The members of the advance team immediately began their work, while Sun Hang walked to the edge of the "ice cap" and set down his backpack.
He opened the backpack and took out a folded "skateboard" from inside.
This is a single-soldier mobility equipment urgently developed by the Dubhe Tower equipment department specifically for the Desert Sea environment in the past month. Once fully unfolded, it looks just like a surfboard, and when paired with a small vector thruster installed at the rear, its short-term maximum speed can even surpass a sand boat.
This speed was enough for Sun Hang to run back and forth from Cairo to the Nile estuary twice within the five-and-a-half-hour "activity window."
Of course, that was assuming Sun Hang didn’t lose his way in this Desert Sea, which was almost devoid of any landmarks.
Stepping onto the skateboard, Sun Hang glanced again at the armband on his right arm, where hundreds of square particles resembling chips were neatly arranged on the surface.
The exterior of these particles was wrapped in a protective shell made of carbon fiber material, and the core inside continuously emitted low-frequency micro-vibrations—the entire armband was the "Nephthys" device modified by Professor Cao. With this thing, as long as he maintained a safe distance of three hundred meters, he could become invisible to the perception of the Sinking Sand Giant Worms.
However, the three hundred meter safe distance required the wearer to be in a "silent" state, which means not actively using any meme ability.
Once the ability was used, the shielding effect of Nephthys would be greatly weakened—Candle Dragon participated in the testing of the new Nephthys model, and simply by releasing a liquid protective shield, the safe distance of Nephthys expanded to two kilometers. However, when Candle Dragon exerted his full strength, the shielding effect of Nephthys completely lost its effectiveness.
This meant that within the advance team, infected members were strictly forbidden from using their abilities unless absolutely necessary—and even if used, they were required to restrain their power as much as possible.
Fortunately, apart from the Sinking Sand Giant Worms, other bizarre creatures in the Desert Sea had mostly been hunted down. Creatures like the strange birds Sun Hang saw being swallowed by the Sinking Sand Giant Worms before could be dealt with using firearms and bullets, so there was no need for the infected members to intervene.
In fact, with Sun Hang’s ability to conceal his aura, he didn’t really need to wear Nephthys. However, Professor Cao mentioned that the improved model of Nephthys had greatly increased mass production compared to the original version. In this month alone, Dubhe Tower had manufactured over fifty sets of Nephthys, allowing each advance team member to have two sets to spare, so Sun Hang naturally took one to try.
Adjusting the output power of the skateboard to endurance mode, Sun Hang swiftly slid down from the top of a sand dune, and when he looked back, the sand dune behind him had already moved several dozen meters, transforming its shape dramatically.
The wind in this area was strong, making the Desert Sea truly like an ocean in constant motion, rendering navigation through terrain impossible. The only thing barely useful for direction was the sun in the sky.
But in the Surrendered Area, overly trusting the sun could easily lead one into traps—even though the sun over Egypt appeared normal for now. Past records of exploring the Surrendered Area indicated that the area’s sky was "half real and half illusion" and could even disturb human common perceptions.
Just as satellites in near-Earth orbit couldn’t see the ground details of the Surrendered Area, from the ground looking up into the sky was the same—Candle Dragon and his team encountered anomalies like "long days" or "long nights" that lasted tens of hours, reversed days and nights, chaotic stars, and other abnormal weather phenomena, not to mention the strange lunar and solar eclipses; some mission records even mentioned a "green sun."
To ensure Sun Hang didn’t get lost in the Desert Sea, both the advance team and he carried powerful communication equipment, which, in addition to communication, could be used for positioning—while it could only determine the relative position between parties, it at least ensured that they wouldn’t get lost in the Desert Sea.
The maximum range of the communication equipment was sixty kilometers in the absence of relay stations and without utilizing ionospheric reflection, and the signal would further weaken if there were terrain obstructions between devices.
According to the prior agreement, once the signal of the communication equipment weakened, Sun Hang was to immediately stop exploring and return to the team’s vicinity.
Seeing the signal at full strength, Sun Hang accelerated slightly.
Ten kilometers, twenty kilometers, thirty kilometers...
When Sun Hang and the advance team reached a distance of thirty-five kilometers apart, something different finally appeared on the Desert Sea covered in nothing but yellow sand.
At the top of a sand dune a few kilometers away, Sun Hang saw the wreck of a "sand boat."
And lying on the fallen "sail" was an "injured person" barely hanging on.
"Goodness!" Sun Hang hadn’t had much hope for this exploration, but who would have thought that after covering such a short distance, he would find one of his primary targets almost immediately.
"Is this what’s meant by ’search high and low only to find it without any effort’?"
Without hesitation, after notifying the advance team, Sun Hang accelerated toward the sand dune.
The sand boat seemed to have collided with something, and half of the hull had disintegrated, while the person lying on the sail had fallen into a coma.
It was indeed a person—all physiological features met the standards for a human, and there were no meme reactions on him.
Not only was he a human, but an "ordinary person" who hadn’t been infected.
He appeared to be a young man between twenty and thirty years old, with a lean build, his upper body bare, and a piece of unknown animal leather wrapped around his waist, while a few bone javelins, sharpened to a fine point, lay scattered among the remains of the sand boat.
"Target is severely dehydrated, with very weak life signs," the voice of the main brain sounded in Sun Hang’s ear, "Immediate treatment is needed, otherwise there will be a risk to the person’s life."
"Given the circumstances, we should prioritize saving him."
Sun Hang took out a water bottle, gave the person some water, and quietly infused a small amount of diluted "materialized vitality"... With these measures, the survivor’s condition improved significantly, and he seemed about to wake up.
Only then did Sun Hang have the mind to examine the wrecked sand boat.
Earlier, Sun Hang had wondered where survivors would find materials to build sand boats in the resource-poor Desert Sea—upon closer inspection, he discovered that the boat’s frame was made of some animal-like bizarre creature’s bones, covered with a thick layer of leather.
The "clothes" on the survivor, as well as the large sail, were made from the same type of leather.
Similarly, the bones used to construct the sand boat’s frame and those used for the bone javelins were from the same type of bone.