“Wow! That’s a slime!” Aaron shouted with delight, raising his phone and taking some pictures.

  Hearing the boy’s voice, the slime driver turned its head. When its eyes fell on the brown-haired kid snapping a picture, it gave a wide grin, grew a hand, and raised in greeting.

  The group began walking alongside the train. Aaron announced:

  “We’re assigned to the third compartment of carriage number eleven.”

  Every window along the train was coated in blackened glass, impossible to see through, with not a single trace of light leaking from within.

  “Here it is.”

  They stopped in front of the carriage marked with a bold white number eleven painted along its side.

  After climbing aboard and passing two closed doors, they finally got to their compartment. There were two benches facing each other inside, and a massive glass window stood against the wall, stretching all the way to the ceiling. A layer of enchantment covered it, allowing them to look outside with clarity despite the black glass exterior. A soft glow filled the compartment, radiating from a yellow circle drawn upon the ceiling.

  “Wow! So spacious! It feels at least twice as large as it looks from the outside, must be space magic at work,” Aaron exclaimed, his eyes shining.

  “That’s correct,” Acher replied. “See those engravings carved into the walls? That’s an expansion rune. The kids of the Ether Wizard Union created it by simplifying the divine spell Pocket Dimension.”

  “That’s really impressive,” Aaron muttered, nodding.

  The two boys closed the door behind them and slid their luggage beneath the seats.

  “You know what?” Acher remarked, tilting his head. “That one-eyed girl and the kitten earlier, both of them are Grand Beings. Has the Orion Route grown so powerful that even creatures of that rank are willing to be their ticket clerks?”

  “What? Grand rank? For real???” Aaron blurted out.

  “I knew you’d react like that,” Acher said with a small, sharp tone. “Try to act normal when we’re back. They’re probably on some secret job.”

  “Understood!”

  They then took off their coats and sat down on the bench.

  “Squeak squeak!” Jack-O squealed, leaning forward with eagerness as if ready to leap down.

  “Hold on.”

  Aaron cast a cleansing spell over the pumpkins, washing away dirt and stains, before placing them down.

  The three pumpkins did a little exploration of their new space, scuttling from beneath the benches up to the ceiling.

  “This is my first time on a train,” Luther said, his eyes fixed outside the window.

  “Really? I think you will like it. Sightseeing by train is much better than by airplane. I hope we’ll pass through a lot of beautiful places,” Aaron replied, smiling.

  After about fifteen minutes, the train shuddered and began to move. The scenery outside began to slide backward, and the station slowly shrank into the distance.

  The tracks carried them past nameless graves, under the wide arms of ancient oak trees, and eventually out of Oakwood Cemetery. As they crossed through the fence, both Luther and Aaron felt themselves passing through a clear barrier.

  Looking back through the window, they noticed the entire station now enclosed under a dim, translucent dome.

  Aaron remarked, “Oh, so this place has a protective shield too, just like Mariana Market.”

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  “Of course,” Acher answered. “That has always been the standard for structures built in the Dark Side since ancient times. This has never been a place of safety.”

  Aaron pulled out his EPhone, opened the map, and said:

  “We’ll be traveling north, through Canada, then on to Greenland, Iceland, and finally circling down toward Europe. That’s just a rough idea, though, since the Dark Side is many times larger than the real world, the locations don’t exactly match up, and the names are different too.”

  “Why such a long way?” Luther asked.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “The tracks are built this way so that the train doesn’t have to cross the oceans too much. The Tranquill Sea is crawling with forbidden areas, dangerous ancient relics, and powerful creatures. The Shadow World is the only place in all of the Origin where I can still sense the presence of demigods, and there’s even one divine being here. Most likely, they’ve been permitted to remain here to keep the Dark Side stable,” Acher said.

  The two boys nodded. They both understood just how dangerous the Tranquill Sea could be after their trip to Mariana Market.

  Aaron pulled a large blanket from his luggage, put it over both of them, and wrapped his arms around Luther.

  “When will you stop feeling cold?” he asked.

  “Acher said. Probably not until I reach Grand rank,” Luther answered.

  “My god, how long would it take?” Aaron muttered with a sigh. Then he brightened a little, adding, “But it’s fine. I’ll keep you warm until then, and even after that, too.”

  Hearing those words, Luther’s lips curved into a smile, his eyes narrowing in a soft expression. The two of them leaned against each other, resting in silence as they watched the scenery glide past the window.

  “Squeak squeak, let me join too!” Squashy cried, springing upward.

  Pompo and Jack-O soon came over as well. Luther gathered them all into his arms, pulling the raven along with them just for good measure.

  “You lot are such a nuisance,” Acher grumbled, but he didn’t resist.

  The three pumpkins squashed themselves around him, leaving only his head sticking out between them.

  Outside, the landscape grew more and more desolate. Alongside the tracks, sometimes there were thickets of wild brush, sometimes stretches of silent lakes, and at other times shadowy forests where not even an insect stirred.

  The train curved to the right, now running parallel to a highway. The Dark Side was like a distorted reflection of the real world, and so the traces of human civilization could be found scattered across it as well, though the distances between them were stretched far greater than in the real world.

  Houses, gas stations, and tall buildings slid past the window, every single one of them cloaked in unsettling silence. There were no moving cars, no light, no people, and not even the faintest hint of sound.

  Moonlight bleached the world outside, casting the scenery into something eerie and unreal. Aaron and Luther edged closer together, caught between nervousness and excitement. Even the pumpkins went quiet, not daring to make a sound.

  Through their divine visions, Luther and Aaron were able to perceive things hidden from ordinary eyes: eyes peering out from behind windows, strange creatures dangling from the branches of the dark forest, a head covered in tangled hair peeking from the tall grass beside a roadside puddle…

  The Dark Side was always busy in its own twisted fashion.

  After some time, Manhattan began to appear ahead. Skyscrapers towered upward, but now they were stripped of all light, standing tall and solemn like giant gravestones stabbing into the sky.

  The Orion Express rolled steadily onward, its wheels carrying them deeper into the city.

  The streets Aaron and Luther once knew felt alien all of a sudden. It was just about seven in the evening; at this hour, the roads should have been full of people, bustling noise, and bright neon lights. Yet now it all resembled a dead city, abandoned and hollow.

  “Ugh, disgusting,” Aaron cursed when he spotted a mite-rat the size of a truck standing in an alleyway, gnawing at something.

  “What’s that over there?” Luther pointed toward a small cafe along the street.

  It looked like a normal Starbucks from the outside, painted cream with the warm glow of yellow lights shining from inside. Within, customers were at tables, some chatting, some reading books, and others working on laptops. The place had a cozy, welcoming vibe.

  But from their perspective, it was something else entirely. The shop stood dark, ruined, and silent. Behind the broken glass, what sat in those chairs were thin paper figures shaped like people, motionless and eerie.

  “Those are silent ones,” Acher explained. “They’re a kind of native species of the Shadow World. They don’t have a fixed form of their own. They often copy the shape of the most recent prey they successfully hunted, so they can lure in more prey of the same kind.”

  Then they witnessed sights even stranger: an entire block turned into a bottomless chasm; a fall of blood spilling down from the highest windows of a skyscraper, flooding the whole area; elder trees bearing fruit that looked like human embryos hanging heavily from their branches.

  “Wherever intelligent beings gathered in large numbers, the corresponding location in the Dark Side would always attract shadow creatures to nest there,” Acher added.

  “Look, there’s something over there. Damn, it’s huge!” Aaron said, pointing toward the distance.

  Beyond a row of skyscrapers, some creature was moving. Most of its body was hidden behind the buildings, yet a portion of it still rose above them, appearing in brief, shifting glimpses, enough to hint at its terrifying scale.

  “That’s a prime rank nightlurker,” Acher said. “Remember this: don’t ever step into the Shadow World carelessly. You’d never be able to guess what’s waiting for you on the other side.”