With Firefly’s power aiding her remote hacking, and another month of digging, Lianna finally uncovered the Greenwild Church’s deepest secrets.
For instance, the cult leader wasn’t even on the Jadeite Continent but hiding on Silvermirror. Lingman Corporation’s laboratories were using the church to funnel “volunteers” for human experimentation. The police department, too, was colluding with the church.
This left Lianna feeling it was all far trickier than she had planned. She’d wanted to simply cut the head off the cult, but the leader had already fled. Their funds—aside from what had been handed over—were mostly transferred away, essentially unrecoverable.
Fortunately, the victims were gamblers themselves. Losing money was just another lesson; hardly innocent.
The urgent task now was to puncture the bubble quickly, to prevent more victims and more girls like Louisa with broken families.
So Lianna decided to go straight to the site of an “Offering Rite” and record the entire process as evidence.
Reporting it, of course, she left to her sister—as a ten-year-old, just obtaining the evidence was already a feat. She didn’t have the network of reporters.
Yvette planned to hand it over, in Nameless’s name, to Firebearer. After all, the Civilization Preservation Society had already proven its media muscle with Codename: Life. For them, exposing a Ponzi scheme would be simple—and Firebearer would surely welcome the chance.
In an old-district church, an iron gate clattered upward with a piercing screech of metal. Bright moonlight poured down like silver frost, only to be washed over by pale yellow headlights as a black bus rolled slowly out from an underground garage and headed for the outskirts of Garde.
Half an hour later, at the gates of a massive suburban research base, the barrier opened. The bus drove through unhindered and stopped before a monstrous structure—like a coiled serpent of black steel. ɴᴇᴡ ɴᴏᴠᴇʟ ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀs ᴀʀᴇ ᴘᴜʙʟɪsʜᴇᴅ ᴏɴ novelFɪre.net
From the shadows of the street outside the base, Lianna’s figure emerged. She stared at the terrifying structure, her pupils contracting. Even though she had scouted the place beforehand, seeing it again still sent a chill through her.
If Yvette had been here, she would have recognized it at once: the structure was the spitting image of the Steel Sea Dragon Beast from the Lands of Termination!
In truth, it wasn’t the Steel Sea Dragon Beast, but a discarded super shield-tunneler from Cindertrace Chemicals—the “Earth-Burrowing Constructor.” Or more accurately, the Constructor’s scrap. This machine, said to be able to dig through the planet’s core, had only four units worldwide. Apart from Cindertrace’s private unit, the rest had either been mothballed or, like Lingman’s, damaged beyond repair. Too wasteful to throw away, they had the bright idea to use it as a building frame.
If the end came and it still hadn’t been scrapped, perhaps the Lands of Termination’s Steel Sea Dragon Beasts would not be limited to one.
Using Shadowmeld and her shadow-touch to crawl walls, Lianna slipped into the research base. From the corner of a laboratory window, she watched from close range as human experiments unfolded.
Inside were four chairs. Each restrained a living human. Researchers fed them a seed—glowing with rune-light, resembling a Heart of Nature—then activated a nearby Source Tree.
After a while, as the magic flared, Lianna saw it with her own eyes: a living human, writhing in agony, slowly turning into a tree.
That Heart of Nature-like object, combined with the Source Tree, could petrify flesh into wood—turning humans into trees in human form!
The researchers in white coats before the platform didn’t even flinch. They were clearly accustomed to it, showing no concern for the volunteers’ lives. Some even smiled with interest, especially when the other three volunteers screamed in terror.
Lianna was stunned. She had never imagined she would witness such a horrifying experiment. She even wondered—if this lab could turn humans into wood, surely it hadn’t just started today.
Could the countless trees in Garde’s greenery actually be transformed people?
And if that seed was truly a Heart of Nature, didn’t it mean that anyone implanted with Lingman’s magitech terminal could have their life stolen at will—turned into just another tree on the street?
Later that night, Lianna returned home in the old district. Her sister was dozing on the sofa. Hearing the door, Yvette’s eyes half opened. She yawned and asked, “Did it work?”
“Mm.” Lianna was subdued. She was still a child, after all, and confronting the darkest side of origin civilization with no way to resist had left her unsettled.
At least she had held herself back. If she had rushed in to save them, given the hidden defenses she later discovered in the base, she might well have become the fifth tree of the experiment that night.
Taking Lianna’s magitech terminal, Yvette glanced through its contents—and was startled. She confirmed the object forced down the volunteers’ throats really was the Heart of Nature. She hadn’t expected that beyond affecting souls and memory, it could now reshape the body itself.
What was Lingman’s next step? To spread the Heart of Nature worldwide—and control all humanity?
She thought about it, then simply forwarded everything to Firebearer. Headaches weren’t hers to worry about. That was what the Civilization Preservation Society was for. With less than two months left in the dreamworld, she wasn’t going to waste her energy on such things.
Two days later, once Firebearer confirmed receipt, Yvette put the Greenwild Church matter entirely aside.
She bustled back and forth between campuses. Besides natural magic courses, she even sat in on unrelated majors—just to see if there were any blind spots in her knowledge worth patching.
But given that her knowledge was already vast as a sea, these courses meant for undergrads did little for her.
Within days, however, something else caught her attention: in response to the President of New Eden’s visit to Glenaut, Lingman University planned to host a three-night academic exchange. It would cover all five schools of conceptual magic, with professors from Lingman and guest scholars from New Eden—a high-level event open only to professors.
To Yvette, it was perfect timing. She could fill gaps in her mastery of conceptual magic—especially in soul magic, where she knew necromancy well but was still lacking in mind magic. It was a chance to learn much.
If she could plug all those gaps by auditing before leaving the dreamworld, truth be told, she would hardly ever need to enter one again.