Chapter 60 Marching in Formation

A burning tree that had become something alive — in the real world it would have been genuinely unthinkable, but inside a dream, any manner of strangeness was possible. Ma En wasn't surprised by the creature itself. What he couldn't ignore was the scale of it: ten meters tall, massively thick, the root system that had been anchored deep underground now splayed in all directions — longer than the trunk, each root lashing the air like a whip. The thing moved on those roots with a force and speed that produced, instantly and viscerally, the conviction that fighting it was out of the question.

If this were his own dream, he might have tried. But the accumulating evidence suggested otherwise — this wasn't his dream but some other form of consciousness-level conflict — and he even doubted whether this was a human dream at all. Human dreams were strange, yes, but they tended to reflect the dreamer's waking reality in fragmented, associative ways. This dreamscape — the celestial body overhead that barely resembled a moon, this atmosphere of cold and violence, creatures lurking in unseen places ready to kill at any moment — was it really something a human mind would generate?

The dream was too aggressive. Even for a human dream, this was not the dream of a healthy mind.

No matter how he examined the environment, the burning tree-monster appeared to be the most powerful thing here. Even if it wasn't the most powerful, Ma En had no intention of facing it head-on. He didn't know what had reduced the three umbrellas to their various states of ruin, or what kind of enemy had done it, or how many more umbrellas might be scattered further along that line. But drawing the three into a single trajectory, whatever waited at the far end was equally beyond his power.

That unknown danger — whatever it was, however it compared to the burning tree — which was worse?

Carrying these thoughts, Ma En plunged forward through the storm. The rain seemed to be intensifying. Wind came at him from the left, from the right, from straight ahead — never from behind — shoving and buffeting him, preventing him from building speed. The muddy ground pulled at his ankles; his shoes were soaked through with icy water, and the sensation was so disorienting that he half-believed he was running barefoot, that hands were reaching up from the earth to drag at his trouser legs.

The world around him had sunk into a deep, saturated green. Unlike the terrain before, vegetation was everywhere now — dense grass and shrubs, trees of varying height and girth, thick leaves that gave way underfoot with the sickening impression that the ground below them was bottomless, that each step might plunge him through. What should have signaled fertile soil and rich natural growth, under this wind and rain and cracking lightning, felt instead like an invitation from death — and death was not in any single place; the gloomy, densely overgrown forest belt was death.

He could see the burning tree behind him whenever he looked back. Flame sheathed its body, but even so, not a single leaf actually burned. The bark was cold — black and charred in appearance, as though all the fire's heat were being absorbed by that scorched surface. The tentacle-like roots that served as its feet propelled it with startling efficiency; for all its mass, it moved several notches faster than an adult at a full sprint.

In this wretched terrain, giving everything he had, Ma En couldn't open the gap. The glow behind him grew steadily closer. The firelight it cast did nothing to warm the cold, dead atmosphere of the forest, and offered no sense of safety. As long as this creature lived, it would burn — and the burning would not stop.

The air carried a peculiar smell — something that felt familiar, though he couldn't place it. That smell, combined with the pressure of the chase and the difficulty of every stride, was disrupting his breathing. A deep inhale sometimes produced a choking sensation instead of relief. But not breathing was no better — it brought the same suffocation, the same mounting fatigue, the same dizziness, as though the oxygen itself had been compromised.

He couldn't breathe deeply. He couldn't stop breathing. And no matter how he adjusted, something kept knocking his rhythm off — as though the dream itself were working against him, saturated with a malice that wanted the intruder dead.

Throughout the chase, the creature's roots kept nearly reaching him — a hair's breadth from striking his body — yet never quite connected. And he encountered nothing else. From start to finish, only the burning tree pursued him. He entertained a grim possibility: the malice suffusing this dream might be deliberately herding him in this direction.

But if the path ahead was also a trap, it was too late to stop. Was he going to turn around and test whether those wildly flailing roots could beat him to a pulp? Against that many tendrils, of varying thickness and reach, only a superhero could thread the gaps and slip through.

He tried changing direction several times. The burning tree matched each adjustment with equal agility — just as its speed slightly exceeded a person's running pace, its directional changes were also slightly faster. It had no front, no back, no sides to speak of. Its roots distributed themselves in every direction; pulled along by tentacles that encircled it entirely, "turning" was a concept that didn't apply to it.

No use. Running was the only option.

The vegetation grew denser as he pressed forward, tripping and stumbling, yet the burning tree — far more massive than he was — seemed to encounter no resistance whatsoever. It moved as though every plant in its path simply cleared the way. Ma En didn't see this happen directly; he passed through gaps too narrow for the creature's bulk, yet when the creature came through behind him in a straight line, there was no sound of collision, no sense of things being smashed aside.

Is it just a dream after all?

This kind of impossibility was standard for dreams, but the result, for anyone living through it, was maddening and hopeless. His heartbeat was so violent it felt like the organ might leap from his chest. He couldn't suppress the fear, but he also knew he hadn't despaired, hadn't lost himself. His mind was working at full speed, searching for anything — any possibility — that might keep him alive.

Before he found one, the light around him plunged. It was as though he'd dropped into a cave — the transition was so abrupt that his vision went blurry. He sensed something was wrong and spun around. The burning tree was gone. The direction he'd come from, stretching back as far as he could see, showed none of the chaos that a blazing colossus crashing through the undergrowth should have left behind.

The trees here were massive, ancient, powerful — more like a forest that had gone centuries without human contact. Bark was cloaked in moss and fungi; stones wore dense mats of dark green growth — something between moss and lichen, or possibly neither. And there were vines: more conspicuous than anything else, hanging from branches, rooted in the ground and on rock faces, swaying in the breeze like lazy, living snakes.

No fire. No adequate light. The air and ground remained saturated with moisture, but the deluge seemed to have stopped. Wind came from all directions without a fixed source, not wild enough to call a gale, but enough to give this ancient forest a deepened, colder edge of menace.

No path. There had been no path for a long time. Turn around and every direction looked the same — no landmark, no reference point, nothing but plants and plants and more plants. Not a single animal. Not even the insects that should have been everywhere. Not one.

Ma En stood still. He turned slowly, looking in every direction — up, down, all around. He hadn't moved, yet the world felt like it was rotating around him. He didn't feel like he'd entered a jungle. It felt like something shaped like a jungle had swallowed him whole.

He licked his lips. Not from thirst — his mouth wasn't dry. It was just that the fear and tension from the chase hadn't faded in the slightest. The scene before him added a new layer: something wordless, cold, and profoundly lonely.

What now?

He couldn't make sense of it. The situation seemed to confirm that the burning tree had been herding him — though if he'd been too slow, he had no doubt it would have killed him. But this ancient forest, steeped in the scent of deep time — what was hiding in it? Why drive him here?

He'd considered the possibility that this was simply the dream changing on its own, but he trusted the continuity of events more than he trusted randomness. Everything he saw now could be connected to everything before.

The malice that saturated this place had never left him. He could feel it.

Ma En hesitated, then unscrewed the umbrella shaft, shook a pill into his palm, and bit down. The bitterness was savage — as though it had stripped away every other taste. But the tightening vise around his brain loosened, just slightly, and clarity sharpened. His blood pressure dropped. His heartbeat slowed. Within moments his breathing had thinned to almost nothing, as though he no longer needed air. His body began to generate heat — only his head felt as though it had been plunged into ice water. His limbs ran with something like lava. The soaked clothes started to feel warm. These effects closely resembled the drug's behavior in reality.

He pressed the umbrella's trigger and extended the blade, then began cutting into the vegetation — peeling bark, examining cross-sections, attempting to use real-world wilderness navigation techniques to determine direction. The results only deepened his confusion. The dreamscape's physical sensations were remarkably similar to reality, but the fundamental absurdity of a dream hadn't diminished at all. Real-world experience applied here produced nothing useful.

The things that looked like trees were hollow inside when he cut them open. No rings. The other plants had no proper fiber, either — the moss wasn't moss, the fungi weren't fungi. When cut, they bled. Not a fluid that resembled blood. Blood. The taste of blood. The viscosity of blood. The unmistakable, irreplaceable character of blood — no matter how he tried, he could not persuade himself it was anything else.

And what filled the space beneath the outer surface, where plant fiber should have been, was muscle. Not vegetable tissue. Animal muscle.

Everything that looked like a plant was something else, wearing a plant's shape.

Beyond the trees, every type of growth — every category of apparent vegetation — was the same: a thing disguised as a plant, an animal in botanical clothing. Beyond bizarre, beyond strange — Ma En had no better vocabulary for it. And yet: could a single person's dream be this detailed? The environment, the atmosphere, the objects within it — however bizarre they were, they did not lack specificity. It was precisely their specificity that made this place feel as real as the waking world.

He could only set the umbrella upright, watch which direction it fell, and walk that way.

The smell in the air grew worse — heavy with decay, conjuring images of maggots burrowing through rotting human flesh. Ma En covered his nose and mouth and pushed forward through the pathless forest, seeing nothing else that moved.

He'd almost resigned himself to being trapped in this ancient, alien woodland indefinitely when a distinct sound reached him. On a journey through absolute silence — the only sounds his own footsteps, his own breathing — any new noise was unmistakable. This was not a hallucination.

It was like bells swaying in the wind. And beneath that, a low murmur. And threading through both, the soft, continuous whisper of something moving through undergrowth. At first the sounds were diffuse, indistinct — but they were approaching from his flank, drawing closer, and as they did, each layer clarified.

It sounded like a long line of people moving through the forest in formation — Ma En stopped and listened carefully, and the longer he listened the more certain he became. This was the image the sounds described: a vivid, specific tableau.

A long column, serpentine, snaking through the trees. Not normal walking — feet not lifting and falling but dragging across the ground. Many people, many dragging feet, their rhythms differing but somehow never falling into disorder; instead they composed a strange, secretive cadence. And these people were murmuring something — chanting, perhaps — in no language Ma En recognized. The phonology was alien, and like the forest itself, it carried a quality of deep, geological age.

Closer now.

Ma En had no intention of meeting them. He listened and moved simultaneously, finding cover — a large boulder flanked by dense growth, enough to conceal a body. He pressed himself into the gap and went still. The sounds that had been drifting and diffuse sharpened at once, as though the column had materialized nearby in an instant — not walking toward him at a natural pace but simply arriving. His view was blocked on all sides except directly ahead, and from that narrow aperture, a faint glow appeared.

Torchlight.

Figures in long robes, carrying torches, processing in a column. Their silhouettes overlapped and obscured one another, further broken by vegetation and the dense, fog-like moisture hanging in the air. The line wound through the forest as far as he could see.

They varied in height and build — tall, short, heavy, slight — but every one of them was wrapped in a grey hooded robe, the long hems dragging through mud and leaf-litter, filthy from head to foot. From Ma En's angle he could see neither their feet nor their faces. Only these murky, vaguely human outlines, shuffling forward.

Each carried a torch, and each torch illuminated only the upper body of its bearer, casting a distinct shadow — shadows that clung to the surrounding tree trunks like silhouettes of branches, or perhaps like the figures' own shapes crawling up the bark. Even the lit portions revealed nothing beneath the hoods. No face. In this atmosphere, Ma En had the unsettling impression that there were no faces — that the space under each hood was hollow, empty, and that what held the fabric aloft was not a head but something that was simultaneously void and forceful.

That, of course, was just his imagination.

He listened to their chanting. He realized quickly that these sounds were not produced by the throat. They came from lower — from the chest, or from the abdomen. The strange phonology combined with the unknown language gave this procession the quality of something that had walked out of an ancient, savage era. The sounds they made were, by any standard of modern civilization, crude, ugly, difficult to endure.

And yet Ma En could not deny that their wordless chanting carried a depth — like the deep ocean: unknown, mysterious, pulling at you, making you want to understand despite the ugliness of the sounds, making you willing to endure the crudeness if it meant getting closer to whatever lay beneath.

But a procession like this, sounds like these, a scene like this, in a forest like this — every element conspired to pull fear out of the bottom of his chest. Everything here was of unknown origin. Even someone like Ma En, who at least knew this was connected to the Room 4 Ghost Story, could only hold on to that knowledge intellectually. Emotionally, something in him was pulling away.

He couldn't tell whether it was the people themselves that repelled him — making him not want to interact, not even wanting to look — or whether it was their sheer number that generated the fear, an instinctive recoil from a scale that made his scalp crawl.

Numbers on a page were just numbers. But numbers made flesh —

Ma En was certain that anyone who saw this would feel terror.

How many were in this procession? Far more than a hundred. The column had been passing for some time now, and the trailing end held at least a thousand more. Perhaps ten thousand. The count pulled his mind back to the Room 3 neighbor's words: At least 100,000.

He knew he'd made the right call to hide. The same instinct that had told him to avoid the monsters — no, this procession was more frightening than any monster he'd encountered. Because the number was simply too large.