William hooked a finger inside the stiff linen collar of his new shirt and pulled it an inch away from his throat, rolling his neck with a grimace as he walked down the second-floor corridor of the castle.
After nearly three weeks of walking around Border Town in their machine-stitched twenty-first-century hoodies and synthetic t-shirts, the visual transition of the two "foreign scholars" into the local era was finally complete.
Prince Roland had insisted on the change the previous evening. As Cheng Yan had pragmatically pointed out, while the illiterate miners of Border Town didn't know the difference between cotton and polyester, the castle would soon be receiving trade envoys from Longsong Stronghold and merchants from across the kingdom. If a sharp-eyed spy from Duke Ryan's court — or worse, an investigator from the Church — got close enough to examine fabric weaves and metal zippers that shouldn't exist for another five hundred years, awkward questions would follow.
To bury that risk once and for all, Roland had ordered the castle tailor to outfit both of his advisors in high-grade attire suited for low-ranking nobility or wealthy guild masters of Graycastle.
Walking on the left side of the hallway, Arthur looked as though he had been born into the aristocracy. He wore a long, tailored tunic of heavy dark-gray wool that kept out the castle draft, accented with discreet silver thread embroidered along the cuffs and collar. The somber, clean lines of the garment matched his calm, observant posture and analytical gaze to perfection.
Beside him, William looked like a promising young knight who had just stepped out of the pages of a classic fantasy epic.
He had been fitted with a sleeveless navy-blue leather-and-wool doublet worn over a crisp white linen shirt, cinched at the waist by a wide belt of thick brown leather with a heavy brass buckle. The tailored V-shape of the doublet accentuated his broad shoulders and athletic chest, making him look every bit the part of the First Army's Commander-in-Chief.
— "Well, Art, I have to admit, the local fashion isn't exactly Adidas or Nike," — William muttered, tugging at the bottom of his navy doublet and adjusting the heavy leather belt around his waist as their new boots clicked against the flagstones. — "At least the wool doesn't itch nearly as much as I thought it would. Still, I'd trade a bag of silver royals for a broken-in pair of jeans and sneakers right now."
Arthur ran a palm down the front of his dark-gray tunic, feeling the dense, hand-woven weight of the medieval fabric while checking that his modern wristwatch remained safely hidden inside his inner breast pocket.
— "Consider it a uniform for survival, Will," — Arthur replied dryly, glancing at his friend's outfit. — "We cannot very well lead an industrial revolution if we get burned at the stake for dressing like time-traveling aliens. Besides, stop complaining — you look like you're about to walk into a Hollywood audition for Game of Thrones."
— "Hey, I make anything look good, partner. Even twelfth-century sheep wool," — William grinned, smoothing down his collar with sudden pride. — "Wait till we get some proper steel pauldrons on this thing."
Rounding the corner at the end of the hall, the two of them stopped in front of a pair of tall oak doors guarded by Chief Knight Carter Lannis. Seeing the two advisors dressed in proper Graycastle attire for the first time, Carter gave a tiny, almost imperceptible nod of approval before pushing the door open for them.
Arthur and William stepped inside the spacious testing chamber on the sunny side of the castle, where large, unshuttered stone windows let in broad shafts of golden afternoon light.
The atmosphere inside the room was dead quiet.
Near the center of the stone floor, Master Mason Karl van Bate stood with both hands resting protectively on the narrow shoulders of a very small, trembling figure. Standing beside them was Anna, who had left her furnace in the courtyard for an hour to offer a comforting female presence, while Prince Roland sat on a low wooden stool a few paces away, leaning forward so he wouldn't tower over the new arrival.
It was Nana Pine.
Even knowing her age from the story, seeing the Baron's youngest daughter in person made Arthur realize just how young she truly was. At barely thirteen years old, she looked like a fragile little sparrow who wanted nothing more than to sink through the cracks in the stone floor and vanish.
Her wide, terrified eyes darted nervously from the guards by the door to the two tall strangers who had just walked in, and her small, pale hands gripped the fabric of her simple wool dress so tightly her knuckles were white.
It was impossible to blame the child for shaking.
For all thirteen years of her life, every bedtime story, every town crier, and every sermon preached at the local chapel had drilled a single terrifying truth into her head: the power awakening inside her chest was the "breath of the devil," a filthy corruption that meant she was destined for hell and the gallows.
Yet here she was inside the Lord's castle, standing three paces away from the Fourth Prince of Graycastle — and instead of shouting for chains or looking at her with disgust, the royal prince was looking at her with a warm, patient, and encouraging smile.
— "These are Lord Arthur and Commander William, Nana," — Roland said gently, keeping his voice soft and conversational as he gestured toward the two newcomers. — "Just like Master Karl and me, they are scholars who study how nature works. Nobody in this room thinks witches are evil, and nobody here is ever going to hurt you."
— "It is true, Miss Nana," — Anna added quietly from the side, stepping half a pace closer so the younger girl could see her clearly. — "His Highness saved my life. You are safe inside these walls."
Hearing the calm assurance in another witch's voice — especially from the older student she used to admire at Master Karl's schoolhouse — made Nana's trembling shoulders relax by a fraction of an inch.
Turning back to the small wooden table set up between them, Roland pointed toward a shallow wicker basket lined with soft dry straw.
Inside the basket lay a small brownish songbird that one of the castle guards had found earlier that afternoon beneath the garden walls, where a stray hawk or a falling branch had struck it down.
Furthermore, sitting on a wooden tray right beside the basket was a live grey rabbit from the castle kitchens, its hind leg bound softly with linen strips after Roland had made a clean, shallow two-inch incision across the skin with a sanitized scalpel to test soft-tissue recovery.
Right now, however, all eyes were on the little bird.
Its right wing was bent backward at a sickening, unnatural forty-five-degree angle, a sharp white splinter of bone poking slightly through the bloodied feathers. Its tiny chest rose and fell in ragged, desperate gasps, its dark eyes filming over as it fought for its last few minutes of life.
— "Master Karl told me that two days ago, when your father's hunting dog cut its paw on a sharp rock in the yard, you touched it and the bleeding stopped on the spot," — Roland said softly, looking into the girl's wide eyes. — "Everything is alright, Nana. Take a deep breath, step up to the basket, and just do whatever feels natural to you."
Swallowing hard, her lower lip still quivering slightly, little Nana took two small, hesitant steps forward until her knees brushed the edge of the table.
Looking down at the dying bird gasping in the straw, the fear in the thirteen-year-old's eyes was suddenly overpowered by a wave of pure, childish sympathy.
Slowly, she raised both of her small hands, holding her palms a couple of inches above the bird's broken body.
Standing three paces behind Roland, Arthur and William held their breath in unison, leaning forward to watch every millisecond of the process.
As Nana closed her eyes and focused on her wish to take the animal's pain away, the ambient Magic Power inside the stone chamber shifted.
Unlike Anna's magic, which agitated the air molecules with dry, explosive thermal energy, the energy radiating from Nana's small hands felt cool, serene, and impossibly gentle.
A soft, milky-white glow — thick and luminous, looking almost like warm liquid honey made of pure light — began to seep from her fingertips, dripping downward to wrap completely around the bird's mangled wing.
What happened over the next five seconds defied eighteen hundred years of medical science.
Click.
With a tiny, audible snap that echoed clearly in the silent room, the shattered radius bone inside the bird's wing pulled itself straight, sliding back through the torn muscle and locking cleanly into its natural alignment.
Before Arthur's unblinking eyes, the jagged edges of the open wound didn't just clot or form a scab; the torn muscle fibers and skin simply flowed back together like two drops of mercury merging on glass, sealing shut without leaving a single trace of scar tissue behind. Even the bloodied, ruffled feathers straightened out and regained their glossy sheen.
A second later, Nana repeated the exact same motion over the rabbit's cut hind leg. The moment the milky-white light touched the two-inch incision, the red flesh zipped shut in less than two heartbeats, looking as though the blade had never touched it at all.
The little bird in the basket — which had been seconds away from death's door — blinked its dark eyes, shook its feathers once, and let out a loud, vibrant chirp that filled the stone hall.
Hopping twice across the wooden table on steady legs, the bird spread both wings wide, beat the air without a hint of pain or stiffness, and launched itself upward, soaring cleanly across the room to land on the high stone ledge of the window.
— "Phew..."
Beside the door, William let out a low, appreciative whistle, his eyes wide with amazement as he tracked the bird's flight up to the rafters.
For a guy whose brain was wired for combat mechanics and tactical RPGs, what he had just witnessed wasn't just a cute magic trick — it was the ultimate battlefield cheat code.
— "Unbelievable..." — William murmured, leaning his head toward Arthur and speaking low enough not to startle the girl. — "A walking, breathing trauma center that doesn't need bandages, sutures, or antibiotics. Art, do you realize what this means? In the Middle Ages, a simple musket ball to the shoulder or a rusty spear scratch usually kills a soldier two weeks later from gangrene. With her standing behind our trench line, our army's mortality rate just dropped to practically zero. As long as a guy's head is still attached to his neck, she can put him right back on his feet. This changes the entire war."
In front of the table, Prince Roland hadn't said a word yet.
In fact, Cheng Yan was staring down at the empty basket and the unharmed rabbit with an expression of far deeper shock than when he had first seen Anna summon fire in the dungeon.
— "How..." — Roland whispered to himself, stepping up to the table and gently picking up the rabbit to part its fur with trembling fingers, searching in vain for a seam on the skin. — "Anna's fire can be explained as a localized transfer of thermal energy. Even William's stories of physical enhancement follow biomechanics. But this... this completely violates cell division cycles and the law of conservation of mass! For broken bone matrix and severed collagen fibers to knit together in three seconds without inflammation or scarring... where did the cellular ATP come from? How did her magic know the exact genetic blueprint of a bird's wing without turning the tissue into a cancerous tumor?!"
Watching Roland's modern scientific worldview suffer a minor meltdown, Arthur maintained his calm, analytical distance, though a fascinated smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
Having read the complete novel back on Earth, Arthur already knew the mechanics of Nana's "divine miracle" — and how, much later on, teaching her basic microbiology and cellular anatomy would allow her to reattach severed limbs and even purge lethal bacterial infections. Seeing the power in person satisfied his intellectual curiosity, confirming that the final pillar of Border Town's survival team was now securely inside the castle.
As Roland recovered his composure and began praising Nana warmly — promising Karl and the wide-eyed girl a massive monthly salary in silver coins if she stayed to practice her gift at the castle every afternoon — Arthur felt his attention drift toward the tall, sunlit windows overlooking the town below.
What truly pulled at Arthur right now wasn't the biological magic inside the room; it was the raw, living, breathing world waiting outside the castle gates.
For over two weeks, Arthur had spent almost twenty hours a day locked inside dusty archive rooms, leaning over map tables, or running numbers beside brick kilns. He hadn't actually taken thirty minutes just to walk through the world they had fallen into.
Stepping forward once Roland finished handing Karl a pouch of advance silver, Arthur offered the prince and William a polite, measured bow of his head.
— "If Your Highness has the secondary stamina tests under control, I will leave you and William to finish up here," — Arthur said smoothly. — "I want to walk down to the southern riverbank before the sun drops too low. Now that Karl's crews have reached the marshy soil near the water, I need to inspect how the lower concrete foundations are reacting to the moisture saturation. Calculations on parchment only take us so far."
— "Good idea, Arthur. Check if they need more gravel ballast dumped into the wet trench," — Roland nodded readily, already reaching for a fresh notebook to record Nana's mana capacity. — "We'll see you at dinner."
Leaving William behind in the testing chamber — where the big guy was already grinning and offering to show little Nana how fast he could do one-handed push-ups to make her laugh — Arthur walked out into the corridor and descended the main stone staircase toward the courtyard.
The moment Arthur crossed beneath the iron portcullis of the outer gate and stepped out onto the main dirt road of Border Town, a rare, genuine spark of pure enthusiasm lit up inside his chest.
Squelch.
As his heavy leather boots sank half an inch into the damp earth of the road, the unmistakable, heavy aroma of the frontier rolled over him — a thick blend of horse manure, wet clay, pine resin, and woodsmoke curling from a hundred low chimneys.
To William, or even to Cheng Yan, this smell and this mud were nothing more than disgusting reminders of a backward, primitive era that needed to be paved over as fast as possible.
To Arthur, however — a man who had spent years in university studying the history of art, classical architecture, and urban design, while secretly devouring fantasy light novels in his free time — walking down this street alone was nothing short of breathtaking.
Border Town possessed a rough, untamed beauty that no computer monitor or printed page could ever capture.
Walking slowly down the center of the winding lane with his hands clasped loosely behind his dark-gray wool tunic, Arthur felt as though he had stepped straight inside a living oil painting by Pieter Bruegel — a canvas painted in rich, earthy strokes of umber brown, slate gray, and the deep, burnt orange of late autumn leaves.
He let his eyes wander over the crooked rows of peasant houses lining the street.
Nearly all of them were built using the classic medieval technique of wattle and daub — rough structural frames of heavy oak timbers fitted together with wooden pegs, the spaces between the beams filled with a woven lattice of flexible willow branches and plastered over with a thick mixture of river clay, mud, animal dung, and chopped straw.
To the miners living inside them, they were merely cramped, drafty shacks. To Arthur's trained eye, they were a living museum of vernacular human engineering — buildings made entirely from the earth and forest within a two-mile radius, without a single factory-made nail or glass window.
Stopping at the corner of the central square, right across from the two-story administrative town hall, Arthur tilted his head back to admire the carpentry.
He studied how the massive, hand-hewed timber beams cantilevered outward to support the upper floor, how the wooden mortise-and-tenon joints locked together under gravity alone, and how the thick bundles of dried river reeds were layered across the steep roofs to shed heavy winter snow.
Every weathered wood grain, every hand-carved doorframe, and every uneven cobblestone around the town well looked as if it had materialized straight out of the fantasy books he had loved back on Earth.
— "It is so... authentic," — Arthur whispered to himself, a quiet, almost boyish smile breaking across his usually cold face as he stepped aside to let a muddy pink pig trot cheerfully past his boots without a care in the world.
As he continued walking south toward the construction site, he noticed something else that hadn't been there two weeks ago.
Because he was wearing the fine wool tunic of a castle advisor, the passing townsfolk still bowed their heads respectfully as he walked by. Yet the suffocating despair he had seen in their eyes on the day of Anna's execution was gone.
Men were walking briskly with bundles of firewood and iron tools on their shoulders; women stood outside their doorways boiling big pots of thick wheat porridge bought with the daily copper wages Roland was paying at the wall; and children were actually chasing each other through the alleys with wooden sticks.
Money was flowing, stomachs were full, and hope was quietly taking root in the mud.
Ten minutes later, the last of the thatched roofs fell behind him, and the wide, churning expanse of the Redwater River opened up before his eyes.
Here on the southern edge of town, Arthur stood on a small rise of dry ground and watched how the first brushstrokes of twenty-first-century civil engineering were beginning to merge with the ancient medieval landscape.
The Redwater River was the true lifeblood of the region, its wide, slate-gray current rushing westward toward Willow Town and Longsong Stronghold.
And right where the riverbank met the southern clearing, stretching all the way back to the dark rock face of the North Slope, stood the one-hundred-meter concrete wall.
Arthur walked down the slope to the river's edge, crouching briefly beside the last wooden cofferdam where the masons had poured hydraulic cement mixed with volcanic ash and gypsum straight into the wet silt forty-eight hours earlier. He pressed his fingers against the submerged gray base at the waterline.
Even underwater, the chemical hydration reaction had worked flawlessly; the foundation was rock-solid, anchoring the end of the wall into the riverbed so no flanking pack of demonic wolves could swim around the edge.
Standing back up and wiping a speck of gray river mud from his fingertips with a handkerchief, Arthur looked back toward the town nestled against the base of the mountain.
A cool breeze ruffled his dark hair as a strange, bittersweet sense of nostalgia washed over him.
Right now, under the golden light of the setting autumn sun, Border Town still looked like a quiet, rustic village from a forgotten fairy tale.
Yet Arthur knew better than anyone alive that he was looking at a dying painting.
Within six months — driven by Roland's relentless engineering and accelerated tenfold by the strategic plans inside Arthur's own head — this quiet valley would be unrecognizable.
The thatched roofs and wattle-and-daub shacks would be torn down and replaced by uniform rows of red-brick apartment blocks. The clear autumn sky above the North Slope would be permanently stained by thick columns of black coal smoke belching from towering blast furnaces and chemical plants. The quiet murmur of the Redwater River would be drowned out by the deafening, rhythmic roar of high-pressure steam engines, stamping mills, and paddle-wheel gunboats.
While William was back inside the castle, probably laughing with the guards and enjoying his role as the larger-than-life military hero, Arthur stood alone by the water and simply breathed it all in.
He used his sharp memory to photograph every single detail of this fleeting moment: the way the slanted golden sunlight hit the moss-covered stones of the old bridge, the smell of woodsmoke drifting over the reed roofs, and the simple, fragile peace of a medieval frontier town standing on the edge of the abyss.
Tomorrow morning, Arthur would go back to being the ruthless corporate architect who helped tear the old world down and rebuild it in iron, concrete, and gunpowder.
For the next ten minutes, however, as the sun touched the western hills, the man who knew the future was content simply to stand still and admire the beauty of the past.