Episode 24: Totem of Hope

The sound of sand grains pelting the alloy plating was like a rapid-fire drumbeat, tightening the chest with every strike.

Lu Chen leaned his back against the makeshift reinforced defensive wall, the hilt of his totem blade slippery with cold sweat. Beyond the camp, a dense mass of sand-skeleton beasts was gathering. At the forefront were the evolved bone-armored beasts, their backs covered in the ribcages of ancient warriors. Each step they took made the ground tremble, and the sand-crystal projectiles they spat hissed as they smashed against the defensive wall, showering the area in sparks.

"Ammo's running low!" Chen Yu’s roar came from the left. He threw his final grenade, and in the flash of the explosion, several beasts were flipped over, only to rise again from the sand moments later. The sand poured from their broken bones, instantly knitting their bodies back together. "They're impossible to kill!"

Su Qing crouched behind the control console, her fingers dancing across the virtual keyboard. Strands of hair stuck to her sweaty forehead. On the screen, the energy field waveform looked like a rampaging viper, having already breached the ninth safety threshold. The infrasonic detector emitted a sharp, piercing alarm that made eardrums ache.

"Their energy cores are synchronizing!" Su Qing suddenly shrieked, pulling up a thermal map of the beast swarm. Each creature had a red point of light inside, all blinking at the same frequency. "It's the bone cores performing remote control! They are sharing energy; our attacks are only making them stronger!"

Old Dao parried a flying sand-crystal projectile, the "Auditory Bone" totem on his own bone blade glowing a deep, vivid purple. "Then what do we do? We can't just sit here and wait for death!" He kicked away a sand-bone snake that had climbed the wall. As its body shattered, the sand grains reorganized in mid-air, splitting into two smaller snakes that lunged at his wrists.

Lu Chen’s gaze swept across the chaotic battlefield and suddenly landed on a corner. Several young fighters were huddled behind a tent. One of them was clutching his knees, unconsciously humming a tune—a very old one, "The Springside Ballad," which every child in the oasis knew. Strangely, the sand around him was eerily calm; even the flying debris seemed to skirt around him.

"Su Qing! That song!" Lu Chen suddenly shouted. "The Oasis Ballad! Get everyone to sing!"

Su Qing froze for half a second before reacting. "Right! Emotional resonance! Hope and fear are both forms of energy; perhaps they can neutralize each other!" She slammed her hand onto the console, and the camp’s broadcast system roared to life. The melody of "The Springside Ballad" flowed out, mixed with the sounds of wind and the tinkling of a spring—natural recordings she had collected earlier.

"The spring water is clear, reflecting the moon, Father returns with a boat full of fish..."

At first, the soldiers hesitated, but seeing Lu Chen begin to hum along, they joined in. Their rough voices and off-key melodies cut through the battlefield’s smoke like a warm current. Even more bizarrely, the moment the singing began, the bone-armored beasts at the front visibly slowed. The ribcages on their backs began to tremble, as if shaken loose by something unseen.

"It's working!" Su Qing’s eyes shone brilliantly. She pulled up real-time data; the blinking red lights within the beasts were dimming. "The totem of hope is neutralizing the fear energy! The emotional fluctuations in the natural sounds and the song are interfering with the bone core's control signal!"

Old Dao seized the opportunity, leaping onto the defensive wall to strike at the joints of a bone-armored beast. This time, there was no expected violent collision; his blade cut through easily. The "muscles" made of sand fell away like melting snow, revealing grey-white human bone beneath—ordinary bone, no longer reinforced by sand crystals.

"Their sand crystals are falling off!" Old Dao roared in ecstasy. "This trick is more effective than bullets!"

Lu Chen hacked the head off a sand-bone snake. The body hit the ground and, instead of reforming, scattered like ordinary sand. He noticed that mixed in with the loose grains were tiny ice crystals—the moisture energy from the spring water recording was freezing the activity of the sand.

"Turn up the volume!" Lu Chen yelled into his comms. "Play all the natural recordings! The wind, the birds, the sound of children laughing!"

The broadcast became rich with sound: the "rustling" of wind through the poplar forest, the "babbling" of water hitting rocks, the shouting of vendors in the oasis market, and the joyous laughter of children at play. These vibrant sounds formed a net, enveloping the entire camp.

The beasts' offensive was thrown into complete disarray.

The armor on the bone-armored beasts began to shed in large flakes, exposing the fragile bone cores beneath. The sand-bone snakes shattered, unable to reform. Even the smallest sand-scorpions began to retreat, their crystal-covered bodies melting away in the song like ice under the sun.

"This is amazing!" Little Chen sat on the ground, clutching his gun, laughing until tears streamed down his face. "They're afraid! These monsters are actually afraid of a song!"

Su Qing, however, did not relax. She stared intently at the energy curve on her screen. Although it was dropping, the rate of decline was slowing down, like a stone getting stuck. "Don't celebrate yet! This resonance won't last long!" She pulled up the soldiers' physiological data; everyone's heart rate was dropping, and the intensity of the singing was fading. "Our emotional strength is waning. We need to find a stronger point of resonance!"

Lu Chen suddenly thought of Alicia’s mother. The woman who had been turned into a vessel for a bone core—the core in her chest had pulsed violently when she heard her daughter's name. Perhaps familial love was a stronger emotional bond than a ballad.

"Listen up, everyone!" Lu Chen’s voice echoed through the camp’s broadcast. "Think of your families! Think of the oasis springs and the crops! Think of why we are standing here!"

His words were like a stone thrown into a lake, and the soldiers' singing grew suddenly fervent. Little Chen thought of his sister’s smiling face; Old Dao saw his grandson grasping a bone blade; Su Qing imagined her grandmother washing clothes by the spring.

The emotional concentration in the song surged instantly. The natural sounds in the broadcast seemed to ignite, erupting in a warm golden glow that formed a massive shield around the camp. As the beasts touched the light, they hissed like snow hit with boiling water, rapidly dissolving into ordinary sand.

"That's it!" Su Qing tapped the console excitedly. "Emotional intensity has reached its peak! The bone core's control signal is completely shielded—"

Before she could finish, the light shield flickered violently, like a faulty lightbulb. The energy curve on the screen plummeted. The red lights inside the beasts flared back to life, and the lead bone-armored beast let out a deafening roar. The ribcages on its back began to grow in reverse, becoming harder and sharper than before.

"What’s happening?" Lu Chen’s singing cut off abruptly, and the jade pendant in his palm suddenly turned scorching hot. "Why did it suddenly weaken?"

Su Qing’s face turned deathly pale. She pulled up the real-time data of the bone core energy field. A new fluctuation curve had appeared, its frequency eerily similar to their emotional resonance, but directed in the exact opposite way. "It's Williams! He's using the temple to interfere with us using reverse emotional waves!"

She pointed at the waveform, her voice trembling. "He's playing fragments of pain and despair to neutralize our energy of hope! At this rate, the shield won't last five minutes!"

Outside the camp, the beasts charged again, three times faster than before. The bone-armored beasts' eyes glowed with bloodthirsty red light, clearly enraged. The ballads on the broadcast became intermittent, and the natural sounds were drowned out by a shrill noise, like countless people weeping at once.

"We need a stronger emotional resonance!" Su Qing cried, her fingers flying across the keyboard. "We need a memory point everyone can empathize with—a symbol of hope that can transcend pain!"

Lu Chen’s gaze swept the chaotic battlefield and landed on a crack in the defensive wall. Stuck there was half a jade pendant—the one that had fallen from his pocket during the earlier fight, the half left behind by Alicia’s mother. Amidst the flickering light of the shield, the pendant glowed with a faint gold, creating a wondrous resonance with the other half in his hand.

He suddenly remembered Alicia’s words: "Mother said the Sand-Guard's mission isn't to suppress the bone core, but to understand it—it absorbs fear, but it also yearns for hope."

"Su Qing! Pull up all the recordings of the Sand-Guard legends!" Lu Chen pulled the other half of the jade pendant from his clothes and held it high. "And play the bone flute of the Sand-Talkers! At maximum volume!"

When the desolate sound of the bone flute mixed with the ancient chants of the Sand-Guards poured from the broadcast, and the two halves of the jade pendant merged within the light shield, erupting in a blinding golden radiance, a miracle occurred.

The sand around the camp stopped its attack and began to swirl, slowly gathering into countless tiny human figures. Some were herding, some farming, some teaching children to play the bone flute—all scenes from a peaceful era. These sand figures walked up to the beasts and gently touched them. The red light inside the beasts faded away like snow meeting the sun.

"This is..." Su Qing’s voice trembled with disbelief. "It’s the souls of the departed Sand-Guards in the sand! They’ve been awakened by the resonance!"

Lu Chen gripped the reunited jade pendant, the totem carved upon it lighting up, creating a synchronized pulse with the sand figures outside the shield. He knew this was the true totem of hope—not merely a song or a natural sound, but the conviction etched into the bones of generations of Sand-Guards, the obsession that, no matter how much suffering they endured, the oasis would return.

But outside the shield, the noise coming from the direction of the temple grew increasingly piercing, like countless awls stabbing into the light of hope. The sand figures began to grow transparent, and the red lights within the beasts re-condensed. The lead bone-armored beast slammed into the shield, producing a sharp *crack*.

"He's coming." Lu Chen looked toward the temple, the pendant in his palm burning as if to consume him. "Williams is using the origin power of the bone core to fight us."

The cracks in the shield grew wider, and the roars of the beasts pierced through the singing and the flute music. Lu Chen knew that while their totem of hope had temporarily repelled the beasts, it had utterly enraged the master behind the bone core.

And the real final battle had only just begun.

At that moment, the reunited jade pendant suddenly cracked open, and a rolled-up piece of parchment fell out. On it, written in ancient Qiang script, was a single line:

"The key to the emotional sacrifice lies in the final breath of the Sand-Talker."