March 13, 1891.
In the suburbs of Buenos Aires, the sunlight of the Palermo District filtered through the massive cast-iron frames and glass domes, refracting into countless hazy golden beams in the humid air.
This botanical garden, built on the banks of the La Plata River, was the crystallization of the Argentine government's ambition to showcase its "Old World style."
The massive Victorian-style greenhouse complex stood at the end of a tree-lined avenue, filled with a rich aroma of palm leaves, damp soil, and ripe fruit.
Carrying his wooden specimen box, Ryan walked through the iron gates adorned with Spanish carvings.
The atmosphere here was completely different from the docks. Wealthy ladies in long skirts strolled among the flowerbeds, accompanied by their servants, while several young students with easels painted watercolors of giant ferns from the Amazon rainforest.
Ryan pulled down his top hat, adjusted his glasses, and walked along the path covered in fine white pebbles into the greenhouse hall.
Botanical research in 1891 carried a rugged, classical charm characteristic of the Victorian era. Scholars relied on their eyesight, magnifying glasses, dissecting needles soaked in alcohol, and dried specimens pressed on thick absorbent paper to sketch the ecological contours of the entire world.
Ryan walked past rows of tall wooden specimen cabinets and stopped in front of the section labeled "Agavaceae and Liliaceae."
Pulling a heavy hardcover notebook from his trench coat pocket, he skillfully used a pencil holder to sketch the characteristics of the plant he had collected from the salt flats yesterday.
His lines were precise and clean.
The curve of the taproot, the tiny serrations on the edges of the leaves, and the extremely fine fuzz on the flower buds were all reproduced flawlessly under his pen. 【Lantern】 amplified his perception of reality.
This kind of work, which demanded extreme focus and patience, allowed him to completely immerse himself in the physical details of the real world.
There was only the rustling of his pencil across the rough paper, and the gentle warmth of the sunlight beating down on the glass roof.
“An exquisite sketch, young man.”
A slightly raspy voice, thick with a Spanish accent, came from behind Ryan.
Ryan stopped his pencil and calmly turned around.
Standing behind him was a man in his fifties. He was short and stout, wearing a faded coarse wool coat with dried bits of soil clinging to his cuffs.
The old man's hair was disheveled and grey, a pair of bifocals tied with a string perched on his nose, and he held a traditional Argentine mate gourd with a silver bombilla.
“Hello, sir,” Ryan said, bowing slightly with a polite but distant demeanor.
“I've been watching you for half an hour.” The old man took a noisy sip of his steaming mate, a calculating glint flashing in his narrow eyes. “Few young people these days are willing to spend two hours drawing a wild herb they can't even name. They're all too busy opening ranches on the Pampas or trying their luck at the stock exchange.”
The old man stepped forward, adjusted his glasses, and carefully examined the dried specimen Ryan had placed on the table.
“The root system is cleaned very well. Did you use the alum water soaking method? The pressing pressure is also very even, without damaging the cell wall structure of the leaf veins... Very authentic Old World academic techniques. Edinburgh? Or Paris?”
“Just self-taught, sir,” Ryan replied with a smile. “I simply have an interest in plants.”
The old man snorted, clearly skeptical, but he did not pry. In this city filled with Old World immigrants and fugitives, not asking about someone's past was a tacit courtesy.
“I am Francisco Fernandez,” the old man said, extending a rough hand stained with plant juices. “A taxonomy consultant here. You can call me Old Fernandez.”
Ryan shook the old man's hand. “Joshua Adams.”
“Adams...” Professor Fernandez muttered the name, then pulled a small magnifying glass from his pocket to examine Ryan's specimen closer, clicking his tongue in admiration. “Very solid foundation. To be honest, Adams, the native plants in the suburban salt flats are overlooked by many. Everyone thinks there's nothing there but thorny shrubs.”
The old man set down the magnifying glass and offered the mate gourd to Ryan. “Want a taste? It has mint and a bit of wild honey. It's much better than that bitter black tea from the Old World.”
“Thank you, but no,” Ryan politely declined.
“Well, a rigorous Englishman indeed.” The old man didn't mind, taking another large sip before leaning against the wooden specimen cabinet. “By the way, this Friday evening, there's a small botanical academic salon at the Columbus Bookstore in the Lower End. A few young folks from the University of Buenos Aires will be discussing the ecological distribution of the Pampas. Interested in joining us?”
“A salon?” Ryan's eyelids lowered slightly.
“Just a few old-timers and some lost newcomers drinking coffee and chatting about specimens,” the old man said, patting his chest.
“Thank you for your kindness, Professor,” Ryan said with a smile, closing his notebook and placing it in his leather bag. “But I prefer going out of the city to collect alone. I don't do well in crowded social settings.”
Never join any circle, never leave a trace of social interaction. This was the iron rule Ryan had set for his secluded life.
Professor Fernandez was taken aback, then shook his head with some regret. “Young people these days... Ah, well, as you wish. But if you collect any rare finds, you can always find me in the basement sorting room here.”
The old professor turned around, shuffling away while sipping his mate.
As he reached the entrance of the greenhouse, he seemed to suddenly remember something and stopped, turning his head back:
“Oh, by the way, Adams. If you're planning to go to the western salt flats or further into the edge of the plains to collect anytime soon, be careful.”
Ryan's hand packing the specimen box paused slightly. “Bandits?”
“Not just bandits.” The old man frowned, lowering his voice. “I heard that several collection teams returning from the Patagonian Plateau in the south have gone missing recently. The police department claimed they ran into Indian attacks, but the whaling crews who retreated from there said they saw something else in the southern winds.”
The old man shrugged. “Who knows, maybe it's just sailors who drank too much cheap whiskey boasting. Young people today always dream of making a fortune in the undeveloped wilderness, forgetting that sometimes, the land eats people too.”
With that, the old man waved his hand and disappeared into the shadows of the lush palm grove.
Ryan stood where he was, his expression unchanging.
He simply closed the latch quietly, letting out a crisp click.
The south? Disappearances?
These words flashed through his mind without stirring the slightest ripple. In this chaotic late nineteenth century, people died in the uncharted wilderness every day—from disease, wild beasts, or the barrels of their fellow men.
It had nothing to do with him.
He had come to Argentina to live, to find a sense of peace in the morning sunrise and the evening sunset.
Ryan picked up his specimen box and walked out of the greenhouse hall along the path of fine white pebbles.
The afternoon sun fell upon his faded trench coat, casting a long, lonely shadow.
He walked through the noisy streets toward his brick cottage, his mind occupied only with the dinner he needed to prepare tonight and the vegetables in his small garden that needed watering.
March 20, after a heavy rainstorm.
The sun once again shone over the salt flats on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, turning the puddles in the hollows into rising plumes of white steam. The air carried the dry, distinct smell of earth baked under high heat.
Ryan wore high leather boots, stepping onto the semi-dried clay of the surface.
The hem of his trench coat was splattered with mud, and the sampling shovel in his hand gleamed with a metallic luster in the sunlight.
Half a month of settled life had slightly darkened his complexion. He had lost the sickly paleness from his time in London, replaced by a healthy, sun-kissed tone characteristic of South America.
He skillfully squatted down beside a low, thorny shrub.
According to the ecological distribution map he had recently drawn, this area should only grow drought-tolerant salt grass and a small amount of wild agave.
However, the moment his sampling shovel sliced through the hard surface soil, Ryan's movements paused slightly.
Deep within the damp grey clay, an extremely bizarre plant root was exposed.
It was a section of root with a light coral hue, about as thick as a pinky finger, its surface covered in an incredibly fine fuzz.
Most astonishingly, deep within such arid and saline soil, this root was actually bursting with rich sap, even emitting an extremely faint, crisp scent resembling mountain snowmelt.
Ryan raised an eyebrow.
His left eye lit up, and he immediately sensed something was wrong.
The characteristics of this plant—its highly absorbent fibrous root structure, extreme downward growth depth, and this unique cell wall thickness—absolutely did not belong to the flat, saline, and hot lowlands of the Pampas.
In existing botanical taxonomies, such features only existed in the cold highlands of the Andes Mountains, at altitudes above two thousand meters.
“It shouldn't be here,” Ryan muttered to himself.
Plants were nature's most honest recorders. Their seeds might travel hundreds of kilometers by wind or birds, but they could never germinate and establish such deep root systems in an environment and soil to which they were entirely unsuited.
Unless... some extremely minute change had occurred in the underground water veins or soil composition of this land, or perhaps something extraordinary...
He carefully used his shovel to dig outward along the path of the root.
One centimeter, five centimeters, ten centimeters...
The root of this tiny plant actually sloped directly down toward the depths of the earth with a near-stubborn tenacity, as if deep below, there was some source drawing its growth.
Ryan used a scalpel to slice off a small section of the root sample, placed it in a reagent bottle containing preservative alcohol, and then filled the remaining soil back in, patting it firm.
He stood under the scorching sun and wiped the sweat from his forehead.
Late at night, inside the brick cottage.
The kerosene lamp on the table cast a warm yellow glow, filling the room with comfort. From outside the window, the distant whistles of ships on the La Plata River echoed from time to time.
Ryan sat at the wooden table, the bottle containing the light coral root sample soaked in alcohol placed before him.
Under the lens of a microscope—a secondhand piece he had scavenged from the market with the money saved from selling specimens recently—Ryan carefully observed the morphology of the sliced cells.
It was indeed the structure of a high-altitude alpine plant from the Andes.
Not only that, but when he flipped through all the collection logs he had compiled over the past half month, a detail he had previously overlooked surfaced.
Ryan laid out seven or eight sketches of different areas flat on the table.
On March 3, along the riverbank to the northeast, he had collected a bitter grass with an abnormally rough pollen structure.
On March 6, along the railway line directly to the west, he had recorded a wild berry whose germination period was advanced by a full two months.
On March 8, near an abandoned cowshed in the southwestern suburbs, he had discovered the dried remains of snowline lichen.
Individually, these were nothing more than accidental dead plants or mutations in the wilderness. But when Ryan pulled out a red pencil and marked the geographic coordinates of these anomalous plants one by one on the map—
A clear line appeared.
The red pencil marks on the map of Buenos Aires connected to form a very subtle arc.
This arc bypassed the bustling harbor and inhabited towns, starting from the northwestern salt flats, extending all the way toward the southwest, and finally disappearing into the depths of the vast, undeveloped Pampas.
Plants did not lie.
Seeds did not distribute themselves precisely along a specific path out of thin air.
This indicated that over the past six months or so, something—or someone—had carried these plant seeds from afar, traveling along this southwestern route all the way to the outskirts of Buenos Aires.
Or perhaps, some underground water vein flowing along this route had altered the ecological environment of the surface plants.
Ryan leaned back in his chair, his slender fingers rhythmically tapping the wooden table.
For an ordinary person yearning for a peaceful life, the most rational choice was to close the log and put this matter out of his mind. Whether it was a shift in underground water veins or the unintentional act of some traveler, it had nothing to do with his peaceful life in the Lower End.
Yet, for someone with the Lantern in his bones, the curiosity brought by the breaking of established patterns was an extremely primal and hard-to-suppress instinct.
Ryan remained silent for a long time, remembering something.
He reached out and pulled from the bottom shelf of his bookcase A Comprehensive Survey of South American Flora and Geology, which he had bought at the secondhand stall.
This book had been published twenty years ago, authored by a German botanist named Hermann.
Ryan flipped through the yellowed, damaged pages with his fingertips until he stopped at the chapter regarding the southwestern edge of the Pampas.
In the margins of this page, the long-deceased German scholar had left a line of scribbled notes in thick black ink:
“In the southwest wind of the Pampas, there is a plant whose roots always point to the place of its birth. If you see mountain moss on the plains, do not panic; it is the land breathing.”
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