I woke up with the sensation that someone had replaced my blood with molten lead. The bruise on my chest—a souvenir from yesterday's encounter with the men in grey robes—had blossomed into a deep purple hue. It hurt to breathe. It was a stinging reminder that, although to the woman those men were "insects," to my human ribs they were a force of nature.
I tried to get up, and the wooden bed groaned. I remembered her warning: "Try to be lighter."
It took me ten minutes to get dressed. She was leaning against the doorframe, watching the mist.
"Repair something," she said, tossing me a piece of wood. "Something small. Something that forces you to remember how to be soft."
I sat before my grandfather's old milking stool. I took the chisel and the mallet. Tap... tap... Every strike was a negotiation with my own strength. It was exhausting, but when the leg finally fit perfectly without a single creak, I felt the humming in my bones quiet down a little.
I was admiring my triumph when peace was shattered.
Heavy footsteps were coming up the hill. Then, a desperate pounding at the door. It was Kael, the butcher's son. His face was smeared with blood.
"Aethel! They're coming back!" he gasped. "Joran... the chief's son. He went looking for them. He told them you had to be hiding the 'treasure' because he felt something strange in your yard the other day. Joran wants revenge for the scare he got, and he's leading those cultivators here. They broke my father's arm because he tried to stop them!"
I felt a cold vibration run down my spine. Kael was a good guy; he had given me lard to survive the winter. Seeing him hurt by Joran's spite stirred something deep inside me.
"Go by the creek path, Kael," I told him, placing a hand on his shoulder with extreme gentleness. "Don't let them see you."
Kael fled through the back. I was left alone with her.
"They are coming by the main road," she said. "That Joran has sold your head to buy back his pride. And the others... the others hunger for easy glory."
I stood in the center of the yard, feeling the cold of the ground seep through the soles of my feet. It wasn't a mystical connection; it was simply the weight. I felt anchored, as if my boots weighed fifty kilos each.
"You have nowhere to go, Aethel," she said from the shadows, her voice a whisper that cut through the air. "And even if you could, your stony pride wouldn't let you."
She was right. I had spent four years fleeing a world of noise and lights on Earth, only to end up in a valley where brute force was still the only law. If I ran now, I would lose the only thing I had left: this small patch of mud I called home. But besides that, I knew it was physically impossible to escape; to these cultivators, my desperate sprint would be seen in slow motion. They would simply fly and intercept me before I even crossed the creek.
The wooden fence I had worked so hard to repair in Chapter 3 creaked again. It wasn't an accidental nudge this time. It was a sharp kick loaded with contempt. The boards splintered, and Joran entered the yard, his face flushed with agitation and a triumphant smile that made me nauseous.
"Here he is!" Joran shouted, turning to the two men following him. "The hermit and his 'mystery'! Remember me, Aethel? The other day you mocked me, made me look like a fool in front of my father. But now I've brought those who can see through your tricks!"
The two cultivators in grey robes entered with an insulting elegance. They didn't walk on the mud; their feet barely grazed the surface. The leader, the same man who had struck me yesterday at the canal, looked at me with disdain, searching for something that sparkled, something that vibrated.
"You still smell like manure, mortal," the lead cultivator said, crossing his arms. "But this youth insists you are hiding something. He says the air changes when you are near, that he felt a pressure right here a few days ago."
"Joran has always had a vivid imagination, sir," I replied. I tried to keep my voice from trembling, but the Thump... Thump... of my heart was so heavy I feared they could hear it. "I'm just a man trying to fix his fence. A fence he just broke... again."
Joran let out a nervous laugh and stepped forward, trying to look good before his new masters. He wanted to erase the humiliation of that day when his legs failed him for no reason.
"Don't believe him!" he shrieked. "Look at him! He doesn't even kneel. He has a buried treasure or uses some forbidden amulet that gives him that arrogance. Master, let me teach him a lesson so he starts talking."
The lead cultivator nodded with a lazy gesture. To him, this was like watching two dogs fight over a bone.
Joran approached me, inflated by confidence. He raised his hand, clenching it into a fat, clumsy fist. I remembered the shove from Chapter 3; that day, I moved. Today, my body simply didn't want to. I felt so dense, so ridiculously solid, that the thought of backing away seemed physically impossible.
"This is for the other day, 'neighbor'," Joran growled.
He threw the punch. It was a direct strike to my jaw.
CRACK!
The sound wasn't my jaw breaking. It was the sound of Joran's knuckles colliding with something that didn't yield an inch. Joran let out a howl of pain, recoiling while clutching his right hand, which was already beginning to swell. His fingers had bent in a way that wasn't natural.
I was surprised myself. I knew I was tough, but at this level? I felt the blow—it hurt as if I'd been hit with a stone—but my head didn't move a single centimeter back. It was as if Joran had struck an iron post driven into granite.
The two cultivators stopped smiling. The leader slowly uncrossed his arms, his expression shifting from boredom to dangerous suspicion.
"That wasn't an amulet," the cultivator muttered, stepping forward and reaching for his sword. "There was no trace of Qi. No spell activation. Just... inertia."
From the corner of my eye, I saw the woman under the willow. She was watching with a new intensity, with the curiosity of someone watching a rock defy the river's current.
"Careful," she whispered in my mind, amused. "You've wounded the pride of the big insect. And big insects have metal stingers."
The lead cultivator, frustrated by the failure of his sword earlier, extended his hand, and a blue spiritual flame began to grow, illuminating the yard with a deathly light.
"If steel won't cut you, let's see if your essence survives the soul-fire," he growled, preparing to cast the spell.
I was paralyzed. I didn't know how to defend myself; I didn't know how to move that "barrier" protecting me. I only felt an immense weariness, a heaviness that wasn't physical, but the exhaustion of someone who has lived two lives and has no more room for noise. In my mind, I just wanted them to stop. I wanted that silence I had worked so hard to find in this valley to return.
"Look at me when I speak to you, mortal trash!" the cultivator shouted, annoyed by my silence.
By instinct, I looked up. My eyes locked directly with his.
In that instant, the world stopped. There was no fire, no screams from Joran, not even the whisper of the wind.
The lead cultivator froze. The blue flame in his hand died instantly, leaving only a trail of black smoke. His companion, standing a step behind, was also caught in the radius of my gaze.
For them, the cabin yard vanished. They suddenly found themselves in an absolute void, a darkness so dense it felt liquid, enveloping them like pitch. There was no sky, no earth, no flow of Qi. Only an immeasurable presence watching them from everywhere and nowhere. They felt themselves being dragged down into an abyss where their years of cultivation, their techniques, and their pride meant nothing. They were like specks of dust trying to fight the gravity of a black hole.
It didn't last more than a second in real time, but for them, it was an eternity of pure terror—a vision of the absolute nothingness that inhabited the depths of my "other world" memories.
Suddenly, the spell broke.
The leader let out a muffled groan. His eyes rolled back and his knees buckled, collapsing into the mud like a ragdoll. His companion fell right after him, his face pale and foam at the corners of his mouth, unconscious before he even hit the ground.
Even Joran, who had only caught a reflection of that exchange, stood speechless, trembling violently as he wet himself, unable to process what had just happened. His "masters," beings who could fly and cut mountains, had been defeated without me moving a single finger.
I blinked, bewildered. I felt dizzy, with a hollow feeling in my stomach as if I had been holding my breath for an hour. My legs shook, and I had to lean against the doorframe to keep from falling myself.
"What... what was that?" I managed to whisper, my voice cracking.
The woman stepped out from the shadow of the willow. She walked slowly among the fainted bodies, observing them with a mix of disgust and fascination. She stopped in front of me and looked into my eyes, but this time with caution, as if evaluating a crack in a wall she thought she knew.
"I warned you, Aethel," she said softly. "Your soul is not from here. It is too heavy, too ancient... too dark for these insects to try and peek into it. You didn't defeat them. They drowned themselves by accidentally entering your mind."
I looked at my hands. They were dirty with earth and resin—the hands of a peasant.
"They have to go," I said, looking at Joran, who was still catatonic. "Take them away, Joran. Take them before something worse wakes up."
Joran didn't need to be told twice. He dragged the two unconscious men toward the road as best as he could, stumbling and weeping, leaving behind a broken fence and the sepulchral silence of the valley.
I was left alone with the woman. The sun was beginning to set, but the cold in my yard was no longer due to the weather.
"Are you sure you're just a peasant, Aethel?" she asked, repeating her doubt, but this time without a shadow of amusement. She looked genuinely interested.
The silence that followed Joran's departure was different from my usual mornings. It wasn't the silence of peace, but that of a room after something has broken and no one knows how to pick up the pieces.
I sat on the stone step of the entrance, feeling my muscles turn to water. The effort of having done nothing had left me more exhausted than an entire day carrying sacks of grain. The woman approached and, for the first time, did not maintain that distance of superiority. She sat a few steps away from me, on the dirt, not caring that her white silk was stained by the mud of the yard.
"That darkness..." she began, her voice soft but loaded with a curiosity she hadn't shown before. "It wasn't just a void. It was the echo of a place that has forgotten the light. What did you see before waking up in this body, Aethel?"
I let out a long sigh, looking at my dirty hands. I no longer had the strength to keep pretending I was just a peasant who knew nothing. I was defeated. The weight of carrying two lives had become unbearable after the clash with the cultivators.
"I didn't see gods, if that's what you're expecting," I said, looking toward the horizon where the sun tinted the clouds a dirty orange. "I come from a place where there was no Qi, no flying swords, no people who could live centuries watching a river."
She tilted her head, her silver eyes fixed on my profile.
"A world without flow?" she murmured. "That should be a desert of ash."
"On the contrary. It was a world of noise," I smiled bitterly, remembering fragments that now felt like fever dreams. "There were cities that never slept, lit by lights that didn't need fire. Metal carriages that ran faster than the wind, and machines that allowed men to speak across oceans. It was... brilliant. And suffocating."
I closed my eyes and, for a moment, the smell of pine and earth from the valley was replaced by the memory of hot asphalt after the rain and the smoke of engines.
"I remember the sound of rain hitting the glass of a window on a twentieth floor," I continued, sharing those unimportant fragments. "I remember the taste of food that came in cardboard boxes and the glow of a screen that was the last thing I saw before sleeping. There was no magic, but we were all connected by invisible threads that stole our souls little by little."
The woman remained silent, processing my words like someone trying to decipher a dead language.
"A world of machines..." she repeated. "Is that why your soul is like this? Because you come from a place where the human will had to harden just to avoid being devoured by its own creation?"
"I don't know," I replied, opening my eyes and seeing my ruined fence once more. "There, I was nobody. Just another cog. But here... here it seems my simple existence is an insult to the order of things. I just wanted to be left alone. I just wanted this little piece of mud to be mine."
I stood up with difficulty, feeling the evening chill beginning to seep into my bones.
"Those memories are the only thing I have that doesn't belong to this valley," I said, looking directly at her. "And today, for the first time, I felt that world is fading. That the darkness those men saw is what's left when you try to mix what I was with what I am now."
She stood up too, with a grace that contrasted with my heavy movements. She no longer looked at me like a laboratory curiosity, but like an enigma she was beginning to respect.
"The noise of your old world is dead, Aethel," she said, taking a step toward the creek. "But the silence you created today will attract predators much larger than Joran. You have shown a truth that you cannot hide again."
I entered the cabin without answering. I lit the hearth and watched the flames lick the dry wood. For a moment, the sparks reminded me of the city lights I had mentioned, but they flickered out quickly, leaving only the familiar warmth of my home of mud and straw.
Tomorrow I would have to fix the fence. Again.