Chapter 6: Beyond the Western Frontier
As the towers of the Sapphire City gradually shrank behind them, Elias and the small team accompanying him made their way toward the foothills of the Western Desert indicated on the map. The backup data crystal they had taken from AETHEL’s main core glowed inside Elias’s backpack, radiating a faint but sharp heat. The crystal did more than prove that the system had collapsed—it also provided the coordinates of four different ancient seals waiting to be awakened across the world.
“We have a long road ahead of us, Elias,” said one of the team’s more experienced technicians as he tightened the laces of his dusty desert boots. On the horizon, the sun’s scorching heat formed a gigantic curtain of haze over the mountain silhouettes to the west. “Victory in the Sapphire City was great, but the valleys here are beyond AETHEL’s control. There are different rules here, and different dangers.”
Elias nodded. The parchment map in his hand trembled faintly in tandem with the energy radiating from the crystal, renewing the lines drawn across it. “I know,” he murmured. “This is a land of not only technology, but also the ancient secrets our ancestors hid before the First Great Division. The second piece is waiting for us somewhere among those mountains.”
On the horizon, an old railway line suspended in midair and emerging from the middle of a colossal sandstorm caught their attention. Trains no longer traveled on rails; they glided through the air on magnetic fields. But this line had been abandoned years ago. Elias signaled to his team and quickened his pace. The gates to a new world had opened, and they were still only at the very beginning of this journey.