The steps Dex and Lumia took as they moved away from the ledge and the lake were their last steps in a world that could be described as rational. With every kilometre they covered heading north, pushing deeper toward the heart of the mysterious and sealed Falus Forest, nature gradually and brutally shed its familiar laws and donned in their place a garment of beautiful madness and terror at once-as though a lunatic god had painted a surrealist canvas.
The trees that had been considered enormous and frightening at the outer edges began here to transform into sky-scraping wooden giants. Their trunks no longer resembled ordinary plant matter-they had become colossal rock-like masses sheathed in bark as hard as interlocking steel plates from an army of titans. The diameter of a single trunk exceeded thirty metres with ease, as though these were not trees at all but the walls of massive fortresses erected by ancient gods to protect their secrets.
The leaves of these trees were not a fresh green. They were a deep green verging on black, broad and dense enough that they fused overhead to form a dark, sealed living canopy, blocking even the smallest ray of sunlight from reaching below. Here, in these depths, dawn had fallen into the trap of eternal night. The place was submerged in a cold, damp darkness broken only by the strange and frightening luminescence of enormous phosphorescent fungi growing on the tangled roots-radiating a pallid, sickly purple and blue light that lent the entire forest a funerary quality, as though it were a graveyard for things that had not yet died.
Suddenly, Dex stopped and raised his hand to warn Lumia to halt. Before them, in the middle of the narrow passage formed by the colossal roots, stood an enormous grey stone, polished with a precision foreign to nature, standing like a silent and forbidding sentinel. The stone was covered in a layer of sticky, blood-red algae-but beneath that layer, deep engravings had been carved in very ancient languages, their edges eroded by the damp passage of centuries, yet still carrying the authority of absolute warning:
"Here the delusion of human protection ends, and the absolute sovereignty of the beasts begins. Mortal-turn back before you are forgotten. For within, silence possesses fangs, and light is nothing but a trap for fools."
Dex read the engraving with glacial composure. He did not hesitate for a single second, did not even blink. For a man who had spent fifteen years in the hell of isolation behind iron bars in the world of men, no written or spoken warning could any longer frighten him or deflect him from his purpose.
"The frank and open brutality here is far preferable to the counterfeit justice that is woven in the palaces of the Empire," Dex murmured to himself with dry contempt, lifting his foot to take a firm, heavy step over the invisible line carved in the earth that separated the relatively Safe Zone from the Danger Zone-the Forbidden Zone.
The moment he crossed that invisible line, Dex felt a sudden, violent shift in the pressure of the surrounding Mana. It was not a mere difference in the air. It resembled physically leaping without warning into an ocean of liquid, heavy mercury. The air here had become suffocating in its density, clinging to the skin, saturated with a raw and dark magical energy that nearly crushed the lungs with every breath. The Mana here was not natural and gentle, aiding sorcerers in their work. It was wild, surging, feral Mana-liable to strangle and tear apart from within anyone whose spiritual vessel was not strong and stable enough to contain it.
"Stay alert, Lumia," Dex said in a low, sharp tone, reaching to his belt and drawing the curved dagger he had claimed as spoils from the grey demon in the cavern. At first glance it had appeared unremarkable-dark steel with a sharp edge. But the instant Dex's Phoenix-saturated fingers closed around it and his energy flowed into the blade, it responded. The steel blazed to incandescent white, and lines of gold extended the full length of the blade-as though a shard of the sun's core had been drawn into a leather sheath-flooding a small circle around them with light and driving back the purple darkness."
"Here, the rules are different." He took a flexible fighting stance. "The beasts in the Forbidden Zone do not consume flesh simply to satisfy biological hunger. They feed on your fear, your hesitation, and the vibrations of your despair before they ever touch you physically. If your soul wavers for a single moment-if you show even a trace of weakness-you will find a thousand fangs buried in your throat before your eyes can blink."
Lumia looked at the thick, dancing darkness ahead. She was not afraid in the human sense. She was primed-by instinct, like a Celestial predator that had caught the scent of dangerous quarry. The pupils of her glowing red eyes widened in a frightening way to cover the entire iris, allowing her to activate her Celestial senses to their absolute limit, to perceive the Mana flows and magical currents in the air.
Through this vision, she saw what Dex could not. She saw that the enormous trees surrounding them were not inert, dormant vegetation. They were living creatures in a state of false stillness, pulsing with slow black and green Mana, watching with a primal, undifferentiated awareness.
Suddenly, from deep within the clinging darkness, they heard a sound coming from far away. Not the ordinary roar of a predator beast. Not a howl or a snarl. It was a terrifying sound resembling colossal bones fracturing beneath the weight of a massive hydraulic press-a sound that struck the eardrums and made the teeth chatter. It was followed by a deep tremor in the earth: a miniature earthquake that sent phosphorescent dust flying from the tree trunks like luminous snow.
The immensely dense upper branches above them began to shift and coil. Not from wind-there were no air currents in these suffocating depths-but because the forest itself had begun to sense the presence of strangers. It had begun to register the blazing Phoenix fire, and the presence of a pure Celestial entity.
The trees that had appeared as solid, mute columns began to twist with terrifying slowness, emitting wooden creaking sounds that resembled groans. And their massive roots-extending above the ground like hills-moved. They slid across the soil like colossal wooden serpents preparing to coil around their prey and crush it. The entire Forbidden Forest resembled one vast single creature, and Dex and Lumia were the foreign microbes that had dared to enter its body. Now its savage immune system had begun to mobilise for their elimination.
Lumia gripped the hem of her black cloak and stepped quickly closer to Dex's back. She could feel the concentrated heat radiating from his aura-the only beacon and the only safe haven in this dark, living ocean.
"Dex... the forest is breathing," Lumia whispered in a voice carrying the awe and reverence of the Celestials, her eyes tracing the disturbed magical currents. "This is not a place we are passing through... it is a single entity. And the Mana here... it holds a great hatred for us."
"Let it hate as much as it pleases," Dex replied in a cold voice, raising his blazing dagger higher as the gold and blue flames seeped from his arm to reinforce the blade-until it became a short sword of burning light. "I faced organised, deliberate, calculated human hatred for years in my cell, and this place is nothing but a primitive, instinctive, mindless version of that hatred. Okonnor is somewhere in here, in the heart of this rot... and I will find him and wrest the nectar from him, even if I have to burn every last tree in this cursed zone and reduce it all to ash."
They launched forward like two warrior shadows amid the towering, coiling trees. Dex moved at the front with the caution and focus of the prisoner who had watched every dark corner of his cell for traps, using his thermal awareness to detect any movement. Lumia followed with the lightness and silence of Celestial creatures that leave no trace-but in the depths of her red eyes, a sharp crimson light had begun to glow, as though her dormant combat instinct had begun to resonate with the place's overwhelming savagery.
They had left behind everything familiar, every law of men, and had entered the heart of what could only be called the Third Continent: the core of the Forbidden Zone-where time stretched and contracted at the whim of ancient beasts, and where every step, every breath, might be the last.
Okonnor... we are coming. Prepare yourself.
The words turned silently in Dex's mind as the living forest opened its vast black mouth to swallow them whole, announcing the beginning of the true and bloody trial of the Heir of the Phoenix and the enigmatic Celestial.
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- End of VOLUME: 001 _ Born From Fire -
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You'll find pictures of Dex and Lumia in the Chapter comments.