According to Pierre's earlier account, the flow of time for various things had fallen into a bizarre state while they were trapped in the small village in the forest. Some things had rapidly decayed, while others had entered a state of temporal stagnation. So what would happen when the village's warped spacetime suddenly vanished?
For now, it seemed that all the distorted time had immediately been "compensated."
The three-hundred-year-old village instantly decayed into ash. The forest that had been held back beyond the walls occupied this once-civilized land in the blink of an eye. As for the villagers who had completely fused with the village and become part of its magical system, they were treated as dead objects—they, too, were instantly compensated into the flow of time.
Pierre looked both surprised and delighted when he saw Hao Ren's group. What had just happened had shocked and terrified him. Watching everything around him decay in an instant, with the great forest creaking and grinding its way over, had nearly given him another heart attack. The Wang Brothers and Catherine beside him, however, looked far more bewildered. The three of them had been trapped in the village for far too long, to the point that they had nearly lost the ability to think independently. The events of the past few years were a muddled dream to them, and they seemed to have lost much of their memories from before they entered that dream as well.
After hearing Pierre explain what had happened, the Wang Brothers looked utterly incredulous, while Catherine's eyes widened even further. She had thought she had just set out from some survey camp outside the forest and was preparing to collect data on the local flora and fauna.
Yet in the blink of an eye, the world had practically