Time ticked by, second by second. Suddenly, a female voice called out,

"I remember! Fatty!"

Rou Yi's sudden, startled shout made Fatty, who was deep in thought, jump. He almost fell off his camel.

"This isn't just a small hill. The white edge on this dune is the half-buried fish bone we saw in the desert before!"

Upon hearing the words "fish bone," Fatty's eyes instantly lit up. "Right! Right! It's that fish bone. I remember now, too."

So, Fatty and Rou Yi told me, Dodge, and Jennifer about their experience of discovering the giant fish bone in the desert, the stone coffin beneath it, and the "Iron Mask" inside.

"A second Iron Mask… and one without a mask…" I murmured.

On the journey from America to China, Fatty and Rou Yi had given us a very detailed account of what had happened in the ancient city beneath the desert, so the image of the Iron Mask was particularly vivid in my mind.

I asked Fatty again and again, "Are you sure? Is this fish bone the same one you saw back then?"

Fatty climbed down from his camel and observed the curved fish bone up close from multiple angles. Then, in a very certain tone, he said to me, "That's right, it's this fish bone. Its curvature and size are exactly the same as what I saw back then, unless there are many fish bones like this in the desert."

I trusted Fatty's intuition and judgment, as he had been a scout. So, I followed Fatty to the fish bone. After observing it for a while, I said to the others behind me, "The place we're looking for is here."

"What?" Dodge was the first to express his doubt. "Are you sure, Master? What's so special about this fish bone?"

I pursed my lips and told Dodge, "It's not the fish bone that's important, but the Iron Mask's stone coffin… The coffin is the key. This coffin can help me confirm something…"

"So, what do we do now?" Dodge asked immediately.

"Dig."

I took several folding engineer shovels from the camel. I had specifically instructed the camel dealer to prepare them.

I distributed the engineer shovels to everyone and said, "Dig. We need to find that stone coffin."

"Really dig?"

"Yes, dig."

…

In the rhythm of our frantic shoveling, sweat quickly soaked our clothes.

Fatty, who was sweating the most, had already gulped down almost a liter of water.

Digging down one meter, two meters, three meters…

The sand was relatively loose, so it was actually easy to dig. Before long, we had dug a large pit more than two meters in diameter and more than three meters deep.

The entire outline of the fish skeleton gradually emerged. As Fatty and Rou Yi had said, it really was the skeleton of a giant fish.

As the fish's head was revealed, we saw the true appearance of this "monster." It didn't look like any fish on Earth at all.

Fatty looked at the fish head for a long time in contemplation. The engineer shovel he was wielding stopped moving.

"Rou Yi, Jennifer, Dodge," Fatty called out their names. When the three of them turned to look at Fatty, he pointed to the giant fish's skull and asked, "Hiss… Have you noticed that this skull, combined with the body formed by this skeleton, looks like something we saw in the Red Sea?"

"Are you talking about the Red Sea in that simulated space in the rainforest?" Rou Yi asked.

"That's right!" Fatty replied decisively.

Rou Yi and Dodge observed carefully for a while and said, "It does look a bit like something, but we can't say which creature. In that environment at the time, we didn't have the opportunity to observe and remember."

Jennifer, on the other hand, remained silent, seemingly having no impression of it.

My shovel didn't stop. I kept digging in the sand. They discussed it for a long time without reaching any conclusion, only feeling that this fish bone resembled a creature they had seen in the simulated world before.

After a while, they simply stopped obsessing over the species of the fish bone. The three of them followed me, digging in the sand with all their might.

After digging to a depth of about five meters, Fatty dug up something hard. At first, we thought Fatty had dug up the stone coffin, but as the sand on the hard thing was cleared away, we realized that it was actually a mummified corpse.

A mummified corpse wearing modern clothes. After examination, we discovered that the deceased had been shot in the head and killed instantly before being buried in the sand. Dehydration in the dry environment over two years had turned the body into a mummy.

As we dug deeper, we unearthed more and more mummified corpses. Without exception, these people had all been shot to death. We gathered the bodies together. There were probably five or six of them.

Fatty and Rou Yi explained that these were the bodies of tomb raiders and defecting soldiers who had been murdered by An Wenshan. Judging from their clothing, they didn't seem like tourists, but more like people who worked outdoors for long periods of time.

Fatty couldn't help but ask, "Logically speaking, these mummified corpses should be below or near the stone coffin. Why haven't we found the stone coffin yet, even after digging for so long?"

I explained, "The sand is shifting. The fish bone you see now wasn't originally in this place. It was brought here by the shifting sand, so the positions of the corpses and the stone coffin are constantly changing. The stone coffin may now be below these corpses…"

As I said this, my head buzzed, as if a violent earthquake had occurred inside my skull.