"Coo, coo."
Birdsong lingered in his ears.
Tang Qi slowly opened his eyes. Twilight suffused with pink spread before him, and he could just make out a few shooting stars flashing across the heavens.
The fragrance of lavender slowly seeped into his nostrils, mingled with the scent of hyacinths and roses, growing richer by degrees in distinct layers.
He felt himself lying on soft grass. Slowly sitting up, he discovered that he was on an endless purple hillside. At the foot of the slope stood a towering tree, with a bright, beautiful town built around its trunk.
"Even knowing this is a dream, it feels real enough..."
Tang Qi instinctively dug a fingernail into his palm. The faint pain seemed to blur the boundary between dreams and reality.
Looking around, he saw no sign of anyone else. Only Yiwu remained in his hood, fast asleep and making little "ee-woo" noises.
His Dimensional Bag was still there. He took his notebooks out of his pack—The Guide and the Journal were both present, but in truth, they were only illusions recreated from his memories.
Anything he wrote in them would not appear in their real-world counterparts, much less be recorded in the Stone Tablet.
Still, he slowly recorded everything he had seen and heard along the way.
"Why do you keep writing when you know the pen and paper aren't real."
Only Shalti would open a conversation with a question delivered as a statement.
Without turning around, Tang Qi continued recording the truth he had learned earlier and answered, "Think of it as completing a task. A little ritual. After all, from the Twilight Forest to Dragon Gold City and the Wasteland... I've hardly ever put my pen down.
"Even if these words are destined never to reach anyone else, writing The