The Record of Unusual Creatures

The dark forest was shrouded in an eerily silent atmosphere, and no matter where they look, they only saw layers upon layers of giant black pines and wildly growing plants, through the narrow slits on the canopy, the sky was being cut up by those bizarre, glowing branches and the original bright light was tainted with an odd light purple shade, and beneath the canopy, a wave of undying fog was coming from all over.

The caravan was on one of the forest paths, and this pathway, which existed symbiotically with the woods were rather wide and was paved with ancient but broken stone slabs. Beside the roads were fossilized wood that was turned into a weird lamp post as the snaking road extended deep into the forest. It was nothing but a sea of fog before them… and behind… it was a similar scene.

It was difficult to tell the direct within the Black Forest, and while this was not something unusual, and every experienced traveler knows that as long as they follow the fixed path, and to follow the marked path at the fork and that will lead them out of the forest, but now, it seemed like everything had gone to hell.

There were no fork, no road markers, and beneath their feet were only an endless path as it snaked into the thick fog as if trying to pull the caravans into a deep abyss within the forest, and yet, the forest itself was eerily silent.

“Something is not right…” Charlemagne said grimly, “We should have passed through the first fork not long after we entered the Black Forest, there would be roads headed either north or west… but we are clearly on neither of those.”

Hao Ren frowned as he knocked on the MDT on his shoulder, “Did we passed through a fork earlier?”

The MDT’s reply was short and simple. “No.”

Vivian looked at Awenna, “How many times had you came to the Black Forest before?”

Awenna was clearly unnerved as she shook her head gently, “I’ve only been here once, and that when I was very young, alongside the emissaries to visit Greenway, and we had a short tour along the edges of the Black Forest…”

“Tsk, so in the end, you had no experience navigating this place huh?” Hao Ren clicked his tongue, “Pretty bold of you to choose this path.”

“Even among the imperials there are very few who had experience navigating through the Black Forest, so it is even rarer for anyone from Izzo from the other side of the world.” Awenna replied rather strongly, “But we know a lot about the Black Forest, and that knowledge is gained by the adventurers from our country personally investigating the place. So we had memorized this knowledge even before we departed…”

“Alright my little naive princess. Let me tell you something, never ever overestimate your ability to react to the changing circumstances.” Vivian said flatly, “All that knowledge is petty much pointless know.”

Awenna’s nose wrinkled but she did not retort, and instead asked, “Should we get the caravans to stop?”

“No, these vehicles have enough power to run a thousand years more, and we have the shields up as well.” Hao Ren waved, “MDT, record the environmental parameters, we will head deeper in, perhaps we can find something there.”

This was clearly a much riskier decision and Charlemagne and Awenna had some minor words to say about it, but Hao Ren had been through even more bizarre and dangerous incidents (like snatching a bone from a giant werehusky’s mouth or to go on a tirade against a god), so he was pretty much the avatar of calmness now, and with him the proper owner of the caravan fleet, the royal siblings could only agree to the decision.

“This fog is very unusual…” Awenna said as she looked around once the caravans got moving again. “There were records of fog in the Black Forest, but nothing of this scale and length. This fog feels very ominous to me… like something within a fog has its eyed fixed on me.”

“Is this the reason why the imperials had not pursued us?” Charlemagne gripped the hilt on his sword as he took a cautious stance against his surrounding. While the caravans were protected by shields, a sword in hand was still a better source of security, “If that is the case… this is bad…”

“Don’t fret too much, stay calm. Going panicky now won’t do your earlier performance justice.” Hao Ren waved dismissively before turning towards the MDT, “Found anything?”

The MDT’s surface was glowing, that meant that its sensors were at work, “There’s no problem with the environmental parameters, nor there are any signs of dimensional overlaps or distortion, very weird… my radar cannot seem to find any irregularities, but we are practically spinning in the circles in the fog…”

Hao Ren frowned as he thought hard again, “Lock on to Nolan, and check if there are any parallel changes.”

“Unable to lock on. I can detect Nolan’s signal, but I’m unable to confirm the parallel locations.”

“That’s interesting,” Hao Ren looked at Lily, “Reckon your nose can do its thing in this situation?”

Lily bared her fangs at him before seriously started sniffing about with her nose, “Awooo… I can only be sure that we are not going in circles, and are going in a straight path. Eh eh, Battie, your sonar is pretty useful right? And it can pierce through the fog, how about you try?”

“Hush, I’m testing it now.” Vivian rolled her eyes at Lily as her brows furrowed gently, “Weird… I can only detect about a few hundred meters around us, anything beyond that is a total flux, as if nothing was there.”

As he heard Vivian mumbling, Hao Ren suddenly realized something.

He then focused his mind as he cast his sight to a direction of the forest, as he shut himself off any outside distractions to look for the ‘real face’ of this world.

And as he focused, the woods and the paths ahead became blurry.

“We… have fallen into a trap.” He retracted his sight as he turn around and tapped Rheia who was seriously spacing out by the shoulder. “Rheia, wake up, wake up. Focus over here a bit, we need your help.”

“Ah?” Rheia looked confusedly at him. “What help?”

“Look around carefully.”

“Oh,” Rheia replied in a total daze before shifting some focus from her main body to her projection.

She had originally only used about a percent of her attention on the projection, and no matter her speed of thought or observation ability or presence were about the same as Hao Ren and the rest, but the moment she shifted her more of her attention to the projection, she immediately raised a brow-raising “Eh?”

As with that, the Black Forest changed abruptly.

The thick fog disappeared as if it was washed away, and became a very thin layer of mist, as layers upon layers of trees appeared much more real. The vision-impairing shadows had also disappeared and while the sunlight through the thick canopy was still weak, but warmth had returned somewhat, and the path before the caravan had finally cleared up again.

A breeze blew past as the sounds of the forest rang in his ears and only now did Hao Ren realized how quiet the forest was, and he had only just sensed the dissonance about a minute ago!

“What happened?” Charlemagne and Awenna were totally confused as they got ‘lost’ in a daze then found the right way again in a daze. More and more they felt that Rheia the autistic little girl was something else…

“The inbetween of reality and falsehood.” Rheia’s thoughts were clearly now that she had focused more attention over, and was more active with her words, “I don’t know what happened there, but we were between the real world and the false world, and were inching in towards the false world. Thankfully we found that out early, or else…”

Charlemagne had cold sweat all over him, while he did not know what the false world was about, he could feel that it was extremely treacherous, “If you had discovered it a bit later… what would have happened?”

Rheia pondered for a bit before saying, “Then I need to go “EH?!” a few times before we could get out… it’s pretty silly-looking.”

The siblings had nothing to say “…”

Hao Ren really felt like reminding Rheia to take note on how she speak, as she could easily mislead the siblings on the difficulty of this journey. What should he do if the two thought that this was easy mode while they were actually on hardcore survival mode and die in the process?

At the same time Lily asked, “Say, what’s that false world about, is it different from an illusion world?”

“No,” Rheia shook her head. “An illusion is just an illusion, it could either be man-made or natural, and its no different than a movie, but the false world is something else altogether. A world in operation is not the only possibility, and at times it will face all sorts of opposite development outcomes, but the truth is only one, or to the observer there is only one truth, so those unrealized truth becomes a mere ‘what if’, that is the false world. Normally, the false world is layered over the real world, and is ephemeral, brittle and undetectable, and it will be in a state of disintegration and reformation, but I’m not sure what just happened… that the false world is reinforced to this point and could appear alongside the real world as an equal, pulling things from the real world into the history that were never realized… This is a very bizarre place.”

Hao Ren nodded as he listened, he knew that the Grand Unification Theory of Information had a similar concept, but Rheia’s explanation was easier for normal people to understand, so he did not interject. He was however curious, why did such an unnatural phenomenon suddenly appeared in the Black Forest?

Regardless, now that the real path had reappeared, they now only need to follow the path to the location with the marker, and after calming down the slightly restless guards, Hao Ren ordered the caravans to go forward.

At that very moment, a guard who was in charged of scouting suddenly pointed to the end of the road in alarm. “Watch out! An unknown squadron ahead of us!”

An unknown group of soldiers suddenly appeared out of nowhere among the thin mist on the road ahead.