A mile away, where the pine forest chokes the horizon, the atmosphere shifts from the roar of the docks to the agonizing grind of wheels in the muck. The road to Admonito is a vein of dark, sludge-like mud that threatens to swallow anything that moves.
Lei Delun wipes a smear of grease from his forehead, his eyes narrowed as he watches a merchant caravan struggle through a particularly deep rut. The oxen are lowing in distress, their breath blooming like white ghosts in the humid air. Lei and his slave-soldier companions are leaning into the wheels of a wagon, their muscles bulging, their boots slipping in the mire.
"Push, you bastards!" Lei grunts, his shoulder wedged against the splintering wood of the lead cart.
Beside him, a dwarf merchant—rotund, bearded, and surprisingly calm amidst the chaos—watches with a pipe clenched between his teeth. Lei looks at the dwarf, his curiosity piqued by the man's stoicism.
"Tell me, Master Merchant," Lei says, his voice strained as the wagon finally heaves forward a few inches. "Why do you do it? This trade is precarious at best. The roads are nothing but open graves, bandits are probably watching us from those ridges right now, and the taxes in Samekh are enough to starve a dragon. Why risk your neck for a few crates of rye and salt?"
The dwarf merchant takes a long pull from his pipe, the embers glowing like a tiny sun in the shadows of his hood. He lets out a puff of grey smoke that lingers in the still air.
"For the sweet scent of gold-dust and the gamble of the road, lad," the dwarf rumbles, his voice like grinding millstones deep beneath the earth. "We've no stomach for the heavy, stagnant air of the citadels. Safety? Safety is a shroud for the dead. My sire was a master of the trade, and his grandsire before him, may the stones remember them. I do but follow the copper-scented trail they blazed. Should the Fates decree I fall in the muck of the highway, I'll go to the halls of my fathers with a heavy purse at my belt and the wild wind tangled in my beard. 'Tis a far finer end than rotting like a damp cask in some marcle cellar."
Lei grins despite himself, a sharp, cynical expression.
[Stubborn as the rock they mine. They'd sell their own mothers for a shortcut, but at least they have a spine.]
The sun sinks further, casting long, spindly shadows of the new piers across the water, but the villagers' attention has shifted from the silver-scaled harvest to the strange vessel cutting through the mist. Out on the lake, the cinematic scale of the landscape takes over. A small rowboat cuts through the vapor that has begun to roll off the water like a dragon's breath. Onaga Kei and Ryong Min Ki sit at the oars, the rhythmic splash-creak of their movement the only sound in the vast, grey expanse.
They move along the shoreline, far from the industrial clamor of Admonito, mapping the fringes of the Marquis's supposed domain. Onaga Kei is the diplomat, the bridge; he spends his days weaving words to keep the peace. Ryong Min Ki, however, is Aldo's eyes and ears for the cold, hard numbers. He has a ledger open on his knees, his quill scratching furiously against parchment damp from the lake air.
"Seriously, look at this place," Ryong muttered, pausing to shake a droplet of lake water off his quill. "A few mud houses, some depressed-looking pigs, and clothes that are basically just held together by prayer. This isn't a basin, Onaga; it's a graveyard of ambition. How does Aldo expect to run a margin on... what, dirt and sadness?"
Onaga sighed, his oars dipping smoothly into the leaden water. "Relax, Ryong. It's a process. You're looking at the balance sheet; I'm looking at the foundations. Give them a year of not starving to death, and they'll start caring about things like 'ambition.' Just keep counting the pigs and try not to look like you're judging their entire ancestry."
"Hard not to," Ryong whispered, squinting at the shore. "The logistics alone are a nightmare. Every time I write something down, they look at me like I'm casting a death curse."
On the shore, the rhythmic thud of the hammers faltered. A group of villagers stood huddled near a stack of salt-crusted barrels, their faces gaunt, eyes wide with a mixture of awe and suspicion. They watched the boat glide past as if it were a phantom ship.
"Look ye there, Wat," hissed Old Marda, clutching her gutting knife. "See the one with the white leaf in his hand? He marks the world with a crow's feather. My grandam told of such marks—they be the soul-stealers, writing our very breaths into their black books."
"Nay, woman, 'tis worse," Wat replied, wiping brine from his beard with a trembling hand. "Look how he eyes the livestock. He counted Gammer's three sows just now. That be a Tithe-Demon. First they bring the fish to lure us out, then they count the pigs to bleed us dry."
The gossip rippled through the crowd like a cold draft. The younger men leaned on their oars, watching the strange duo with predatory curiosity. To them, a man recording the number of their pigs was a herald of doom.
"They say the one rowing speaks with a tongue of silver bells," whispered Enpeth, peering through the gloom. "But the other—the one with the book—he has the eyes of a hawk over a mouse-field. He's weighing our lives against a copper coin, he is."
As the boat pulled away into the bruised violet of the mist, Ryong closed his ledger with a dry snap. "See? That old lady definitely thinks I'm a demon. Let's get out of here before they find the pitchforks."
Beside Ryong, several slave-soldier "Recorders"—men who can actually read and write, a rarity in this company—are scrambling over the rocky embankments. They climb the jagged limestone cliffs and peer through brass spyglasses, trying to map the undulating shoreline.
The boat passes Hollowmere, where the water turns a sickly, stagnant green and the trees hang low, their mossy hair brushing the surface. They row past Deepfen, a place of reeds and unseen predators that hiss in the dark, and Stonewake, where the earth is more granite than soil. They pass village after village until they reach Willowbreak. In every location, the story is the same: the peasants scratch at the earth to produce a little stone, some bitter rye, and miscellaneous goods. They try to produce everything to survive and end up being good at absolutely nothing.
[They're drowning in their own lack of focus...] Ryong thinks, watching a woman beat a rug with a stick. [They need a trade. They need a purpose beyond not starving.]
As they reach Willowbreak, the sun finally dips below the mountains, casting long, skeletal shadows across the valley. The late afternoon light is a dying gold.
Onaga Kei suddenly stops rowing. He looks at his map, then at the shore, then back at the map. His face reflects a sudden, jarring shock.
"Ryong," Onaga says, his voice low. "There are only thirteen villages. Count them again."
Ryong looks up, blinking. "What? What? What? Don't be ridiculous. The Marquis's letter was explicit. Sixteen villages along the lake shore."
"I've been counting the elders..." Onaga says, shaking his head. "I've been counting the hearth-fires. We've explored the entire perimeter. We've even pushed the scouts inland. There are only thirteen."
Ryong's jaw tightens. He looks out at the darkening forest. "Was he exaggerating? Or is he so incompetent he doesn't know his own borders?"
Onaga Kei smiles, a calm, subtle joke playing on his lips. "Perhaps his definition of the lake shore is wider than ours. To a noble in a palace, perhaps any village that can see a puddle is 'on the shore.'"
Ryong isn't laughing. He stares into the encroaching dusk. "Where's the other village? I can't see the trail anywhere. If we don't find all sixteen, Aldo is going to have our heads for a 'best conditions' failure."
The group decides to row back toward the center of the lake. As the moon begins to rise—a pale, ghost-like orb—they encounter a large flat-bottomed boat transporting massive beams of timber. The merchant at the helm looks weary, his face illuminated by a flickering lantern.
Onaga hails him. "Ho there! You're deep in the mist. Where's that timber headed?"
The merchant draws a weathered hand across his brow, flicking away the beads of honest toil. "To the port of Admonito, God willing and the axles holding. I hauled this lot from the timber-wrights of Timbercross but yestermorn."
Ryong and Onaga exchange a look of pure bewilderment. "Timbercross?" Ryong asks. "Where the hell is Timbercross? We just circled the whole basin."
The merchant gestures vaguely toward a dark inlet where the shadows of the pines seem to swallow the light near Hollowmere.
"Aye, 'tis a stone's throw from Admonito's skirts, though the path be a shy one. Thou must seek the timber-bridge that spans the little river—the one that feeds the belly of Hollowmere. Thou'lt find no sight of it from the open waters of the lake, nay. 'Tis tucked right cozy-like amidst the weeping pines, hidden from the eyes of the wayward like a coin dropped in the tall grass."
Despite the hour, despite the exhaustion clinging to their bones, Onaga and Ryong persist. They steer their boat toward the hidden river, their oars cutting through the water with renewed urgency. They explore the hidden hamlet before finally turning back toward Admonito.
It is late at night when they return. The village of Admonito is quiet now, the only sound the lapping of waves against the new piers and the distant, lonely howl of a wolf in the Pirus woods.
Ryong and Onaga are covered in dirt, their clothes damp with spray and sweat. They enter the command shack where Aldo sits by a single, guttering candle. He is staring at a map, his face a mask of weary contemplation. He looks like a man carrying the weight of two worlds—his old life in Japan and this miserable isekai fate that has cast him as a slave-soldier king in a land of mud.
They hand him a thick stack of papers. The edges are curled, and the ink is slightly smudged, but the data is there.
Aldo looks at the papers, then at the two men. He sees the exhaustion in their eyes, the way their shoulders hang. A rare, genuine softness touches his face. He reaches into a crate and pulls out a bowl of wildberries and two wooden mugs of mead.
"Good work," Aldo says, his voice a low rasp. "Eat. Drink. You've earned more than this, but it's what we have."
Onaga looks at the mead and shakes his head slightly. "I'm not really used to beer, Commander. Water would do."
Aldo pushes the mug toward him. "This medieval world doesn't have modern water filters, Onaga. This drink is the safer option. The fermentation kills what the filth doesn't. Drink it."
Ryong and Hano—who has just appeared in the doorway—each grab a mug and drain half of it immediately. Hano wipes his mouth with his sleeve, his voice loud and echoing in the small room.
"Mages!" Hano scoffs, his :3 face returning in a twisted, cynical way. "They claim they can purify anything, but they just use dark magic to clear the cloudiness. They don't know a damn thing about parasites or heavy metals. They just make the water look pretty while it rots your insides."
Aldo nods slowly, staring into the candle flame. "Not really, I think mainly because the magic users—the nobles who have the time, the money, and the resources—will never bend their ego for commoner things. Why invent a filter when you can just cast a spell for your own cup and let the peasants die of the flux?"
Ryong leans forward, resting his elbows on the table. "Commander, the Marquis... he's a liar or a fool. He said there were sixteen villages bordering the lake. In reality, only three villages actually touch the water's edge. The rest are tucked away, connected by bridges or hidden trails. That's why we're so late. We had to hunt them down like ghosts."
He pauses, taking another swig of mead. "It's another example. That noble could have used magic or even basic cartography for more practical things than display and combat. He doesn't even know his own land."
Aldo nods, his eyes fixed on the stack of reports. [The geography of a lie. He wants 'best conditions' for sixteen villages he can't even find on a map.]
"Rest.." Aldo says, his voice final. "Both of you. You've done what was needed."
As they file out, Comtois enters from the back, his skin damp and smelling of lye soap from a recent shower. He sees the mountain of documents on the table and whistles low.
"That's a lot of paper for a bunch of mud huts, Aldo," Comtois says, leaning over his shoulder. "What do you intend to do with all that information? Planning on writing a book?"
Aldo doesn't look up. He places his hand on the stack of papers, his fingers drumming a slow, steady beat against the parchment. The candle flickers, casting his shadow long and dark against the wall.
"This isn't a book, Comtois," Aldo says, his voice cold and focused. "It's input."
"Input for what?"
"For outputting the 'best conditions'."