“This strangely reminds me of the Four-Legged Rainforest….”
Gio looked around.
“It truly does resemble it.”
“Ppiing.”
“You even agree with me. You have the qualities needed to be my friend.”
“Ppiiii….”
“Yes, yes.”
At their exchange, Honey popped out of the hood.
“Kkururuk?”
“You are my child, Honey.”
“Kkuru.”
Satisfied, Honey disappeared back inside the hood.
‘Was I always fated to have so many animals around me?’
Even when he lived in a peaceful, close-knit mountain village in Gangwon Province, he had occasionally encountered wild boars and water deer. Somehow, though, he seemed to meet animals more often after becoming the Portrait than he had back then.
“This, too, must be the cycle of nature.”
After spouting some approximate nonsense, Gio thought,
‘Could the Four-Legged Rainforest have somehow originated from this place? They truly resemble each other.’
Yet Argio himself knew better than anyone that the Four-Legged Rainforest was a separate dimension. He marveled at how his homeland, which he visited for the first time in ages, had been destroyed as thoroughly as though someone had painted the scene.
“…What in the world happened here?”
The Black Forest had always been dense, but its densely packed trees had held so much rainwater that poisonous rain fell without warning day and night. That notorious Black Forest’s structure…