Three days after the torrential rains subsided, the north slope experienced its first frost of autumn.
The temperature plummeted to freezing after nightfall. A thin layer of white frost formed on the thick canopy of the redwood forest, while on the ground, the dark red, highly acidic rusty mud froze solid.
Rowan lay hidden behind a massive fir trunk, her breathing controlled to an extremely faint frequency. Each exhale was carefully filtered and dispersed with a rough animal-skin collar to prevent it from revealing her location in the frigid air.
She had to descend the mountain.
Three days earlier, a group of humans in black uniforms and gas masks had invaded her territory and brutally destroyed her greenhouse. They smashed all the glass jars, trampled the carefully cultivated fungal specimens, and even took Julian Carter's bloodstained coat.
But for Rowan, the collapse of the greenhouse and the loss of the coat were not the most devastating consequences. Most fatally, during the raid, the police inadvertently kicked over the last bit of high-concentration alcohol she used to store salt for the winter and purify plant alkaloids.
Without salt, her muscles would suffer extremely dangerous spasms in the harsh winter blizzards; without pure alcohol, she couldn't extract a sufficient dose of defensive toxins before the soil completely froze. Nature's gifts are generous, but also extremely harsh. Having lost her greenhouse—her "miniature ecological cycle"—she faced the most severe survival crisis in fourteen years.
She had no choice but to turn her attention to that gray area on the edge of Graycliff—Old Moore's scrap yard.
Old Moore was a Vietnam War veteran, blind in one eye, his lungs constantly whirring like broken bellows from inhaling too much Agent Orange. He was one of the very few in town marginalized by mainstream society, indifferent to the law and only concerned with transactions. Rowan had traded a rare deer antler for a salt lick from him during the extreme cold of several years ago. That was the only time she didn't feel the malice of human hands in a transaction, because old Moore's eyes couldn't see the mud on her body, and his lungs didn't care about the wild, pungent smell emanating from her.
At eleven o'clock at night, the edge of Graycliff was deathly silent.
Rowan, like a detached shadow, silently slid out of the last thicket on the north slope. When her calloused, bare feet once again touched the cold, rough asphalt, the memory of Julian smashing her collarbone with a stone fourteen years ago surged through her spine like an electric current.
The intense physical aversion remained. The air here was thick with the pungent smell of engine oil, fermenting garbage, and cheap asphalt. Every roar of an internal combustion engine in the distance sent a slight stinging pain through her eardrums.
But she didn't back down. Hanging from her waist was a small bag tightly wrapped in bark, containing the roots of three "ghost orchids," extremely rare even on the black market. This was enough to buy her everything she needed to survive the winter.
Old Moore's junkyard was located in an abandoned auto repair shop in the south of town. Piles of rusted car chassis and scrap tires surrounded it.
Lowwin, like an extremely cautious nocturnal feline, used the massive metal scraps as cover, inching closer to the dimly lit tin door. She didn't go through the main entrance, but instead nimbly leaped onto a corner piled with scrap tires, and silently climbed along a rusty drainpipe to a half-open ventilation window on the second floor of the repair shop.
She stopped outside the window, closed her eyes, and meticulously discerned the smells in the air.
There was the cheap tobacco smell of Old Moore, the rusty smell of waste engine oil, and the smoky smell of pine burning in the stove.
No one else. No industrial soap or gun oil smell of the uniformed law enforcement officers.
Lowwin, like a supple snake, slid through the ventilation window and landed on the second-floor floor piled with old newspapers. She moved silently down the iron staircase.
Beside the fireplace on the first floor, old Moore was dozing in a worn rocking chair, a faint midnight country music playing from the radio.
"Snap." Rowan deliberately stomped on a loose floorboard.
Old Moore jolted awake, his single, cloudy eye warily scanning the shadows of the stairs. His hand instinctively reached for the double-barreled shotgun hidden under the rocking chair cushion.
"Who's there?" Old Moore's voice was hoarse and tense.
Rowan emerged from the shadows, the red glow of the fireplace illuminating her expressionless face, smeared with insect repellent, and her amber pupils, which gleamed faintly in the darkness.
Old Moore paused, then his tense shoulders slowly relaxed. He lowered the shotgun and coughed twice.
"It's you, Ghost of the Forest." Old Moore chuckled dryly, a greedy glint in his single eye. "Haven't seen you in years. I heard from the townspeople that you killed the Carter's son, and the police turned the North Slope upside down to catch you." Rowan ignored his probing. She stepped forward and tossed the bark bag from her waist onto the greasy table in front of Old Moore.
"Salt. Ten pounds. And medical alcohol." Rowan's voice was extremely hoarse, her pronunciation even having a strange pause, like that of a savage who had just learned to speak.
Old Moore opened the bark bag, and after seeing the roots of the "Ghost Orchid" inside, he gasped. This stuff could fetch an astronomical price from the state's black market apothecaries.
"Big spender." Old Moore licked his dry lips, stood up, and walked towards the back storeroom. "Wait here, I'll go get it for you." Rowan stood by the fireplace. Although the intense heat of the flames made her extremely uncomfortable, she remained absolutely still, like a hunter lurking in the treetops.
One minute passed.
Two minutes passed.
Old Moore still hadn't emerged.
Suddenly, Rowan's ears, incredibly sharp, caught a sound. It wasn't the sound of Old Moore rummaging through things; it was the soft, rustling sound of heavy rubber tires crushing tiny pebbles on the asphalt outside. And there was more than one.
Even more deadly, the smell in the air had changed.
A faint odor, carried by the night wind from the ventilation vents, stung Rowan's nostrils. It was the smell of sweat from a highly stressed adult male, mixed with the chemical odor of the nylon fibers from a bulletproof vest.
A trap.
"Old Moore!" Rowan whirled around, staring at the storage room door, his eyes flashing with terrifying killing intent.
From inside the storage room came old Moore's trembling voice: "I'm sorry... little girl. They... they said if I don't cooperate, they'll revoke my scrap metal recycling license and kick me out of town..." Rowan didn't hesitate. Her body instantly unleashed astonishing strength, propelling her like a cannonball towards the iron staircase she had just descended, attempting to return to the second-floor ventilation window.
Just as her toes touched the first step...
"Bang!" The massive roller shutter door of the repair shop was violently forced open from the outside.
Immediately afterward, a deafening "whoosh" echoed.
Six high-intensity searchlights mounted on the police SUV simultaneously illuminated the scene. Tens of thousands of lumens of ghastly white beams, like incredibly sharp lightsabers, instantly pierced the dim air of the repair shop, pinning Rowan to the center of the stairs.
For Rowan, who had long been accustomed to darkness under the canopy of trees, this intense light was tantamount to shoving burning magnesium strips into her eyes.
"Ah—!" Rowan let out an extremely painful, inhuman scream. She abruptly closed her eyes, clutching her face with both hands, her body losing its balance from the intense physical pain, and tumbled down the stairs.
"Don't move! Graycliff Police Station! Lie on the ground, hands behind your head!" Officer Fakin's voice boomed through the empty auto repair shop, megaphone in hand.
A full twenty fully armed riot police surrounded him. Sheriff Brody stood beside the police car, his hand gripping the walkie-talkie tightly, his eyes filled with complex emotions as he watched the "beast" writhing in agony under the bright light.
Brody knew very well that a conventional search of the mountain wouldn't catch Rowan. The North Slope was her absolute home turf; sending more men in would only be suicide. Therefore, after discovering the shortage of supplies after the greenhouse was destroyed, Brody ordered a covert surveillance of all possible black market trading points in town. He exploited Rowan's extremely limited experience with human society, playing his most despicable yet most effective trump card—betrayal.
"Go! Control her! Be careful of her hands, don't touch her skin!" Captain Hank roared, clearly still haunted by the image of the search and rescue dog's gruesome death from poisoning.
Four officers, clad in heavy riot gear and tactical gloves, approached Rowan with extreme caution, like facing a raging grizzly bear.
The intense stinging pain subsided slightly, and Rowan jerked her eyes open on the ground. Her vision was still a blurry, blood-red blur, but her hearing and sense of smell had completely taken over her body's defense mechanisms.
Just as the first officer's shield was about to crush her, Rowan moved.
Her movements lacked any human martial arts techniques; they were pure, primal instincts honed through countless life-or-death struggles in nature.
Like a venomous snake cornered, her body twisted at an unbelievable angle, sliding across the cold concrete floor out of the riot shield's range. Then, her legs, like springs compressed to their limit, released a powerful burst, slamming into the officer's knee.
"Crack." The two-hundred-pound riot policeman screamed, his knee dislocated by the devastating lateral force, collapsing to the ground with a thud.
"She assaulted a police officer! Use non-lethal weapons!" Hank roared.
Two blinding arcs of electricity crackled in the air as both officers simultaneously pulled the triggers of their Tasers.
Rowan, with terrifying instinct, twisted her body mid-air, dodging the first barbed electrode probe. But the second probe struck her shoulder precisely, embedding itself deep into her rough animal-hide coat and piercing her skin.
Fifty thousand volts of high-voltage current instantly coursed through her body.
The feeling was more terrifying than the most violent lightning strike on the north slope. Rowan's body stiffened abruptly in mid-air, slamming to the ground like a heavy stone. Every muscle in her body spasmed violently under the stimulation of the high-voltage electricity; she couldn't even breathe, only managing suppressed gurgling sounds from her throat.
But nature's tempering had given her a resilience beyond human limits. Even in the extreme pain of the electric shock, she didn't give up the fight. With her blood-stained fingers, she dug desperately into the ground, trying to pull the electrode probe stuck in her shoulder.
"Keep discharging! Don't stop!" Fakin shouted in terror from the side. He saw this woman still moving under the 50,000-volt shock; the fear of the unknown creature completely overwhelmed his reason.
The continuous current finally exhausted Rowan's last bit of strength to resist. Her vision began to black out, and her muscles, due to excessive spasms, lost control.
"Net! Use the restraints!" Hank seized the opportunity, directing officers to throw out an extremely thick, high-strength nylon net, designed for capturing large predators, and tightly draped it over Rowan's body. Immediately afterward, four or five burly men swarmed forward, using extremely rough methods to bind her hands behind her back through the nylon net, and fasten them with extremely heavy steel handcuffs.
The moment the cold metallic touch touched her wrists, Rowan's heart sank.
It was over.
She was locked up. Not by vines, not by rocks, but by the hardest shackles ever made by human industrial civilization.
The searchlights were still blinding. The smell of waste oil from the auto repair shop mixed with the tense stench of the officers' sweat made Rowan feel extremely nauseous.
Like a completely subdued caged beast, she was roughly dragged from the ground by two tall riot police officers like a bag of garbage. Her disheveled hair hung down her face, obscuring most of it, and a trickle of blood trickled from the corner of her mouth as she gritted her teeth to endure the pain of the electric shock.
Sheriff Brody slowly walked up to her.
Fourteen years. This was the first time he had seen this girl, known as the "Ghost of the North Slope," so closely since Julian's case that rainy night.
Under the glaring incandescent light, Brody didn't see a cold-blooded serial killer, nor a witch with supernatural powers. He saw only a thirty-year-old woman, covered in mud and bruises, gaunt from malnutrition. Her eyes held no humiliation of arrest, no fear of human laws, only a profound, silent desolation, like a thousand-year-old redwood about to wither.
"Sheriff, target secured," Hank reported breathlessly, his face still showing the shock of surviving a near-death experience.
Brody touched the pocket of his trench coat, where Julian's diary, filled with premeditated murders, had once been kept. He looked at the woman before him, bound tightly by steel bars yet still trying to tear them apart with her gaze, and a complex, indescribable sense of absurdity welled up within him.
Human law, mobilizing such vast resources and setting such a despicable trap, merely to arrest an outcast who refused to join them and only wanted to live quietly in the forest. Meanwhile, in that extravagantly luxurious office, Julian Carter, the one truly harboring murderous intent and greed, enjoyed the highest level of respect and protection in this society during his lifetime.
"Put her in the riot van." Brody took a deep breath, his voice revealing undisguised exhaustion. "Tell everyone not to speak to her, not to provide her with any food or water from town. Take her directly to the county precinct's heavy-duty solitary confinement cell."
"Yes, sir!" Rowan was roughly led towards the riot van outside, its flashing red and blue lights.
Just before being shoved into that cold, steel compartment, Rowan suddenly stopped. She didn't resist, but slowly turned her head, past the armed police, past the blinding searchlights, and looked north.
That was the direction of the north slope.
Tonight's frost would kill many fragile fungi, but it also heralded a more abundant growth next spring. She knew that the redwood forest wouldn't stop breathing because of her departure. The spores hidden beneath the dark red soil, the poisonous vines twining around the dead trees, were still patiently waiting for the next human who dared to cross the line.
"Go!" Fakin shoved her forcefully.
The heavy carriage door slammed shut, shutting out the light and noise outside.
In this extremely small, diesel-smelling, dark space, Rowan closed her eyes. She didn't cry, nor did she tremble. She simply pressed her cheek against the cold iron wall of the carriage, trying to find the last pulse of the earth in the faint tremors.
The hunt was over.
But for human society, the real nightmare has only just begun in that civilized arena called the courtroom.