Nearly a week had passed since Alden had arrived in this world, and he had been doing his best to adjust to his new life. It wasn’t easy. Having to go to the outhouse every morning instead of using a modern toilet attached to his bedroom had been an experience on its own—and it wasn’t even cold yet. He couldn’t imagine how people managed during the freezing winters.
His body was still recovering after being ill for so long, so he had spent the week working to rebuild his strength. He started joining the guards for their morning exercises and had begun sparring with them using practice swords. The last time he had encountered monsters, he had nearly frozen in place on the road back from the river. It had ended without casualties, but it could easily have gone the other way. He didn’t want to be that helpless again.
Within a few days, he realized his body already knew how to fight properly with a sword. Muscle memory guided his movements as he managed to defeat one guard after another. He just needed some more practice so he could contribute as well the next time monsters attacked them. But whenever he thought he was doing really well and began to grow too confident, Roderic stepped in and put him flat on his back every time.
Alden realized that with the guard captain’s massive build and years of experience as a ranger, beating Roderic was unlikely—perhaps impossible. But if he could hold his own long enough and not freeze in the face of danger, he could survive until help arrived. That was good enough for him.
He had no desire to win swordfighting championships in this world anyway. What he wanted to do instead, was to make guns. Once he had one of those in his hands, he could face almost anyone on equal footing, except maybe the armored knights.
Alden had also used the past week to get to know his newfound siblings properly. He had spent many hours in their father’s study with his brother also reading nearby, while he skimmed through one book after another. Caelen had been overjoyed to see that his older brother had somehow gained a new interest in reading, and he had even begun pestering Alden to get him new books from Garitus in the future. He knew that would be difficult for many reasons, so he had told a servant to bring an empty ledger and had begun teaching basic math to his brother.
But Caelen had surprised him by saying that Vusato had already covered those things. That made him realize that the original Alden must have received the same lessons from the majordomo, but simply hadn’t been interested enough to learn properly, or even to remember that he had been taught those things, which had made him think that he was teaching new stuff to Caelan. But that turned out to be a good thing. This way, he wouldn’t have to spend too much time explaining where his more advanced knowledge came from.
During the week, he had moved on from basic arithmetic and algebra to advanced trigonometry and beginner calculus. Caelen soaked it up like a sponge. Apart from math, Alden went over the basics of physics and even introduced some fundamentals of mechanical engineering. When Caelen asked where he knew those things from, Alden told him that he used to read a lot every winter when they went to Garitus. There were plenty of books in the huge library in the Duke's castle where they stayed, and Caelen hadn’t been allowed to access it at the time, so it was a plausible excuse that would work for a while.
Setting up a foundation for the future, he had also made an excuse that Vusato's lessons had just been too boring for him, which is why he didn't focus on it in the past. But he always had an interest in reading, which had satisfied Caelan for now. But in return for teaching him, Alden made him promise to keep it all secret from others, especially the majordomo. He didn’t want people asking too many questions yet. Caelen was more than happy to agree, as long as he could keep learning more in the future. It had been a good week for brother-to-brother bonding.
Alden had also spent a lot of time with his younger sister, Lira, who was just 12 years old, but didn't get to play in the courtyard and run around like other kids because of her poor health. She had been overjoyed to talk with him so much, even though her frail constitution didn’t allow her to stay awake for more than a few hours at a time. She was the only one in the manor younger than him who called him by his name, but it only felt endearing on her.
Alden had kept thinking about her condition, and he began to wonder if it had something to do with a nutritional deficiency. When he asked Lira what she liked to eat and what she avoided, her answer had been a good clue towards what could be wrong with her. She loved eating sweet things and bread, but she rarely ate fruit, and the sight of green vegetables—or even meat—often made her nauseous. He got the same nagging feeling in his mind after hearing that, like he had been having since the very first day he arrived in this world.
After a few minutes of thinking, something clicked in his mind. What if this was something as simple as anemia? Lira's constant fatigue, her pale skin and cold hands all pointed towards that. If she wasn’t getting enough iron in her diet, and barely had any vitamin C to help her absorb what little iron she did eat, it was quite possible her weakness came from that.
When he asked why, her answer had thoroughly surprised him. She had been barely five when their mother died, but she had fond memories of their mother feeding her small bites of vegetables and meat. But after her mother’s death, seeing those foods reminded Lira of her, and she would lose her appetite immediately.
Their father had always been too busy managing the barony to look after the children closely, and her older brothers—while always caring for her—had also been too young at the time to notice what she was going through. Over time, Lira had formed a habit of refusing those foods, not because she disliked their taste, but because she didn’t want to feel that loss. She pushed those things away from her plate because she didn’t want to miss the only person who had ever really cared about her.
He had keenly felt her loss after that, but he realized it wasn’t something he could fix in a day. Still, he tried to help her understand that her weakness might be tied to that habit. He explained that their mother had wanted her to eat those foods because they mattered for a growing child. He told her their mother wouldn’t want to see her like this, and that eating a balanced diet in her memory would honor her more than avoiding the food ever could. He told her that it would be difficult in the beginning, but it would get easier with time, and slowly she would be able to eat everything without being reminded of their mother.
But talking about their mother had just made Lira start sobbing. Alden held her for a while, patting her back gently until her breathing steadied. When she finally calmed down, she gave a tentative nod and said she would try. It wasn’t a promise, but it was better than nothing.
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Once she started eating even small amounts and got over that psychological barrier, she should be able to move on to eating a proper diet faster. If Alden was right—and he hoped he was—there would be visible improvement within a few weeks, and a full recovery within months. If he was wrong, and it was a more serious illness, then with the limited medical care available in this world, he didn’t want to think about what that might mean.
Over the past week, he had noticed Lira making a real effort to change her habits. He even started sitting with her during meals whenever he could, talking to her and telling some children's stories from Earth so she wouldn’t have to focus on the food or the memories tied to it. Frankly, she was too old for them now, but nobody had spent enough time with her to tell her stories after their mother had passed, so it was still a new experience for her, and she enjoyed them enough that she even stopped frowning as she ate veggies. But this wasn't something which could be changed immediately.
Still, at least she was moving in the right direction now. After nearly a full week, he learned that earlier this morning she had managed to eat small amounts of meat and vegetables even when he wasn’t there. He took that as a win.
He was in an upbeat mood hearing that, so after he returned from his morning training with the guards and took a bath, he decided it was finally time to find out just how much in the red this barony was. It was around an hour after noon now, and he was still sitting in the small dining room after lunch, and the plates and utensils had already been cleared by the maids. So he finally sent for the majordomo and told him to bring the revenue and expenses ledger for the past year. He didn't want to use his father's study, and this was the only other room where they could talk somewhat privately without the other manor residents overhearing about it.
He had memories of seeing his father frowning over that ledger so many times, so he already had an idea that the numbers couldn’t be any good. But his father had been out for nearly a week now, so he wanted to get himself up to date on everything before he returned. He had been dreading seeing the ledger for days, so he hadn’t asked for it until now, but if he could take some pressure off from his father, it would make it easier for Baron Edaroc to manage the other things needed to run the barony.
He drummed his fingers on the dining table while he waited. He had found out that there was no good paper here, only parchment. Paper was still available, of course, which was what the books were made from, but it was costly enough to be used sparingly. So in the past few days he had taken some parchment and started drawing sketches of the crossbows and scorpions he had decided to build here. It wasn’t easy, though.
In his job in London, he was used to working on a modern computer with the help of the latest software to design blueprints. But here, all he had was rough parchment and a quill. It had taken him a few days just to get his mind adjusted to this new setup. By yesterday, he had nearly finished the design of the crossbows, while the design of the scorpion was nearly half done. Once he finished that, he planned to call up the village carpenters and blacksmiths to see how they could make these things here, cheaply and in good quantities.
He had also gone on another visit to the village yesterday, this time focusing on the defensive structures. He had found out that the palisade wall here was built nearly three and a half years ago, in the spring after a severe winter when monsters had run over the village, leaving nearly nothing here but rubble. For the first year after that, these walls were all that the villagers had to protect them. In the next spring, when they saw that the walls were still standing after the winter, the baron had ordered four watchtowers to be constructed, in the few weeks of free time available to the village laborers after returning from the fortress city.
The logs of the walls were thick, and the wall looked sturdy enough to him to defend against monsters, but then he had only seen the smallest of them by now—which had still been nearly enough to take his life on that trip to the river. Roderic had told him that if even medium-sized monsters came here, these walls wouldn’t be able to do anything to prevent them from coming inside. Those were rarely seen in the warmer months, but as winter came closer, the likelihood of one of those roaming to this region would keep increasing. On the other hand, the largest monsters—the ones as big as a few rooms, according to Caelen—only came in the peak of winter, and even then they were rare. Those were big enough to give trouble even to the mighty walls of Garitus, so they could only hope Sarnok remained out of notice to them.
He had also climbed up on the northeastern watchtower, which was one of the four such towers of the village, and had seen the snowy peaks of the Pinotian mountain range clearly visible in the north. Beyond that was where the monsters lived, the climate being much colder up there. In the northeast, the ranger company of around a hundred men, including a few elves but no orcs or dwarfs, must be busy defending the outpost from the monsters who wandered south even now.
The watchtowers weren’t very tall, though—just around 6 meters high, compared to the 4 meters high palisade walls of the village, and 3 meters high walls of the manor. When he had asked why they hadn’t built them taller, Roderic had explained that there was no point if monsters could run over everything made of wood in the winter, making them start from nothing in the spring. It made sense, since the primary purpose of these walls was to just make sure the smaller monsters of the warmer months didn’t attack people's homes in the night. It wasn’t meant to defend against anything more serious than that.
That higher vantage point of the watchtowers still helped the archers keep an eye into the distance—or at least out to the treeline located around a 100 meters away, from where the dense forest started. It was nearly dark beyond that, the greenish-brown colors merging into each other, now interspersed with the reddish yellow autumn colors. Ideally, they should clear at least double that area beyond the wall in the future—perhaps in the next spring after they return from Garitus—while new watchtowers could also be made in double the current height to compensate. With the presence of scorpions on the new watchtowers, and crossbows in the guards' hands, the village would become a lot safer after that—at least outside the winter months.
The opening of the dining room's door brought his mind back to the present. He braced himself, knowing that the revenue and expenses numbers Vusato was going to show him weren’t going to be good. At all.
However, it wasn’t the majordomo. A young servant had opened the door and was standing at the entrance hesitatingly.
Alden frowned. “Where is Vusato? He should have told me if he was busy."
But the servant didn’t reply and just stared at him with a miserable expression, looking like his world had turned upside down.
Alden’s frown deepened, as he stood up with a growing sense of unease. “What is it? Tell me!"
A tear fell from the servant's eye. “Your… your father… he's…"
“What about my father?"
“He’s… he’s dead, milord. Baron Edaroc is no more. Long live Baron Alden Rinarius."
