Red Eagle Fortress stood in the Kingdom of Mokoto, located at the extreme north of Featherland.
Mokoto had once been part of Mayedisa.
The land was mostly plains and cold.
Its north was vast and sparsely populated, and the local character was fierce.
To outsiders, it seemed that only those with true strength could earn the respect of the locals.
“Getting from here to Klijin is rather inconvenient,” said old steward Mova beside Eve, stretching out a rough hand and pointing at a spot on the map. “The fastest road is this one. Here… we’ll need to cross the Tianxia River. Our carriage won’t be usable then. We’ll have to find another one on the far side after the crossing. Then there’s this stretch. This forest is huge. We’ll need to go around the outside, or take the marching gorge through Sunlight Valley. The road there will be easier, but we might run into some dangerous beasts…”
“Find a steadier one. I’m not in a hurry,” Eve said quickly.
“Lady Eve, we should still take the marching gorge,” a youth suggested from the other side.
“We Modesans aren’t afraid of those beasts and bandits. You just enjoy the journey in peace. Leave all the trouble to us.”
The youth’s name was Bowenros Berklin.
He was seventeen this year, at an age that feared neither heaven nor earth.
Like his general father Cregov, Bowenros also had a sharply defined face, but his jaw was not as wide as his father’s.
Though that made him look a little less steady, it added a bit of the heroic air unique to youths.
His attitude toward Eve was respectful yet mixed with suspicion.
Bowenros was not like his father’s generation, who dared not harbor the slightest doubt the moment they heard Harvin’s great name—he had the sensitive mind that belonged to the young.
Eve’s visit had stirred every person of name in Red Eagle Fortress.
When Bowenros heard of the matter, he learned the detailed course of events from his father’s mouth.
He immediately proposed to his father that he act as a guard and accompany Eve to Klijin.
Cregov felt the request both accorded with propriety and would let Bowenros grow in experience at a personage’s side, so he agreed.
This morning, when Bowenros first laid eyes on Eve, he was genuinely a little disappointed.
This soft and frail little girl still seemed to be savoring last night’s sweet dreams.
Even now she looked muddled.
She was so lax and delicate she looked completely like a green little girl who still smelled of milk.
But Bowenros did not show this contempt.
Though he, like his father, had grown up under Barnbaros’s instruction, he was far sharper than his father.
Because of that, he always maintained respect and humility toward strangers and could carefully follow what he had been taught.
Although he did not yet fully understand the reasoning, he understood that doing so was always better than being scolded afterward by someone.
They set out at once.
There were seven people traveling with Eve to Klijin: one coachman, two of Cregov’s personal guards, Bowenros, and his three guards.
By rights, escorting someone of this status should not have involved sending only so few guards.
But Cregov and Barnbaros had on one hand overestimated Eve’s ability to protect herself, and on the other had wrongly taken her “as soon as possible” to mean she wanted to travel light.
Eve, for her part, happened to lack understanding of all common sense, so of course she raised no objection.
In the end the escort party became only a token.
Although every member of the party was of no mean strength, without the pomp of a personage’s departure there was, after all, little deterrence against those with ill intent.
The convoy had only one carriage, drawn by three sturdy highland horses.
The coachman drove.
Bowenros and Eve rode in the carriage.
The five guards each rode endurance Golan warhorses distributed around the carriage, and one of them led an extra horse prepared for Bowenros.
Some supplies were placed in two two-wheeled trailers pulled in turn by several horses.
They set out not long after the sun rose in the morning.
In early spring the road conditions were still fairly good.
Less than two days after departure, Eve reached the first city within Mokoto, which counted as leaving the sparsely inhabited borderlands.
Although Bowenros and Eve sat in the same carriage, the two of them had not talked much.
Eve wanted to learn about this world, yet did not know how to ask without making people suspicious.
She was cautious by nature, or more precisely, timid and afraid of trouble.
Before leaving she had even asked old steward Mova for a few books, saying she wanted to read them on the road to pass the time.
But when she opened the books she was dumbfounded—she could not read the writing in them.
She could only tell that it might be a phonetic script.
Then the question arose: how had Eve understood and spoken a language the locals could understand?
Before looking at the books she had not even realized this: what she spoke did not seem to be the language she had brought from the other world, nor was it a new language.
It was more like the direct expression of thought—that is, the words she wanted to say were automatically translated and conveyed to the other party, and vice versa.
Eve lifted her head and looked toward the opposite corner of the carriage.
Bowenros sat there.
The youth with the brown buzz cut was at this moment leaning against the carriage with his eyes closed to rest, his mouth seeming to mutter something silently.
“Bowenros?” Eve called tentatively in a light voice.
“You called.” Bowenros’s eyes snapped open. He sat up straight and looked at Eve with a compliant expression.
“What language do you think… I’m speaking?” She could not hold back the curiosity in her heart and finally asked the question she had wrestled with for a long time.
“What language?” Bowenros blankly scratched the back of his head. “Isn’t it Modesan?”
“How is my speaking?” she asked again.
“Very good, like speaking a mother tongue.” Bowenros nodded quickly.
“Then I’ll say a few words. See if you can understand.”
“All right. Please speak.” Bowenros swallowed, seeming a little nervous.
“Automobile,” Eve said.
Bowenros’s eyes lit up. “Is it a vehicle similar to a carriage? But I’ve never seen one.”
“More or less.” Hearing Bowenros’s answer, Eve was very surprised in her heart. Then she said the next word: “Next—airplane.”
“A machine that can fly…” Bowenros was a little puzzled. “Can it really be done with machinery alone?”
“Plato.”
“Seems to be a thinker from some ancient city-state?”
Eve grew more and more surprised.
“Yuantuo.”
“An edible plant with a special fragrance? Should be a bit like sailgrass?”
She had meant coriander, but had deliberately said a wrong character.
Yet the other party could still understand clearly and without error, as if the spoken words were only an aid to conveying thought, and the difference in the sound itself was of no urgency.
“Cell phone.”
This time Bowenros opened his mouth but could not answer.
He said a little dejectedly, “I seem able to understand the meaning in your words, but I can’t say what that thing is… How did you do it? Expressing it so specifically with only one word. Could this be a wondrous use of magic?”
It could annotate the speaker’s expression, yet could not make the listener accept an understanding that surpassed their common knowledge.
“Something like that,” Eve answered perfunctorily.
Clearly she had noticed she was expressing a form of communication finer and more accurate than language, as if expressing thought itself.
What on earth was this?
Was it a talent Ivetrona possessed, or was it…
She thought of Harvin, of that strange accent when he spoke.
Had he been speaking Chinese then?
Something suddenly occurred to her.
She reached out, hooked a cord from below her neck, and drew out from her bosom an ancient bronze coin that still held body heat.
Is it this thing? Eve thought, frowning.
Why could technology of this degree be realized so easily in a magic world?
If evaluated by the technological level of her former world, this bronze coin was at least a device that could only be invented after the appearance of strong artificial intelligence or even super artificial intelligence.
Yet from what she had seen so far, the Kingdom of Mokoto still seemed to be at a medieval level of civilization.
So—where had this unconventional equipment come from?
Could magic really do as it pleased?
If she had not truly crossed into this world and witnessed it with her own eyes, Eve would never have thought about how a magic world stripped of mysticism and natural-religion elements ought to achieve self-consistency in a logical way.
But now she had indeed crossed.
When this world most likely was not a dream or a fictional world, then how to understand and live in this world became the problem Eve needed to face.
She wanted to understand first, then decide whether to use the rational thinking she had once been accustomed to in dealing with everything that might happen in the future.
Bowenros looked at Eve in thought and wiped the sweat from his head.
The unknown was undoubtedly frightening.
Just now, from only a stretch of conversation, Bowenros had already felt how unfathomable Eve was.
He even worried a little that the other party had in fact long since sensed the disrespectful thoughts he had earlier, and had simply not said them aloud.
So he could only sit there dryly with a guilty heart, exactly like a devout believer in the midst of confession.
But the silence between the two did not last long.
They heard laughing and shouting from the guards.
Bowenros opened the carriage window to look and only then learned that someone had hunted a deer.
An arrow was in the deer’s neck.
The arrow had stabbed slantwise from the back of the neck into the deer’s head, the tip piercing out from the chin, seeming to have hit the brainstem.
This gray deer had not completely lost its vitality.
Its hind legs were still straining to leap and flee, but its body could no longer keep balance and could only lie on its side on the withered grass, spinning in place around its head like a top.
The temperature in early spring was not high.
Hot vapor rose from the deer’s torn wound and from its mouth and nose toward midair, and the brown-yellow grass blades beneath it had also been smeared a stretch of dark red.
Eve saw this scene and felt a little uncomfortable, yet could not help looking.
A short guard swung down from his horse and, amid the laughter and shouting of the crowd, ran toward the dying deer.
He seized the chance, gripped one of the deer’s hind legs with his right hand, then pulled back and thrust a dagger into a certain spot on the inner side of the deer’s opened front leg.
Then the deer stopped moving completely.
The short one’s name was Golusido.
He was a skilled hand at horseback archery.
Golusido split the deer’s belly open on the spot, his expression serious and solemn, his mouth seeming to mutter some words that could not be heard clearly.
He cut out the viscera with the dagger and tossed them in piles toward the roadside shrubs that had just sprouted new buds.
Then he grabbed a few handfuls of grass blades and wiped the blood from his hands and the venison.
He tossed the processed boned venison and the deer hide into the trailer behind the warhorse.
Before long the convoy continued onward.
Eve stared at that trailer for a while, as if she could smell the bloody scent rising from it.
“Golusido used to be a hunter in a local small tribe. That tribe didn’t farm. Almost every man was a skilled hunter, and this fellow was the most formidable among them.”
Bowenros thought Eve was looking at the man on the horse, so he introduced him to her.
“Besides boiling in water, do you have any other ways of cooking?” Eve suddenly asked.
Ever since she had eaten the pan-fried Xiongbai meat Harvin made on the snowy mountain, she had been missing that scorched, rich flavor.
After arriving at Red Eagle Fortress she had eaten only salt-boiled meat in plain water for several days, so she felt quite helpless inside.
“How would you like to eat it?” Bowenros asked.
“Roast, fry, deep-fry, anything is fine. Even if it’s boiled in water, at least put in some side dishes and seasonings.”
“I understand.” Bowenros heard the complaint in Eve’s words. He explained, “These people all come from frontier military backgrounds. They’re used to eating in the wind and sleeping in the open. They never pass food over their tongues. And we didn’t consider that you would eat with us. Actually you should have reminded us to bring a cook.”
“What do you mean? Is there a problem with eating with you?”
Hearing him say this, Eve felt a little baffled.
“Someone of your realm… can completely go without eating, right?”
Bowenros felt equally baffled by Eve’s question.
“What realm?” Eve asked again.
“Just—a realm like Harvin’s…”
“What realm is Harvin?”
“It’s… I don’t really understand either… probably the realm of not needing to eat.” Bowenros felt hollow inside from being questioned.
“But he does have to eat.” Eve frowned and touched her shoulder bag—otherwise why would Harvin have brought so much dry rations up the mountain?
“Then maybe I got it wrong.” Bowenros was finally shaken by her questions.
That evening they made roast meat.
Several people gathered in front of the campfire, all staring eagerly as the venison turned above the flames, sizzling.
Oil beads seeped from the half-charred meat, boiling and dripping into the firewood.
Bowenros personally took the field at this moment, gripping the wooden stick that served as a spit and turning it slowly.
Seeing the heat was about right, he cut a small piece of meat from the deer leg and put it in his mouth, only to be scalded until he bared his teeth.
He puffed and said, “About right.”
So everyone together lifted the half deer with bones from the temporary roasting rack, divided it with daggers, and seeing that the inside still had blood and was not fully cooked through, they cut off the outer half-charred cooked meat into a basin, then frantically set the rest back to continue roasting.
Someone produced a white porcelain plate from somewhere, sliced a piece of venison that looked presentable, plated it, and sent it before Eve.
For this group of coarse men who had not seen the world, this counted as decent.
Eve had been sitting the whole time on the carriage shaft, her shoulder against the front side of the carriage box, watching this group fumble about.
She could not personally take a hand, and because of her status it was inconvenient to point and criticize them.
She could only sit a little farther away and fret dryly.
After seeing that the finished product they brought over looked decent and the aroma was tempting, she felt relieved inside.
She carelessly rolled up the hem of the cloak on her legs, revealing the white skirt hem beneath, set the plate on her legs, yet for a long time no one brought eating utensils.
“Bowen—” she called in a small voice, a little embarrassed.
This sound was buried in the noisy shouting of the crowd, yet Bowenros miraculously heard it.
He turned his head.
His handsome face was dusty, his forehead covered in sweat.
He stood up, sidestepped the several people beside him, and walked before Eve.
The girl lifted her head and looked at him, pointed at the plate on her legs, then spread her hands.
Under the sunset, the girl’s azure pupils seemed as clear as gems.
She wore a faint smile that did not quite seem like a smile.
On this delicate face with little expression, it was hard to guess what she was thinking, yet her eyes seemed able to speak, like a faint light leaking from deliberate restraint.
Bowenros stared blankly into her eyes for a few seconds like that, then realized what she wanted.
He first walked a circle in place, then felt over his body, drew a sheathed pocket dagger from the wristband on his forearm, and handed it to Eve.
“Uncle Ba gave this to me. I’ve basically never used it. It’s very clean,” he explained.
Eve saw the dagger was far too exquisite and instinctively did not quite want to use it.
Her gaze swept and she saw dining forks stored in iron tubes not far away, so she pointed with her hand.
“Those have all been used by them. Not suitable.” Bowenros drew the dagger from its sheath, stuck it into a piece of roast meat, and said, “You need not stand on ceremony.”
Eve watched Bowenros leave, then put her attention on the roast meat before her.
She picked out a piece with the knife and sent it into her mouth.
A faint salty taste paired with the scorched aroma of the meat.
It was still all right just after entering the mouth, but once she started chewing she discovered the meat was both dry and hard, tough as a wad of rag.
No matter how she chewed it remained a lump.
This meal of roast meat ended amid the silent chewing of the crowd.
After tasting it, everyone lost some interest.
Hunter-born Golusido covered his jaw and complained that the young master’s skill was too poor, yet did not mention at all that he himself had been pointing and criticizing from the side just now.
Short-haired Bowenros scratched the back of his head in shame, yet had a good-natured temper that did not take offense.
That night Eve lay alone in the carriage box, yet was too ashamed to fall asleep.
Although this dinner had been ruined, no one blamed her willfulness, blamed her for wasting half a deer—but things could not stand being thought over.
She buried her face in the fluffy hat and tossed and turned all night in the cramped carriage.