Seeing the child’s face twist as if he’d just swallowed a fly, Lise realized he’d probably misunderstood. She hurried to explain, “The settlement consulted the wise elders who live in seclusion on the mountain. They suggested you sleep in a Coffin and become intimately familiar with death.”

The prophecy foretold a trial he would have to face. The settlement’s answer was to have him grow ever closer to death. Coffin burials, earth burials, water burials, cremations—he would have to experience every kind of funeral up close. During that time, he’d even have to stay away from the living.

Lise raised her delicate hand, and an invisible force pushed open the stone Coffin’s lid. It slid aside—this thing had a sliding lid!

“You’re only five, but I can tell you’re already stronger than an adult man without spiritual energy. There’s some food inside the Coffin, along with currency used in the outside world and five sets of leather clothes I sewed with my own hands. I hope the True Gods bless you so you can make it to the fifth set.”

Sewing clothes was usually a task given to the men of the settlement. Yet Lise, an elder, had made these clothes for him herself. Each set was a little larger than the last. It was the settlement’s custom for people to change into new, well-fitting clothes at each stage of their growth, as a sign that they were growing up.

Elder Lise truly hoped he could survive the fate that awaited him.

Fenmu reacted with surprising calm—not like a five-year-old at all. “What’s that weird rock for? Is it my pillow?”

The elder glanced at the strange stone in the Coffin, then stepped inside, her shapely brown legs carrying her forward. She picked up the rock. “The night we found you, we were actually tracking a meteorite. This is the one we found. I hope it can protect you, too.”

Meteorites from outer space usually contain radioactive elements, don’t they? Are they trying to make me mutate?!

“This is as much help as we can give you. If we keep you in the village, you’ll die when you come of age. Go hide somewhere else, just like I told you. You might even turn out to be that crafty fish that slips through the net. Remember what I told you.”

Lise tried to make her expression look as relaxed as possible.

“First: go to sleep when it gets dark.”

“Second: don’t sleep anywhere but inside the Coffin.”

“Third: stay away from places where the living gather.”

“Fourth: show respect to the dead.”

She gave the poor child a few days to get used to the idea. Lise had even arranged a feast for him, hoping he’d at least get a few more good meals. But Fenmu said nothing. He went into the smithy and hammered away all night.

The people of the settlement heard the smithing continue through the night, but they weren’t annoyed. The blows rang out with a clear, rhythmic beat, as if they held some mysterious, indescribable wisdom. They’d never heard a blacksmith hammer a billet with such skill. It was practically art.

It was even more beautiful than the songs of the wandering bards who sometimes visited the settlement!

Half a month later, the hammering stopped. The Coffin had vanished, too.

Lise found a box of cast-iron weapons in her courtyard. Their quality was astonishingly good! She could tell the smith’s skill had been limited by the quality of the iron ore.

There was also a piece of parchment in the box, covered in the child Fenmu’s handwriting.

“Thank you all for taking care of me. Elder Lise, please thank my former wet nurses on my behalf, too. And please apologize to the children my age. If I hadn’t been so greedy, they wouldn’t have been forced to compete with calves for milk. These weapons are my gift of thanks to the settlement.”

*

Meanwhile, Fenmu dragged the Coffin to the settlement’s grave mountain.

The cemetery here had a clear hierarchy between men and women, with the women above and the men below. The men’s tombstones were clustered at the foot of the mountain, out of the way. In front of the women’s tombstones stood finely carved little stone figures, about the size of figurines. Each was a lifelike likeness of the person buried there, every detail rendered with vivid precision.

...Even the view beneath their skirts.

Lying in the Coffin, Fenmu gazed up at the vast night sky and remembered a wish he’d casually made many years ago.

“—I want an innocent childhood, and a grand adventure with a rough start that’ll have beautiful girls paying attention to me later!”

He sat up in the Coffin and looked at the row of tombstones across from him. The beautiful figurine-like women carved in stone seemed to be staring at their young male visitor.

“This isn’t the kind of attention I wanted!”

Fenmu lay back down in the Coffin and ran his hand over the blade beside him, wrapped in strips of cloth. It had been forged from that mysterious meteorite. It wasn’t finished yet, but it was the best weapon he’d made so far.

*

Name: Unfinished Blade

Quality: Unknown

Rank: Unknown

Origin Trait: “Dripping Water Wears Through Stone: Every enemy slain permanently increases the blade’s attack power.”

*

Thanks to the [Swordsmith] ability, Fenmu had also claimed this Origin Trait, making it part of his own power.

Uneasy in his new surroundings, he walked around the grave mountain before going to sleep to familiarize himself with the area. If something really happened, he didn’t want to have no idea where to run.

The grave mountain was huge. There were even streams and valleys among the woods. By some rocks beside a stream, Fenmu found a dead woman.

She looked as though she were merely a traveler taking a brief nap, but the gruesome wound over her heart silently told the truth: she was dead.

The woman was stunning. Her dark purple hair flowed down like a waterfall, and her figure was voluptuous and graceful. Her clothes were silky and soft, thin as a cicada’s wings. They looked like the robes of some kind of battle mage, but they weren’t associated with any True God. She was probably a false-god cultist—or even a follower of an evil god!

Though he didn’t know why this big-sister heretic had died, Fenmu was sure she was a good person!

After all, someone with a butt that beautiful couldn’t possibly be a bad person.

A deep unease stirred in Fenmu’s heart. The settlement’s grave mountain was generally off-limits, and this world had a doctrine against desecrating places where the dead rested. No sane person would choose to kill someone here!

“That’s too cruel!” Fenmu stared at the stunning dead woman—and her fine backside—and felt indignant on her behalf.

After murmuring an apology, Fenmu used water from the stream to wash the blood from her wound. The dead woman was colder than the stream at night.

“Big sis, outsiders can’t be buried on the settlement’s grave mountain. You might be a false-god cultist, but I believe you’re a good person. Good people deserve a place to rest. You shouldn’t be left lying out here like this.”

Fenmu had eaten well as a child, so he was much more developed than boys his age. But he was still just a kid, and carrying a woman around five-foot-seven was a bit of a struggle. Luckily, he had enough strength.

“My Coffin’s pretty big. Big sis, let’s squeeze in together tonight. Once it’s light, I’ll leave here and ask around nearby. Maybe I can get you buried back in your hometown.”

Fenmu’s voice soon faded into the grave mountain. He didn’t notice the “dead woman” on his back open her gorgeous wine-red eyes, then quietly close them again.