May on the north slope is a silent yet frantic race for life.
The redwood canopy has grown dense as clouds, blocking most of the sunlight hundreds of feet above. Only at midday can slivers of golden light occasionally pierce through the thick foliage, like divine fingerprints dotting the damp red earth.
Twelve-year-old Rowan lies prone beside a massive, decaying log, her nose almost touching the wet moss.
She survived a deadly fever, the price being the complete severing of her last ties to human society. Now, she is more silent and more dangerous than a year ago. The childlike confusion in her amber eyes is gone, replaced by an almost stern observation.
She is searching for an extremely rare fungus—a close relative of the "Angel of Death."
Behind her, the outline of a building completely covered in vines is faintly visible. It is the abandoned greenhouse left behind by the "Ecological Commune" established on the north slope in the late 1960s by a group of idealists. As the commune members dispersed due to hunger and infighting, the makeshift structure built of wooden frames and thick plastic sheeting was rapidly swallowed by the redwood forest.
This place is now Rowan's palace, her laboratory, her temple.
Rowan stood up, carefully carrying a piece of sawdust covered in white mycelium, and walked towards the greenhouse. Her gait had completely lost the unsteady sway of a human; each step was precisely aimed, avoiding dead branches, as if every nerve in her body was connected to the tremors of the ground.
Pushing open the crooked wooden door, a pungent, almost suffocating odor assaulted her senses.
It was a mixture of humus, acidic spores, fermenting wild berries, and a certain cold, metallic scent. The plastic sheeting on the greenhouse roof was mostly torn, replaced by a natural canopy formed by intertwined vines and ferns. Sunlight streamed down, illuminating countless swirling spores in the air, like snow in a microcosm.
In the center of the greenhouse stood several old, long wooden tables dragged from the ruins of the commune.
If the greenhouse Sheriff Brody saw thirteen years later was a gruesome gas chamber, then in this early summer of 1980, it resembled a primitive yet meticulously crafted natural history museum.
Hundreds of clean glass jars were neatly arranged on the tables—her trophies, painstakingly collected from the suburban landfill and sterilized with boiling spring water.
Each jar contained different colors of red soil.
Rowan was conducting a cross-species chemical experiment. She had discovered subtle differences in pH levels in the soil at different depths on the north slope, differences that determined the toxicity of the fungi.
On the counter to the left was the "paralysis zone," filled with various forms of puffball fungi. Rowan had learned how to control the humidity to induce these fungi to erupt prematurely. She had witnessed a wild rabbit, having wandered into a greenhouse, accidentally crush a puffball fungus and, within seconds, freeze in a state of stunted, clay-like rigidity due to the disruption of its neuromuscular junction.
The central area was the "corrosion zone." Here grew fleshy, eerily purple fungi. Their sap was highly acidic; Rowan used them to treat animal hides or to carve markings only she could understand into hard wood.
And in the deepest shadows, in that tightly concealed area, was her "ultimate defense."
It was a mixture she extracted from the carcasses of animals that had died from ingesting poisonous plants. She inoculated these toxins onto specific fungal substrates and observed how they mutated. She had no formal education in modern pathology, but nature was her most rigorous yet most generous teacher. Through countless near-self-mutilating experiences (applying only small amounts to her skin), she recorded the physiological reactions to each toxin: rapid heartbeat, hallucinations, localized redness and swelling, or brief respiratory depression.
She was compiling her own, wordless "North Slope Natural Defense Outline."
"Tap, tap." A blue raven landed on a broken beam in the greenhouse.
Rowan looked up, a rare gentleness flashing in her eyes. She took a few dried pine nuts from her leather pouch and placed them on the corner of the table. The raven hopped down, tilting its head to examine the mud-covered little girl, then began pecking at them with a sense of peace.
In this greenhouse, Rowan was no longer the "wild monster" whose head Julian Carter had smashed.
She was the master here. She had established a remarkably rigorous ecological logic. She didn't kill unless for survival; she didn't sow seeds unless for defense.
She carefully inoculated the white mycelium she had collected that day into a jar of soil containing a high concentration of rust. She observed the slender mycelium spreading like white veins in the red soil. The beauty of that engulfing and transforming gave her a sense of security she had never experienced in the human world.
At Julian Carter's house, his father was showing him maps symbolizing conquest—red lines marking the forest areas Carter's lumber mill was about to bulldoze.
Meanwhile, in the abandoned greenhouse on the north slope, Rowan was also drawing her maps.
Her maps were drawn with spores and scents. Which areas were absolute no-go zones, which fungi released hallucinogenic gases on rainy nights, which vines could instantly trip a running predator. She was turning this greenhouse into the "brain" of the entire north slope forest.
At dusk, a torrential downpour descended without warning.
Raindrops pounded on the remaining plastic sheeting, making a dense, drum-like sound. Rowan leaned against a redwood pillar in the far corner of the greenhouse. She closed her eyes, feeling the vast network of fungi underground pulsating wildly under the stimulation of the rain.
She knew that the humans would return sooner or later.
They would bring chainsaws, guns, and contracts written with greed.
But she was no longer afraid.
She gazed upon the laboratory, a silent testament to accusations. Every glass jar, every poisonous weed, every inch of red soil was her soldier. She had spent a whole year building an invisible fortress beneath the forest canopy.
That night, twelve-year-old Rowan fell into a deep sleep on the greenhouse floor.
Her dreams contained no dolls, no birthday cake, no mother's lullaby. She dreamt she had transformed into countless tiny spores, carried by the wind to every corner of the redwood forest. She saw the intruders lost in her territory, screaming, finally collapsing in the red soil with maniacal laughter.
She and the forest, in that moment, made their final pact.
When the dawn of the next day once again pierced the canopy, bathing the colorful fungi in the greenhouse, Rowan opened her eyes, a cold, rational glint in her pupils.
She stepped out of the greenhouse, her bare feet touching the damp earth.
She knew that Julian Carter and his ilk were ultimately just a fleeting moment in the long life of this forest, while she had become an eternal part of it. Beneath the canopy of trees, all is silent, save for the echo of life growing wildly in the darkness.