That night, Ryan did not sleep a wink.
He sat on the driver's seat of the carriage, his right hand gripping his heavy double-barreled shotgun, while the Lantern's glow deep in his left eye watchfully monitored the massive, dense forest that had materialized out of nowhere in the darkness ahead.
The surrounding floral scent was so rich it was almost sickeningly sweet. The plants in the night swayed without any wind. The hundreds of threads extending from between Lucia's brows stretched into the depths of the forest like harp strings in the void. Ryan watched all of this with his own eyes, recording every detail.
He watched until the first extremely faint sliver of dawn broke on the horizon.
A soft rustle came from inside the carriage cabin as someone turned over. Lucia exhaled a long breath and slowly opened her eyes, waking from her deep slumber.
Almost at the exact moment Lucia opened her eyes and the threads of spirituality began to contract and snap—
Whoosh—
An abrupt cold wind swept across the grassland.
Before Ryan's very eyes, the massive, ancient forest—hundreds of meters tall and spanning an untold distance—began to fade. Like a watercolor painting stripped of its color, it grew illusory and transparent at a visible rate in the dim morning light.
The towering redwoods dissolved into the air, the tangled vines melted into wisps of pale white morning mist, and the rich floral fragrance was replaced in half a breath by the crisp, cool scent of wild grass.
In just a few moments, as the first golden rays of the sun completely bathed the earth, the dense forest ahead had vanished without a trace.
In its place stood only the boundless, wind-rippled Pampas needle-grass.
“Teacher...”
Lucia pushed open the carriage door and hopped down, rubbing her sleepy eyes. Her first words were:
“In my dream last night... I walked beneath that giant tree. There were so many people dancing under it. They were wearing clothes made of feathers, and they kept smiling at me...”
Ryan did not answer. With a grim expression, he left the carriage and strode directly toward where the dense forest had stood the night before.
Though bewildered, Lucia jogged to keep close behind her teacher.
A few minutes later, Ryan stopped.
Beneath his feet was nothing but ordinary soil and knee-high grass. The rich, refreshing scent of spirituality from the previous night had vanished without a trace.
The sky and earth were vast, and the wilderness was dead silent. The massive, miraculous forest from last night felt as though it had truly been nothing more than a bizarre hallucination born of Ryan's sleep deprivation.
An ordinary person would probably have begun to question their own sanity by now.
But Ryan was extremely rational and commanded the Principle of the Lantern. He would never blindly doubt his own perception; he believed only in facts and verification.
He pulled out his pocket watch and compass to remeasure the precise coordinates and magnetic field deviation—they were completely identical to last night.
Next, he drew his scalpel and thrust it into the soil.
At a depth of about three centimeters, the tip of the blade struck something hard. Ryan brushed away the dirt. A small pebble, which he had personally stepped on and pressed into the mud with a shotgun shell last night, lay there quietly.
Furthermore, Ryan searched along the footprints he had left behind the night before.
On the blade of a tall grass, he found a thread of fiber that had been snagged from his trench coat pocket; by a dried-up ditch, he found the marks left behind when he had sliced cabbage with his scalpel last night.
Every single mark Ryan had left in the real world remained perfectly intact on the spot!
Only the massive forest, the thick ancient trees, the floral fragrance, and the spatial wrinkles had vanished completely.
“This wasn't a mental hallucination, nor was it a visual disguise.”
Ryan stood up and brushed the dirt off his hands.
“The forest wasn't destroyed, nor is it hiding... It simply withdrew entirely from the physical dimension when Lucia woke up.”
That extraordinary domain was not a physical structure permanently anchored in reality. It was more like a massive ship moored in the depths of the void. Only when a specific "key" awakened it in a dream and cast down an anchor would its hull briefly overlap with the shores of reality. When the key awoke and the anchor was raised, the ship would slip back into the depths of the invisible mists.
That night, they camped on the plains.
Just as night fell, before Lucia even had time to finish her dinner, an incredibly heavy wave of exhaustion washed over her right on schedule. Clutching her notebook, she didn't even climb into her sleeping bag before falling fast asleep beside the carriage's small wooden table.
Her dream that night was even deeper than those of the previous days.
At midnight, the sleeping Lucia suddenly began to squirm uneasily in her sleeping bag. Her eyelids fluttered rapidly, and her lips parted slightly as she began to utter low, incredibly bizarre syllables.
“...A-shah... Tura... Mal-Keth...”
It was not Spanish, nor English, nor any indigenous Indian dialect Ryan knew of.
It was an extremely ancient language with heavily accented syllables and a primal rhythm. Every time a syllable escaped her small throat, the flame of the kerosene lamp in the cabin flickered slightly, as if the sounds themselves carried a faint spiritual resonance.
Ryan pulled up a wooden chair and sat beside her. Holding a pencil, he rapidly and precisely recorded every syllable Lucia uttered in Latin phonetics in his hardcover notebook.
“Teacher... the white tree...”
Lucia suddenly mumbled in Spanish, then unconsciously switched back to that ancient tongue:
“...Sen-na... Ma-tah... people with feathers... they are singing... they are calling me...”
The girl's expression was not one of pain; rather, it held a sense of yearning and bewilderment.
At two in the morning.
Ryan finished organizing three whole pages of phonetic records and closed his notebook.
He walked to the cabin window and stared out at the plains, where the floral fragrance was beginning to drift again and the grass was swaying without wind. He fell into deep thought.
The path of the Lantern represented rationality, illumination, revelation, and knowledge.
However, last night's attempt had proven that when the extraordinary domain was suspended between illusion and reality, the rigid, illuminating spirituality of the Lantern aspect would be firmly blocked by the soft barrier woven from pure life and dreams. Forcing a way through with the Lantern aspect would only shatter the barrier and might even harm Lucia, who served as the anchor.
“Forcing entry is impossible...”
Ryan turned his head to look at the old organ leaning in the corner, then at the slightly frayed threads on his sleeves from the journey's wear and tear.
“Moth.”
Moth represented the scenes within the Wood, signifying shedding skin, disguise, chaos, lies, and smuggling.
Moth did not need to illuminate the truth; it only needed to clip its wings and disguise itself as part of the mist. It did not need to force open the door; it only needed to be like an inconspicuous breeze, slipping silently through the cracks.
Since the Lantern could not illuminate this domain in the manner of a conqueror, then let the Moth, in the guise of a smuggler, deceive the domain's perception!
At the end of his notebook, he penned his final decision with absolute calm:
“Lantern aspect is obstructed by the membrane of dreams. Forcing entry is unfeasible.”
“The domain views me as a foreign object, but views Lucia as its own kind.”
“Next time... I shall shed my light and don the disguise of the Moth. I will go with her.”
Late night, April 24th.
The sky was as heavy as a massive sheet of black velvet. There was no moon, only a few sparse, cold stars glittering in the high heavens.
Inside the carriage cabin, Ryan blew out the kerosene lamp completely.
The cramped space fell into absolute darkness, with only Lucia's steady breathing echoing in the air. Tonight, the girl had once again entered that deep dream smoothly.
Ryan stood in the dark.
He pulled out his scalpel, gently pricked his finger, and traced a faint spiritual trail on the back of Lucia's hand. Then, he snipped a small lock of his own hair and bound it together with a lock of Lucia's light brown hair using a thin hemp rope.
“Shed the outer shell, clip the wings...”
Ryan whispered the secret words of the Moth path in the dark.
In his spiritual world, the grand and bright golden eye representing the Lantern slowly closed. In its place, a faint, chaotic spirituality—like the fluttering of moth wings—began to rise from the depths.
Ryan's breathing became incredibly light, his body temperature began to drop, and even his heartbeat and muscle tension fell to the verge of near-suspended animation.
Under spiritual perception, Ryan's originally sharp and distinct human outline began to blur and warp. He was like a shadow blending into the night, or a shed skin.
The Moth aspect's disguise activated.
Ryan reached out with a cold palm and gently grasped Lucia's sleeping hand.
Hum—
In an instant, the world spun!
It felt as though he were standing in an icy river that suddenly warmed up in a few moments, turning into a thick, abundant soup of nutrients.
The wooden walls of the carriage cabin quietly receded in the darkness like melting wax. The howling wind of the wilderness vanished instantly, replaced by the dense, heavenly chorus of countless insects and the rustling of unfurling leaves.
An unimaginably rich aura of spirituality surged into Ryan's nose and lungs like a physical substance!
Ryan opened his eyes.
Reality had not collapsed, and the carriage had not disappeared—it was just that their location had been completely overlaid by another grand, ancient world.
His feet were no longer on the hard Pampas soil; instead, he stood on deep green moss dozens of centimeters thick, which emitted a soft scent of humus.
Looking up, the sky was no longer the cold Pampas night, but a brilliant canopy shielded by massive tree crowns! Ancient trees hundreds of meters tall towered into the air, their trunks so thick they would require a dozen men to clasp. Countless tiny spores and pollen, glowing with a faint blue light, drifted through the air like snowflakes.
Ryan looked down. Lucia was holding his hand.
The girl was in a translucent spiritual state within the dream, looking around at her surroundings with curiosity.
Ryan felt the power within him—the Moth aspect's disguise was absolutely perfect. The massive extraordinary domain ignored him completely, treating him as nothing more than an epiphytic vine entering alongside the "key."
They had successfully crossed the boundary.
The true extraordinary domain—the Wood fragment—revealed its full glory.
There were no sickening monsters in this forest, no warped and violent aberrations, and no Cthulhu-esque mad laughter.
There was only extreme, almost excessive vitality.
Giant ferns over ten meters tall stood like open green umbrellas. Tangled around ancient trees hundreds or even thousands of years old were flower vines as thick as pythons, blooming with massive, double-petaled purple flowers. The oxygen content in the air was extremely high; with every breath, one could feel a faint plant spirituality nourishing the physical body through the respiratory tract.
“Teacher... this is the place from my dreams,” Lucia whispered. There was no fear in her eyes, only an indescribable warmth and sense of belonging.
Ryan warily observed their surroundings.
In his perception, the ecological laws here were entirely independent of the outside world. Every grain of sand in the soil and every drop of dew on the leaves contained the faint glow of the Heart and Life paths.
This was no wilderness; this was an extremely rare reality overlap zone left behind in the river of history and gradually manifested by some ancient Hour—likely one associated with life, reproduction, and the Wood!
Bringing even a single weed from this place back to Buenos Aires would be enough to drive the pharmaceutical societies and botanists of the Old World mad.
Just as Ryan prepared to take further samples for investigation, soft footsteps and the snapping of twigs echoed from deep within the forest ahead.
Ryan instantly shielded Lucia behind him, his right hand resting on the grip of his revolver.
What emerged from the shadows of the forest was neither a fierce beast nor a bizarre shadow.
It was a group of humans.
There were about thirty of them, including men, women, young, and old. They were of medium build with healthy, copper-brown skin. They wore no textiles of modern civilization, but were dressed in finely tanned sheepskin and woven bark. On their heads were feather crowns woven from the plumage of vibrant birds, and around their necks hung animal teeth and polished bone ornaments.
In their hands, they held crude wooden spears, stone axes, and bone knives, maintaining an extremely primitive tribal state.
However, what caused Ryan's pupils to contract sharply was that every single one of these tribal natives radiated a spiritual glow!
In the secular world, out of hundreds of thousands of people, there might not even be a single occultist who commanded extraordinary power.
Yet in this extraordinary Wood domain, every one of these dozens of seemingly primitive tribal natives possessed clear fluctuations of the Heart path within their bodies!
Beneath the feet of an old woman, wild flowers bloomed automatically with her steps; on the shoulder of a young hunter perched an unsuspecting, highly venomous bird; and the breaths of some drew faint resonances from the surrounding leaves.
Their strength was not great, at most equivalent to a First Stage Apprentice who had not crossed the threshold.
The tribal hunters held their bone spears, their faces initially filled with wariness and hostility toward the outsiders.
However, when their gazes passed Ryan and fell upon Lucia behind him—
Clatter.
The bone spear in the hand of the leading old hunter clattered onto the moss.
The old man's eyes stared intently at Lucia, transfixed by the spiritual resonance that perfectly integrated her with the entire forest. His legs began to tremble violently, and his face erupted with a near-frenzied devotion and awe!
“Vu... Vutibo...”
The old man cried out in trembling, ancient syllables, then pressed his hands together and fell heavily to his knees on the damp moss, pressing his forehead firmly against the ground!
Behind him, the thirty-plus tribal warriors and women holding stone tools and bone spears did not hesitate for a second. Like wheat before a scythe, they all fell to their knees in devout reverence!
Tears of excitement even welled in the eyes of many as they prayed aloud in that ancient tongue:
“The Guide... Lord Guide!”
“Mother... the great Mother of the Wood has finally answered us again!”
The forest wind blew, and countless spores of pollen drifted down like snow.
Shielded behind Ryan, Lucia stared blankly at the scene, while Ryan, standing at the very front, felt his eyes grow incredibly bright after a brief moment of shock.
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