In late summer on the north slope, a pervasive, violently low pressure always brewed in the air.
At three o'clock in the afternoon, the entire redwood forest canopy suddenly ceased its swaying. The wind died without warning. The air became incredibly thick, like a massive lump of melted resin, clinging tightly to the respiratory tracts of all living things. The highly sensitive underground fungal networks stopped releasing spores, and birds, as if pressed pause by some terrifying signal, vanished instantly from the branches.
Sixteen-year-old Rowan was squatting at a wooden table in the abandoned greenhouse, intently observing a slice of *Amanita phalloides* through a brass microscope. Over the past year, this sophisticated instrument had become her most advanced sense for understanding nature.
Suddenly, her nostrils twitched violently.
She smelled an extremely sharp odor, similar to the acrid smell of two flints rubbed together violently in the dark. It was the smell of ozone being torn apart by an extremely strong electrical charge in the upper atmosphere. This smell, in nature's early warning system, signified a devastating release of energy.
"Go."
Rowan swiftly looked up from the microscope, grabbed a waterproof tarpaulin from the table, and tightly wrapped the brass microscope.
Elizabeth, standing at the other end of the table, paused, stunned. As a geological surveyor, he was now an extremely rare "visitor" to the North Slope. For the past year, he had come here monthly, avoiding the loggers, carrying heavy supplies—distilled water, blank slides, and even a few discarded test tubes—in exchange for permission to conduct botanical records on Rowan's territory.
"What's wrong?" Elias asked, utterly bewildered, pushing up his glasses. His extremely dulled human senses were completely oblivious to the terrifying drop in atmospheric pressure.
"A storm." Rowan's voice was extremely hoarse and short, carrying an undeniable, chilling command. "Now, get out of the greenhouse."
The moment her words fell...
"BOOM—!!!"
A terrifying clap of thunder seemed to explode directly on their skulls. The entire north slope trembled violently. Then, a massive hurricane that had been brewing over the Pacific Ocean for a week, like a horde of extremely violent, enraged ancient beasts, crashed down upon this ancient temperate rainforest with devastating force.
The rain didn't drip, but poured down like a heavy, solid waterfall, with extreme violence.
The greenhouse's extremely fragile plastic sheeting roof held up for less than three seconds in the gale before being brutally torn to shreds. The wind whipped up highly acidic red mud, sharp broken branches, and countless dead leaves, creating a terrifying mudslide storm in the air.
Elijas cried out in utter dismay; his prized waterproof jacket instantly became as thin as paper before the overwhelming force of nature.
"Follow me!"
Rowan grabbed Elias by the collar with extreme roughness, yanking him away from the collapsing wooden table.
They struggled relentlessly into the rain-swept woodland.
It was a brutal race for survival. The dark red, rusty mud of the ground, eroded by the relentless downpour, instantly transformed into a viscous, leech-like swamp. Elias's hiking boots lost all grip in the mud; each step required immense effort, his lungs throbbing with icy vapor from his labored breathing, triggering a violent cough.
In contrast, Rowan was like a slippery black fish in this muddy river. Her incredibly flexible bare feet landed precisely on the hard tree roots hidden beneath the mud. She could have easily shaken off this clumsy human, but she didn't.
In Rowan's utterly ruthless ecological logic, Elias was not merely a "person," but a remarkably useful "knowledge transfer machine." Over the past twelve months, he had taught her incredibly complex chemical formulas and toxicological mechanisms. He was an extremely valuable tool, and the laws of nature abhor any form of resource waste.
"Hurry up!" Rowan roared, a rare occurrence for him, his voice ripped apart by the wind and rain.
After a nearly twenty-minute, arduous trek, they finally arrived at a hidden landmark deep within the north slope.
It was an enormous, thousand-year-old redwood known as "Grandfather." The tree, exceeding an astonishing twenty feet in diameter, had been utterly hollowed out by a devastating lightning strike decades ago, its heartwood completely carbonized, creating a massive, naturally formed hollow filled with dried wood chips.
Rowan forcefully shoved the nearly unconscious Elias into the dark hollow, then nimbly squeezed in himself.
Outside the hollow, a violent, apocalyptic scene unfolded. The howling wind sounded like a mournful wail, and massive trees snapped painfully in the wind.
But inside the tree hollow, an eerie, oppressive silence reigned. It was incredibly dry, the air thick with the deep, ancient scent of carbonized wood and centuries-old pine resin.
Rowan quickly shook her tangled hair, like a wary wild animal rapidly assessing her surroundings in the darkness. She was covered in a thick layer of bear fat and insect-repellent mud, a primitive waterproof layer that kept her core body temperature stable even in the downpour.
But Elias was in dire straits.
He huddled painfully in the dark corner of the tree hollow. His supposed waterproof coat was completely soaked through by the icy rain, clinging to his pale skin and greedily draining the last vestiges of warmth from his body.
"Cold…" Elias shivered violently, his teeth chattering uncontrollably, producing a sharp, grating sound.
Rowan walked up to him with utter indifference and knelt down.
With the incredibly systematic biological knowledge he had acquired from Elias over the past year, Rowan's brain swiftly and accurately diagnosed a severe hypothermia. His capillaries were constricting violently, and his muscles were spasming in an attempt to generate heat. Without immediate intervention to warm him, his central nervous system would soon plunge him into a deep coma, followed by cardiopulmonary failure.
In nature, when a weakened herbivore exhibits these symptoms, predators usually wait for it to die. But Elias was different; he was her only window to the outside world.
Rowan reached out roughly and yanked open the zipper of Elias's jacket.
"What…what are you doing…" Elias weakly tried to stop him, but in his hypothermic state, his arms were incredibly heavy.
"Take it off. Extremely cold dead skin, it'll kill." Rowan's voice was icy, devoid of any human shame.
She swiftly and thoroughly stripped Elias of his soaking wet, skin-clinging clothing, tossing it deep into the tree hollow. Elias lay naked, curled up on the charred wood shavings, his skin a dangerously bluish-purple.
Without hesitation, Rowan quickly removed her own animal-hide cloak, stained with mud and resin.
In the utter darkness of the ancient tree hollow, outside, a furious storm raged.
Rowan pressed herself against him, slowly but surely.
This wasn't love, nor desire. It was a pure, transcendent exchange of heat between species—a "warm-blooded animal heat exchange."
When Rowan's burning hot, rough-textured, mud-covered skin clung tightly to Elias's cold, soft skin, Elias's body shuddered violently. It was an extreme physical shock.
Lowyn, like a mother wolf protecting her cubs, tightly wrapped the extremely weak Elias in her body and animal-skin cloak. Her incredibly powerful thighs pressed tightly against his, her warm chest pressed firmly against his extremely cold back.
This extreme physical contact was immense torture for both of them in the first few minutes. Rowyn felt an extremely terrifying chill seep into her body through Elias's skin. This physical heat conduction made her frown uncomfortably.
In Elias's perception, he felt as if he were enveloped by a blazing fire, exuding a strong earthy smell and the scent of wild beast sweat. That wild temperature was forcefully tearing apart his fragile consciousness.
As time passed, an hour went by.
Outside the tree hollow, the torrential rain continued to ravage the north slope with extreme ferocity. Inside the tree hollow, an extremely strange chemical reaction was taking place.
Elias's body temperature slowly rose. His intense shivering subsided, and a faint color returned to his bluish-purple lips. His breathing gradually became steady, and he even drifted into a semi-conscious sleep in extreme exhaustion, instinctively moving closer to Rowan, his only source of warmth.
And Rowan.
This utterly cold-hearted girl, who treated the entire forest as her laboratory, suddenly opened her eyes in utter astonishment in the darkness.
She felt something.
It was Elias's powerful heartbeat.
At such close proximity, that incredibly fragile, human heart was pounding rhythmically against her chest. "Thump—thump—thump—"
In the utterly silent tree hollow, this rhythm remarkably resonated with her own heartbeat.
Rowan's mind went blank for a brief moment.
In her encyclopedia, she had seen spore ejection, she had seen cells rupture. But no scientific work had ever accurately described to her the instinct called "kinship"—that transcendent, cross-species connection—when two lonely, carbon-based beings clung to each other in the cold, desolate wilderness.
She felt Elias's breath on her neck, carrying a faint, civilized minty scent (the smell of his brushing his teeth that morning), a stark contrast to her earthy stench.
Rowan slowly extended a calloused hand, his fingertips lightly touching Elias's collarbone.
It was a soft, undefended, incredibly fragile structure. With just a little force, she could snap his throat.
But she didn't. Instead, with extreme hesitation and clumsiness, she gently rested her chin on the top of Elias's head.
At that moment, in this forgotten hollow of a withered tree, the torrential rains of 1984 forged two vastly different souls into a fleeting symbiosis.
For the first time, Rowan realized that beyond predator and prey, observer and observed, humans could also exist as incredibly warm, compassionate members of a community, sharing the cold. This nascent realization was far more shocking to her than the spore-shooting under the microscope.
Meanwhile, miles away, Julian Carter sat in his warm, luxurious Carter mansion, listening to the rain outside, plotting how to completely eradicate the "hybrids" on the north slope. He could never imagine that in this downpour, the forest he considered his ATM was nurturing a bond more resilient than poison, more complex than law.
The rain continued to fall, and this symbiotic touch would become the only warmth Rowan tried to recall but could never express in human language during that cold courtroom trial in 1993.