The redwood forest on the north slope possessed a suffocating darkness in the height of summer. The thick canopy was so dense that even the most intense afternoon sunlight couldn't penetrate completely, casting only patches of whitish light on the extremely damp red soil.
Fifteen-year-old Rowan sat at a wooden table in the abandoned greenhouse, an open, dark green "Illustrated Guide to the Poisonous and Medicinal Plants and Animals of the Northwest of North America" before her.
The edges of the guide were frayed from being rubbed by her extremely rough fingers. For the past year, this culmination of human civilization had been her sole "bible." She effortlessly matched each color illustration in the guide with the deadly fungi in the glass jars of her greenhouse.
She knew what they looked like, knew their smell—a mixture of rust and rotting flesh—and even knew the convulsions they inflicted on their prey.
But she couldn't "read" them.
The dense black English letters, to her eyes, resembled a swarm of dead ants, haphazardly arranged on the white paper. With her extremely limited literacy skills honed in town before the age of eleven, she could only painstakingly piece together the most basic words like "water," "root," and "death."
But the crucial terms that determined the potency and volatility of toxicity—"Alkaloid," "Mycelium," and "Neurotoxin"—were like a cold, insurmountable wall of sighs to her.
This sense of powerlessness instilled in her an unusually intense anxiety. It was as if the prey was already lying before her, but she only had a blunt, unsharpened knife in her hand.
"Snap." Fifty yards from the greenhouse, the crisp sound of a dry branch breaking shattering the deathly silence of the north slope.
Rowan looked up with keen awareness, his amber pupils instantly shrinking to pinpoints. She swiftly closed the mapbook, tucked it into a hidden compartment beneath the wooden table, and then, like a weightless ghost, silently leaped onto the extremely thick beam at the top of the greenhouse, completely concealing herself in the dense shadow of the vines.
Someone had crossed the line.
Moreover, this person was not only unarmed, but even the sound of their footsteps carried an extremely restrained, almost humble, probing quality.
Ten minutes later, a man dressed in an extremely ordinary gray linen shirt, carrying a heavy wooden box, appeared in the greenhouse's view.
It was Elias.
The geological surveyor who had nearly died a year ago in the Black-spotted Watercress Swamp, and who had been forcibly brought back to life by Rowan with a mouthful of extremely bitter herbs.
He wasn't wearing the extremely glaring waterproof jacket of the Carter Lumber Mill, nor was he carrying any machete or theodolite. He carefully avoided every trace that looked like red soil had been disturbed, his face pale, and his forehead covered in a dense layer of cold sweat. For an adult who knew what kind of "toxic monster" lurked in this forest, stepping back here required terrifying courage.
Elijas stopped before the half-open, dilapidated wooden door of the greenhouse.
He didn't try to go in, but instead obediently placed the heavy wooden crate he was carrying on his back onto the moss-covered ground. Then, he took ten steps back, raised his hands, and stood there in a perfectly standard posture of submission before an apex predator.
"I know you're watching me," Elias's voice trembled slightly, but he tried his best to remain steady. "I'm not here to lead people to cut down trees. I've already quit my job at Carter's Lumber Mill." Rowan, perched on the beam, didn't move. Her breathing was extremely faint as she coldly looked down at the strange human.
"A year ago, I left that guidebook on the tree stump. I later realized… it might be like a locked gun to you." Elias swallowed hard. "You recognize the plants, but you don't know the words. You don't know how they work under a microscope."
He crouched down very slowly and unlocked the metal clasp of the wooden box.
There was no gun, no bait. Inside lay a highly precise, portable brass optical microscope, several boxes of glass slides, and a basic biology dictionary.
"I owe you a life. In the human world, debts must be repaid." Elias looked at the dark greenhouse door. "I'll teach you how to use it. Teach you to read. Only the words you need."
Silence.
The deathly silence on the north slope lasted for a full five minutes. Only a few tiny fungal flies swarmed in the sweltering air.
Just as Elias thought he had misjudged the situation and was about to turn away, he heard a very faint rustling sound.
Rowan emerged from the shadows.
At fifteen, her body had completely shed its childlike innocence, revealing a terrifying, explosive, wild quality. Her face was still smeared with black insect repellent, but her eyes gleamed with a pure, cold light, an intense thirst for knowledge.
She walked to the wooden crate, not looking at Elias, but instead reaching out her mud-covered hands to carefully lift the brass microscope.
This utterly cold industrial instrument, at this moment, became a bridge connecting two completely different species.
The lesson began.
This was undoubtedly the most bizarre tutoring session in human history. There was no classroom, no blackboard. Only an abandoned greenhouse filled with highly poisonous plants, and a "savage student" who could poison the teacher at any moment.
Elias dared not approach within three feet of Rowan. He used a long, withered twig to write the English alphabet on the extremely damp red clay.
Rowan's learning method was utterly inhuman. She didn't study grammar, poetry, or any emotionally charged adjectives. She treated the alphabet with the cold-blooded ruthlessness of dissecting a frog's entrails.
"T-O-X-I-C, poison," Elias wrote the word in the mud.
Rowan stared intently at the five letters. Her lips moved with extreme stiffness, emitting a strange, grating sound: "Toxic."
"Yes. Any word with this prefix means deadly." Elias pointed to the jar of poison amanita in the corner of the greenhouse.
Rowan swiftly and rigidly physically linked the word to the pungent, metallic smell of the fungus in her mind. In her understanding, letters were no longer tools for human communication, but symbols used to mark the weaknesses of prey.
In just two weeks, Rowan, with an astonishingly mechanical memory, mastered all the core terms in the atlas concerning toxicology, plant anatomy, and fungal reproduction. Her mind, pure and untouched by the distractions of human society, absorbed these incredibly complex biological terms like a dry sponge absorbing highly acidic rainwater.
But the most awe-inspiring moment in the entire process was the opening of the microscope.
It was an exceptionally clear day in early August. Sunlight streamed straight through the hole in the greenhouse roof, illuminating the long wooden table.
Elijas carefully adjusted the reflector at the bottom of the brass microscope, precisely refracting the sunlight into the condenser.
"Look here," Elias said, placing a tiny slice of nematocystis hymena extracted from a puffball fungus variant on the stage, adding a drop of crystal-clear distilled water, and covering it with a coverslip.
Rowan cautiously leaned closer. She closed her left eye and awkwardly pressed her right eye against the cold eyepiece.
"Turn this knob, very slowly," Elias instructed.
Rowan turned the coarse focusing knob with extreme stiffness.
Suddenly, her body trembled violently. She stumbled back, her amber pupils widening in shock.
In that tiny glass cylinder, she saw a universe utterly shattering her understanding.
What appeared to the naked eye as an ordinary mass of gray powder, magnified four hundred times, transformed into an incredibly intricate and magnificent alien fortress. The intertwined hyphae resembled extremely thick, translucent blood vessels, flowing with incredibly tiny particles.
And in the very center of her vision, an extremely plump sporangium was on the verge of bursting.
"Look closely," Elias's voice trembled slightly in the extremely quiet greenhouse, "Nature kills, and there are physical laws governing it." Rowan greedily pressed her eyes against the eyepiece again.
In that instant, the osmotic pressure of the water reached its extreme.
"Bang!" In the microscopic world, it was an extremely violent explosion. The sporangium ruptured in an instant, and tens of thousands of tiny spores, carrying potent neurotoxins, were ejected in all directions with terrifying initial velocities. That ultimate mechanical beauty, that perfect combination of pure physical pressure and biological toxins, was laid bare before the fifteen-year-old girl's eyes.
Rowan's breathing was extremely rapid. Her mud-covered chest heaved violently.
Before this, she only knew that crushing puffball fungi would release poisonous gas. She knew the facts.
But now, this brass microscope, these "borrowed eyes," coldly revealed to her the "why." She saw the extremely precise hydraulic mechanism of the spore ejection; she saw how those extremely tiny toxin particles possessed sharp barbs capable of penetrating the alveoli of an animal.
By controlling the moisture, air pressure, and the force of physical compression, she could precisely transform this fungus into a perfectly crafted "biological mine."
"So...that's how it is." Rowan uttered a complete sentence in an extremely hoarse voice. A rare, uncharacteristic upward twitch of her lips revealed a chilling, fanatical smile befitting a top scientist.
Elijas stood to the side, watching this earthy-smelling savage skillfully operate the microscope, a profound chill instantly piercing his spine.
He suddenly realized he had done something utterly terrifying.
He thought he was teaching a primitive man to read, but in reality, he had implanted an incredibly sophisticated brain into this cruel redwood forest. He had personally handed over humanity's most prized modern biological weapon to a "monster" completely unrestrained by human morality.
"I should go," Elias's voice was extremely weak; he didn't even dare to reach for the wooden case containing the microscope.
Rowan slowly raised her head from the microscope.
The bewilderment at the unknown had been completely erased from her amber eyes. In their place lay a chilling calculation, a condescending detachment, like a god looking down upon ants.
She didn't thank Elias. In her rules, Elias had bought back a pitiful right to survival with knowledge; the transaction was perfectly fair.
Elizaas stumbled out of the greenhouse. When he fled the north slope in utter disarray and saw again the ugly asphalt roads of Graycliff Town, he knew he had unleashed an utterly unsolvable specter.
From that day on, the number of glass jars in the abandoned greenhouse increased at an alarming rate.
Rowan was no longer merely a savage who instinctively gathered poisonous plants. She had become an extremely ruthless pathologist, an extremely precise creator of plant weapons. Using her brass microscope, she patiently observed the microscopic reactions of each toxin, calculating with unparalleled precision how to perfectly combine the highly acidic soil of the redwood forest with the lethality of the fungi.
That deep green guidebook was densely covered with symbols only she could understand.
She used human eyes to see through the ultimate mechanism of nature's killing.
This also foreshadowed that stormy night ten years later. When Julian Carter arrogantly stepped onto the edge of the abandoned mine shaft with his shotgun, he wasn't facing an unarmed homeless woman.
He was facing an extremely precise, extremely perfect "absolute defense system," the result of ten years of microscopic toxicology research. The mutated puffball spores that were precisely smeared on his face were a macroscopic reproduction of the "microscopic explosion" Rowan had observed under the microscope countless times.
Nature combined with science created the most perfect death.
In the extremely dry, suffocating isolation cell of the county police station in 1993, Rowan, in a coma due to severe dehydration, may have been hallucinating, once again coldly observing these humans who attempted to judge her through that utterly impersonal brass microscope.
Under her microscope, human laws, courts, and arrogance were nothing more than ridiculously fragile single-celled organisms.