Mausoleum of Nature

Tuot saw a dog girl above him, falling head first. The dinosaur was delighted, as he had long been looking for a way to get such a character.

Tuot activated his aura. An energy harpoon grabbed Nora's leg just as her head was about to touch the rocks on the shore.

“I caught her,” the dinosaur rejoiced. “Now she will agree to become almost my character, like Etinnei.”

“Let me go, chicken!” the dog girl shouted. “I'm not food!”

Tuot looked at the captured "prey" and saw the end of the harpoon, which grabbed the lower part of Noru's leg and held her in that position. The character's tail hung down, revealing a view of her fleshy thighs.

Tuot's mouth automatically opened and released his tongue, which began to frantically dangle in the air, as if it wanted to touch the food.

Noru puffed out her cheeks and frowned. A few moments later, her body burst and left behind a clot of flame, which then dissolved into thin air.

“Noru exploded?” Etinnei looked at the empty space where the dog girl was. “She hates dinosaurs so much that she decided to destroy herself?”

But the Arctic fox girl was worried in vain. A flash of fire passed between her and Tuot, and soon the dinosaur was swimming in the lake, though not of his own free will. Noru fell on the shore right in front of Etinnei and smiled.

“What did you do to Tuot?” the arctic fox girl asked.

“I sent him to the hot springs,” Noru explained. “I suggested he go, and he agreed.”

“I think you were too rough with him.”

Noru patted Etinnei on the head and laughed.

“He's a dinosaur,” the dog girl said cheerfully. “That’s the way to go with them, until they eat you.”

“But Tuot is a good dinosaur,” Etinnei objected.

“He caught me by the leg and looked at me like he wanted to eat me.”

Etinnei remembered Tuot's harpoon pulling her out of the water in Tohsonun when she was stuck in the ice.

“I promised that I would destroy this skill if I saw him again,” the Arctic fox girl thought. “But I forgot about it. It happened too quickly, and I didn't have time to understand it.”

Etinnei looked around, but there was no longer a harpoon or aura. Tuot himself was floundering in the water far from the shore and could not even call for help.

“Let's get out of here,” Etinnei suggested. “It's hot here.”

The animal girls walked away from the lake and headed into the courtyard of the wooden fortress. Soon they were sitting in a cafe with wooden columns covered in moss and vines.

“I like this place,” Etinnei noted. “Can I eat a green energy mushroom here?”

“The energy mushrooms?” Noru wiggled her ears in opposite directions. “Are they edible?”

“The creature in the bubble said so.” Noru laid her head on the table in the shape of a mushroom cap and stopped wiggling her ears.

“They are indeed edible,” the dog girl answered. “But only for Myuryuri. It feeds off energy. But we, living beings, cannot do that.”

“It’s bad,” Etinnei looked at the wall, in which even the window was in the shape of a mushroom. “But then what can you eat here?”

Noru ran her finger across the middle of the table. A virtual screen appeared above it, with cells containing images of dishes.

“Is this all edible for me?” Etinnei licked her lips.

“Food for the animal girls in a red frame,” Noru said. “I don't know the rest.”

The red frame was the first one on the left, and it contained a bird's leg. The frame was flickering and indicated what the selected cell represented.

“Actually, it should move,” Etinnei touched her finger to the next cell, and the red frame moved to it.

“I didn’t know…” Noru moved her ears. “How do you know that?”

“I play a game, but I forgot what it’s called. So I often have to poke buttons on the interface.”

“You're smart.”

“I've discovered things like this a lot. But this is too easy.”

“What?”

“It's too obvious. Don't you know what the red frame means?”

“Eh... Itinit told me. I just press buttons and don't think about what any symbols mean. I do, I don't think.”

Etinnei chose the cell with fish. A wooden plate appeared on the table with a flat fish covered in blue-green scales and an open, toothy mouth. The being's gray eye stared motionlessly at the ceiling.

“It looks kind of scary,” Etinnei noted. “Is it really edible? What if it bites?”

“Try it,” Noru stuck her finger in her mouth.

“I'm scared. Let's have you try it.”

Noru pulled her finger out of her mouth and then stuck it in the fish's mouth. The being's eye began to glow green and its tail began to move.

“She's alive!” Etinnei climbed onto the seat with her legs to escape.

“Eh...” Noru scratched the back of her head with her foot. “She just has something that glows.”

“Is it an organ?”

“Itinit told me that such fish live deep in the ocean, where it is very dark. That is why they light their eyes to see.”

Etinnei summoned a mirror from her inventory, then looked into it.

“My eyes don't glow, only in the dark and only a little,” the Arctic fox girl noted.

“You live on land,” Noru stroked the dog's ears with her hand. “It's light here.”

“But it's dark at night.”

“I always have light. I have a fiery aura that illuminates everything in the dark. I also have simple lights, but I can't use them normally to shine. My little sister can. I want to ask her, but Itinit won't return her to me.”

“Did he take her somewhere?”

Noru stuck her finger out of the fish's mouth and it opened. Inside were pieces of boneless meat. The dog girl put one of them in her mouth and ate it.

“The last time I saw Kimchan was over a year ago,” Noru explained. “I was playing with her, but then Itinit came, grabbed my sister by the hair and dragged her to the ship. I ran after her, but Itinit promised that he would return her soon. But then he went missing and when he came back, he came back with you, not Kimchan! At first I thought that he had confused the animal girls, and I got angry. But then I noticed how cute you are and I was happy.”

Etinnei put a piece of fish meat in her mouth.

“It's edible,” the Arctic fox girl noted. “I didn’t know Itinit was like that. He seemed good to me. He helped me cross a scary energy bridge.”

“What?” Noru stood up and looked at Etinnei in surprise. “Did someone come up with this?”

“They are on the railway,” Etinnei explained. “When a train goes across a river, it goes over a bridge like this. I saw a bridge like this across a river in another city.”

“Is it blue?”

“Yup. It's also a little transparent. You can see what's underneath.”

“It’s scary.”

“Yup. But Itinit helped me cross this bridge. Have you never seen energy bridges?”

“No. I never left the island. Itinit said that dinosaurs live there, and they eat dogs. That's why I'm so afraid that my little sister will be eaten!”

“Dinosaurs don’t live everywhere. There are places where they don't live.”

“Let's go there!”

Noru looked at Etinnei with her tongue hanging out. The dog girl was so obsessed with desire that her hair caught fire. Soon she was engulfed in flames, which fried the fish.

“It's not that simple,” Etinnei warned. “We're on an island. How will we travel?”

“What will we fly on?” Noru was surprised. “I will take the form of a big dog and fly like a comet.”

“And I'll sit on your back?”

“Yup.”

The flames around Noru disappeared. The dog girl returned to her seat and looked out the window.

“Only...” Noru said. “I don’t know if I have enough energy to reach the earthen place. I imagined myself falling into the sea with you, and we drowned together.”

“That’s why you need to think first and then do,” Etinnei smiled.

The animal girls' dinner ended with pine juice and sawdust cake, after that, Etinnei couldn't get out of the table and fell asleep.

Meanwhile, Tuot sat in the hot water near the shore with his eyes closed.

“The water is so warm,” the dinosaur thought. “It's a pity Etinnei isn't here.”

Tuot imagined his girlfriend next to him, who emerged from the water and shook her head. The dinosaur felt happy despite the fact that in reality he was sitting in the lake and dozing…

There was a sound of bubbles and then a splash of water. Tuot opened his eyes and saw a purple mushroom cap with black horns emerge from the water.

The dinosaur tried to activate its aura to quickly get to the shore, but it failed. The hat rose completely out of the water and showed what was underneath it... It turned out to be the mushroom spirit that Tuot had met in his dream and on the illusion train.

“Eh?” Tuot could not understand. “Why are you here? Can you really leave your shelter?”

“I didn’t leave it,” Sanachan answered. “You just fell asleep, and I took advantage of that to talk to you.”

“Did I fall asleep in the hot springs?”

“Yup. But don't be afraid. You've already drowned.”

Tuot opened his mouth wide and let out what was probably his last breath.

“I wanted to say that you haven’t drowned yet. When I talk to someone through dreams, there are distortions. So don't pay attention to it.”

“Okay.”

“I wanted to talk to you about the source of dreams.”

“Why?”

“We are well compatible. My signals penetrate your brain well.”

“No, I don't want a mushroom girl,” Tuot thought. “I only like girls with ears and tails.”

“I'm not going to become your character,” Sanachan grimaced. “Mushrooms, unlike animals, don't have a master. We're only interested in information. Endless streams of data that constantly flow into the brain and form neural networks. All information about the world comes to me, but cannot be deciphered.”

“I don't understand anything,” Tuot thought.

“It's not scary,” Sanachan replied. “Your brain doesn't receive as many signals as mine does. You don't have antennae, and you don't have a lot of neural connections in your brain.”

“Are you reading my thoughts?” Tuot realized it only now.

“In dreams I can do this. But in the residence I can't. You see and hear me because my virtual copy entered your brain during sleep via a signal. When a being sleeps, its level of feelings is low, so the signal can easily enter the brain.”

“This is already a little clear. Now I know why, out of fear, I was able to resist the signal of one creature with antennas on its head.”

“Are you talking about a penguin with antennas on its head?”

“Yup. You read my mind correctly.”

“This doesn’t always work out. That's why I want to talk to you.”

Sanachan pulled her hat over her upper face with her hands, causing her blue eyes to disappear under the headdress.

“I want to tell you about my dreams,” the spirit of mushroom said. “I’ve been seeing them for so long that I don’t remember when I started dreaming about them. Over the years, I’ve systematized the information about them and deduced patterns.”

“I don’t understand,” Tuot asked. “Can you explain it more simply?”

“I’ll just show you…”

Sanachan pressed her finger on the convex center of the hat, after which a virtual screen appeared above the mushroom spirit's head, and in it was an image of a hill, above which floated the skull of a three-horned dinosaur with a clot of blue energy inside. The hill was surrounded by a forest of tree ferns.

“It looks like that creature in the bubble,” Tuot noted.

“The resemblance is not accidental,” Sanachan explained. “Myuryuri appeared in my brain due to the influence of such dreams. Then he had to be extracted from there.”

“Now it is clear why Myuryuri looks so strange,” Tuot guessed. “It could not have appeared naturally. This type of creature does not exist.”

“This skull moves in a circle, but it makes no sounds,” Sanachan continued. “And it is not the only strange creature.”

“It’s better not to show it,” Tuot objected. “I’m afraid to imagine who will be there next.”

“If I don’t show you, you won’t be able to find it. These creatures definitely exist somewhere. Signals come from them. They have horns. And the horns are antennas.”

“When you say that, I understand.”

Sanachan sank into the water, leaving only her hat on the surface.

“How I envy someone who has a small brain,” the spirit of the mushrooms thought. “Many thoughts and different signals do not come to them at the same time.”

The image on the screen changed. Instead of one mountain peak, another appeared, with ruins of buildings and the remains of columns. The skull was replaced by a statue of a humanoid creature with a helmet-mask that covered the top of his head and was a smaller copy of the skull from the first image.

“It's the same skull,” Tuot noted.

“Exactly,” Sanachan returned from under the water. “It is the same skull. There used to be dinosaurs of this kind in the world, but now even their remains are not found. So I don’t know what kind of creature it is and why I dream about it.”

“I saw him somewhere. I think I had a dream about an arctic fox girl where there was such a statue. I thought the fox girl looked like Etinnei, but I wasn't sure.”

“These are just images. The image in a dream can be very different from the image in reality. Only if you process the data from many dreams can you get some kind of approximate image, like on the screen.”

“That animal girl is not Etinnei, but just a collective image?”

“It is unknown. It took several decades and many dreams to obtain these two images.”

“This is longer than I have lived,” Tuot thought.

“These dreams torment me. I have been trying to solve this mystery for a long time, but so far I have only two images. Because of the signal from my antennas, I cannot travel freely around the world.”

“Did you ask Itinit to help? I can hardly cope with this.”

“I need any help. Itinit is already doing what he can.”

***

Yueret approached the wooden fence behind which his house could be seen and sighed. The journey from the station had been long and difficult. But that was not what worried him. Yueret was only thinking about whether his younger sister would look for him or not.

Suddenly, a head with dog ears appeared from behind the fence. Due to fatigue, Yueret mistook it for a bear. The guy instantly became covered in a blue energy aura and summoned a sword and shield.

“Has the bear finally come for its paw?” that was the first thought in Yueret's head.

The guy carefully looked over the fence and noticed a brown puppy there, similar to a bear cub.

“It's you, Kimchan,” Yueret guessed. “I already thought it was a bear.”

The guy instantly stopped being afraid, but then he heard a growl behind him.

Yueret turned around and swung his sword. The blade, covered in aura, stopped in front of his sister's face.

“Where have you been?” Unana asked, as if she wasn't afraid of the sword in front of her.

Yueret deactivated the aura, recalled the weapon and shield.

“Sorry, I didn't mean to,” Yueret took a few steps back.

‘What didn't mean to?” Unana was worried. “Your friend made you kill the squirrel?”

“No. I was just walking through the forest and noticed the dolls there. I had to go another way.”

“That's what I thought,” Unana thought. “Yueret can't be left alone.”

Unana grabbed her brother by the hand, led him into the house, and then closed the door. The puppy ran after them, but did not make it to the entrance and remained on the porch.

“Were these the same dolls that attacked us?” Unana asked.

“I don’t understand,” Yueret lied. “The dolls are all the same.”

“Where were they going?”

“Not here.”

“You better not go outside the fence. All sorts of creatures walk there.”

Yueret noticed the top of a head with brown ears of some animal in the round window of the corridor.

“There’s something there,” Yueret pointed to the window.

Unana recognized the dog’s ears in the window and became frightened.

“It seems to you,” little sister lied. “You are too tired. Go to sleep.”

Only on the threshold of his room Yueret realized that he had never seen bears or their tracks in the vicinity of the village, and began to suspect something. Only extreme fatigue helped him forget about it.