Getting further and further from the town of Alberti and the abandoned ranch, the carriage rolled slowly through the depths of the boundless Pampas grassland for five days.
According to 《General Compendium of South American Flora and Geology》 left behind by the German botanist Hermann twenty years ago, this former alluvial plain on the outskirts of the salt marshes should have been a desolate area with poor soil, severe salinization, and extremely low annual rainfall. The vegetation here was supposed to consist mainly of low thorny shrubs, salt grass, and a few shriveled wild agaves.
However, the reality before them completely overturned the records in the literature.
For every ten kilometers the carriage advanced southwest, the surrounding ecology displayed an astonishing, “reverse-growth” prosperity.
The hard soil, which should have been shriveled and cracked, became soft and moist; the branches of the thorny shrubs were covered in vibrant green buds; and the needle-grass, which normally did not grow past one's knees, had now shot up to nearly the height of the carriage's wheel hubs. As the wind blew, wave after wave of green grass rippled across the plains, stretching toward the distant horizon.
It was not just the plants.
The ecological chain along the way also showed an unnatural explosion.
Sitting on the driver's seat, Lucia stared with wide eyes—she saw tens of thousands of iridescent wild bees buzzing among the flowers, flocks of South American stilts, which were usually extremely rare, nesting by the puddles, and even the once-scarce Pampas deer running in their hundreds and thousands over the distant hills.
“This doesn't make sense.”
Ryan pulled the carriage to a stop and knelt beside a patch of muddy ground that had just been trampled by a herd of deer.
Using a shovel to slice open the soil, he scooped up a clump of dark earth and brought it to his nose to sniff. The soil emitted an extremely rich, sweet aroma of humus, with even a trace of the crisp, cold scent of melted snow.
“If it were just a local increase in rainfall, it would be absolutely impossible to change the salinity across hundreds of square kilometers,” Ryan said to his young apprentice beside him, pointing at the soil cross-section on the shovel. “Look at the depth of the roots here. They aren't passively absorbing rainwater; the soil itself is nourishing them. This ecological prosperity... is not a localized, accidental event. It's more like some immense force is continuously radiating outward, forcibly altering the climate and soil quality of the entire plain.”
Lucia nodded thoughtfully, quickly writing down Ryan's words in her small notebook.
The anomaly was spreading.
Like a drop of ink falling into a pool of water, it was spreading outward from the far southwest, rippling toward the boundaries of the secular world.
Late at night.
The wind on the wilderness blew exceptionally hard, howling as it tugged at the carriage's windproof canvas. Inside the cabin, a kerosene lamp cast a dim, warm glow.
Lucia woke up from beneath her blanket. Instead of immediately scrambling up to eat hard biscuits like she had the past few days, she sat in her sleeping bag, her small face filled with a mix of bewilderment and an unusual, pleasant surprise.
“Teacher...” Lucia rubbed her eyes, looking at Ryan, who was sitting at a small wooden table organizing reagent bottles.
Ryan turned around. “Did you dream again?”
“Yes...” The girl nodded, her voice carrying an unbelievable hesitation. “But, Teacher... last night's dream seemed to continue from the night before!”
Ryan's hand, which was organizing specimens, paused slightly. “Continue from it?”
“Yes!” Lucia sat on her blanket, gesturing with her hands. “The night before last, I dreamed I walked through a field of flowers and stopped beside a small mound with three pointed stones. I even picked a small, blue, four-petaled flower and placed it on the tallest stone... and then, last night, I dreamed of that same field of flowers again!”
Lucia's eyes lit up:
“The moment I opened my eyes, I was standing right next to those three pointed stones! And on the tallest stone, the blue flower I had placed there the night before was still sitting right there! It hadn't fallen off, and it hadn't withered! I walked around the mound and kept going, and a very clear stream appeared ahead. By the stream, there were so many purple ferns that looked like giant umbrellas...”
As Ryan listened to Lucia's description, an absolute silence fell over the carriage cabin.
Only the wick of the kerosene lamp crackled softly from time to time.
Ryan's gaze instantly became incredibly deep.
The dreams of ordinary people were chaotic, fragmented, and lacked logical persistence. It was impossible for someone to enter a dream with the exact same geographical details two nights in a row, let alone preserve a time marker like “placing an object” from the previous day.
The dreamscape had lost its illusory randomness, instead exhibiting a solid continuity and spatial reality.
“Last night... how long did you walk along that stream?” Ryan slowed his tempo, his voice gentle yet carrying a certain gravity.
“I walked for a long time,” Lucia recalled seriously. “The water was extremely cold. I followed the stream all the way, and at its source, I saw a massive tree. But before I could reach it, dawn broke and I woke up.”
In silence, Ryan pulled out his hardcover 《Flora Observation Log》. On the newest page, he opened a separate section titled "Dream Geography Records."
Following every detail Lucia described—the three pointed stones, the blue four-petaled flower, the clear stream, and the giant umbrella-like purple ferns—he used a pencil to sketch an extremely precise map of the dream terrain on the paper.
In the latter half of the night, Lucia fell fast asleep once more.
The girl's breathing was steady and even, her small face bathed in a peaceful, faint glow.
Ryan sat quietly in the corner of the carriage. Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath, and the golden-yellow light deep within his left eye—the spiritual perception belonging to the Glory of the Lantern—instantly surged to its absolute peak.
To the naked eyes of a mortal, there was only the dark wilderness and the howling wind outside.
But under Ryan's Lantern-aspect vision, the entire world instantly revealed another shocking microscopic view:
Centered around the carriage, across several miles of the surrounding area, countless invisible, pale green glimmers of life drifted up from the tall grass, the shrubs, and even the tiny wild flowers.
Instead of dispersing into the air, these glimmers of light seemed to be drawn by some gentle gravity, turning into extremely soft threads that flowed continuously toward the sleeping Lucia inside the carriage.
Those glimmers of life clung to the girl's breath and the surface of her skin, nourishing her body. It felt more like a welcome and a call after a long separation.
Ryan attempted to extend his own Lantern-aspect spirituality, trying to split off a thread of light to follow the trajectory of Lucia's consciousness into her dreamscape, hoping to investigate that continuous space.
However, the moment Ryan's Lantern spirituality touched the void half a foot above Lucia's forehead—
“Hum.”
An extremely faint yet incredibly resilient sensation of obstruction arose.
It was a soft barrier woven from countless layers of thick leaves and clear water. The moment Ryan's Lantern-aspect perception, which was sharp enough to pierce through ordinary mists and disguises, touched this barrier, it was actually bounced back gently but completely, like a fine needle falling onto cotton.
This was the first time Ryan had suffered a setback on a spiritual level since arriving in this world.
Even the Lantern aspect, which represented “revelation,” “illumination,” and “knowledge,” could not forcibly peer into the world unfolding inside the girl's mind.
Ryan opened his eyes, the golden light in his left eye slowly fading away.
He was not discouraged; instead, a near-obsessive desire to know burned in his eyes.
The next morning.
Lucia pushed open the carriage door, greedily breathing in the cool morning air. She turned around and, with a mix of bewilderment and determination, said to Ryan:
“Teacher... I feel like the garden in my dream is always waiting for me to keep walking forward. If I don't go, it will just stay there forever.”
Ryan folded the sketched dream map, slipped it into his pocket, and climbed onto the driver's seat.
Tautening the reins, he made a decision for the first time to completely abandon existing geographical maps:
“Starting today, we will no longer look at our maps. Lucia, you will guide us.”
Turning the carriage around, they began to advance toward a narrow valley to the south-southwest, completely following the topographical features Lucia had seen in her dreams.
As they ventured deeper into the no-man's-land, they occasionally encountered a few scattered native Indian nomads near the damp pastures, or hunters returning from further south.
Every time, Ryan would stop the carriage to exchange cigarettes and salt for information from these rugged men of the wilderness.
However, everyone's answers were surprisingly consistent.
“The weather is great this year, mister,” an old hunter riding a pony said, spitting on the ground and grinning. “Look at this grass, it's growing higher than a horse's belly! Even the wild sheep we haven't seen in years are coming out! God bless us, we'll get dozens of good pelts this year.”
“Don't you think the grass is growing too fast?” Ryan handed him a cigarette.
The old hunter took the cigarette and waved his hand dismissively. “Bah! Isn't that just how the wilderness is? One moment it's dry as a bone, the next it's flooded. Isn't it good that the grass is growing well? Would people only be happy if we harvested absolutely nothing? Everyone is saying the heavens have finally opened their eyes!”
Ryan watched the old hunter's departing figure, his gaze growing deeper.
Noon on the ninth day.
The blazing sun hung high in the sky, and the rising heat from the plains caused the distant landscape to warp slightly.
Sitting on the driver's seat, Lucia suddenly stood up, shading her eyes with her hand as she pointed somewhat uncertainly at a gentle slope ahead and to their left:
“Teacher... in my dream, there should be a stream flowing out from under the mountain rocks up ahead. Beside the stream, there's a large black rock shaped like a crouching frog.”
Ryan did not speak. He gently flicked the whip, urging the carriage to pick up speed.
Two hours later.
When the carriage crested the gentle slope, the sight before them caused Ryan's pupils to contract sharply!
Below the slope, a crystal-clear, fast-flowing stream wound through the grass! And upstream, a massive black rock, worn incredibly smooth by time and shaped exactly like a crouching frog, stood prominently!
Whether it was the curve of the stream or the distribution of moss on the rock, everything was completely identical to what Lucia had described in her dream two days ago!
“Teacher! Look! It really is here!” Lucia cried out excitedly, her voice filled with disbelief.
But this was only the beginning.
At dusk, the carriage continued forward.
Looking at a sparse grove of trees in the distance, Lucia blurted out once more: “At the end of the stream in my dream, there is a tall oak tree. Half of its trunk was split by lightning, but the other half is still blooming with white flowers...”
Half an hour later.
As the carriage rolled into the edge of the woods, a giant oak tree—half charred black as coal, the other half draped in dense, snow-white blossoms—stood quietly in the fading light of the setting sun.
White petals drifted down in the wind, scattering over the dirt in front of the carriage.
Dream and reality had converged.
What Lucia had dreamed of was not some distant fantasy or abstract projection.
Every continuous dream she experienced was, in some way beyond mortal comprehension, pre-experiencing and recording the true contours of this land's reality!
Or rather... that space hidden in the void was using her dreams as a bridge, gradually pulling the real world into its embrace.
Late at night on the tenth day.
The carriage stopped beneath the giant oak tree that was half-charred and half-blooming.
Night fell, and the stars in the sky were suffocatingly dense. But tonight, the night sky held a bizarre silence—even the endless wind of the plains had vanished, and the tall grass stood perfectly still in the darkness, unmoving.
Inside the carriage, Lucia drifted off to sleep.
But this time, things changed completely.
In the latter half of the night, when Ryan prepared to wake Lucia as usual to record her dream, he found the girl lying on the blanket, her breathing steady and her face rosy, but with absolutely no sign of waking.
“Lucia?” Ryan called softly, reaching out to shake her shoulder.
The girl did not react at all. Her body temperature was normal, her heartbeat was strong, and there was even a peaceful smile playing on her lips, but her consciousness seemed trapped in some extremely deep, distant place, unable to break free no matter how the outside world called.
Ryan instantly became alert!
He immediately activated his left eye's Lantern-aspect perception!
The moment his spiritual vision opened, the scene before him made Ryan suck in a sharp breath—
Extending from deep within the forehead of the sleeping Lucia were hundreds of extremely fine, faint golden-green threads of Lantern's glow!
These threads pierced through the wooden boards of the carriage, cutting through the night like taut harp strings, stretching endlessly into the dark woods deeper to the southwest!
At the same time, hair-raising changes began to occur in the real world.
Rustle, rustle, rustle...
Though there was not a breath of wind, the surrounding grass and trees began to sway slowly at a bizarre frequency. The snow-white blossoms on the oak tree opened on their own in the dead of night, and an extremely unfamiliar, thick, almost sickeningly sweet floral scent filled the air out of nowhere.
Ryan drew the revolver from his waist, slung the shotgun over his shoulder, and walked step by step toward the depths of the pitch-black woods, following the direction of the threads of Lantern's glow stretching from Lucia's forehead.
He walked for about four hundred meters.
A massive, deep, ancient forest appeared ahead.
This forest did not exist on any official maps of Argentina. It simply stood abruptly at the edge of the plains, tall redwoods and dense vines intertwined like a green wall soaring into the clouds.
Most bizarrely, there was no physical boundary between the edge of the forest and the ordinary plains outside.
Yet in Ryan's Lantern-aspect vision, the world was entirely different—
In the void just a step away, the structure of real space exhibited a squeezed, eroded wrinkling.
Ryan stood before that invisible boundary, the wind rustling the hem of his trench coat.
The rich floral scent washed over him, and faint glimmers deep within the forest danced among the leaves, as if inviting the uninvited guest to enter.
Ryan remained silent for a long time.
Slowly turning around, he gazed through several hundred meters of night toward Lucia, who was still sleeping soundly in the carriage.
Then, Ryan pulled out his hardcover 《Flora Observation Log》.
Beneath the late-night floral fragrance and the strangely quiet starry sky, Ryan used a pencil to draw the final boundary line at the edge of his map, leaving behind the most critical record of this volume:
“Late night, April 22, 1891. Mapping confirmed.”
“The large-scale vegetation anomalies along the way are neither the source of the phenomenon nor the result of natural climate change. Rather, they are the overflow of a massive, extraordinary domain.”
“The true source is an extraordinary Wood currently in a state of descent, slowly overlapping with the real world.”
“The boundary between reality and the occult has ruptured beneath my feet.”
“Click.”
Ryan closed his notebook, the latch shutting with a crisp snap.
Rate on N.U.
