"What about food?" Isaac tried another angle.
"Are you starving to death?"
"No..."
Carlo closed his eyes. "Unless you need to take a dump, there's no reason to stop."
Isaac: "..."
What was wrong with this guy? Isaac suspected that if the man didn't seem to have a bit of a cleanliness obsession, he wouldn't let him out even if he needed to take a dump.
With no other choice, Isaac leaned against the carriage wall and closed his eyes, trying to rest without falling asleep. But the carriage jolted so much that it was hard to relax. Just a few seconds after he began to adjust, a bigger pothole bounced his back off the seat.
Isaac gave up trying to adjust his position and let the carriage toss him about. Perhaps it was because he'd been shaken for so long that he felt a little dizzy, gradually sinking into a state between sleep and wakefulness.
Isaac stood on a pitch-black surface of water.
He knew it was water, and he knew he was inexplicably standing on it, just as he knew he was dreaming.
But he had never had such a strange, lucid dream before. He even remembered that he was sitting in a carriage on his way to Vista.
Isaac looked around. The water stretched as far as he could see, without a ripple or wave. Like a black mirror, it reflected an equally dark sky, with no stars and no moon.
He took two steps forward, but the water beneath his feet didn't produce so much as a ripple.
"Is anyone there?" Isaac called. His voice spread through the empty space, but there was no response.
...What kind of dream is this?
Isaac was about to walk a few steps farther to take a look when he suddenly felt something cold and slimy grab his ankle.
He looked down and saw a tentacle reaching out from beneath the water, coiled around his lower leg. Its surface was covered in suckers, writhing wetly.
A wave of nausea washed over Isaac. He tried to lift his foot and pull free, but the tentacle tightened its grip and gave a fierce downward yank.
Then the force holding Isaac up on the water seemed to disappear. He plunged beneath the surface, instinctively closing his eyes and holding his breath.
But the expected sensation of choking on water never came. The liquid was unlike water. Being submerged in it wasn't particularly uncomfortable; he even felt more at ease than he had standing on the surface.
Isaac opened his eyes. He could still see his surroundings within the liquid-or rather, his own body was glowing. A faint white light shone through his skin, illuminating the water nearby.
This dream is way too strange, he thought.
Isaac tried swimming upward, but unfortunately, he felt no buoyancy. He continued to sink slowly.
As he descended, he finally saw by the light of his own body that the space around him wasn't empty. The shapes lurking in the darkness emerged one by one.
Beasts, far larger than ordinary wild animals; humanoid figures with ulcerated, peeling skin; writhing lumps of flesh embedded with eyeballs and rows of teeth...
Some looked alive, their bodies intact. Others were incomplete, half their bodies already rotted away. Some had even lost all trace of their original forms, reduced to piles of rotting flesh that still writhed slowly, not yet completely dead. Others were simply beyond description: masses of twisted, writhing shadows lingering at the edge of the light.
Drowned corpses. The words came to Isaac's mind.
The monsters felt like corpses drowned in water, but they weren't ordinary corpses. They were still alive, existing in some form.
And those gazes, watching him from every direction, sent a chill down Isaac's spine.
The water around him pushed him downward. Isaac tried to struggle, but he was powerless, able only to watch as he sank deeper and deeper into the dark water. Those gazes followed him, growing more numerous and drawing closer, and then...
Thud-
Then his head struck something.
Isaac opened his eyes. The kerosene lamp before him was still swaying, having been lit at some point.
He rubbed the spot where he'd hit his head and found that he had gone from leaning against the carriage wall to lying crookedly on the seat. He had probably lost his balance after falling asleep.
"Oh, you're awake?" Carlo's voice came from across from him. "You slept soundly enough, though your posture wasn't very elegant."
Isaac didn't respond to the remark. He sat up straight, the images from the dream still lingering in his mind.
Those monsters, those gazes, and the oppressive feeling of being watched had all been far too real, nothing like a dream.
He glanced at Carlo, who was looking out at the night through the carriage window.
Isaac hesitated, but in the end, he didn't mention the dream.
He still couldn't fully trust the man before him.
"Boss, where are we?" Isaac started a conversation.
"Still on the road, anyway."
It had grown completely dark outside, and the black dogs were still running, their speed undiminished.
Carlo suddenly slid open the small window. "Slow down and head over there."
Isaac paused in surprise as the black dogs slowed, veering right from their original straight course.
As they drew closer, Isaac gradually made something out: a faint light in the darkness, flickering like a lone star in the wilderness.
Closer still, more lights appeared, scattered across an area.
The carriage slowed, and the jolting eased considerably. Isaac stared at the lights as they steadied, a little curious. Who would have lights burning at this hour in this sparsely populated wilderness?
Then he finally saw where the lights were coming from.
It was a crew of workers, about twenty or thirty of them, spread out on both sides of the road. Some held oil lamps, while others carried things. Two parallel lines of... Isaac wasn't quite sure what they were, but they had been laid on the ground and stretched into the darkness in the distance.
"This is..." Isaac watched the workers fasten sections of the things to sleepers, their movements practiced and orderly.
"Railroad tracks," Carlo said. "A major project Vista has been pushing forward lately. They want to connect Vista to the surrounding towns with tracks to make it easier to transport people and goods."
Isaac strained to get a better look at the tracks. "Will this line go all the way to Palmer?"
"In theory, yes, but at the current pace, it'll take at least several more years to lay the tracks as far as Palmer," Carlo said. "And that's only the first phase of the plan. Ogway has bigger ambitions. He wants to connect all the major cities in the Western Territory by rail, and eventually link them to other regions as well, establishing a complete transportation network."
Isaac imagined the scene. If one day people could travel safely and comfortably along these tracks, what would that be like?
Though all he could imagine was horses pulling something along the tracks, still...
"That sounds amazing," Isaac said.