Chapter 582 - When trouble comes, it comes in doubles

This time, Erik and Naeku were moving across the desert, with nothing but sand dunes stretching in every direction. They were now in former Somalia, the most eastern sector of the Enkare Nkai kingdom. In this area, the desert was expanding, rather than the jungle.

The sun burned hotter than it had any right to, and even Naeku felt the heat. These areas, where the desert became ever harsher since the awakening, were actually some of the few places where Naeku's people would usually willingly move away from.

It wasn't that their traditions and ancestral, usually nomadic, ways were less important to them, or that they were any more pragmatic than the villages that persisted in the jungles, but rather that the desert was simply becoming increasingly unlivable, even for Arcanists and Runebound.