A stick of blackened willow charcoal glided across a wide sheet of pale parchment, tracing three concentric circles around a dense central cluster before linking them to a second set of rings with sharp, straight lines.
To any passing bishop or inquisitor of the Church of Hermes, the geometric symbols covering the oak table would have looked like profane, heretical summoning circles drawn to call forth demons from the abyss.
To Cheng Yan, however, those simple circles were the true building blocks of the universe: a basic Bohr diagram of oxygen and carbon atoms.
Two days had passed since Ambassador Petrov had bolted out of Border Town in his rattling carriage, pale-faced and terrified after touching the twelve-foot concrete wall. With the diplomatic threat from Longsong Stronghold temporarily paralyzed, the great dining hall of the castle—once a gloomy chamber of cold drafts, tasteless boar meat, and nervous whispers among the servants—had undergone a complete metamorphosis.
The long banquet tables had been separated and pushed into three distinct stations across the stone floor, transforming the royal hall into something that had never before existed in the history of Graycastle: an advanced research classroom.
Over the past week of frantic construction, Roland Wimbledon had come to a sobering realization.
If his industrial revolution was going to take root in this feudal wasteland and survive past a single winter, modern knowledge could not remain locked away inside a secret vault like a dragon's hoard. Science had to be shared, taught, cultivated, and forged into a weapon.
Previously, that realization had weighed on Roland like a mountain during his sleepless nights. Trying to drag an illiterate medieval population into the nineteenth century using only his own fragmented engineering memories felt like trying to empty an ocean with a soup spoon.
Now, however, with Arthur and William standing beside him, the crushing burden of teaching Natural Sciences was split across three twenty-first-century minds. It was an indescribable relief no longer being the only modern man in a room full of cold stone.
The cavernous hall hummed with three different frequencies of work: the dry rustle of turning parchment, the steady scratch of quills dipped in ink, and the faint, crisp scent of ozone whenever magic briefly sparked in the corners. Slanted shafts of golden afternoon sunlight poured through the tall, narrow stone windows, illuminating thousands of tiny dust motes dancing in the air like silent witnesses to the birth of a new era.
In the brightest corner of the hall, right beside the roaring stone fireplace where the warmth kept the chill away, Roland leaned over a thick stack of handwritten notes alongside Anna.
After spending the entire morning firing clinker nodules at the courtyard kilns, the seventeen-year-old witch looked understandably tired, rubbing her eyes briefly with the back of her wrist before locking her gaze back onto the diagrams with fierce concentration.
— "Anna, if we want to push your ability past its current limits, you need to stop thinking of the fire you summon as a mystical 'gift' or a random burst of heat," — Roland explained in a low, patient voice, leaning in slightly so she could follow the tip of his ink-stained finger across the parchment. — "What you are triggering in the air is a physical and chemical reaction. Everything in this world—the invisible air we breathe into our lungs, the solid iron in the mine, the water flowing down the Redwater River—is made up of trillions of microscopic, invisible particles called atoms."
Roland tapped the cluster of interconnected circles he had just drawn:
— "Even inside a solid bar of cold iron that looks completely still to our eyes, these tiny atoms are never truly at rest," — Roland continued, his gray eyes lighting up with the passion of a true teacher. — "They are in a state of constant, microscopic vibration. What human beings feel on their skin as 'heat' or 'temperature' is nothing more than the speed at which those particles are vibrating and colliding against each other."
Sitting beside him, Anna studied the strange circles and lines with her trademark serious, unblinking logic.
She didn't interrupt, nor did she question how something invisible to the human eye could make up solid rock. Instead, her clear blue eyes absorbed every curve and equation on the page as if she were reading the fundamental laws of creation.
The contrast in her life was almost surreal. Less than a month ago, she had been curled up on rotten straw at the bottom of a freezing dungeon, waiting for the hangman's rope and convinced by the world that her very blood was a cursed plague.
Today, inside the Lord's own hall, Prince Roland's science wasn't just giving her an afternoon job; it was giving her a sacred, rational language that explained her own existence. In a universe built out of atoms and energy, there were no "servants of the devil" and no "original sin" imposed by the Church—only physical laws waiting to be understood. It was hard, mathematical proof that she belonged to this world just as much as anyone else.
— "Right now, when you summon your flame, you are instinctively agitating those particles without knowing what they look like," — Roland said, the dark circles of exhaustion under his eyes fading behind a contagious grin. — "If you can truly visualize how these molecules move, collide, and break their bonds, your fire will reach temperatures that no coal blast furnace in history could ever dream of achieving. We won't just melt brittle pig iron anymore, Anna—we will burn out every trace of impurity and forge high-grade steel strong enough to reshape the continent."
Anna remained completely silent for a long moment.
Slowly, she looked down at her own small, pale hands resting on the edge of the oak table—hands marked with faint calluses from hauling crucible tongs, the same hands that used to terrify every neighbor on her street.
Reaching out with her right index finger, she hovered the tip a millimeter above Roland's drawing of an oxygen molecule, her brow furrowing in deep thought as a tiny, almost invisible ripple of heat shimmered around her fingernail.
— "Then... when I call my fire, Your Highness, I am not actually creating something out of nothing," — Anna whispered, her soft voice trembling slightly with the weight of a profound scientific epiphany. — "The particles are already floating there in the empty air. I am simply using my Magic Power to accelerate the velocity of what already exists?"
felt as though a centuries-old mountain of religious guilt had just slid off her narrow shoulders and shattered on the stone floor.
Roland leaned back in his chair, a wave of genuine pride and warmth swelling in his chest as he looked at the young girl discovering her own worth.
— "That hits the nail right on the head," — Roland smiled warmly. — "You were never a witch of destruction, Anna. You are a master of kinetic energy."
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Ten paces away from the fireplace, at a smaller wooden table set up near the quiet eastern wall of the hall, the atmosphere was much softer.
Here, away from the heavy thermodynamics of the forge, Arthur had taken on the delicate responsibility of tutoring their newest recruit: thirteen-year-old Nana Pine.
The tiny girl was sitting on a heavy, high-backed oak dining chair that was at least three sizes too big for her, her short legs swinging nervously six inches above the stone floor like a small sparrow perched inside an eagle's nest.
When they had first sat down an hour ago, Arthur had tried showing her a basic anatomical sketch of mammalian muscle fibers and blood vessels. Within two minutes, seeing the little girl's eyes glaze over with confusion and intimidation, Arthur's Intelligence 14 mind had immediately recalibrated his teaching strategy.
A sheltered thirteen-year-old child in the Middle Ages couldn't absorb dry university-level cellular biology overnight; to unlock the true potential of her healing magic without scaring her, he needed to translate microbiology into a story she could actually picture.
Picking up a sharpened goose quill, Arthur pulled a fresh sheet of pale paper across the wood and began sketching with fast, clean strokes.
He didn't draw complex medical diagrams. Instead, he drew a large circle representing a cell wall, and inside that circle, he sketched half a dozen tiny, smiling stick-figure workmen wearing little aprons, carrying miniature hammers, trowels, and stacks of tiny bricks.
— "Listen closely, Nana. When you touch an injured animal or a wounded soldier, I don't want you to think of your power as some scary, inexplicable miracle that just happens by luck," — Arthur said, keeping his voice low, warm, and as encouraging as an older brother.
He pointed the tip of his quill at the smiling little stick figures carrying bricks inside the circle:
— "Every living body—whether it's that little bird you healed yesterday, your father's hunting dog, or a grown knight—is actually built like a massive castle made out of millions of tiny, invisible rooms called cells," — Arthur explained gently. — "When a sword cuts the skin or a bone snaps in half, it's just like a section of a castle wall collapsing. Normally, the tiny workmen inside the body take weeks to clean up the rubble and lay new bricks one by one."
Nana leaned forward on the oversized chair, her wide eyes fixed entirely on the cute little workmen on the paper as she forgot to swing her legs.
— "When you let that warm white light flow out of your hands, you aren't simply 'wishing' the pain away," — Arthur continued smoothly, drawing a little wooden supply cart unloading bricks next to the broken wall. — "Your magic acts as the royal architect and the fast-delivery supply wagon. You are pouring pure energy straight into those tiny workmen and handing them the exact mortar and bricks they need to rebuild the bone and close the skin in three seconds instead of three months. You are the master builder of life, Nana."
Sitting on the big oak chair, little Nana tilted her head to the side, a lock of soft brown hair falling across her forehead as she stared at the drawing.
For days, ever since the glowing light had first appeared in her palms at her father's manor, she had been paralyzed by the terror that a demon was living inside her chest, waiting to eat her soul.
Now, listening to Count Arthur's calm, logical voice explain her magic as an army of helpful little bricklayers fixing broken walls, a wave of warm, comforting relief washed through her small chest. If her power followed clear rules—like building a house with Master Karl—then it wasn't a curse at all; it was something she could actually control and be proud of.
— "So if a bone is broken crookedly, Lord Arthur..." — Nana whispered, pointing a tiny finger at the drawing, — "I shouldn't just pour the light in blindly? I should first tell the little workmen to pull the two ends of the wall straight before they put the mortar on?"
— "Brilliant girl. That is the exact foundation of orthopedics," — Arthur praised with a genuine smile.
Yet, beneath the calm drape of his silver-embroidered gray wool tunic, the muscles across Arthur's upper back remained subtly coiled with tension.
Without moving his head or breaking his warm smile toward Nana, Arthur let his peripheral vision flick for half a second toward the far corner of the dining hall, right where the heavy hunting tapestries hung in the deep shadow beyond the reach of the afternoon sunlight.
Just like in Roland's study two days earlier, the air in that dark corner looked faintly, almost imperceptibly distorted—like the heat haze rising off summer asphalt.
Arthur could practically feel the razor-sharp gaze of the unseen assassin resting on the back of his neck from inside the silent, black-and-white realm of the Mist World.
She is definitely in here today, Arthur noted silently, keeping his breathing completely steady. Nightingale is watching how we treat the two witches when no outsiders are around.
Knowing that their invisible judge was standing less than fifteen feet away, Arthur consciously weighed every single word and inflection that left his mouth.
He wasn't just teaching a thirteen-year-old girl how to align fractured bones; he was putting on a live demonstration for the deadliest protector of the Witch Cooperation Association. Every sentence he spoke was carefully designed to show Nightingale that the "science" he and Roland practiced was a shield of preservation, dignity, and life—making a silent, undeniable appeal for an alliance that would soon decide the fate of everyone in this room.
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Meanwhile, right in the center of the stone hall, the third station was anything but quiet and delicate.
WHOOSH—SNAP!
Two consecutive punches sliced through the cool air so fast that the heavy linen sleeves of William's shirt cracked like a bullwhip!
Having watched Chief Knight Carter Lannis patrol the castle yard for three weeks with that stiff, aristocratic disdain toward the militia's "peasant exercises," William had decided after lunch to drag the proud knight straight into the dining hall for a private lesson.
As a lifetime fighter, William knew that a traditional military man like Carter would never be won over by chalk diagrams on a blackboard; if you wanted a knight's respect, you had to teach him applied physics through the only language he truly respected: the mechanics of violence.
— "Tell me the truth, Carter—do you honestly still believe that your broadsword cuts through a leather jerkin just because of the brute muscle size of your biceps?" — William asked with a wicked grin, bouncing lightly on the balls of his boots in the middle of the stone floor.
Before Carter could even open his mouth to give the standard knightly answer about training and strength, William dropped his weight half an inch and threw a lightning-fast shadow-boxing combination—a snapping left jab followed instantaneously by a pivoting right cross that stopped a hair's breadth from the tip of Carter's nose!
The wind from thestopped punch ruffled the hair on Carter's forehead.
The Chief Knight's eyes widened slightly, his body freezing in place. As an elite swordsman, Carter wasn't easily impressed by parlor tricks, yet the sheer speed of that two-punch combination—and the total absence of any telegraphed shoulder winding—caught him completely off guard.
— "It isn't arm muscle that knocks a man out, my friend," — William said, tapping his own hip and then pointing down at his planted rear heel. — "It comes down to a physical law called inertia and acceleration. Force equals mass times acceleration. When you swing a sword using only your shoulder and arm, you are only hitting the enemy with twenty pounds of arm weight. When I throw a strike, I build a kinetic vector starting from the ground up—rotating my ankle, snapping my hips like a whip, and transferring all ninety kilograms of my body weight straight into a two-inch knuckle impact."
Carter raised a skeptical eyebrow, his calloused right hand resting instinctively on the pommel of his longsword as his sharp jaw clenched.
— "Words and numbers, Commander William," — Carter replied stiffly, clearly struggling to reconcile an "academic" lecture with the bloody reality of the battlefields he had fought on for a decade. — "On a muddy field, a punch without steel behind it bounces off a shield."
— "Does it now?" — William's grin widened. — "Raise your left forearm in front of your chest, Knight. Brace your stance as hard as you want, just like you're blocking a warhammer."
Humoring the foreigner, Carter slid his right foot back into a rock-solid knight's defensive stance, raising his steel-vambraced left forearm across his chest and locking every muscle in his upper body.
Standing barely ten inches away—too close for a normal brawler to even pull his arm back—William didn't wind up at all.
Keeping his right knuckles only six inches from Carter's steel forearm guard, William snapped his rear heel off the stone floor, twisted his hip with explosive Speed 11 torque, and delivered a textbook modern short-range kinetic strike straight against the knight's braced arm!
CLANG—THUD!
It sounded as if someone had hit Carter's vambrace with a blacksmith's sledgehammer.
Despite wearing steel armor and weighing nearly two hundred pounds with his gear on, Carter's boots skidded backward across the smooth stone floor by two full feet! A violent shockwave traveled straight through the steel plate and padding, numbing Carter's left arm all the way up to his shoulder socket and forcing a sharp grunt of surprise out of his lungs!
Carter stared down at his tingling left forearm in genuine shock, flexing his fingers to make sure the bone wasn't cracked.
There was no denying the physical proof that had just rattled his teeth. Whatever "kinetic vector" science William was talking about, the sheer mechanical efficiency of that six-inch punch bordered on the supernatural.
Seeing that he finally had the stubborn knight's undivided attention, William walked over to the side table, picked up a heavy, round paperweight made of solid cast iron, and held it up between two fingers.
— "Now apply that exact same law of mass and velocity to the weapons His Highness is building," — William said, his playful tone dropping into cold, military pragmatism as he traced a fast, straight line through the air with the iron ball. — "Roland isn't forging better swords, Carter. He is building firearms that use the instantaneous chemical expansion of gas inside a sealed tube to propel a lead sphere forward."
William stopped the iron ball an inch from the center of Carter's polished steel breastplate:
— "You saw what that pistol did in the yard two weeks ago, and the new long rifles are twice as powerful," — William stated flatly. — "The era of the noble knight in shining armor is officially dead, my friend. It doesn't matter if you spent twenty years perfecting your footwork, and it doesn't matter how much silver trim is on your cuirass—if a one-ounce ball of lead hits your chest moving at three hundred meters per second, the kinetic energy will punch through your steel and stop your heart before your brain even hears the gunshot. In the new world the Prince is building, individual brute strength loses. What wins wars now is gas pressure, muzzle velocity, and the iron discipline of a firing line that doesn't flinch when hell breaks loose."
Carter Lannis stood very still in the center of the hall.
Slowly, his broad, armored shoulders drooped by a fraction of an inch as he turned his head to glance at the side table near the fireplace—where several intricate charcoal blueprints of standardized flintlock muskets and rifled barrels lay waiting for Roland's inspection.
For a brief moment, a heavy, painful shadow crossed the veteran knight's eyes. It was the quiet grief of a proud craftsman realizing that the art to which he had dedicated his entire life, his blood, and his family honor was about to be swept into the dustbin of history.
— "A battlefield without the honor of the blade..." — Carter murmured, his deep voice unusually quiet. — "Where a starving peasant hiding behind a wall can kill a lifelong warrior from a hundred paces away by pulling a tiny lever, without ever looking him in the eye or testing his courage steel-to-steel? That sounds like a very cold world, Sir William. A world without a soul."
— "Cold? Hahahaha!" — William let out a sharp, booming laugh, stepping forward to clap a heavy, comradely hand onto Carter's steel pauldron. — "Yeah, it's going to be freezing cold—for the poor bastard on the other side of the wall who takes a lead ball between the eyes! For us standing behind the triggers, though? It's going to be nice and warm!"
William's smile faded into a look of hard, battle-tested truth that didn't quite reach his eyes:
— "Listen to me, Carter: when three hundred mutated Demonic Beasts come charging out of a blizzard in two months to rip the throats out of the women and children in this town, those monsters aren't going to care about knightly chivalry," — William said quietly. — "And when you see your men gunning those beasts down before they even touch our wall, you're going to love those soulless iron tubes just as much as I do. Because at the end of the day, Carter... honor belongs to the survivors."
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The remainder of the afternoon passed in a steady, low murmur of intense mental labor.
Once Carter bowed his head in deep thought and returned to his guard post by the door, and Master Karl arrived to walk little Nana back home for supper, the three modern men and Anna converged around the main table by the fireplace to review the week's engineering bottlenecks.
It was the unmistakable sound of progress: charcoal pencils scratching furiously against parchment, pages turning, and the occasional crackle of oak logs in the hearth.
At one point, while William leaned over the back of a chair trying to crack a terrible joke about using mechanical pulleys and levers to launch Barov over the river if he complained about the budget again, Arthur stood up quietly from his seat and walked around behind Roland's shoulder.
Leaning down without making a fuss, Arthur tapped the tip of his fingernail against the bottom corner of Roland's structural stress equations for the new wooden-and-concrete supply bridge across the Redwater River—silently pointing out a misplaced decimal point in the shear-load calculation that would have caused the central pier to buckle under a heavy ore wagon.
Roland blinked, caught the mistake immediately, let out a breath of relief, and corrected the number with a quick nod of thanks.
Around five o'clock, when mental exhaustion finally hit all of them at once, a rare moment of complete, shared silence fell over the hall.
Almost as if choreographed, Roland, Arthur, and William all stopped talking at the exact same second, reached out across the table, picked up their dented tin water mugs, and took a long drink to wet their dry throats.
Across the table, however, Anna did not reach for her cup.
Resting her small hands flat on top of the atomic diagrams and thermodynamic equations, the seventeen-year-old witch slowly raised her head.
Her clear blue eyes moved with unhurried, surgical deliberation—looking first at Prince Roland, then shifting across to Arthur, and finally settling on William.
There was not a shred of childish naivety in her expression. Instead, her gaze was overflowing with a deep, sharp curiosity—and an undeniable spark of suspicion.
Clink.
As the three men set their tin mugs back down onto the oak wood at the same time, the metallic sound echoed through the sudden stillness of the dining hall.
— "The three of you..." — Anna spoke, her calm, quiet voice cutting straight through the silence of the room with that terrifying directness of hers that always went straight for the jugular.
Roland paused with his hand still on his mug.
— "What about the three of us, Anna?" — the prince asked carefully.
— "Whenever the three of you talk about the future," — Anna continued, looking straight from Roland's eyes to Arthur's, — "when Your Highness describes those heavy iron 'engines' that generate power from boiling water, when Mr. William speaks of 'kinetic vectors' and three-hundred-meter-per-second projectiles, or when Mr. Arthur corrects a formula before it is even finished... you speak as if all of it is already written down somewhere."
Anna tilted her head slightly, her blue eyes narrowing by a fraction of an inch:
— "You do not sound like scholars who are inventing something new through trial and error," — she said softly. — "You sound like men who are simply remembering it. Almost as if the three of you are reading aloud from a history book that the rest of us in this world cannot see."
At the head of the table, Roland's breath caught halfway down his windpipe, his fingers freezing around the handle of his tin cup.
Caught completely flat-footed by the girl's frighteningly accurate intuition, Cheng Yan shot a lightning-fast, sidelong glance of pure alarm toward Arthur. Beside them, even William stopped smiling, keeping his face carefully blank.
In that microscopic two-second silence, the crushing weight of the secret the three of them shared—the truth of the twenty-first century, of Earth, and of a world billions of light-years away—felt heavier than the solid stone walls of the castle around them.
Inside this muddy, superstitious world ruled by spears, feudal kings, and religious terror, the three of them were complete aliens. They were the clandestine architects of a script that no priest, duke, or pope on this continent could ever comprehend.
Before the silence could stretch long enough to confirm her suspicions, Arthur smoothly stepped in to break the ice.
Folding his hands calmly over the ledger in front of him, Arthur met Anna's piercing blue gaze and allowed a small, quiet, and genuinely nostalgic smile to curve his lips. For a split second, behind his dark eyes, the memory of a rain-slicked metropolis of glass skyscrapers and neon lights flashed and vanished.
— "You could say that we had the fortune of reading the right books before coming here, Anna," — Arthur replied, his voice soft, steady, and completely disarming. — "There is no dark mystery to it. The three of us are simply ordinary men who are sweating blood to build a world where reason rules over superstition—a prosperous, safe future where neither commoners nor witches ever have to fear the winter or the gallows again. That is why getting the numbers inside those 'books' right is the only thing that matters right now."
Anna didn't look away.
She held Arthur's gaze for three full seconds, her sharp mind clearly weighing the smooth evasion behind his words.
Yet she could also feel the absolute, unshakeable sincerity behind the second half of his answer—and in the corner of the room, inside the unseen Mist World, Nightingale felt it too.
Finally, the slight crease between Anna's eyebrows smoothed out, and she gave a single, slow nod of acceptance, pulling the charcoal diagram of the steel furnace back toward herself. If there were deeper secrets locked inside the brilliant minds of these three men, she didn't need to force them open today; as long as she kept learning their science, she would uncover the truth of their world in due time.
Outside the tall stone windows, the late autumn sun finally touched the jagged western horizon, flooding the vast dining hall with a deep, blazing orange-gold light that stretched their long shadows across the stone walls.
Looking at the room bathed in that sunset glow, the picture was undeniable: Anna's evolving kinetic fire, Nana's cellular healing, and the ruthless ballistic discipline William was drilling into Carter and the army—all bound together and directed by the "alien" science of three men from another time.
Outside the fortress walls, the freezing gale of the northern mountains howled louder as dusk fell, heralding the imminent arrival of the first snow and the ravenous hordes of the Months of Demons.
Yet inside that warm, candle-lit hall, surrounded by charcoal equations and atomic rings, the true foundation of humanity's future had already been poured—and nothing in this world was going to stop it from curing into solid steel.