Luo Feng smiled gently at the two girls, his young face calm and kind under the dappled sunlight filtering through the trees. "Can you take me to the village?" he asked. "I have been walking alone for a long time. It would be good to see people again."
Miya glanced at Luna, then nodded slowly, still holding her water pot tightly. "Okay," she said. "Come with us. It's not far."
The three of them started walking along the river path toward Eden Village, Luo Feng keeping a respectful distance behind the girls so they would not feel uneasy. The forest thinned as they went, and for the first time in three months his steps felt lighter.
"What kind of village is it?" he asked after a short silence, his voice warm with genuine curiosity.
Miya answered without turning around, her long black hair swaying as she walked. "It's a small village. About two hundred people—men, women, children, and elders. We're poor… really poor. Sometimes when the crops fail we eat grass that's edible, just to fill our stomachs. It keeps us alive, but it's not much."
Luo Feng's heart tightened. He looked sad, the same quiet sorrow he once felt when a monsoon ruined his own fields back in Churachandpur. "Didn't the kingdom help you?" he asked softly.
Luna shook her head. "It's three months' walk from the Dragon Kingdom to our village. They don't send soldiers or supplies. The king and the mages are too busy with their own troubles—the Demon King, the heroes they summoned… So we, the village people, try our best to survive on our own."
Luo Feng stayed quiet for a moment, then asked another question, his farmer's heart already turning toward solutions. "Don't you farm? Plant crops?"
Miya sighed, her voice heavy. "We did. We tried everything. But more than half the plants always die. There are these strange bugs that come every season—black, swarming things that eat the roots and leaves. We don't know what to do. We burn the fields sometimes, but they come back stronger. The soil is tired too."
Luo Feng's face grew even sadder as they walked. He could already picture it: small wooden huts, thin children, tired elders, fields half-wilted under the same sun that had once warmed his own maize back home. Yet inside his chest, the practical farmer who had survived a bull through the heart and three months in a monster forest was already thinking—Appraisal skill. Storage Bag full of rare herbs, monster-ward thistles, healing blooms. Mithril and adamantite worth a fortune. I can help… but I must be careful. No one can know where I really came from.
He said nothing more about it for now. Instead he walked beside them in silence, the river murmuring beside the path, the trees slowly giving way to open fields and the distant smoke of cooking fires.
Up ahead, the wooden gates of Eden Village came into view—simple, patched with vines, guarded by two thin young men with old spears. Smoke rose from rooftops. Children played in the dirt. The air smelled of woodsmoke and boiled grass.
Miya pointed. "That's home," she said quietly. "Welcome to Eden Village, Luo Feng."
Luo Feng nodded, his handsome young face still carrying that gentle, determined look. He had crossed a world, died once, and walked through hell. Now, for the first time since the goddess had thrown him away, he felt something like purpose stirring in his chest.