Stuck in an Island with Twelve Beautiful Women
Chapter 899 - 901

Chapter 899: Chapter 901

Afterward, they continued. Silence again. The sunlight dimmed. Every rustle seemed deliberate, every breath a message.

They reached a small stream that wound sideways across the path. The water shone in sunlight, carrying scent of sulphur and stone. On the far bank was a cluster of the same fungi Grace had encountered, blue-veined, glowing faintly. Jude stood before it, feeling his chest tighten.

"This is the place," he breathed.

Lucy knelt to collect one. Touching the gill-sides gently. Emma took a small flask of water and poured a ritual offering. Natalie snapped photos of the mushrooms, knotting another ribbon.

Jude spoke softly: "These, I don’t know if they cause the blackouts. But they’re part of this." He looked at Emma. "You remember touching it. Where did it lead?"

Emma swallowed. "I remember feeling... something pull me. Like I was meant to stand there, to feed it. To give it something."

She shuddered. "But I never left. Not physically. But everything else... hazy. Like a dream you don’t want to revisit."

Lucy placed a hand on Emma’s shoulder. "We stand together. Here."

Jude held his palm above the fungi. "I feel...the island is using them as gates, or nodes. When we cross its threshold, it reaches to fill us."

Natalie knelt, arranging cloth and clay flask. "Everywhere it touched you, it marked with memory. We tag each zone where memory falters."

They sat around the fungi circle. A sense of worship, of ritual filled the forest like fragrance. Jude closed his eyes. He felt soil, seed, root, and breath. He felt his heart drum warm.

He looked up at his companions.

"I’m going to take one with me," he quietly said. "Home."

There was no shock. Only comprehension.

Lucy began, "If you take one, we’ll take one each."

She unwrapped cloth from her pack and produced a single mushroom, smaller, sealed in cloth. Emma and Grace each held theirs. Jude nodded.

"Tonight," he said, "we cook them. We eat them. Together."

They loaded the fungi in separate cloths. Packed carefully.

They descended back to camp, souvenirs of sacrifice.

The forest glowed around them. They passed under the arch again. The sunlight changed, warmed, and birds welcomed them home.

They stored the fungi, marking each with names and times.

They ate dinner as dusk nodded in. Fish, fruit, roots, stew. Each wife ate in sequence: Grace, Lucy, Emma, then others. Jude watched as each consumed, concentrating.

Grace ate first of her fungus, tears in her eyes.

Lucy ate second, closing eyes.

Jude said nothing, breathing slow.

Then Emma swallowed the last bit. The circle ended.

Each wife exhaled. They looked at each other. Some shook.

Then closest to Jude, Grace said, "I... remember."

Lucy nodded. "Everything before, during, after."

Emma exhaled. "And nothing beyond."

Jude closed his eyes. "You remembered where you were when it touched you. You remembered who you are. And where you aren’t."

They nodded.

"That is proof," Jude whispered. "That these... gates can show us the truth, and through it we can anchor ourselves. We must walk forward. We must keep our lives. And our names."

They sealed the memory in the record box with a fresh scroll. They vowed to revisit every node.

At night, before sleep, they held hands and shared memories: first dream, first memory of the island, first kiss, first fear. They spoke them aloud until dawn, chanting softly, weaving names together.

Each morning since had taken on purpose. They moved with intent, watching, naming, remembering. The island sighed around them. Sometimes comforted, sometimes uneasy.

Jude often went to the arch alone now, standing under stones, arms out. Each day he asked simply: "Show me where to next." And each evening Natalie tied a ribbon on a tree, marking the day’s path.

Over time they began to collect mushrooms, but not eat them until they could all consume together. Unity of memory.

This morning, Jude walked into the garden with Grace, Lucy, Emma, Natalie. Sunlight warmed them. They touched vines, touched roots. Planting seeds. Nurturing what grew on the island, and inside themselves.

They paused at the new-tended garden bed. Grace placed her hand on growing lettuce. "It’s alive."

Lucy laughed. "We’re alive."

Emma exhaled. "It knows us now."

Jude surveyed their circle. "Then we’ll stand together. We’ll remember together. We’ll live here... but keep ourselves."

Nods.

They walked back to camp, stepping in silent cadence.

They would remain. And they would not forget.

They were named. And the island would remember.

Morning broke over the island with a gentle ache, as if the world itself was waking slowly from a deep and troubled sleep. Jude rose from the shared shelter he had built for his wives, the wooden boards damp beneath his bare feet. His hand brushed against the carving he’d etched into the floorboard the night before, a spiraling symbol combining their names and the island’s emblem, a silent promise to bind them together and to the place that had almost swallowed them whole.

He stepped outside past the woven grass matting and inhaled the air, ripe with the scent of rain-soaked earth, salty sea mist, and the distant echo of the volcanic heart buried deep beneath their feet. The island was breathing again, steady, deliberate, resolved.

Nearby, Grace was already stirring the embers of their small cooking fire, coaxing them awake. Lucy and Emma hovered behind, passing her a flat stone for cooking the fish they’d caught the evening before. They greeted Jude with quiet smiles that spoke more of solidarity than cheer, as though they all carried the same unspoken understanding of how fragile their peace still felt.

"Morning," Grace said softly, her voice low enough that it didn’t carry. Yet it carried weight, both of promise and caution.

Jude nodded, placing a hand on her shoulder. He could still feel the gentle tremble of last night, when they gathered in prayer around the arch, offering thanks but also acknowledging that they remained strangers in some deep ways to the island itself. "Morning," he whispered back. They each felt the electricity humming in the subtle opening of day, the boundary between memory and dream shifting, so he added, "We did what we came to do. We’re here."