Chapter 355: The Fountain of Youth (12)
The moment her body became suspended in midair, Everly’s heart leapt into her throat, and a powerful sense of panic instantly seized her.
She had thought she would fall into the void, then helplessly roll down the slope, tumbling head over heels and getting thoroughly battered.
However, when Everly, trapped inside the ball of thorns, collided with the image of the planet, countless dense streams of information suddenly emerged from the surface of the image.
They sprouted from the image of Earth, gathering strand by strand until they formed several enormous, cloud-like tentacles that blotted out the sky, completely enveloping Everly.
The tentacles carried an ocean of information. Whenever Everly’s gaze swept across their surfaces, countless tiny, rice-grain-sized buds would emerge wherever her eyes landed. Once she moved her gaze away, they would wither and collapse like water plants left behind by a receding tide, rustling as they shrank back into the tentacles and vanished.
Paralyzed by the thorns, Everly could not move, and inevitably, her gaze lingered a little too long on one particular cluster of buds.
Sensing that they were being observed, the tiny bodies of those buds immediately began to swell like balloons being inflated. They grew larger and larger, cracks splitting open across their petals, until one strange flower after another burst into bloom, each vying to display its splendor before Everly.
Every flower was a record.
Within the flower centers of the blossoms crowding into her field of vision, Everly saw the explosion of an ancient supernova. She saw Ediacaran organisms writhing in a vast primordial ocean. She saw a mysterious flying craft descend amid flashes of lightning and thunder. She saw grand sacrificial ceremonies taking place upon ancient lands. She saw towering buildings of reinforced concrete rising from the ground…
In just a few fleeting glimpses, as flowers bloomed and withered, she witnessed everything from the birth of the planet and the emergence of the primordial oceans, to the Cambrian Explosion and the thunderous end of the age of dinosaurs, from the moment an australopithecine first stood upright to the bonfires of civilization driving away the darkness of night…
Billions of years of evolution, an immense torrent of information beyond the limits of human comprehension, drove into Everly’s mind like thick steel nails through her eyes. Her vision went black, and her head felt as though it were splitting apart.
“Continuing to look will kill me. This is knowledge that the human brain simply cannot contain!”
An alarm from her sixth sense exploded inside her mind, forcibly jolting Everly awake from her helplessly entranced state.
To protect herself, Everly immediately closed her eyes, cutting off the unconventional influx of information.
With her vision gone, her other senses were magnified infinitely.
In the darkness, Everly suddenly felt a powerful sensation of weightlessness.
It seemed as though some force had wrapped itself around her body and carried her into midair. A moment later, her feet dropped, landing on some kind of hard platform.
The force that had lifted her body then withdrew.
Everly waited for a moment before tentatively opening her eyes. She discovered that she had appeared on a floating, saucer-shaped platform.
Several hundred meters away from the platform floated the tower-shaped mountain she had seen earlier. At the foot of the mountain stood a blurry silver-white human figure, silent and motionless like a statue.
Everly looked around.
There was no silver-white passage, no holographic image of Earth, and no Grant or Savannie watching her with hostile intent. As far as the eye could see, everything was an expanse of blank white. There were no clouds or sun in the sky, nor any land or ocean beneath her. Aside from the platform and the mountain, there seemed to be nothing else at all.
The thorns wrapped around her body were gone as well. Even the backpack she had been carrying and all the various items on her person had disappeared during those brief few dozen seconds she had kept her eyes closed.
Apart from the clothes covering her body, Everly had nothing.
Having already experienced the yellow corridor, Everly quickly realized that she had entered another new world.
She walked to the edge of the saucer-shaped platform.
A ring of decorative statues had been placed there. Starting from the side directly facing the mountain and counting clockwise, they were a coyote, a squirrel, a chipmunk, and a frog.
To decipher the poem about the Fountain of Youth, Everly had once conducted a detailed investigation into the myths and legends of the Winton people. She remembered that one famous story involved these four animals. The story was called “Coyote Steals Fire”:
[Long ago, the Winton people had no fire. They could only eat raw food, and whenever the weather turned cold, they would shiver from the chill.
The thick-furred Coyote took pity on the frail humans and decided to steal fire from the two women who guarded the flames. He told his companions about his plan and received their unanimous support.
So Coyote hid in the darkness and crept toward the fire, quietly waiting until day turned to night and the two guards began changing shifts.
Seizing this brief opportunity, Coyote suddenly leapt out of the forest, snatched a glowing ember in his jaws, and raced down the mountain.
The guards immediately gave chase. They were fast, and when they reached out to grab him, their hands caught the tip of Coyote’s tail.
But Coyote reacted quickly. Seeing that things were going badly, he tossed the ember ahead of him and threw it to the waiting Squirrel.
From that day onward, Coyote’s tail bore a patch of white—a medal of honor belonging solely to the hero who stole the fire.
Squirrel caught the ember and carried it on his back, darting nimbly through the trees.
The fire was scorching hot, burning Squirrel’s tail until it curled upward. Even so, Squirrel refused to drop the ember, holding on until he successfully passed it to Chipmunk.
From that day onward, Squirrel’s tail remained curled upward. It became a silent monument, commemorating Squirrel’s great sacrifice.
Chipmunk seized the ember in his teeth and raced along the ground. But the guards were not slow either. They reached out with their claws, leaving three scratches across Chipmunk’s back.
The brave Chipmunk, despite his wounds, carried on and passed the ember to Frog.
From that day onward, three stripes appeared on Chipmunk’s back. They reminded all who saw them of Chipmunk’s immortal contribution in bringing fire to the people.
Frog bravely pressed forward through the stream. Along the way, the guards accidentally caught hold of his tail. To protect the fire, Frog struggled desperately and tore his own tail free.
From that day onward, all frogs lost their tails. Whenever people saw them hopping along the water’s edge, they would remember the sacrifice Frog had made for the fire.
At last, after protecting the fire all the way, the animals successfully tossed the ember onto a piece of wood belonging to the Winton people. From then on, the wood acquired a special property: whenever two pieces of dry wood were rubbed together, the fire hidden within them would reveal itself.
The Winton people could finally eat cooked food and no longer had to fear the bitter winter.
And Coyote, Squirrel, Chipmunk, and Frog became the Winton people’s eternal friends.
…]
This entire story was essentially the Native American version of Prometheus stealing fire. Everly felt that there had to be a reason these animals had appeared on the platform.
Could she finally be about to enter the classic puzzle-solving segment found in treasure-hunting adventure movies?
Her mind churning with all sorts of possibilities, Everly reached out toward the stone statue of Coyote and tentatively touched its head.
“Vmmm—!”
The instant her fingertip touched the stone, a voice rang out from the sky. Clear and pure like a flowing spring, it reverberated throughout the entire world.
It was not a language Everly recognized, yet the moment she heard it, she somehow understood its meaning.
The voice was devoid of emotion, cold and indifferent as it asked her:
“Only those who have accomplished extraordinary deeds may pass. Human, for what reason are you immortal?”
For what reason was she immortal?
The instant she heard the question, Everly remained frozen with her hand resting against the statue. Her azure eyes became vacant, and her consciousness suddenly plunged into darkness.
She was inside an old movie theater.
Everly sat in the center of the audience, on a filthy, hard, battered folding chair. People filled every seat around her, in front, behind, and on either side.
The theater was shrouded in darkness, and a bleak, oppressive black-and-white film was playing on the screen. Judging by its subject matter, it appeared to be a horror movie. When Everly looked up, she saw that inside the enormous building, more than a dozen black-robed figures were laughing maniacally as they chased and hacked at a group of unarmed civilians with various weapons.
The air was thick with the smell of dust, while the screams of the victims in the film echoed in her ears.
The entire theater was filled with an atmosphere of despair, oppression, and terror.
Everly had no idea why she had been on the saucer-shaped platform one second and fallen into this movie theater the next. She first lowered her head to check herself. Everything was still the same as before: aside from the clothes covering her body, all her items and equipment had vanished without a trace, including her Sacred Tree bracelet.
The lack of equipment made Everly reluctant to act immediately.
Remaining seated, she leaned against the hard backrest and slowly turned her head, looking around in an attempt to figure out her current situation.
Just then, the scene on the screen changed, cutting from a narrow corridor to a large white room. Inside, two people dressed as nurses were desperately bracing themselves against a door, struggling to keep it shut against a group of thugs trying to break in.
The room was predominantly white. At this point in the film, the screen suddenly brightened.
In the faint light from the screen, Everly suddenly realized that the figures sitting in the seats around her were not people at all, but dolls made of wood.
They were exactly the same as the wooden dummies she had encountered in the yellow corridor!
Wh-what was going on…?
Click!
She had barely realized the truth when the crisp sound of joints twisting rang out.
In the enormous theater, hundreds of wooden dolls sitting in the seats simultaneously turned their heads, all their featureless faces pointing directly at Everly, who sat in the very center.
“No, no! I don’t want to die!”
A hysterical scream suddenly came from the theater’s speakers.
The wooden dummy clicked its head back around and returned its gaze to the screen.
Everly’s attention was drawn back to the giant screen as well.
On the screen, one of the two nurses had an emotional breakdown from sheer terror. Screaming hysterically, she abandoned the other nurse, who was still on the phone calling for help, and ran past row after row of incubators holding babies. She sprinted to the window and leapt out, plunging from the high-rise building.
Everly’s eyes widened in shock.
She remembered this scene—it was something she had experienced as a newborn. On that rainy night, cultists from the True Realm Society had stormed into the hospital, slaughtering people indiscriminately and nearly carrying her away while she was still swaddled.
It had been the most helpless night of her life. Lying inside her incubator, she had watched helplessly as Nurse Nancy was brutally murdered, unable to do anything. Even her own survival had been a matter of sheer luck: the cultists’ obsession with cleanliness was the only reason they had not taken her away as a sacrifice.
Could it be that this theater was showing her life?
With this suspicion in mind, Everly continued watching.
Sure enough, what happened next matched her memories exactly. After the first nurse jumped to her death, the metal door of the neonatal ward was smashed open by the black-robed figures. During the ensuing chase, Nurse Nancy was killed, dying right in front of the tiny infant girl…
The baby in the incubator remained there alone, facing the corpse, enduring for a long time.
It was only when the sound of police sirens shattered the silence of the rainy night and a large number of officers arrived at the scene to rescue the surviving infant that the image on the screen abruptly changed.
It changed to a beautiful woman with blonde hair and blue eyes.