The further northwest they walked, the flatter and more open the terrain became.
Thin daylight spread over the boundless waves of grass, and the air was filled with the slightly fishy scent of fermenting soil and wild weeds. After walking for most of the day, Lucia's steps grew visibly heavy, and her stomach rumbled right on cue.
“Teacher...” she whispered tentatively, “can we take a break?”
Ryan didn't even turn his head. He simply kept his steady pace while casting his gaze toward the horizon. “There is still half an hour before it is time to camp.”
“But my feet are about to break,” Lucia mumbled softly. Still, she followed obediently behind him, though her eyes began to wander restlessly, trying to find something to fill her stomach or quench her thirst.
However, this ordinary travel rhythm was abruptly interrupted half an hour later.
At the edge of the horizon, a rising shadow emerged.
At first, Ryan thought it was a solitary stone mountain or a sudden hill. But as the two drew closer, the shadow expanded in their vision at a speed that defied common sense.
It was not a mountain.
It was a tree.
A colossal ancient tree so massive that it completely overturned common knowledge.
Its trunk was as thick as a sheer cliff face rising from the ground, with deep, axe-hewn fissures crisscrossing its grayish-brown bark and stretching infinitely to either side. Its canopy spread wildly toward the dome of the sky, its branches piercing the clouds like iron hooks, rising so high that the top was completely invisible, blotting out more than half of the sky.
On this flat, almost monotonous grassland, this giant tree was like an anomaly that did not belong to this world, heavily squatting upon the earth.
Ryan suddenly stopped.
The golden glow of 【Lantern】 flickered imperceptibly deep within his eyes, attempting to analyze the physical data and spiritual topology of the gargantuan entity before him. However, the only feedback he received was a boundless, complex silence.
“What... what is this...” Lucia's mouth fell open as she stared blankly up at the sky-blotting canopy.
In her perception, as a vessel carrying the authority of 【Grail】, the giant tree did not emit the cold aura of a dead object. Instead, it radiated an intense, almost viscous wave of life. It felt as if countless hearts were beating simultaneously deep within the trunk, gushing with a greedy and overflowing vitality.
Even more bizarrely, heavy, strange fruits hung among the towering branches. The fruits possessed a sickly, translucent texture, with a faint luster flowing within them—a form never recorded in any of their past guides or books.
“Teacher, are we going over there?” Lucia swallowed, instinctively feeling a hint of unease.
Ryan did not answer immediately.
Resting his hand on the scalpel at his waist, he kept an absolute safe distance as he walked a small arc around the giant tree. This tree was too strange; no birds or beasts circled it, and even the sound of the wind blowing through the grass blades was gradually fading.
But the pull between rationality and his instinct to explore the unknown ultimately made him reach a decision.
“Let's get closer and take a look. Stay alert.”
One after the other, they carefully walked toward the giant tree.
As the distance closed, the surrounding environment began to display a panic-inducing anomaly—the sound of the wind had completely vanished.
The chirping of insects, the rustling of the rolling grass waves, and even the sound of their own footsteps on the soil seemed to be forcibly wiped away by some invisible, massive hand. The closer they got to the trunk, the heavier this deathly silence became, as if the entire world were left with only their own heartbeats and breathing.
Finally, they arrived beneath the tree.
Looking up, the colossal trunk was right before them. The rough bark patterns resembled a thousand-fathom cliff, so massive that they could not even perceive its curvature; it felt like a grayish-brown mountain wall spanning between heaven and earth.
Ryan looked up slightly, the vision of 【Lantern】 locking onto a translucent fruit hanging from a low branch.
Just as he attempted to further analyze the composition of the fruit—
Plop.
The fruit suddenly detached from the branch and fell straight down.
Ryan's pupils shrank. Gripping his scalpel, he pulled Lucia and retreated backward at explosive speed!
However, the fruit did not smash into the soil as common sense dictated. At about half a meter from the ground, it eerily hovered in mid-air. Beneath the translucent skin, the flowing luster suddenly emitted an extremely soft, viscous glow.
In the next second, an irresistible, massive wave of drowsiness flooded Ryan's rationality like a torrential wave!
His thoughts ground to a halt in a ten-thousandth of a second. 【Lantern】's calculations were forcibly severed, and he could not even finish the motion of drawing his blade.
“Ry... an...”
Beside him, Lucia did not even have time to call out a complete cry for help. Her eyelids grew heavy, and she collapsed forward.
Ryan bit the tip of his tongue, trying to use the sharp pain to stimulate his nerves and drag Lucia away from this area. However, his entire body's muscles had already stopped responding. The world before his eyes plunged into a chaotic darkness.
...
He did not know how much time had passed.
A heavy sensation of cold stimulated his skin. Ryan suddenly snapped his eyes open and leaped to his feet like a pouncing leopard!
However, the expected attack did not come.
He instinctively reached for his waist—it was empty.
The steel scalpel at his waist, the alchemical potions in the lining of his trench coat, the flint, the test tubes, the wooden box containing the dark gold seed... even the notebook he was accustomed to carrying with him had all vanished without a trace.
Even the trench coat on his body had been stripped away, leaving him in only a thin shirt.
“Teacher...!”
Lucia's panicked voice came from not far away. The girl was sitting on the grass, urgently searching her person, but she too had nothing left. The notebook she had carried all this way, along with her small bag, had completely vanished into air.
Ryan did not panic. He quickly scanned his surroundings.
There was no massive trunk resembling a mountain wall, no strange fruit hovering in mid-air, and no eerie, windless atmosphere.
They were standing on a strange, vast, and colossal grassland.
The grass stalks here were half a person high, and a gentle breeze howled past, kicking up wave after wave of deep green grass. The sky presented a sickly grayish-purple, without any familiar constellations or sun to serve as a reference.
Standing in the waist-high grass, Ryan looked coldly at this boundless, unfamiliar territory.
They were no longer beneath that giant tree.
“Teacher... what do we do now?”
Barefoot, Lucia jogged over, stepping on the wet, soft grass and mud, her small face as pale as paper. Her hands nervously fidgeted with the hem of her thin clothes, her bright black eyes filled with panic and confusion after losing her support.
“Calm down. The more resources we lack, the more emotional fluctuations will accelerate the consumption of physical strength and water.”
“Teacher...” Lucia pressed her hand to her chest, her small brow furrowing tightly as she struggled to describe it, “it... feels very wrong here. The grass here, and the soil beneath our feet... it's like they are all 'alive.' Not the living growth of normal plants, but... it feels like we are standing on the surface of some giant creature's stomach or internal organs.”
“Record this feeling, but do not overextend your inspiration.” Ryan reached out and slapped the back of her head, stopping her from further resonating with this space. “If you suffer mental pollution, I won't be able to save you.”
Lucia quickly shrank her neck and pulled her inspiration back inside.
“First, we find an exit. Along the way, collect any usable resources.”
Ryan bent down and picked up two sharp-edged, hard gray stones from the wet mud. He tapped them against each other to test their hardness.
The two began to trek across this ridiculously vast grassland.
They walked in the same direction for a full two or three hours, yet the surrounding scenery did not change in any fundamental way. There was the same grayish-purple sky, the same waist-high deep green grass waves, the same howling wind, and not even a single undulation in the terrain.
As time went on, the physical torment and bodily metabolism brought about by walking barefoot began to manifest.
Without the protection of boots, Lucia's feet had long been soaked and worn raw by the muddy water. The soles of her feet were cut with tiny wounds; every step felt like treading on needles. Combined with the long period without water or food, her complexion grew worse and worse, her lips cracking with bloody fissures.
“Teacher... I'm so hungry, and my throat feels like it's on fire,” Lucia whispered weakly, her body trembling slightly.
Ryan stopped walking.
He glanced at Lucia's trembling legs and did not force her to push on. He squatted down, stopping before a tall weed with serrated leaves and a thick, protruding root.
Instead of reaching out to pull it directly, Ryan picked up a sharp stone and meticulously dug away the soil around the root, exposing a half-fist-sized tuber with a faint white sheen inside.
Ryan peeled the skin off the tuber and handed it to Lucia. “Chew it, swallow the juice, and spit out the pulp.”
Lucia quickly took it and stuffed it into her mouth, biting down hard.
A bitter, slightly earthy juice burst in her mouth. The taste was by no means pleasant, but the abundant moisture and trace starch instantly suppressed the burning, twisting pain in her stomach.
Leaning against a low mound, the two obtained a brief moment of respite.
The sky began to slowly darken.
The grayish-purple sky gradually sank into a viscous, oppressive deep black. And at the exact moment the last sliver of faint daylight vanished below the horizon, the faint sound of human voices suddenly echoed from deep within the distant waves of grass!
Ryan's ears twitched, and his pupils contracted instantly!
Reacting with extreme speed, he reached out and pressed down on Lucia's shoulder. The two instantly lowered their bodies, completely concealing themselves deep within the dense, waist-high grass.
The long-range perception net of 【Lantern】 quietly spread out.
Peering through the extremely narrow gaps between the grass blades, they saw seven or eight blurry figures standing scattered on a clearing about two to three hundred meters away.
Those people were dressed in various attire; some wore expensive but crumpled satin formal wear, while others wore the coarse burlap clothes of common farmers. Without exception, all of them were just like Ryan and Lucia—carrying no bags or weapons, their expressions anxious, and their eyes filled with extreme panic and exhaustion.
This group was clearly also travelers who had been inexplicably stripped of all their belongings and trapped in this bizarre grassland.
“Teacher... there are people!” Lucia lowered her voice, a flash of joy in her eyes as she instinctively tried to lift her head.
“Don't move.”
Lucia lay flat in the mud, not daring to move another inch.
However, before the seven or eight people in the distance could reach any conclusion, an unbelievably bizarre and drastic change suddenly erupted in the nighttime grassland!
Buzz—!
The ground violently trembled without warning!
In the open space not far from the group, amidst the pitch-black night, dim yellow lights emitting a warm red glow suddenly lit up out of thin air!
Immediately after, the rumbling of brickwork construction and the creaking of wooden mortise-and-tenon joints interlocking echoed in the night wind.
Wooden houses, slanted brick chimneys, winding cobblestone streets, and taverns with hanging wrought-iron signs... an ancient village that should have belonged to the civilized world actually grew out, house by house, from the empty night and the soil like bamboo shoots after a rain!
Warm red lanterns hung within the village, and the streets even faintly echoed with the crisp barking of dogs, clinking of wine glasses, and illusory sounds of laughter and joy. In this deathly silent, cold, and pitch-black grassland, it appeared exceptionally cozy and inviting.
The group of humans, trapped for who knew how long, fell into an instant commotion upon seeing the village and the lights.
However, to Ryan's surprise, the group did not swarm inside like starving travelers finding an outpost. On the contrary, the moment they saw the village appear, everyone's faces turned deathly pale!
“It's here! It has appeared again! Run—!!”
The man leading them let out a piercing, desperate shriek. Frightened out of his wits, he spun around and fled madly toward the depths of the pitch-black grassland, away from the village! The others also screamed in succession and stumbled to escape, as if they had seen the most terrifying demon in the world!
“Teacher... the village... inside that village...”
Lying beside Ryan, Lucia suddenly began to tremble violently. Her small hands clutched tightly at the cuffs of Ryan's shirt, her fingernails almost sinking into his flesh. Her small face was paper-white under the reflection of the red light, and dense beads of cold sweat broke out on her forehead.
“Those aren't houses at all... Teacher... that village... it's breathing! It has a stomach! It is a living... very, very terrifying...”
Lucia's voice was filled with extreme fear and agony, her teeth chattering with a clicking sound:
“It is opening its mouth... the scent it emits... is waiting for living people to walk in... to eat them!!”
Ryan pressed his hand against Lucia's back, the rapid calculations of 【Lantern】 frantically sorting through the information in his mind.
That village did indeed emit a bizarre spiritual disturbance. However, those fleeing humans had clearly survived in this strange space for some time, meaning they possessed some survival rules that he and Lucia did not know.
Entering the village directly would be a blind gamble, but following those experienced escapees was the best shortcut to unveiling the veil of this dream space.
“Close your eyes and follow me.”
Ryan gave the command in a low voice, reaching out to tightly grasp Lucia's cold hand.
Lowering his body, he used the cover of the waist-high weeds and the thick night to slip silently into the sea of grass, quietly trailing behind the screaming, fleeing crowd.
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