Chapter 418
The village where Xavier spent his childhood was not an ordinary village, even though to a child who had never seen the outside world, everything seemed perfectly normal.
Yet there was one peculiarity that always shadowed their lives, a mystery that had never been solved by any generation.
Around the borders of the village, in every direction of the compass, stretched an expanse of thick fog that never descended.
It was not the kind of fog that arrived in the morning and disappeared when the sun rose, not the kind that could be crossed by walking carefully through it, not the kind that would eventually vanish when blown away by the wind.
This fog was a permanent entity, a gray wall that had stood firmly since before the great-grandfathers of the village elders were born, never shifting, never thinning, never changing.
Its thickness was so immeasurable that anyone who gazed into it would see nothing but endless gray darkness, as if the world truly ended there, as if beyond the fog there existed only emptiness, as if their village was the only place in the universe still inhabited by humans.
And because of that immeasurable density, almost no villager had ever succeeded in passing through it.
Those who dared to try, those who were curious about what lay beyond the gray wall, those who felt suffocated by their limitations and decided to search for a wider world, all met the same fate.
They disappeared.
No one knew where.
They never returned.
They never sent word.
They never left a trace that could be followed.
Thus the village lived under an unwritten rule obeyed by everyone, a prohibition passed down from generation to generation, from mouth to mouth, from heart to heart.
Never approach the fog.
Never try to pierce it.
Never ask what lies beyond it.
The border of the village was the boundary of the world, and anyone who crossed it would vanish, swallowed by a mystery that never gave answers.
Children grew up hearing stories of those who disappeared, of friends who left and never returned, of parents who one morning decided to search for a better life and ultimately left nothing but emptiness at the dining table.
And unsurprisingly, from all of this was born a village legend that continued to whisper in every home, in every coffee stall, in every gathering of the villagers.
The legend declared that no human beings still lived anywhere except the villagers who remained inside the settlement surrounded by fog beyond its borders.
They were the last of humanity, the final civilization still standing, the only hope for the survival of the species.
Beyond the fog there was only death, only emptiness, only nothingness.
Or perhaps no one truly knew, because no one had ever returned to tell the story.
"The fog that for decades no one could penetrate… has cracked. Not from within, but from outside."
And one day, amid the slow routines of the village that flowed like a river during the dry season, an event shook the foundations of beliefs that had been built over generations.
The thick fog that had long served as the wall separating the village from the outside world, that had long been believed to be the final boundary of human existence, that had swallowed anyone who dared approach it, suddenly sent something out from its depths.
Not corpses, not bones, not messages in bottles—but a group of living people who had managed to pass through it from the opposite side.
They emerged from the fog like ghosts turning into flesh, like dreams suddenly becoming real, like legends stepping down from sacred texts to walk among ordinary people.
Their faces were unfamiliar, their clothes different, their language somewhat awkward yet still understandable—and most astonishing of all, they were not dead, not missing, not consumed by the mystery.
They stood upon the village soil with steady breaths, with hearts still beating, with eyes that could still see and mouths that could still speak.
Chaos quickly swept through the village as the news spread from mouth to mouth, faster than fire burning through dry straw in the heat of summer.
Villagers who had lived for decades believing that beyond the fog there was only death were suddenly confronted with living proof that contradicted the legends they had inherited.
Children ran to call their parents, farmers abandoned half-worked fields, mothers carried their babies and hurried toward the center of the village where the newcomers were surrounded by a crowd.
The aging village chief was supported out of his house by several young men, his failing eyes struggling to observe the details of the unfamiliar figures now standing in the village square.
Meanwhile, the newcomers appeared calm amidst the uproar they had created, as if they had expected their arrival to cause such a commotion.
Perhaps they truly had expected it, perhaps they had even prepared themselves to deliver the message they had carried across the thick fog once believed to be impenetrable.
And when the villagers' crowd finally began to calm, when curiosity overcame fear, when the village was at last ready to listen, the newcomers began to speak.
They explained the purpose of their arrival with simple yet meaningful words, with voices calm yet clear enough to reach even those standing at the very back.
They had come to this village in search of a village long believed to be lost.
A village that, in ancient records, in legends passed down beyond the fog, in old maps preserved within ancient libraries, was described as a place that had once been the center of an extraordinary civilization before it vanished within a mysterious fog and was never heard from again.
For years—for decades, perhaps even centuries—the outside world had believed that this village had been destroyed, swallowed by the earth, erased along with all of its cultural riches.
And yet, the village still existed.
Still alive.
Still breathing.
Still living its daily life behind the wall of fog that had served both as protection and as a prison.
And through the group of brave people who had managed to cross the fog from the opposite direction, a shocking truth was finally delivered to the entire village.
The world they had long believed to be gone, the world they had thought contained no living humans except themselves, had not disappeared at all.
The world beyond the fog still existed, still turning, still inhabited by millions—perhaps even billions—of humans and their own civilizations.
And even more surprising, that world longed for the existence of their village.
Not longing in the literal sense of missing relatives unseen for years, but longing in the sense of civilization, of history, of cultural wealth once believed to be extinct.
Because their village, with all its uniqueness, with all its preserved traditions, with all its local wisdom untouched by time, was considered extraordinarily worthy of exploration.
It was a living museum, a time capsule, a window into a past long forgotten by the outside world that had moved forward so rapidly.
Amid the noise of progress and modernity, the village hidden behind the fog offered something priceless—a chance to witness how life once unfolded before everything changed, how humans lived in harmony with nature, how ancient values were still upheld and practiced in everyday life.
To be continued…