Several more days passed.
Ruger sat atop Zhizhi, his arms folded before his chest. With one hand, he idly rubbed and toyed with the few tufts of fur that had grown thicker again, while Zhizhi writhed along silently behind Vito and Layden.
Fewer than ten of the cone-shaped little objects remained in Ruger's and Layden's hands, but the past few days had not gone smoothly. Brother Vito seemed to have lost that unseen guidance; no matter what he did, he could no longer sense that ambiguous call. Their efficiency had plummeted once more, and the few they had left were even harder to throw away than the previous hundred-odd.
Swaying along with Zhizhi, Ruger took a moment to glance at the Hand-Holding Tree in his spell dreamscape, then stopped maintaining the spell.
He discovered that even without continuously sustaining the spell, the Dream Tree would still slowly grow on its own. That slow growth gave the dreamscape room to breathe, and the dreamscape created by the spell also had a chance to gradually expand. The tiny patch of grass was stretching outward in ways invisible to the naked eye—slowly, but constantly changing.
At the same time, he had experienced what Layden had described: after planting this tree, his dreamscape seemed to have become fixed in place. Fortunately, one time after falling asleep, he finally had what seemed like a normal dream. Of course, normal was not an accurate word for dreams. In it, he arrived at a vaguely familiar Tavern, surrounded by people he knew yet somehow did not know. Amid the shifting crowd, everyone raised goblets whose appearance he had forgotten—but then he sensed something. He began to run in his dream, without knowing how far he ran, until he appeared before the tree.
The Tavern dream vanished—or rather,