A new dawn broke over Falus Forest, but the pale light that seeped through the dense crowns of the trees brought with it no sense of safety. It was as though it were raising a curtain on a theatre staging ever more inventive methods of dying. The grey mist coiling around the tree trunks resembled wandering souls keeping their silent watch.
Dex moved between the enormous trees with measured, rhythmic, perfectly soundless steps. The physiological change wrought by absorbing the Shadow Wolf's core days ago had begun to bear its frightening fruit. He no longer stumbled over protruding roots, and dry leaves no longer crackled beneath his boots. His movements were fluid, low-centred, and his eyes-which had acquired a faint golden gleam since reaching the peak of Rank E swept every dark corner, every tree branch, every suspicious shadow.
This manner of walking, this obsessive vigilance, had not been learned in the halls of any prestigious magical academy-where nobles trained in honour-duels on polished marble floors. It had been learned in a far bloodier and more instructive place: the main yard of the maximum-security prison in his former life. Recreation hour in the yard had resembled walking through a human minefield. One wrong step, a glance held a fraction too long in another inmate's eyes, or drifting into the territorial boundary of a rival gang-any of these meant a treacherous shiv in the kidneys, delivered with a rusty blade hidden inside a sharpened toothbrush. The forest was no different. Here, the gangs simply came equipped with fangs, claws, and venom.
As Dex pressed eastward, closing in on his final destination-the Lake of Silver Tears-the atmosphere changed without warning in a way that raised every hair on the back of his neck. Throughout the preceding days, the forest had reeked of its heavy death-perfume: a compound of rotting leaves, wet earth, beast droppings, and rusted iron that smelled like clotted blood. Then, suddenly, that smell was cut off completely-as though an invisible wall separated two entirely different worlds-and in its place arrived something else. A scent. Floral, sweet, intoxicatingly heavy, heady enough to provoke nausea and a faint spinning in the head.
Dex stopped at once and reduced his breathing to the bare minimum. Ahead of him, the dense trees parted abruptly to reveal a vast, open circular clearing, lit by sunlight pouring through a gap in the forest canopy. The ground in this area was carpeted entirely with exquisite violet flowers, their petals glittering with dewdrops that looked like scattered diamonds. They appeared to be a royal tapestry woven from silk, cast by some generous hand into the middle of the rotting filth of the forest.
"Far too beautiful to be real..." Dex murmured under his breath, his cold mind already beginning to disassemble the scene.
In the novel he had read in his former life, this area was known as the Meadow of Dreams. The author had described it as a region where flowers released magically soporific spores. Novice adventurers, worn ragged by the forest's terrors, were drawn to this beautiful place and lay down to rest, breathing in the spores and sinking into a deep, wonderful sleep-from which they never woke. Their bodies decomposed slowly, feeding the meadow's soil.
But Dex was no naive adventurer, and his prisoner's instinct had caught something deeper than a mere botanical sedative.
"This reminds me of the Cook..." Dex thought, a cold and sardonic smile forming on his lips.
In the prison, there had been an inmate everyone called the Cook. He was a heavyset man, perpetually cheerful, who distributed warm smiles and extra food portions to the new arrivals, displaying a gentleness that was profoundly out of place in that hell. The newcomers trusted him. They found comfort in his presence amid the monsters surrounding them. But Dex had watched. He saw how the Cook reserved his brightest smiles for just before he ground rat poison or crushed glass into the food of his rivals in the drug trade. Excessive beauty and excessive warmth in a brutal environment are nothing more than masks worn by the most bloodthirsty predators.
Dex studied the Meadow of Dreams with experienced eyes. The soporific spores were not the real danger-they were merely the anaesthetic that preceded the surgery.
His heightened senses caught a terrifying detail: the ground beneath the violet flowers was too clean. In a forest teeming with microscopic life, not a single ant was crawling along the flower stems. There were no flying insects, no birds approaching the area, not even the decomposed remains of the adventurers who had supposedly slept here. Where had their bodies gone?
"Absolute cleanliness in the wild is a classical and unmistakable sign of a highly active territorial predator-one that is extremely hungry," Dex concluded.
Rather than striding over the flowers or attempting to hold his breath through the clearing, Dex stepped back, dropped to one knee at the edge of the bare mud where the forest ended and the beautiful meadow began-precisely on the boundary between the dying forest and the beguiling clearing.
He removed the tattered leather glove from his right hand and pressed his bare palm flat against the cold, wet soil. He closed his eyes, pushing the intoxicating floral scent out of his thoughts, and focused his entire consciousness on the Mana Core pulsing in his chest.
"In prison, never trust what your eyes show you. Trust only what you can feel in the dark," he whispered to himself like a personal incantation. "Earth Element: Sonar Pulse."
He did not pump a massive volume of Mana to raise stones. Instead he deployed an extraordinarily delicate technique demanding superior mental control: he sent a faint, paper-thin wave of Earth Mana through the soil-like a single drop of water falling onto a still pond. The wave spread in a circle beneath the Meadow of Dreams. It was not strong enough to alert any creature living underground to his presence, but it was sufficient to strike solid and hollow masses and return to him with precise tactical information.
When the wave returned to his palm, Dex opened his eyes. His pupils dilated slightly at the horror of what he had "seen" with his mind's eye.
The beautiful meadow was nothing but bait. Beneath the thin surface layer of flowers, at a depth of no more than one metre, there were no ordinary roots growing in quiet peace. Instead lay a dense, complex, interlocking network of what appeared to be massive vegetative muscles. These were the Serpent Vines-mentioned in the continent's legends as one of the worst nightmares a traveller on foot could encounter.
They were carnivorous plants-not the kind that trapped insects, but semi-conscious organisms that fed on the blood and flesh of large mammals. The vines lay coiled underground like bowstrings drawn to breaking point, covered in thorns hard as steel, awaiting the first regular vibration of an unsuspecting foot stepping onto the meadow-at which moment they would explode from the earth and wrap themselves around the prey, dragging it down into the depths of the soil to crush it and feed on it while it was still alive.
What Dex discovered through his sonar wave was worse still: these vines were not separate plants. They were limbs connected to a single centre. Approximately fifteen metres ahead of him, at a depth of three metres beneath the heart of the meadow, there existed a colossal central node: an enormous vegetative bulb the size of a horse-drawn carriage, pulsing with a faint, viscous Mana, functioning as both the heart and brain of this lethal network.
Dex withdrew his hand from the soil with deliberate slowness, and a lopsided, sardonic smile settled on his face-his glacial composure entirely undisturbed.
"A classic trap, and a masterful one," he said in a whisper meant for no one but himself. "They lure you with surface beauty, dull your senses with the scent, then strangle you and tear you apart in the dark where no one can hear you scream. Exactly like the isolation cells in the west wing."
Dex rose slowly and brushed the clay from his knee. The logical choice for any Rank E sorcerer was to circumnavigate the meadow entirely-a detour that could consume hours through unknown and treacherous terrain, draining Mana and physical reserves before he even reached the lake.
But Dex did not have the luxury of time, and he was not the type to retreat from a plant trap. He had already located the mastermind beneath the earth. It was time to apply the laws of the street to the magic of nature.