This road seemed to have no end.
Neither A Tai nor I knew how long we had been walking.
A Tai said there was something very wrong with this road. He asked whether I had noticed the sides of the road. The road ran through the woods, and there were trees on either side, weren't there? But I quickly realized that while there were indeed trees along the road, we had already felt that we were at the edge of the Dark Forest. Given our pace and the time we had spent, we should have left the Dark Forest long ago.
Yet we remained on this road.
"Mr. Jiang, I suspect Tina is behind this," A Tai said.
I stopped and said to him, "Why would she do that? What would she gain from it?"
Tina was one of the Ancient Pompeii people. She had come to this world with a mission.
Her mission was to secure the Ancient Pompeii people's right to relocate to this world. That was why she had approached the Holy See, but the Holy See was not qualified to make that decision.
The Mysterious Person and his organization had given the decision-making power to me.
She knew that.
So, logically speaking, she should not have set me up. Nothing good would come of it for her if something happened to me.
Seeing that I said nothing, A Tai added, "I have a guess, but it's only a guess. I don't know whether it's right."
No need to think about it. He was planning to badmouth Tina again.
"I suspect Tina has already reached some sort of agreement with that other self of yours. You never gave Tina any promise before. If you didn't agree, none of us could enter the world. I know what concerns