Chapter 1 The Beginning

Dream plane, deep night. On the breezy grassland, Hao Ren and a huge black wolf, as tall as a person on all fours, stared at each other. Both sides were quite shocked, and the aftershocks were still going.

Just now, the black wolf, which Hao Ren thought was a "wild animal," started talking, and it spoke clearly and sharply, with a bit of a Beijing accent—of course, we should attribute the last point to the power of the intelligent translation system. Hao Ren firmly believed that no matter how strange the dream plane was, it wouldn't be able to cultivate a big black wolf that spoke with a full Beijing accent. But even with intelligent translation, he could be sure that the wolf was speaking human language, and that the translation system wasn't just translating the roars of beasts into language. This had been tested; the translation system couldn't translate Lily's "Woof"... it could only handle advanced languages with linguistic structure.

Hao Ren sat on the grass in his pajamas, still shrouded in a faint layer of light. He didn't dare remove the rigid shield casually, because the surrounding wolves didn't look so safe. He glanced at the big black wolf opposite him, his voice still a little surprised, "You really can talk? Do all the wolves in this place talk?"

"That depends on the pack," the big black wolf glanced at the transparent light membrane on Hao Ren with great apprehension. A fist covered with this light membrane felt like being hit on the head with a steel pillar. It had barely recovered from the dizzy state, and was therefore very cooperative with Hao Ren's question. "Some grassland wolves can talk, like us with bone plates on our bodies—we are excellent breeds, much smarter than those idiots who only know how to howl at the moon! But where did you come from? You've never even seen a talking wolf? We are the most famous pack in this grassland!"

Hao Ren's mind was in a mess. He had no idea about the situation in this dream plane. Now he could only follow the advice of the data terminal and Raven 12345 to take everything he saw as a matter of course, and try not to show too much surprise. Based on the way the big black wolf spoke, he judged that it had extremely high intelligence, perhaps even comparable to humans. So he abandoned the idea of ​​fooling it as a wild animal, and nodded sincerely, "I can't say where I came from, I'm just passing through this place. You can treat me as a traveler."

"Traveler? To this grassland?" The big black wolf looked at Hao Ren suspiciously, with an incredible expression on its face. "Few humans come here. This place is useless to you, you can't grow food, there are no specialties, and no... um, ore. No ore. There used to be some herders, but they moved away recently: there are too many wolves here, and their livestock isn't enough to eat."

After the big black wolf finished speaking, it approached Hao Ren under his wary gaze, sniffing Hao Ren's scent up and down. "You don't smell like a traveler, you don't have that strange smell of not bathing for a long time. But suit yourself, it has nothing to do with us anyway, we are just wolves."

Hao Ren wiped the cold sweat from his forehead. Is a wolf this smart still a "wolf"?

"By the way, why did you attack me?" Hao Ren asked rather awkwardly. He felt that he must look very stupid, chatting with a bunch of wild animals in a serious manner, but then again... who the hell would have thought that wolves could speak more fluently than humans!

"Why can't we attack you?" The black wolf's voice was even more surprised. "We want to eat meat. Although you don't look like you have much meat, it's enough to feed a few of our cubs. We don't eat much. But I thought you would be easy to deal with. You weren't wearing those hard clothes, and you didn't have any weapons in your hands—but you're even more powerful than those guys, I'm not happy about that."

This wolf ultimately had something different from humans, and that was that it spoke very frankly, saying whatever it thought. Hao Ren was speechless for a few seconds at his "food" status in the other party's eyes, but considering the other party's race, he couldn't get angry, and could only laugh dryly twice, "Hehe, do you still want to eat meat now?"

"I don't want to," the black wolf shook its head. "Too hard, harder than those people wearing hard clothes, and I can't beat you. It seems that you can't just fight with humans, you always have too many strange things on you, it's very dangerous."

At this time, another slightly smaller black wolf suddenly spoke, "Boss, wasn't it your idea to eat this person in the first place?"

Hao Ren looked at the black wolf in front of him in surprise, thinking that this guy was actually the leader of the pack. The target he chose when he subconsciously rushed over to beat it up was really good.

"Who told you to get up in the middle of the night and say you were hungry?" The black wolf leader roared. "You ate so much meat in the afternoon that you were as round as a ball, and you started saying you were hungry as soon as the moon came up. You're the biggest glutton in the whole pack! I even got my teeth knocked out for this!"

"Boss, you only lost one, some unlucky ones over there are about to lose all their teeth." The slightly smaller glutton wolf pointed its nose at a few black wolves squatting outside the circle. Those were the unlucky ones who had rushed over to bite Hao Ren before. These unlucky guys bit into the rigid shield in one bite, and now they had regained their youth and had baby-like teeth—the best-case scenario was two rows of molars left...

Those unlucky guys were covered in blood, and could only squat outside the circle, licking each other's fur to comfort each other, looking extremely pitiful.

The wolf king sighed and lowered his head, "Consider it a bad day today. Human, can we go now?"

"Oh," Hao Ren nodded subconsciously, but just as the group of wolves sighed and supported each other, preparing to disperse, he suddenly remembered something and quickly shouted, "Wait a minute! There's something else!"

The wolf king staggered, twisted his head, and glared at Hao Ren with his neck stretched out. "Don't bully the wolf too much! I am also an unyielding wolf with dignity! You didn't really suffer a loss, is it necessary to be so relentless?"

Hao Ren choked on a mouthful of sarcasm in his throat: based on the sentence "Dare you spare my life," this wolf king was not suitable to say the word "dignity," but he just shook his head and pointed his finger in the direction of the horizon, "I want to go over there, can you give me a ride?"

The shadows of those buildings that looked like man-made houses looked really far away. Hao Ren felt that at his current state, running barefoot would probably take until tomorrow morning. The time he could stay in the dream plane was limited, so he wanted to find a convenient way.

"Over there?" The wolf king looked up in confusion. "Didn't I say that the herders are gone? Now there are only a few mud shacks left."

So that was where the herders that the wolf king mentioned earlier had lived. Hao Ren nodded, "I'll just go take a look."

Whether there were people there or not was not important. What was important was that there were traces of human activity left behind. Hao Ren was now unprecedentedly curious about everything in the dream plane, and he was willing to take a look at anything.

The wolf king grumbled twice in his throat, then turned around. "Alright, then get on, I'll carry you over there."

Hao Ren was a little surprised. He thought it would take some talking, but he didn't expect the wolf king to take the initiative to turn around and let him ride on his back. This was different from what he had expected. He muttered as he climbed onto the wolf king's back, "So generous? Didn't you say that you guys don't like people riding on your backs? It's a matter of dignity, you have to pass the test or something..."

"Dignity? What's that for?" The wolf king was very strange about Hao Ren's statement. "You humans think about things too complicatedly, you only study things that have nothing to do with filling your stomach. We really don't like people riding on our backs, because it's troublesome to walk with things on our backs, but what does that have to do with dignity? It's just uncomfortable... hey, move forward a little, or lean back a little, don't ride on my waist, I can't run if you do that."

Hao Ren adjusted his sitting posture while sweating in his heart: humans usually really study things wrong. Whether it's in novels or movies, everything is measured by human standards. Wolves don't want people to ride them because they are proud, wild horses don't want people to ride them because they are proud, unicorns don't want people to ride them because they are not only proud but also noble—in fact, it's probably all nonsense...

The only reason they don't want you to ride them is that they find it troublesome. Who wants to have dozens of kilograms of useless things on their backs when they can walk well? Even Vivian only tied luggage to Lily when the latter was sleeping and sleepwalking.

Hao Ren couldn't help but think that if unicorns could communicate, maybe you could give them two biscuits and they would be willing to let you ride them. To animals, what is the human "dignity theory"?

"Are you sitting still?" The wolf king suddenly interrupted Hao Ren's random thoughts. "Then hold on tight, let's go!"