"Kent's too honest for his own good. Master Hallman gave him another thrashing. Poor lad..."
"Aye, what do you expect? He's an orphan and the lowest sort of slave there is. Now Hallman will surely send him up to the horse ranch in the back hills, to take the punishment meant for his own nephew."
"Right, right. The back hills are full of wild beasts, and the food's barely worth eating. And if the master's horses get thin or go missing, why, the groom's as good as dead. Still, if the master were home, Hallman wouldn't dare do it. The master's a knight, after all."
"Shh! Hallman's mind is no bigger than a field mouse's eye. If he hears you, he'll find some excuse to come down on you too. And best call him 'Master' — he likes that."
Two ragged, skinny men whispered in the corner of the yard. Not far ahead of them stretched an enormous enclosure—more like a school track than a courtyard. Inside it stood two men and one stout, proud-faced old woman. The shorter of the two men, thin and dressed in coarse linen, was the steward Hallman the servants had been gossiping about. The other, clad in light armor, was Torry, the constable of the castle and the village, who also served as captain of the guard. The fat old woman wore a haughty expression and clearly outranked them both.
"Madam Alia," Hallman said, bending low with a fawning smile, "I caught Kent red-handed stealing bread in the bakery. By the rules, he should have a hand cut off." His tone was pleasant enough, but the words sent a chill through anyone who heard them.
"Humph." Torry knew Kent's character well. The boy was sixteen, had grown up in the castle, and was the meekest, most timid soul you could imagine. He would never steal bread. This was plainly another scheme cooked up by the old fox Hallman. But such small matters were beneath Torry's notice—a slave wasn't worth his concern, not when he could spend the time thinking about how to charm the barmaid at the village tavern instead. His "humph" was simply his way of showing disdain for Hallman's petty ways.
"Must you drag me all the way back from Harri for a thing like this?" the plump old woman demanded. "Don't you know the young lady needs me waiting on her hand and foot? I was miles away, and you called me back for this?" Alia was dressed more richly than Hallman, but when the flesh of her face trembled, it shook off a flurry of snow-white dandruff.
"Madam Alia, with the master away at his service, you're the one in charge. I wouldn't dare make such a decision on my own." Hallman hurried to flatter her, his face oozing with sycophantic smiles.
"Very well. Since Kent has done wrong, we'll go by the rules. But the master is a knight, and he always tells us to be merciful. So we'll sentence Kent to watch over the horses in the back hills. He may come back to town once every three months. That's settled. Now, the young lady is still waiting for the vegetable salad I made with my own hands." With that, Alia swept toward the gate, where a carriage stood waiting in the yard, something that looked like a greatsword strapped to its side.
"Madam Alia! Oh, Madam Alia!" Hallman scurried after her, still fawning. "The hunters in town brought in a blue fox a few days ago—I'll have the pelt sent to your rooms right away."
"Oh? A blue fox? Well, thank you kindly." Alia paused, and a smile spread across her vast, wrinkled face. It was a ghastly sight—so awful that even Hallman flinched. But then he remembered that Alia was the master's closest confidante, and the young lady's official guardian besides, so he swallowed the bile rising in his throat and kept smiling.
"Alright, lads," Torry shouted once the others had gone, "drag this one back and patch him up. When we send supplies to the back hills in a few days, we'll take him along." With that, he strolled toward the gate. Two guards in leather armor, greatswords strapped to their backs, hauled Kent behind the castle, dumped him in the little room he used to live in, and swaggered off. As for the promised healing—there was no sign of it at all.
"Ow... ow!" Kent slowly came to, the pain in his backside making him hiss through clenched teeth.
"Good heavens above! Mother Earth below! How did I get so unlucky? All I did was eat a piece of bread—and the cheapest black bread at that!—and they gave me a beating like this. Ow! Where the hell am I? I was playing games for three days and three nights straight. We'd just captured the enemy base when my head spun, and I fell asleep on my desk. But everyone here is dressed like they're from old Europe... Wait. Is this... a transmigration? Me—Arthur, handsome and clever, a decent guy? I never did much good, sure, but I never did any real harm either. Why would I be the one transmigrated? I want to go home. I want my games—my beloved military war game. I want to read web novels. I want to argue on forums. Ow! I just want to go back to being a shut-in! Well, at least my backside is only swollen. In the old days, if you bled, there'd be a nine-in-ten chance of infection and death."
Kent lay on the bed, complaining with all his might.
It turned out that Kent hadn't actually dared to steal food at all. The real culprit was Arthur—a shut-in from Earth who spent three hundred days a year hunched over a computer. When he woke up and opened his eyes, there was a pile of bread right in front of him. The loaves looked dark and unappealing, but the smell of fresh bread was unmistakable. Still half-dazed, Arthur grabbed one and took a huge bite. The bread was coarse and gritty in his mouth, so terrible that he was about to spit it out—but before he could, a few burly hands seized him and gave him a thorough beating. That was when Arthur fainted, quite spectacularly, from the pain. You have to understand, this was a guy who was terrified of needles; he'd rather pay a hundred dollars for pills than take a ten-dollar injection. As it happened, Arthur had actually regained consciousness while the bigwigs were still debating what to do with him, but he didn't dare sit up, so he just kept playing dead. It took every ounce of willpower to lie there silently. The moment the two guards left, the boy started howling.
Once the pain had dulled a little, wouldn't you know it—the first thing Arthur did was check out his own appearance. He ran his fingers through his coarse, unruly hair and studied his reflection in a bucket of water. "Not bad," he muttered. "Must be over six feet tall, even if I am a bit skinny. And this face—wow. Sharply chiseled features, a clean jawline, high brow ridges, a straight, sculpted nose. thick lashes, and eyes carrying just the right touch of aloofness and fragility. Damn, I've even got abs!" Arthur went on admiring himself like a runway model, completely forgetting that he was a slave, not a piece of eye candy.
Then he turned his mind to a much more serious question: exactly what era had he landed in? Unfortunately, Kent's memories were frustratingly sparse. All the boy knew was that this was Terry Town, and that the castle belonged to Lord Terry, a great knight. Beyond that, there was the scheming Hallman, the guard captain Torry, and that stout woman Alia. Everyone else was just small fry around town. The last memory was of a provocatively dressed woman who seemed to be the local tavern keeper—and Kent had only seen her once, because he didn't have a single coin to his name, and setting foot in a tavern required gold. That was just about all Kent's memory had to offer.
Arthur tried to wring out more details, but he soon realized that a place matching these clues could be found anywhere in medieval Europe. The only keywords that mattered were "knight" and "gold coins." If he'd had Google, he could have narrowed it down among hundreds of thousands of search results. As it was, he had exactly zero leads. To make matters worse, he sadly discovered that he couldn't even run away. Kent was a slave, not a hired servant. A servant at least pocketed a small wage; a slave owned nothing and got nothing. If he had a single gold coin, Arthur mused, he could at least date it and figure out the era. After all, this shut-in had accumulated a mountain of knowledge—the natural byproduct of countless hours online. His expertise ranged from the basic structure of an aircraft carrier (the rough outline, anyway, not the detailed blueprints, those were top secret), to the mechanics of firearms, all the way down to how a nail clipper was forged. It was classic half-baked knowledge. Talking to someone who knew nothing, he could rant on and on until their head spun. But face a real expert, and all he could do was laugh it off with a sheepish "ha-ha."
What comforted Arthur, though, was that the boy whose body he now occupied understood the local language. When it came to languages, Arthur himself was a complete idiot. If a French speaker and an English speaker each said one sentence, he probably couldn't tell them apart—let alone cope with Old English.
"What a wretched slave society! Take one bite of bread and they chop off your hand. Human rights, where are you?" Arthur looked down at his clothes and shook his head with a helpless sigh. The garment was like a bedsheet with a hole cut in the middle, folded over and tied. Every time he shifted his feet even a little, a cold draft crept over his bare backside and everything else down below. It wasn't that Arthur didn't want to lie down and rest—though calling that plank of rough wood a bed was generous. He tried to figure out where he was by studying the board's material, but if the tree had been alive, he might have had a fifty-fifty chance of identifying it. As it was, the dark, weathered timber would have required scientific equipment to analyze. But that wasn't the real problem. The real problem was that his whole body itched and stank, as if he hadn't bathed in years. Arthur knew that in ancient Europe, a slave who dared to wash could expect a visit from the Inquisition.
"My God! This... this is supposed to be a castle?" Arthur stood—no, Kent, because Arthur had decided to change his name. The name Arthur sounded nice enough, but he didn't dare use it; it might give him away. So he kept telling himself his name was Kent. Kent stared at the two-story wooden structure. It took up a fair amount of space, but half of it was just an open yard. On one side stood a massive log building, two stories tall, surrounded by an enormous wooden palisade. As for his own quarters—a low, shabby hut beside the fence, with a pile of firewood stacked next to it—it contained only a wooden plank, a wooden bowl, and a rickety table on the verge of collapse. At least it was somewhere to sleep. Blankets, apparently, were legendary creatures that didn't exist here. Kent knew perfectly well that this sprawling wooden mansion was the legendary castle. Inside lived two servants and himself, the only slave. Hallman and Torry had their own homes in town. The two servants handled the castle's upkeep and cleaning, while Kent collected firewood and baked bread—bread destined for the tables of Hallman and Torry. He and the other servants subsisted on a black, paste-like slop. But Kent didn't have time to worry about that, because the itching was growing worse by the minute. He shuffled slowly toward the water source he remembered—a spring behind the big wooden hall, the very spring that supplied the entire castle.
"Stop it, Xixi. I'm going to bathe. Oh... my God!" Kent snapped, annoyed. Xixi was the local equivalent of a dog, a creature kept for guarding. That was its name. Kent had scolded it out of habit, but the moment he got a good look at it, he dropped to the ground in shock—the sharp, burning pain in his rear completely forgotten. Because Xixi wasn't anything like a dog. It looked more like a pangolin, except that a single horn jutted from its head, its body was covered in black scales, and its thick, sturdy limbs could give a large lizard a run for its money. It had all the makings of a ferocious beast. And a creature like that could mean only one thing: this wasn't Europe. This was another world—a brand-new, unknown world.