Torrential rain.
A week of relentless downpours had transformed the entire redwood forest on the north slope into a suffocating, gigantic water prison. Millions of tons of icy moisture, torn down by strong winds from the Pacific Ocean, slammed into this ancient temperate rainforest. The canopies of each century-old redwood tree acted like leaky giant umbrellas, completely extinguishing the already dwindling starlight.
In this absolute darkness, only the surface soil was undergoing a violent chemical reaction. The highly acidic, rusty mud unique to the depths of the north slope, repeatedly eroded by the torrential rains, was releasing large amounts of its pungent, metallic odor. This mud was extremely sticky, with an unsettling, dark reddish hue, like dried blood.
Lowwin, like an upside-down female big cat, lay silently lurking on a thick redwood branch forty feet above the ground.
The icy rain streamed down her rough back, but her body heat was locked inside by a thick, waterproof layer made of a mixture of bear fat and some kind of moss. She had been lying there motionless for four hours. Her heartbeat was extremely slow, almost in sync with the rising moisture in the trunk of this giant tree.
She could not only hear the rain, she could also "hear" the forest's alarm.
It was the faint tremors transmitted from the underground fungal network. Hundreds of meters away, a herd of black-tailed deer on the verge of hibernation was startled; they broke off dead branches and fled in panic to higher ground; then, a faint, unnatural odor in the air pierced through the heavy rain and precisely entered Rowan's nostrils.
It was the stench of industrial gun oil, expensive aftershave, and overstretched adrenaline.
He had come.
The man who, despite seeing the warning of three bloodied black duck skulls on the hood of her jeep, still arrogantly chose to trespass into her territory. The Julian Carter who, fourteen years ago, smashed her collarbone with a stone, utterly banishing her from human society.
Rowan's eyes slowly opened in the darkness. There was no hatred in those eyes, nor the ecstatic gratification of impending revenge. Only an absolute calm, like that of dealing with rotting flesh.
Hundreds of feet below, at the edge of the woodland, a jarringly incongruous beam of flashlight beam pierced the rain.
Julian Carter was trudging through the mud. He wore expensive waterproof hunting clothes, his hand gripping a fully loaded Remington pump-action shotgun tightly. This deadly weapon, weighing eight pounds, was the only "human class privilege" he could grasp at this moment. He firmly believed that, with a single pull of the trigger, the twelve-gauge buckshot could tear any carbon-based creature to shreds.
But he had completely underestimated the North Slope. In this awful weather, so bad even the town sheriff wouldn't leave his house, the entire forest seemed to be against him.
The dark red, highly acidic, rusty mud clung to his high-top boots like living leeches. Each step he took required an immense expenditure of his strength. His breathing became heavy, and his once meticulously combed hair now clung to his forehead like soaked weeds.
"Come out! You filthy bitch!" Julian roared furiously, his voice laced with hysterical panic. The rain tore his voice apart.
Rowan silently adjusted her position in the treetop. She watched Julian, like a lost, stupid pig, stumble and stagger towards the ruins of the old commune in the center of the valley. There lay her greenhouse, the "obstacle that must be cleared" that Julian had marked in his diary.
Fifteen minutes later, Julian finally stood before the greenhouse door.
It was a makeshift shed built from discarded planks and plastic sheeting, teetering precariously in the downpour.
A cruel grin flashed across Julian's face. Without hesitation, he swiftly raised his Remington shotgun, aimed it at the fragile wooden door, and cocked it with a "click."
"Die!"
"Bang! Bang!" Two deafening gunshots ripped through the silence of the rainy night. The immense recoil jolted Julian's body violently. The wooden door was instantly blasted to pieces, and the plastic sheeting shredded under the impact of the powerful steel pellets.
Julian kicked aside the wreckage, flashlight in hand, and rushed inside.
But he was destined to find nothing. The greenhouse was empty. The beam of his flashlight swept across the floor, revealing only potted plants, mangled beyond recognition by the shotgun blast.
Unbeknownst to him, he had just foolishly destroyed dozens of highly poisonous plants that Rowan had carefully cultivated. The roots and sap of the plants evaporated rapidly in the air, releasing a subtly sweet, cloying scent. This was the absolute no-go zone that, in a few hours, would leave the county search and rescue dogs foaming at the mouth and convulsing on the ground.
Julian inhaled a tiny amount of the toxin, and a burning, stinging pain began to burn his lungs. He coughed violently, cursing as he stumbled out of the greenhouse.
"You can't escape! That two-million-dollar woodland belongs to the Carter family!" Julian frantically spun the beam of his flashlight in the rain.
Rowan knew the time had come.
Like a withered leaf falling from a tree, she glided with incredible lightness from the canopy of one tree to the low branches of another. Her landing was silent.
She extended her leather-gauntleted fingers and tapped the tree trunk twice with extremely short, forceful taps.
"Tap, tap." The sound wasn't loud, but to Julian's highly tense nerves, it was like a thunderclap.
"Who's there?!" Julian whirled around, his flashlight beam sweeping wildly across the darkness at the ten o'clock position.
Rowen moved again, snapping a dead branch from a bush further away.
"Snap."
"I see you!" Julian was on the verge of a breakdown. He stopped thinking, driven by primal rage and the instinct to kill, gun in hand, and sprinted toward the sound.
Rowen led the way like a ghost. She didn't need to run; she knew every ditch, every fallen log. She deliberately left extremely small tracks—a bent fern, a wisp of moss—just enough for Julian's degenerated eyes to spot, but not enough to catch her.
The route of this hunt was a death parabola drawn with meticulous calculation.
The destination was the long-abandoned, blind mine. It was the perfect dumping ground Julian had chosen for her in his diary, and now Rowan had returned it to him intact.
The terrain began to drop sharply. The red soil here became even more slippery, as if covered with a thick layer of lard.
The mine entrance was hidden between two massive granite blocks. It was a natural vent, with extremely cold and damp underground air currents constantly gushing out from the bottomless shaft.
Above the edge of the mine, lay a century-old redwood trunk, completely rotten.
To ordinary people, it was just a piece of rotten wood. But to Rowan, it was an "arsenal" she had painstakingly cultivated for three years in this highly acidic soil. On the back of the trunk, in a shaded and rain-sheltered corner, grew a dense, extremely rare variant of puffball fungus.
This fungus, during its mature stage, had extremely high internal pressure, containing billions of tiny spores carrying potent neurotoxins. With just the slightest physical pressure, they would explode like grenades.
Rowan stood on the rock opposite the mine, coldly watching his prey below.
Julian burst from the bushes. He was panting, his eyes bloodshot. The beam of his flashlight flickered violently in the rain, finally illuminating the bottomless abyss at the mine's edge.
"Damn it!" Julian abruptly stopped, but the highly acidic, rusty mud beneath him betrayed him.
He slipped, losing his balance, sliding like a heavy stone towards the mine's depths.
"No!" Driven by an extreme survival instinct, Julian frantically flailed his arms. He discarded his useless Remington shotgun. In the final second before sliding towards the opening, he gripped tightly with both hands the rotting redwood trunk above him.
"Crack..." The withered wood snapped under the strain.
At the same time, Julian's gloved hands roughly crushed the dense swarm of mutated puffball fungi on the back of the tree trunk.
"Pfft—" The extremely muffled, tiny cracking sound was barely audible to a human ear in the wind and rain. But the next second, a massive cloud of spores, an eerie, ghostly green, almost invisible to the naked eye, was propelled by the strong airflow from the bottom of the mine and slammed directly into Julian's wildly gaping face.
In a state of oxygen deprivation and terror, Julian gasped.
Tens of thousands of tiny fungal spores rushed through his trachea, directly into his fragile alveoli, and instantly penetrated the blood-brain barrier.
The neurotoxin's onset time was 0.5 seconds.
Julian didn't even have time to scream. His central nervous system was instantly severed. His facial muscles, stimulated by the toxin, underwent extremely violent and irreversible spasms. His lips twitched upwards involuntarily, his eyes tearing open to reveal an extremely eerie, fanatical, and terrifying smile.
His hands completely lost their strength.
"Bang." Julian, his face contorted in a maniacal laugh, plunged straight into the abandoned shaft. A few seconds later, a dull thud echoed from below, the sound of flesh hitting the rocks.
All was silent.
Only the discarded Remington pump-action shotgun, half-submerged in the red mud, looked utterly ironic and ridiculous.
Rowan rose from the rock. She walked to the edge of the mine and looked down. She couldn't see anything in the abyss, but she knew that nature had already received its nourishment. No bullets needed, no bank demand notices needed; that invisible plant dust had effortlessly choked this greedy human.
This was the law of the forest. Those who cross the boundary die.
She didn't look at the expensive shotgun, nor touched the fallen flashlight. She simply bent down and, with a twig, meticulously moved the damaged red soil back into place, concealing the traces of someone slipping.
The downpour continued, washing everything away. That two-million-dollar woodland would never belong to the Carter family.
Rowan turned, like a wild beast that had just surveyed its territory, and once again silently melted into the ancient, cold, and eternally vibrant coniferous forest.