At this moment, on the wilderness at night, the gale always carried an indelible scent of dust and a faint hint of blood.
Wu Erhun, the leader of the Black Tooth Tribe among the Tide-Followers, sat broadly on a throne carved from the skull of some giant lizard.
His armor, a haphazardly stitched mess of black iron and leather, glinted coldly in the firelight. His fingers unconsciously rubbed a crudely made shotgun at his waist.
His tent was pitched on a slightly elevated rocky ridge.
In the far distance, a similarly hazy and towering shadow rose, standing in silent opposition to this place.
If viewed from a great height, these two jagged, steep highlands stretching for dozens of miles looked more like a pair of incredibly long, endless dikes.
Sandwiched between these two giant dikes was a vast, sunken plain.
Right now, that parched plain was covered in layers of accumulated and condensed crimson solid crystals.
Under the cover of the cold moonlight and the dark night, the entire massive, ancient riverbed was dyed a terrifying deep red.
This was the Red Tide riverbed.
Wu Erhun listlessly picked up his tin cup.
As cruel predators, the Black Tooth Tribe's reputation on the wilderness was built entirely on the skulls and blood of other small tribes.
Wu Erhun was not a good man; he never denied it and was even quite proud of the fact.
His tribe was large, his warriors numerous, and his weapons brutal. Therefore, their most accustomed way of survival on this wilderness was raiding.
In the past, wherever the Black Tooth Tribe's wolf flag was planted, the surrounding nomadic tribes, large and small, would pack their bags and flee overnight like hamsters spotting a hungry wolf.
"A bunch of rats who only know how to hide in holes," Wu Erhun spat into the campfire.
Originally, according to his plan, he wanted to use this Red Tide cycle to conduct a thorough and bloody pillaging of both banks of the riverbed.
On the wilderness, the Red Tide was everything.
It was the blood flowing through the withered husk of the wilderness. It could be refined into water, processed into fuel, or even become food.
The Red Tide was the largest and most precious resource on the wilderness, one that no Tide-Follower tribe could ignore.
It was a divine gift bestowed upon living beings by this desperate land... perhaps the only gift.
But because of this, the actual beginning of every Red Tide also signaled the start of a bloody carnival.
Big fish ate little fish, and little fish ate shrimp.
The hierarchy of the wilderness had always been established with iron and fire.
Small tribes struggling to survive had to seek protection from major powers like the Black Tooth Tribe just to get a sip of the soup during the Red Tide.
They had to pay tribute on time and surrender people and weapons; they couldn't just run away.
As for those small tribes who dared to remain neutral and refused to pick a side, in Wu Erhun's eyes, they were no different from wild prey on the roadside that could be gutted at will.
This was the eternal iron law of the wilderness for thousands of years: might makes right.
However, in this Red Tide cycle, things had become a bit different.
Wu Erhun looked up irritably, staring past the roaring torches at the edge of the camp into the distance.
In the next second, without warning, he swung his hand and smashed the tin cup heavily onto the rocky ground.
Clang!
The crisp sound of spirits hitting metal echoed far into the night.
In an instant, the high-ranking members of the Black Tooth Tribe, who had been laughing and roasting mutant beast meat, shut their mouths. It became so quiet that one could hear a pin drop.
All the warriors shrank their necks in fear, terrified of drawing the ire of their tyrannical leader.
What made Wu Erhun exceptionally displeased and caused him to click his tongue repeatedly was the massive shadow currently straddling the center of the Red Tide plain.
It was a behemoth that completely transcended the limits of the wilderness humans' imagination.
The land ship lay quietly on the deep red riverbed.
With its towering spires, layers of composite armor plating, and dense rows of heavy walking wheels—each several meters wide—on both sides of its chassis...
It didn't look like a ship; it looked more like a mobile mountain pieced together from steel and gears.
"People on the Lake."
Wu Erhun chewed on the name between his cracked lips, his eyes flickering with complex light.
It was a mix of fear of the unknown and a feverish, greedy envy.
In the legends of the wilderness, these "upper-class people" from the mysterious City of the Sky Lake possessed endless pure water, stable food sources that never rotted, and... incredibly powerful, suffocating strength.
Powerful strength.
Initially, Wu Erhun had treated this term as mere hearsay and gossip.
Even when this land ship first sailed into the Red Tide riverbed, he had eagerly gathered over a thousand tribal cavalry, wanting to test the quality of this fat piece of meat.
However, as a tribal leader who had survived to this day, Wu Erhun ultimately possessed a bit of the survival wisdom unique to the wilderness.
He stayed his hand and secretly incited and lured a medium-sized tribe with more brawn than brains to act as a scapegoat.
That tribe sent out their proudest iron-armored chariot team.
However, before those cobbled-together chariots could even charge to the one-kilometer red line surrounding the land ship, the steel beast's broadside armor opened up in sections amidst a dull mechanical grinding.
Immediately following that was a torrential downpour of azure high-energy particle beams.
There were no tactics, and there was no suspense.
Those strings of dazzling beams plowed through the space within one kilometer several times over in a few seconds.
The entire reckless tribe's charge was instantaneously vaporized in the blinding light, turning into a mist of blood that evaporated into the air.
Not a single intact corpse or even a decent piece of scrap metal was left behind.
After that battle, all the Tide-Follower tribes on both banks of the Red Tide riverbed became like birds startled by a bow.
It was precisely because of that absolute military suppression that an extremely strange, passive rule had formed on both banks.
The various tribes swore to one another that they would not fight amongst themselves and would present a united front against the outsider.
Fortunately, the People on the Lake seemed to have no interest in this group of wilderness "beggars."
The massive ship simply remained there, silent and cold, in the distance of the plain.
As a result, the Red Tide riverbed, which should have been accompanied by bloody raiding and carnival, had actually remained in a state of stalemate and confrontation.
No robbery, no killing—everyone was just waiting. How could Wu Erhun, who made his fortune through raiding, sit still?
All of this was very, very much against the Black Tooth leader's wishes.
"Damn 'People on the Lake'."
Wu Erhun stared fixedly at that steel mountain, squeezing a vicious curse through his teeth.
"If only this piece of junk would suddenly blow up..."
At that very second.
Boom!
Rate on N.U.
