The late autumn wind howled through the narrow stone embrasures of Prince Roland's third-floor office, a relentless, whistling drone that served as a somber metronome for the passing days.
Outside the frosted glass panes, the pale snowflakes that had begun to drift down from the Impassable Mountain Range twenty minutes earlier were already gathering in the corners of the courtyard flagstones. It was a cold, biting reminder that the harvest season was officially dead. The total isolation of Border Town was no longer a distant warning on a calendar; it was an imminent, suffocating reality.
Inside the study, however, the air was warm and heavy with the scent of old羊 parchment, damp masonry, crackling pine logs, and the faint, sharp chemical odor of the new carbon ink Roland had recently ordered from the workshops.
Sitting in a high-backed wooden chair across from the Prince's desk, Arthur rested his elbows on the armrests and watched Roland's goose quill sweep across a thick stack of winter supply manifests. Stacks of grain, tons of mined iron ore, and baskets of black coal—on paper, they looked like dry accounting figures, yet to the two men in the room, those columns of numbers were a fragile lifeline stretching across the edge of an abyss.
Now that Nightingale had vanished from the study after their confrontation over Baron Pine—no doubt heading down to the courtyard kilns to watch over Anna and cool her temper—the third-floor office was completely quiet.
Letting out a slow breath, Arthur reached up with two fingers to adjust the stiff, silver-embroidered collar of his dark-gray wool tunic. After nearly a month in this world, he had finally grown accustomed to the heavy weight of medieval fabric, just as he had grown accustomed to wearing the cold, untouchable mask of a foreign strategist.
— "Your Highness," — Arthur said, breaking the silence with a dry, conversational tone that carried the tired honesty of a man who spent his nights reviewing fortification blueprints and his days arguing with masons. — "Speaking of long-term planning and the literal foundations of this territory... when exactly is my promised manor going to be built?"
Roland didn't even look up from his ledger, the corner of his mouth twitching slightly as his quill kept moving.
— "Only after the Months of the Demons are over, Arthur," — the Prince replied, gesturing vaguely with his free hand toward the southern window overlooking the distant gray line of the defensive rampart. — "Right now, every sack of hydraulic cement from Anna's kiln and every pair of working hands in this town belongs to the military perimeter. Master Karl van Bate is already on the verge of a nervous breakdown just trying to finish the artillery platforms and trench funnels before the ground freezes solid. Diverting masons to build you a luxury residence right now wouldn't just be a distraction; it would be logistical suicide."
— "A man can still ask," — Arthur murmured dryly. — "The draft in the eastern guest wing is doing terrible things to my posture."
With a faint chuckle, Roland finally set his quill down into its brass inkwell and leaned back against the creaking oak frame of his chair. As the humor faded from his gray eyes, his expression grew sharp and deeply inquisitive.
— "Since we are on the subject of the approaching winter..." — Roland said, folding his ink-stained hands across the desk. — "You and William clearly have a much more detailed picture of what is coming down from those peaks than Iron Axe or Carter Lannis ever could. I've heard the frontier legends, and I've read the old patrol logs, but I need concrete data. What exactly are we going to face when the snow piles up? What is out there beyond my wall, besides 'monsters'?"
Arthur leaned back in his chair and crossed one leg over the other, his dark eyes narrowing slightly as he accessed the mental library of meta-knowledge from his previous life—the written chapters of the story that had now become their flesh-and-blood reality.
— "As Deputy Commander Iron Axe already briefed you, the common demonic beasts are, frankly, low-tier tactical threats," — Arthur explained calmly. — "The vast majority are ordinary forest fauna—wolves, foxes, boars, and bears—whose biology has been violently mutated by the surge of ambient winter miasma. Their muscle mass swells, their blood turns black and toxic, and their brains are stripped of all self-preservation in favor of blind aggression."
Arthur tapped a slow rhythm against the wooden armrest with his index finger.
— "Against a medieval wooden palisade defended by starving peasants with spears, a pack of five hundred mutated wolves is a massacre," — Arthur continued. — "Against the First Army, standing behind a twelve-foot concrete wall with V-shaped trench funnels, flintlock muskets, and ceramic shrapnel grenades, those creatures are little more than moving targets. They bleed, their skulls crack under lead, and they lack the intelligence to do anything except charge straight into our crossfire."
Roland nodded once, his engineer's mind categorizing the variables. — "And the second wave?"
— "The Hybrid Beasts," — Arthur said, his voice dropping half an octave. — "Those are the real structural hazard. Imagine nature's worst evolutionary nightmares stitched together into a single frame—a creature with the speed and six legs of a giant wolf fused underneath an obsidian-hard turtle carapace, or an armored bear towering three meters high with bone-plated scythes for forearms. They are resilient enough to shrug off iron crossbow bolts, and a heavy hybrid can crack a stone wall if you let it batter the same spot four or five times."
— "Even so, they are still made of flesh and bone," — Roland reasoned aloud, his fingers drumming against the supply ledger. — "Kinematics and materials science don't disappear just because an animal is large."
— "Precisely," — Arthur agreed. — "A concentrated volley of high-caliber lead to the eyes, a heavy repeating rifle, or a crate of buried black powder will still turn them into minced meat. Their true danger isn't supernatural invincibility; it is their sheer, exhausting mass and the psychological terror they inflict on ordinary soldiers."
Roland frowned slightly, leaning forward over the desk. — "And what about the root cause behind all of it? Why does this 'miasma' only surge out of the northern range during the four months of winter? Why does it mutate forest animals while leaving humans untouched?"
Arthur let out a quiet breath, a rare flash of genuine frustration crossing his composed features.
— "To be honest, Your Highness, even with my... privileged access to information, the exact biological trigger of the winter miasma remains locked behind a curtain we haven't reached yet," — Arthur admitted. — "We know the source lies far to the north beyond the Impassable Mountain Range, tied to the ancient history of the demons. However, the precise cellular chemistry of the gas is something even our 'records' didn't fully dissect."
A heavy, contemplative silence settled over the medieval office, broken only by the whistling wind outside and the pop of resin in the fireplace.
Arthur looked down at the spread of charcoal blueprints on the desk—drawings that used modern orthographic projection and metric tolerances—and then up at the exhausted young prince sitting across from him.
For nearly four weeks, the three of them had danced around the obvious truth. In the dungeons, in the dining hall, and in the courtyard, there had always been guards, bureaucrats, or an invisible assassin listening from the shadows. Now, with Carter down at the barracks, Barov buried in town hall ledgers, and Nightingale down at the kilns with Anna, the two of them were completely alone.
Feeling an unexpected, quiet ache for a world that no longer existed, Arthur decided it was finally time to put down the heavy shield of their cover story.
— "Roland," — Arthur said softly, dropping the formal courtly cadence completely. — "There is nobody else in this wing right now. I don't think we need to keep pretending that William and I found a pair of waterproof encyclopedias in the Fjord Islands anymore."
Roland's hand froze on the edge of the parchment. Slowly, the Prince raised his head, his gray eyes locking onto Arthur's.
Arthur looked straight into the engineer's soul and spoke a single word in their true, native tongue:
— "Earth."
For three full seconds, Cheng Yan didn't breathe.
— "Earth..." — Roland whispered back, testing the shape of the word on his tongue as though he hadn't spoken it aloud in a hundred years.
As he stared across the oak desk at Arthur, the stoic, commanding mask of the Fourth Prince of Graycastle melted away completely, leaving only a tired, bewildered man sitting in a foreign body thousands of light-years from home.
— "I knew it," — Roland breathed, letting out a long, shaky exhale that seemed to carry the accumulated tension of two lifetimes. — "From the first afternoon at the castle gates, when I saw the CNC-machined steel of your wristwatch and the industrial stitching on your shirts, I knew that story about the Kingdom of Dawn was a smokescreen. I tried a dozen times to fit the two of you into the logic of this world, wondering if there was another transmigrator ruling a kingdom across the sea... yet to finally hear you say it out loud. You really are from home. From our home."
Arthur nodded slowly, feeling an unexpected tightness in his own throat.
— "You have no idea what a relief it is to drop that act, even for ten minutes," — Arthur admitted, leaning back and rubbing his temples. — "Spending the last month pretending to be an aristocratic count—measuring every single word in front of Carter and Nightingale so we don't sound like lunatics or get dissected as heretics—has been more exhausting than auditing a bankrupt corporation."
— "That explains practically everything," — Roland said, a wry, understanding smile touching his lips as he folded his hands over the maps. — "The way you naturally grasp assembly-line standardization, your instinctive revulsion for feudal inefficiency, the modern corporate metrics in your ledgers... and, in William's case, his total refusal to bow to royal etiquette."
Roland's smile faded slightly, replaced by a look of pragmatic concern as he glanced toward the door.
— "He came over with you from the same place, I assume?" — Roland asked. — "Yesterday morning, Carter mentioned the two of you had a rather explosive argument in the gallery before William went down and tore eight armored traitors apart in the granary tunnel with his bare hands."
Arthur winced slightly, the brief smile vanishing from his face as he remembered the bitter confrontation in the hallway.
— "Yes. Both of us are from South America—Brazil, to be exact," — Arthur confirmed, running a hand through his dark hair. — "We were best friends back home, sitting in the same living room when we were pulled into this place. Yet despite coming from the exact same sofa, the two of us brought completely different worldviews across the threshold. My background in corporate management taught me that wars are won through logistics, industrial output, and statistical probability. Whereas William..."
— "He thinks he's the protagonist inside an anime," — Roland finished dryly, the perceptive engineer immediately connecting the dots. — "A young guy thrown into a fantasy world with special powers. He doesn't view Border Town as a fragile socioeconomic survival crisis; he views it as a hero's journey where he has to save everyone within arm's reach."
— "Spot on," — Arthur sighed, shaking his head in exasperation. — "Without going into the complex mechanics of how our crossing altered our bodies... let's just say William and I were granted a strictly limited 'budget' that we could either invest in technical treatises or personal physical enhancement. Yesterday morning, right before our argument, that idiot behind my back and dumped his entire reserve into raw, superhuman muscle density. He decided that instead of waiting for factories, he wants to be the front-line meat shield for your soldiers and the witches."
Roland closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, letting out a low groan. Suddenly, the headaches caused by Assistant Minister Barov and the illiterate stonemasons felt like child's play.
— "In a medieval death world where mutated hybrid beasts weigh two tons and winter blizzards freeze iron brittle, your friend decided his best strategy was to punch monsters in the face," — Roland muttered. — "Considering he saved our entire winter grain supply last night, I can't deny the results... It is brave, and undeniably noble, Arthur. However, from an engineering standpoint, it is also borderline suicidal."
— "Which is precisely why I lost my temper with him yesterday, and why I apologized to him last night," — Arthur said quietly, his voice earnest as he leaned forward across the desk. — "I can't change who William is, Roland. If a nineteen-year-old guard is about to get skewered in the dark, or if witches are freezing in the mountains, William is going to throw himself into the fire every single time. And that is why the work you and I are doing in this room is so critical. If he is going to play the invincible hero out there in the mud, then you and I have to build a wall of steel, concrete, and high-velocity gunpowder strong enough to make sure he—and everyone he's trying to protect—actually survives the winter."
Roland opened his eyes. The deep physical fatigue was still etched into the dark circles beneath his gaze, yet behind them burned a steady, renewed flame—the unmistakable solidarity of fellow castaways sharing the same lifeboat in a hostile ocean.
— "Sometimes," — Roland said, his voice dropping into a quieter, nostalgic register as a small smile tugged at his mouth, — "I look out at that forest and wish we were dealing with the kind of problems I used to read about in comic books during my rare breaks at the university. Honestly, if William's 'enhancement' had given him a Spirit Gun instead of just dense muscles, our defensive math would be a lot simpler. A single Reigun off the parapet would clear a path straight to the mountain peaks."
Arthur blinked, a look of genuine confusion crossing his clinical features.
— "A Spirit Gun?" — Arthur repeated slowly. — "You mean some kind of pneumatic or mana-compressed firearm? It's an interesting concept for a future prototype, Roland, though without Anna mastering high-pressure seamless steel tubing—"
— "No, Arthur, I mean the Reigun," — Roland interrupted with a laugh, raising his right hand and pointing his index finger like a pistol with his thumb cocked upright. — "From Yu Yu Hakusho! Come on, don't tell me a guy whose best friend is an anime fanatic doesn't know Yusuke Urameshi? The teenage delinquent who dies in chapter one and becomes a Spirit Detective? It was the biggest show on television when I was in school."
Arthur stared at the Prince's pointing finger, tilting his head slightly as a strange, faint wave of cognitive dissonance washed over him.
— "Wait... Yu Yu Hakusho?" — Arthur frowned. — "I mean, I know of it because William likes retro classics, and the theme song is famous in Brazil... yet why would you bring up an antique from the nineties when there are much more obvious examples? When you talked about clearing a battlefield, my mind went straight to Naruto—if we had a few hundred Shadow Clones pouring cement, Karl wouldn't be losing his hair. Or a Logia Devil Fruit from One Piece so Anna could turn into pure fire like Ace."
Now it was Roland's turn to stare across the desk in complete bewilderment.
His pointing finger lowered slowly back to the wood as his brow furrowed.
— "Naruto? One Piece?" — Roland repeated, testing the unfamiliar foreign syllables. — "What are those? Are they some kind of niche Western comic books that only aired in South America?"
Arthur froze in his chair.
For two seconds, the only sound in the study was the crackle of the hearth. A strange, creeping realization began to dawn at the back of Arthur's Intelligence 14 mind.
Ever since the afternoon at the gallows, Arthur had known that Prince Roland was possessed by the soul of Cheng Yan, a modern mechanical engineer from Earth. Because they were both young men in their twenties, Arthur had unconsciously assumed that Cheng Yan had been pulled from the same modern world he and William had left behind.
He had never stopped to ask when the original novel had been written—or when Cheng Yan had died.
— "Roland... Cheng Yan," — Arthur said slowly, his voice dropping to a quiet, careful murmur. — "I need to ask you a very specific question. Back on Earth... what year was it when you died?"
Roland leaned back against his chair, his gray eyes drifting up toward the timber ceiling beams as if trying to focus on a distant, fading dream.
— "It was 1998," — Roland said softly. — "Late autumn of 1998. I was twenty-four years old, working seventy-hour weeks at a mechanical design institute to finish a project deadline before my heart gave out at my drafting table. Why? Did something major happen to the animation industry after '98?"
Arthur almost choked on his own breath.
Staring across the medieval desk at the young prince, Arthur felt a surreal wave of chronological vertigo—before a quiet, astonished laugh escaped his chest.
— "Nineteen ninety-eight... My God," — Arthur whispered, shaking his head in disbelief as he looked at Roland with entirely new eyes. — "You're practically from my father's generation, Cheng Yan. I wasn't even alive when you died. I was born in 2004, and William was born in 2006. When the television screen in our living room pulled us into this world, the calendar on Earth was 2028."
Roland's jaw dropped half an inch.
For five full seconds, the silence inside the stone office was absolute.
— "Two thousand and twenty-eight...?" — Roland breathed, his eyes widening as his mind calculated the thirty-year gulf between their lives. — "You mean the two of you aren't just from another continent on Earth... you're literally thirty years from my future?! You grew up in the twenty-first century?!"
— "Thirty years after you closed your eyes at that drafting table," — Arthur confirmed, a genuine, boyish smile finally breaking through his stoic facade at the sheer absurdity of their situation.
They were two ghosts from different centuries of Earth, sitting across from each other in a fifteenth-century feudal castle.
— "No wonder you didn't recognize Naruto," — Arthur chuckled. — "The manga hadn't even started serialization when you passed away, and the anime didn't air until 2002. You missed the entire digital revolution, Roland. By 2028, nobody used paper maps, film cameras, or fax machines anymore. We carried pocket-sized glass computers called smartphones that held the entire sum of human knowledge on wireless high-speed networks, and Artificial Intelligence was already writing code and analyzing corporate spreadsheets."
Roland let out a dry, self-deprecating laugh, rubbing the back of his neck as he stared at the younger man who was technically thirty years his junior, yet thirty years ahead of him in history.
— "And here I thought I was a cutting-edge modern man because my design institute had just upgraded from manual drafting boards to Windows 95 desktops that took five minutes to boot up," — Roland said, shaking his head with a wry grin. — "In 1998, high technology to me was carrying a digital pager on my belt and renting VHS tapes or reading bootleg manga volumes at the corner shop after a twelve-hour shift."
— "Wait—don't sell 1998 short," — Arthur said, his smile turning into a look of profound, genuine respect as a crucial piece of the puzzle clicked into place inside his head. — "In fact, realizing you're an engineer from the late nineties explains something I've been marveling at for three weeks."
Roland raised an eyebrow. — "What's that?"
— "Why your practical engineering knowledge is so terrifyingly solid," — Arthur said, gesturing toward the hand-drawn schematics of the double-acting steam engine and the Bessemer blast furnace sitting on the corner of the desk. — "Think about it, Roland. William and I grew up in an era where information was outsourced to the internet. If a twenty-first-century engineer needed a specific thermodynamic coefficient, a chemical titration ratio, or a structural load formula, they didn't memorize it—they typed it into a search engine or let a CAD program calculate the stress tolerances automatically."
Arthur leaned forward, tapping his knuckle lightly against Roland's charcoal blueprints.
— "If you threw an average twenty-four-year-old from 2028 into the Middle Ages without a smartphone or a System shop, they would panic within an hour because the 'cloud' isn't here to think for them," — Arthur pointed out. — "Yet because you were trained in the nineties—right at the tail end of the analog mechanical era—you actually had to memorize the foundational physics, metallurgy, and industrial chemistry inside your own skull. You are building an industrial revolution from scratch because your generation still knew how to build things with pencil and paper."
Roland looked down at his ink-stained hands, pausing for a beat as Arthur's words sank in.
— "When you are a junior engineer in 1998, Arthur, there is no safety net," — Roland replied quietly, a glint of quiet pride warming his gray eyes. — "You learn to trust your reference manuals and your own brain, because you either know the exact equation by heart, or the boiler explodes."
Roland picked up his goose quill again, spinning the feather lightly between his fingers as he looked back up at Arthur.
— "Still, those old nineties stories I watched on cathode-ray televisions did more than just pass the time," — Roland added softly. — "During my first few days in this body, when I saw the gallows and realized what kind of superstitious hellhole I had woken up in, remembering characters like Goku in Dragon Ball—who never gave up no matter how many times he was beaten into the dirt—or Ranma ½, which taught me that people and situations can change in the blink of an eye, kept me from losing my mind. Though I will admit... now you've made me curious about what I missed in those thirty years."
— "Tell you what," — Arthur said, leaning back and uncrossing his legs as the last trace of the previous day's stress finally left his shoulders. — "Once we finish smashing the winter horde and get the steam engines running at full capacity in the spring, we'll open a bottle of wine and I'll tell you the entire story of Naruto from start to finish. It's about an outcast kid with a demon fox sealed inside his stomach who refuses to give up until he changes his entire world. Somehow, I think you'll relate to him."
— "It's a deal, Count Arthur," — Roland said, his eyes shining with the rarest expression in Border Town: a carefree, genuine smile. — "Now, bring your twenty-first-century brain over here and help this nineties relic balance the winter coal distribution for the barracks. If we don't optimize the stove allocation before the blizzards hit next week, all our futuristic strategies won't mean a thing because our riflemen's fingers will be too frozen to pull the triggers."
— "Right away, Your Highness," — Arthur chuckled, pulling his chair closer to the desk and reaching for a fresh sheet of parchment.
Outside the tall stone windows, the first real snowstorm of the season began to swirl across the dark rooftops of Border Town, heralding the imminent arrival of the Months of the Demons.
Yet inside the warm, candle-lit study on the third floor, as the two men worked late into the night accompanied only by the rhythmic scratching of quills and the occasional quiet mention of a planet lost across time and space, the crushing weight of the crown felt lighter on Roland's head than it ever had before.
For the first time since opening his eyes in Graycastle, Cheng Yan knew he wasn't carrying the memory of Earth alone.