"We haven't run into any large animals since we came to the island. What made those strange roars from the legends?" Miao Yu asked Dr. Deng as well.
"Maybe the animals went to find shelter from the rain," Chu Yuan said. "That rain was like hail. Any animal with half a brain would know better than to come out in it."
"That might count as a reason," Dr. Deng said with a smile. "But it's also possible that we can't appreciate these wonders because we're right in the middle of them."
"Some things look like magic from a distance, but once you get close, they're nothing special. There's no technology involved."
Dr. Deng then gave them a scholarly explanation of some of these natural phenomena, and pointed out which plants were valuable or had unusual properties.
Xu Huo wasn't interested in anything else, but a little red flower caught his attention. "This flower looks familiar. I think I've seen it somewhere before."
He thought it over carefully. "Maybe in an online science article. But that flower wasn't entirely red, and its color changed from time to time."
"You mean the wormhole flower, right?" Chu Yuan knew this one. He leaned over and said, "Wormhole flowers look a lot like this, but they're smaller. Sometimes they turn purple, though most of the time they're half red and half purple."
"Wormhole flower?" Xu Huo clearly remembered the reddish-purple flower he'd taken from Little Flower Red Red Building, mixed in with the other Mutated Plants of similar colors. After he brought it home and planted it, he'd found that much of the red had faded and the purple had spread. The painted woman had seen it, but she didn't know what it was.
"Wormhole flowers are plants that let you directly observe how