Summer on the north slope was a green, violently boiling pressure cooker.
The temperature didn't rise with the season; instead, an oppressive humidity, trapped beneath the hundreds-of-feet-high redwood canopy, created a suffocating heat. The dark red, rusty mud on the ground, catalyzed by the high temperature and humidity, emitted a strong, strange odor, a mixture of fermenting fungi and rotting ferns.
Fourteen-year-old Rowan lay prone on a massive fallen log spanning a dry ravine. She was covered in camouflage oil made from crushed black walnut shells and bear fat, which not only allowed her to blend seamlessly into the bark's texture but also protected her from the deadly blood-sucking insects of the rainforest.
She had been tracking the intruder for three whole days.
It was an incredibly foolish, yet incredibly stubborn human.
Rowan closed her eyes, using the changes in the concentration of scent molecules in the air to clearly visualize the man's location in her mind: about half a mile away, at her two o'clock position. The air was thick with the pungent smell of DEET spray, the acrid odor of sweat-soaked industrial fabrics, and an increasingly intense, palpable fear, the kind that emanates from prey on the verge of death.
The man's name was Elias. He was a top surveyor for a private geological survey company in the state capital, employed by Carter Lumber Mill. Julian's father had hired him at great expense to create the first precise topographic map of this "virgin land," in order to prove to the bank that the North Slope possessed immeasurable timber reserves.
On his first day, Elias entered the North Slope with the arrogance of a conqueror. He wore a high-end waterproof jacket and carried a heavy theodolite, rangefinder, and a full set of cartographic tools. He roughly chopped down the vines blocking his path with a machete, while tying extremely glaring fluorescent orange markers to the redwood trunks along the way.
To Rowan, that fluorescent color looked like a malignant tumor growing on the skin of the forest.
She didn't attack immediately. Nature has its own way of digesting things. Rowan followed him like a ghost, patiently removing the orange marker tapes from Elias's sight each time he disappeared, burying them deep in the highly acidic red soil.
By evening of the next day, Elias's prized sense of direction had completely crumbled.
He discovered that the markings he used to mark his escape route had vanished into thin air. His compass spun wildly in the redwood forest, rich in magnetic iron ore. He tried to climb trees to find landmarks, but the ancient redwoods, often two or three hundred feet tall, with smooth trunks and no low branches, refused to be climbed by any human.
Fear is the first step in the forest's destruction of reason.
By the third day, today, Elias's water bottle was completely empty. Driven by extreme dehydration and panic, he strayed wildly through the forest like a mad boar, completely deviating from the relatively safe animal trails.
Rowan moved silently along the tree trunks, like a giant female lynx. She was preparing to witness this human's end. Half an hour later, Rowan reached the edge of a natural depression known as "Snake Swamp."
This was one of the forbidden zones on the north slope. Due to its low-lying location, it was perpetually filled with stagnant water containing trace amounts of toxins, and the surrounding area was overgrown with a highly poisonous plant called "Black-spotted Watercress." This plant has extremely fine serrations along its leaves, capable of not only cutting the skin, but its sap also contains potent neurotoxins that can rapidly damage the motor nerve centers of mammals.
Elijas was there.
He had already discarded the expensive theodolite, and his waterproof jacket was torn to shreds by thorns. His eyes were bloodshot, and his lips were cracked and bleeding from dehydration. When he saw the murky but shimmering pool of water in the center of the swamp, the instinct for survival completely overwhelmed his reason.
He scrambled and stumbled into the depression, completely unaware that he was roughly wading through a vast expanse of dense Black-spotted Watercress.
The sharp serrations of the plant tore at his calves and arms. A trace amount of neurotoxin mixed with the muddy water, rapidly seeping into his capillaries, which had dilated from the strenuous exercise.
Elijas collapsed by the puddle, scooping up the stagnant, foul-smelling water with both hands and frantically gulping it down.
"Cough... Ugh—" The parasites and heavy metals in the water caused his stomach to instantly react violently. He vomited violently, spewing the muddy water and stomach acid he had just drunk onto the red muddy ground.
Just as he tried to prop himself up, the toxin took effect.
Elijas was horrified to find that his hands were completely numb. The numbness felt like a cold snake, surging wildly up his veins. Less than ten seconds later, his legs also lost their strength.
"Thump." He fell heavily into the muddy water, face up. His mind was still clear, but his body was like a puppet with its strings cut, completely immobile. His breathing became extremely difficult, as if a huge stone was pressing down on his chest, each inhale accompanied by a tearing pain in his lungs.
"Help...help me..." he tried to call out, but the muscles in his throat had completely spasmed, and he could only manage a faint hiss.
Sunlight filtered through the gaps in the tree canopy, casting a pale light on his mud-covered and despair-stricken face. Looking at the towering redwoods above, he realized for the first time how insignificant humanity was compared to this ancient ecosystem—less than a speck of dust.
Rowen crouched on a rock at the edge of the depression, coldly observing everything.
At fourteen, her eyes held no compassion or pity whatsoever that of a human girl. In her view, Elias's struggle was no different from that of a dead deer whose spine had been broken by wolves. He had drunk poison, touched poisonous plants, and thus he was paralyzed and about to die. It was a perfect, flawless causal law.
She had intended to turn and leave, letting the body decompose into fertilizer by fungi and scavengers in three days.
But she stopped.
Rowan's brain, reshaped by the laws of the wild, performed a lightning-fast calculation.
If this human died here, Carter Lumber Mill would definitely call the police. The Graycliff police, the state search and rescue team, even helicopters with large searchlights would flood the North Slope. They would be cutting down fallen logs with noisy chainsaws, trampling her painstakingly cultivated fungal laboratory with search dogs.
Death itself wasn't frightening, but the "noise" and "intrusion" it brought were something Rowan absolutely could not tolerate.
She needed him to get out alive, and with an extreme fear of this forest, as a living warning.
Rowan, like a light leaf, leaped from the rocks, landing silently beside Elias.
Elias's eyes darted around wildly. When he saw the face suddenly appear above his line of sight, he instinctively wanted to scream, but no sound came out.
It was a face like that of a demon. It was covered in black grease, and its hair cascaded over its shoulders like a tangled mass of snakes. But what terrified him most were its eyes—amber pupils belonging to an apex predator, cold, deep, and devoid of any human emotion.
Elijas thought it was Death, or a demon materialized from this terrifying forest.
Rowan ignored the fear in his eyes. She roughly pried open Elias's jaw, checking the dilation of his pupils and the stiffness of his tongue.
"Black-spotted watercress. Third-degree paralysis. Fifteen minutes until cardiopulmonary failure," Rowan quickly concluded in her mind. She knew the onset time of these toxins better than any pathologist in town.
She stood up, her gaze rapidly scanning the surrounding bushes.
Nature never provides only one lock; it always leaves the key nearby. The antidote for black-spotted watercress usually grows on dry, high ground no more than fifty feet away.
Rowan quickly ran to a raised patch of tree roots and used her bone knife to dig out a hideous tuber covered in red, wart-like growths—"snake-eye root." This tuber itself contained a mild toxin, but the alkaloids in its sap precisely neutralized the neurotoxins in watercress.
She carried the tuber back to Elias. To speed up the effect, she didn't even bother to find a stone to crush it; instead, she stuffed the soil-covered, bitter-sap-laden tuber into her mouth and chewed it vigorously.
An intensely spicy and bitter flavor exploded in Rowan's mouth, but she didn't even flinch.
She spat the chewed herbal residue into her palm.
Elijas stared in horror at the savage. He didn't know what she was going to do; he even thought she was going to eat him alive.
The next second, Rowan pinched Elias's nose, forcing his mouth open. She roughly shoved the mixture of her saliva, dirt, and herbal juices deep into his throat.
"Swallow it."
This was the only sound Rowan had made in days, hoarse like sandpaper scraping together.
Elias instinctively gagged, but Rowan held his mouth shut, forcing a swallowing reflex. The bone-chillingly bitter herbal mixture slid down his throat into his stomach.
Having done this, Rowan immediately released him and stood up straight.
She didn't stay by the patient's side to monitor his vital signs like a human nurse would. The antidote had been given; life or death was entirely up to this human's fate.
Before leaving, Rowan bent down and picked up the finely crafted machete Elias had dropped beside him. With the blade of her knife, she forcefully carved a deep, taboo "X" symbol into a piece of rotten wood beside Elias.
Then, she turned and, with a rustling sound of ferns in the breeze, vanished instantly into the dense green shadows, as if she had never been there.
Ten minutes later.
The alkaloids of the snake-eye root began to take effect in Elias's body. The numbness gradually receded from his limbs like the receding tide, and his stiff alveoli began to function again.
"Huff—ha!" Elias sat up abruptly, letting out a violent, greedy gasp. He gasped for the damp air, tears and snot mixed with mud streaming down his face.
He had survived.
He trembled as he raised his hands, looking at the red mud clinging to his fingertips, then touching the extremely bitter herbal residue remaining in his mouth. He abruptly turned his head, looking around.
There was nothing but a desolate redwood forest. No demons, no savages.
Only a glaringly obvious "X" was carved into a nearby piece of rotten wood.
It was a stark warning: cross this line, and even a god couldn't save you.
Elijas's mental defenses crumbled completely at that moment. He even scrambled to his feet, abandoning his expensive machete and remaining supplies. Only one thought occupied his mind: escape. Escape this living, breathing, cursed forest.
Driven by his last remaining survival instincts, he ran frantically along the edge of the depression he had come from. Unbeknownst to him, it was Rowan's early removal of the incorrect fluorescent markers that had prevented him from venturing deeper into the poisonous swamp, instead leading him by chance onto an old logging road leading to the edge of town.
Two days later.
When the ragged, nearly insane Elias collapsed on the highway on the southern slope of Graycliff Town, he was emaciated from the ordeal. Julian's father personally visited him at the town hospital, attempting to retrieve the costly topographical map.
But on his sickbed, Elias gripped the white sheets tightly, his eyes wide open, ignoring any questions about the North Slope timber.
"The map...there's no map..." Elias screamed hysterically, his voice filled with bone-chilling fear, "We can't go there! There are monsters there! The forest has eyes...she shoved poison into my mouth! That's the devil's territory!" Old Carter stormed out, convinced that the expert he'd hired at great expense was a complete fraud and a madman.
But he didn't know that Elias's madness was exactly what Rowan wanted. From that day on, legends of the "North Slope Ghost" and the "Poisonous Witch" began to circulate secretly in the taverns of Graycliff. Lumberjacks began refusing to venture deep into the North Slope, even when Carter's Lumber Mill offered double wages.
Rowan, through a bloodless "borderline deal," secured eleven years of peace for the North Slope. Deep in the forest, Rowan was already using the expensive, confiscated machete to cut the fungus in her petri dishes. She knew that fear could only hold humanity back temporarily; greed would one day triumph over fear.
She had to cultivate even more deadly spores before their next large-scale invasion.
Beneath the forest canopy, the brutal process of evolution never ceased.