Chapter 569

Chapter 569: Another Place in the Forest

In the forest shrouded in dusk-like light, Lucretia followed behind the elf woman with the strange long-handled weapon, trekking deeper and deeper into the dense woods.

The woman moved very fast. Even in a forest that was rugged and uneven, with vines everywhere and no paths at all, her footsteps were like she was running along a wide, smooth road. This extreme adaptation to the forest and her special way of moving made one think of some “classical arts” mentioned in ancient elf legends. In those stories, elves also lived in vast realms filled with forests. They could leap and move through the trees like a light wind, instead of being like modern elves, who had already forgotten many skills of living with nature in their high-rise city-states.

Lucretia of course could not keep up with such a pace. She knew that even without trying.

The young witch always refused outdoor activities. Even when she had to go out, she traveled using all kinds of spells. So the first time the elf woman left her behind, she decisively activated Phantom Wind, now and then turning herself into scattering scraps of paper to slip through the trees and keep up with the other’s speed. Father was not here anyway.

Her only worry was how the strange elf who had appeared in this “dream” would react after seeing all this. But in fact the other woman had no reaction at all when she saw Lucretia’s odd spells. Just like at the very beginning, this elf had not realized that the “uninvited guest” before her was human. She simply invited Lucretia along as if she were one of her own kind, and wanted to take her to that place called the “Wall of Silence”.

Seeing this, vague guesses formed in Lucretia’s heart. So she intentionally did some even more obvious and out-of-place things to test her idea. She would simply stop now and then and use magic to cause quite a commotion, such as suddenly summoning huge flowering vines or making small explosions in the air.

The elf still showed no anomalous reaction. At most, when Lucretia deliberately slowed things down, she would stop and wait patiently for her to catch up.

Lucretia stopped her “tests” for the moment and focused on following the other woman. At the same time she controlled the distant puppet medium in her mind and described her situation to Duncan:

“Based on my tests, this elf is definitely not the Dreamer of this dream. She should be a ‘product’ of the dream, or one of its components. Her perception and behavior patterns are clearly limited. It looks like a kind of ‘Normalization Filter’. The anomalies of outsiders are being ‘normalized’ in her eyes. This normalization is probably meant to keep the dream stable.

“I haven’t done any more intense ‘tests’, so I don’t know the upper limit of this ‘normalization’. In theory, if my actions go too far, it might reset this elf’s perception, or it might cause a stronger ‘rejection’ from the dreamscape itself… I need to keep investigating right now, so I can’t take that risk…

“Ah, you’ve already entered the block where the ‘mutation’ happened? That’s great. Then I hope you can find the Dreamer from the Mortal Realm side. Once you lock onto the source of the dream, you should be able to intervene here directly as usual…”

“By the way, what’s your name?”

A voice suddenly came from ahead, cutting off Lucretia’s mental conversation with the distant side. The witch stopped at once and looked up.

The elf young lady with the poleaxe and the strange blue-glowing strands woven through her blond hair had turned her head and was looking over curiously.

“You can call me Lucretia,” Lucretia answered calmly. “Why did you suddenly decide to ask my name?”

“If one more person knows your name, that might be one more person who remembers you,” the elf said seriously from not far away. “My name is Celine. You need to remember it.”

Lucretia noticed the worry and tension in the other’s eyes.

Along the way, she had sensed this same worry in the strange elf more than once. The tense atmosphere had also filled the whole forest from the very start, like the “base color” of this dream itself.

After a slight hesitation, Lucretia asked: “What happened?”

Celine opened her mouth but could not get any words out, as if she did not know where to start, or felt that some things should not be told casually to an ordinary person. In the end she only shook her head lightly: “Don’t worry. Atlantis will protect us. Everything will be all right… Hurry up. It’s no longer safe outside the Wall of Silence. corruption could appear outside the wall at any time. Meeting a ranger like me is your good luck.”

corruption. Lucretia immediately noticed this special word and silently wrote it down in her mind. Then she followed Celine’s wind-like steps again, trekking toward the depths of the seemingly endless forest.

…

“Dog, do you hear anything?”

In the dark, endless, overgrown forest, Shirley suddenly frowned. She bent over to hide behind a clump of bushes while she watched her surroundings with care, and quietly asked Dog, who was hiding in the shadows.

Dog’s voice went straight into her mind: “The wind, the trees, the calls of birds I don’t know. On the surface, it’s all normal sound. But the mood is very strange, and it’s only been getting stranger. I don’t know how to describe it. It’s like… the environment itself is changing. The trees around us are no longer trees, but something that is slowly starting to show malice…”

Goosebumps rose all over Shirley. Her eyes showed her nerves as she looked around at the towering trees whose species she did not know. One of her arms was already slowly transforming, taking on traits of a Abyssal demon: “Dog, you’re kind of scaring me here. This place is nothing but trees everywhere, damn it…”

“You’re the one who asked me to say it. I’m just telling you what I ‘feel’,” Dog replied in a muffled tone. “I suggest you take it seriously. A Abyssal Hound’s senses are always sharp. This forest is slowly becoming wrong.”

“Even an idiot can tell this place is messed up…”

Shirley muttered under her breath and carefully left the bushes where she had just been hiding. She did not know what was changing here, but her instincts told her it was best not to stay in one place for too long.

As far as her eyes could see, there were plants everywhere. The dense, gloomy jungle was something a young lady who had been born and raised in the cramped, crowded Slum Quarter could never have imagined. Only recently had she heard about such places from the captain and the others in their conversations. She had not expected that just taking a little nap would bring her here as well. If she was not mistaken, this should be the “Nameless One’s Dream” that the captain and Lucretia had both mentioned.

Feeling the creepy atmosphere around her, a hint of regret suddenly showed on Shirley’s face: “Maybe I shouldn’t have taken a nap while I was doing homework…”

“I don’t think your entering this weird ‘otherworld’ has anything to do with whether you took a nap while doing homework,” Dog’s shape slowly emerged from the shadows, condensing out of drifting smoke and dust. He paced beside Shirley, watching all around them, and kept grumbling: “But you’re not wrong about the rest. You really shouldn’t nap while doing homework.”

“It’s just that my head hurts every time I do math,” Shirley muttered, as if she wanted to talk about something ordinary to distract herself from the eerie mood here. “And I already know a lot of basic words. Why do I still have to learn math…”

Dog listened quietly beside her. He seemed to want to stay silent, but after a few seconds he still started nagging like always: “You still need to learn some math, even if it’s just for your own sake…”

Shirley pressed her lips together and could not help muttering: “Dog, why do you want me to learn these things so much… You seem more motivated than the captain…”

Dog did not speak for a while. When Shirley was almost ready to forget the topic, he suddenly said: “Do you still remember those seventy-two pesos?”

Shirley froze for a moment. After a while she slowly widened her eyes, as if she finally remembered something from a faded childhood memory.

A slightly complicated look came over her face. She spoke in a low, embarrassed voice: “You… still remember that. It was so long ago…”

“I’ll never forget. Some bastard, worth a thousand cuts, used a few pieces of paper scribbled with nonsense to cheat a child out of several days of pay from crawling through chimneys at the factory. If I had known how to read back then, you wouldn’t have gone hungry those days. If you had known how to read, you wouldn’t have had to crawl into those dark, dangerous chimneys at all. Being an apprentice in the pump room, copying down numbers, would have been better than that.”

Shirley fell silent.

After a long time she spoke again in a small voice: “But you can read now. You don’t just read. You can even keep up with Nina’s study pace…”

“What if I can’t stay with you forever?” Dog muttered.

Shirley was taken aback, at a loss for words for a moment. Then she spoke without thinking: “Then the captain…”

“The captain can’t protect you forever either. He’s a good man and he takes good care of you now, but Subspace is always unfathomable,” Dog said, shaking his head. “Shirley, you have to rely on yourself.”

Shirley lowered her head. After a few seconds she gently shook the chain linked to her arm: “Dog, what did you mean just now, when you said you might not be able to stay with me?”

“…Don’t think too much. I was just giving an example,” Dog sighed from deep in his throat. “I have no plans to leave you. It’s just that even I can’t be sure about the future. After all… I have a ‘heart’, and there has never been a Abyssal demon with a heart in this world before. No one knows what changes will happen to me. Maybe this ‘humanity’ will give me a lifespan limit like you humans. Maybe my reason will slowly wear away as the years go by. Maybe one day my ‘heart’ will just vanish again…”

“Dog,” Shirley suddenly cut him off. She stared wide-eyed and yanked hard on the chain in her hand. “You… stop talking.”

“All right, I’ll stop.”