire and set a pot of mushroom soup to boil. Today, he added a sprinkle of ground sandworm jerky. His monster meat had run out six months ago; vine shavings had grown nauseating. He'd tried the sandworm powder on a whim a month ago—and found its sharp, tangy flavor cut through the mushroom's monotony, making him forget the worms' grotesque appearance.
The mushrooms in the pot were red, white, and black—matching the fire, light, and dark magic he wielded. Elemental Mushrooms' colors depended on the mage's affinity. Kay knew other low-tier spells, like Vine Bind, but he stuck to these three to keep his mana stable. Besides, their taste was the same—color didn't change much.
"The Sand World's mana density is way lower than the Wizarding World's," he muttered, sipping the soup and scribbling notes. "My mental power recovers at the same speed, but my mana builds much slower."
In this empty, endless desert, keeping busy was the only way to stay sane. At some point, Kay had taken to writing things down. Thinking, or even recording with a crystal ball, didn't etch ideas into his mind like pen and paper did. He finally understood why Moses and other formal mages loved annotating their spellbooks. He'd kept notes before, but never this diligently.
Busywork, deep thought—they let him forget himself, forget where he was. He took another sip of soup, lost in the pursuit of truth. The scratch of his quill against paper was the only sound in the quiet night.
Another half year passed. Kay returned to the sandworm valley—the only landmark he'd found, his starting point for every search. When he got lost in the dunes, he'd follow his markers back here, then set out again.
But the desert was shifting sand. The portal's location might have moved too. As time dragged on, his hope faded.
"Maybe I should go deeper into the valley," he thought. "Better to die exploring the unknown than lose my mind in the sand."
No matter how many times he visited, the valley barely changed. Its funnel shape shielded it from sandstorms; unlike the rest of the desert, it didn't shift. That's why he could always find it.
Curiosity, boredom, desperation—whatever the reason, he stepped into the valley's center again. The deep cave he'd blown open still gaped there, unrepaired by the sandworms. Fewer worms lingered outside now—no sign of the giant ones. Only swarms of tiny, writhing larvae.
Thanks to his research, Kay no longer feared them. He cast Water Sphere, shaping it into a thin film around his body, then walked to within two meters of the swarm. The harsh desert had honed his magic control—six months ago, he could never have manipulated Water Sphere so precisely. He'd refined all his spells to near-perfection; without new knowledge to learn, he'd had nothing but time to practice.
The water film lowered his body temperature, making him "invisible" to the larvae, and its moisture kept them at bay. But this trick wouldn't work on worms over two meters long. Otherwise, he would've sneaked back for the Orbs months ago, instead of using the cannon.
He collected more specimens, glanced around, then jumped into the cave.
Faint light filtered in—reflected from the desert above, where the triple suns still hung low. It felt like the Underdark, dim and cool. The cave was different from what he'd imagined: fewer sandworms, and the walls were coated in a thick, sticky yellow slime. He collected a sample; its strong adhesive suggested it was what kept the cave from collapsing.
"Not the sandworms' melted bodies… their bodily fluid?" he wondered.
Deeper in, he found the giants. In a greenhouse-like pit, over a dozen sandworms—two to sixteen meters long—wriggled. The pit was dotted with white eggs: some as small as sand grains, others half a meter wide. He even saw one worm bigger than the queen he'd fought—sixteen meters, by his guess.
But the most shocking sight was two seven-meter worms. Each had only one maw; the stumps at their tails marked them as the same worm he'd blown in half a year ago.
"They didn't die—they split into two?" Kay whispered, aghast. Their vitality was terrifying.
Hidden in the shadows, his tattered robes blending with the dark, Kay didn't attract their notice. They were too busy tending to their eggs. Driven by curiosity—or maybe just restlessness—he crawled closer, slipping several eggs into his spatial ring. It couldn't hold living creatures, but eggs were fine.
Emboldened, he inched toward the pit's center and grabbed the half-meter egg.
That was a mistake.
The sixteen-meter queen roared. It sensed its offspring vanish. It the worm it had been tangled with, its jagged maw (locking onto) Kay, who was still crouched on the ground.
Kay's hair stood on end. He sprang up and ran deeper into the cave—he couldn't go back; the "sa sa " of approaching larvae blocked his escape. He had to keep going forward.
He ran until the "sa sa" faded. The cave grew darker, vaster than he'd imagined.
"Come here, Wizarding World mage," a voice echoed in his mind—neither male nor female. It made his head throb. Not out of malice, but because their power levels were worlds apart. A mere mental message from such a being was almost too much for an apprentice to bear.
"We can make a deal."