Hao Ren no longer cared much whether the Black Pine Forest was real or illusory, because he had realized that concepts like reality and illusion were meaningless here.
He knew that La Rian had once experienced destruction and rebirth, but through deduction, he could tell that the apocalypse this planet had endured was far more than the one ten thousand years ago. This was the Dark Domain, a fragment of a universe—the sole surviving remnant of a universe once destroyed by the Lord of Madness. Everything that remained in the Dark Domain had endured another apocalypse.
Destruction and rebirth had happened more than once. No matter what kind of mutation occurred on this planet, it had become only natural. Hao Ren guessed that the Black Pine Forest might be the "distortion focus" formed by this planet after the apocalypse.
In this special place, all kinds of things had piled up together. They included not only the world of the past, but also the possible future of this world, the possible future that the old world had once possessed, unrealized fragments of history, history that had already come to pass but had been erased by "God's Dream," history that had never appeared but had surfaced within "God's Dream," and even fragments of Worldlines so absurd that they had only a one-in-ten-thousand chance of existing.
Everything had piled up here, forming a Black Pine Forest.
Yet mortals could never observe the truth within the Black Pine Forest. Their eyes could not observe a single world across multiple dimensions at the same time, so they could only enter the "outermost layer" of the forest. It was a dense jungle filled with beast lairs, monsters, traps, and even things that looked like ruins. Those surface-level objects alone were enough to deceive travelers and make