These Familiars Are Strange

At this point, I really was losing my patience with the Astral White Tiger.

It really didn't seem like the Astral White Tiger knew what it was doing, but it was still excitedly pointing forward as if it wanted to lead the way.

I really wanted to toss the Astral White Tiger out with the way that it was acting…

But since it was my familiar, it wasn't as if I could do that.

And in the end, Wang Rong and Iris convinced me to keep following it.

They said that since we had already come this far, it would be a waste to turn back now.

At the same time, it wasn't as if there was anything to lose from following the Astral White Tiger's directions a bit longer.

But I could tell from the look in their eyes that they were also starting to lose faith.

It didn't seem like they believed that the Astral White Tiger would be able to find anything meaningful.

Though I really couldn't blame them.

After making that detour past that last battlefield, it seemed like the desert was finally changing. It seemed like there was finally some greenery in the area around us, which showed that there was more life here.

Was it because there was no fight between the Abyss Demons and the sand people here, or was it because of something else?

With the way that things looked, it really felt like it was pointing to something else.

After all, we could tell that the concentration of mana in the air was becoming much greater than before. It seemed like there was something here that was filling the air with mana.

This kind of concentrated mana wasn't something that could be achieved that easily.

Eventually, we arrived at the source of this mana.

It was an oasis that was in the middle of this desert.

This almost seemed out of place with all of the things that we've seen so far in this Hidden Dungeon. It seemed like a little piece of hidden paradise with the way that it was completely untouched.

"A mirage?" I couldn't help saying under my breath before rubbing my eyes to make sure that this oasis was actually there.

But it was impossible to fake the mana that was in the air.

And the source of that mana was the water that was in the oasis. It seemed like the water itself was releasing the mana, but one could easily tell that it was something under the water that was doing it.

It was as if there was some kind of flow of mana that was being pushed into the bottom of this pool of water.

This place seemed like it was the perfect place to live, but that meant that it also seemed like it was impossible for the sand people and Abyss Demons to ignore this place. There was no doubt that they knew about this place, so why wasn't there a single sand person or an Abyss Demon that was here?

It was just too calm in this place that it seemed like some kind of trap.

We didn't let our guard down as we stepped closer towards the oasis to take a look.

As we came closer, I couldn't help thinking about something else.

It was the name of the dungeon.

Desert Tyrant's Oasis.

That was the name of the dungeon, so it had to have some kind of significance. However, until now, we just didn't see an oasis at all.

"Could it be that this is the place where the boss is hiding?"

When I made this connection, it was already too late.

There was something that suddenly appeared in front of us.

It was a sand person, but it seemed different from the other sand people that we had seen before. It was hard to tell what was different about this sand person at first, but then we realized that there was something off about this sand person.

It seemed that there was something that was inside of this sand person that seemed to be different.

At the same time, there was this aura around it that was different from all the sand people that we had met before.

It was as if there was this kind of sinister feeling to this sand person.

It wasn't exactly dangerous, it was just that it seemed dark.

It was hard to describe exactly what it was, but it definitely wasn't a good feeling.

"What are you doing in the private garden of the lord? Are you here to steal from the lord?" The sand person said this before any of us could say anything.

There was a clear hostile tone to the voice of the sand person that was hard to miss, so it wasn't hard to guess why it had suddenly appeared like this.

But the words that it said did confirm what I thought.

There was a reason why this dungeon was called the Desert Tyrant's Oasis in the first place. This all lined up with the information that the sand people had given us before, as well as the quest that we had been given.

We had been asked to take down their king who had been corrupted and to put him out of his misery.

However, it wasn't as if a single corrupted king would be able to push back all of the Abyss Demons. It wasn't as if just a single corrupted king would be enough to protect his territory from the invaders.

So there had to be other corrupted sand people as well.

That was the one that was standing in front of us.

This sand person most likely followed the corrupted king and received some kind of power from it since the aura that it had was much greater than that of the other sand people.

It was clear that this corrupted sand person held great power.

Only we didn't panic in the face of this power.

Rather, we were even looking forward to facing it.