Chapter 593

By noon of the next day, Ludger finally reached the second location.

Sigrid had described it in her usual way, two sentences and an insult.

“Old watch hill,” she’d said. “Not the tall one. The one that was burned in the war. You’ll see black stone and bones. The old man lives in a hut below it. He hates everyone.”

She hadn’t been wrong. She’d just… left out about a thousand details. The hill rose out of the snow like a scar.

Not a clean slope, but a jagged mound of fractured rock and soot-stained earth, as if something had tried to melt the stone itself and failed halfway through. Blackened pillars jutted at odd angles, remnants of an old watch structure, collapsed and half-buried, their edges brittle and uneven. In some places, the rock had bubbled and cooled into warped shapes, frozen mid-scream.

And the bones… They weren’t neatly piled like trophies.

They were scattered, half-covered by drifted snow, bleached by cold and time. Too many of them to be a single animal. Too mixed to be coincidence. Some were small, fox, hare, whatever survived long enough to die here. Others were… larger. Thick ribs and curved pieces that made Ludger’s mind quietly note

predator

and

don’t assume anything is dead just because it left bones.

The air smelled wrong too. Not rot, cold prevented that.

It smelled like old smoke trapped in stone, like ash that had soaked into the earth and never been washed out. At the foot of the hill, exactly where Sigrid said it would be, sat a hut.

Low and ugly, built from rough timber and stone, half-sunk into the ground for insulation. The roof was heavy with snow, and the entrance looked like it had been repaired a dozen times by someone who didn’t care about beauty, only function.

Ludger stood there for a moment, scanning the place with narrowed eyes.

This wasn’t just “isolated.”

This was

deliberate.

A location chosen to repel normal people. Cold. Empty. Haunted by war. Surrounded by bones and burned stone. He exhaled through his nose.

“Why,” he muttered, “do these people want to live in isolation so much?”

He could understand the appeal. Annoyingly, he could understand it too well. If this were his previous life, if he still had his teenage mindset, before responsibilities had teeth, then honestly?

As long as he had a computer and an unlimited supply of soda and snacks, he could’ve lived in isolation too. No meetings. No politics. No people demanding things. Just quiet, time, and whatever obsession he wanted to sink into.

A simple life. A stupid life. A peaceful life. Ludger stared at the hut again, then felt the familiar weight of reality settle back into his chest. He couldn’t do that now. His life wasn’t that simple anymore. He had a guild. He had a town.

He had a mother and twins who deserved a future that didn’t depend on luck. And somewhere south of all this snow and silence, an Empire was already deciding what shape his life was supposed to take.

Ludger adjusted the strap of his backpack and stepped toward the hut. Isolation might be tempting. But for him, it was just another resource.

Ludger approached the hut with clear, deliberate footsteps. If someone lived out here, they either sensed you coming or they didn’t deserve to.

His boots crunched on hard snow and scattered grit. The sound carried in the thin air, echoing faintly off the burned hill behind him.

Despite the noise… There was no reaction.

No shift in presence. No movement inside. No spike of awareness that Seismic Sense would catch as someone stood up and reached for a weapon.

Nothing.

When he got close enough to knock, he finally heard it. Snoring. Loud. Unapologetic. The kind of snore that said the owner trusted their hut, their instincts, and the fact that the north itself was a better guard than any door lock.

Ludger frowned.

Snoring at noon, at a time like this, in the middle of winter, with no civilization around, was a pretty laid back way to live. Either the person was supremely confident… or supremely careless. Or both.

Ludger lifted his hand and knocked. Three firm raps. He waited. The snoring continued, steady as a drumbeat. Ludger knocked again, harder this time.

Nothing. No “go away.” No irritated curse. Not even a pause in the snore to suggest the sleeper had registered the sound. Ludger stood there a moment, staring at the door. Then he exhaled slowly through his nose, annoyance flickering in the tight line of his mouth.

“…Seriously?” he muttered.

He waited anyway, because forcing entry was always a choice you couldn’t take back. But the only response he got was the same loud, lazy snore rolling through the hut like the owner was sleeping through the end of the world.

Ludger knocked again. Hard enough that the whole doorframe shuddered.

Hard enough that, for a heartbeat, he wondered if he’d just invented a new method of entry called

accidental demolition.

Inside, something finally happened. A thud.

Then another, lighter, followed by a groan that sounded like someone had just introduced their forehead to the floor with enthusiasm.

“I am coming,” a voice mumbled from within. “I am coming—”

More noise followed immediately. The unmistakable chaos of someone waking up and losing a fight to their own furniture. Something bumped. Something fell. A chain of small impacts traveled across the hut as if the person inside was ricocheting off obstacles on the way to the door.

Ludger stood there, expression flat, listening. This one lived in a house, yes. But it didn’t feel like a master. It didn’t feel like Valk. No oppressive presence. No disciplined silence. No sense of a predator deciding whether you were worth acknowledgment.

Just… someone stumbling through their own home like winter had smacked them awake and they didn’t appreciate it.

The bolts scraped. The door cracked open. And Ludger frowned.

A woman stood there, around Elaine’s age, maybe. Not a hulking northerner, not broad-shouldered and carved from meat the way Sigrid’s people tended to be. She was smaller than them, though still tall by normal standards, her frame lean rather than massive.

She looked like a mess.

Hair flattened and wild at the same time. Eyes half-lidded with sleep. Face pale from warmth-starved months. Wrapped in layers, blankets, furs, something stitched that might’ve once been a robe but now looked like a desperate compromise between clothing and survival.

She had the unmistakable aura of someone who’d been trying to sleep through winter and was still losing to it. The cold wind slipped past Ludger’s shoulder and she shivered violently, blinking like she’d forgotten the outside existed.

She stared at him, then croaked, “Yes?”

Ludger stood there, mouth slightly open for the first time in a while.

He’d been ready for another “old goat.”

Another hermit. Another brutal specialist with a beast skull helmet and a philosophy sharp enough to cut. Instead, he’d found… this. And for a moment, Ludger genuinely didn’t know what to say.

Ludger cleared his throat and forced his brain to start working again.

“I’m Ludger,” he said, voice calm. “Vice Guildmaster of the Lionsguard in Lionfang.”

The woman blinked at him as if he’d just introduced himself as a type of rock.

Then she yawned, wide, unashamed, and rubbed one eye with the back of her hand.

“Sigrid sent me,” Ludger continued, trying to keep the conversation on rails. “She said you could teach me…”

“Sigrid?” the woman interrupted, brow furrowing. “Never heard of her.”

Ludger paused.

“And I’ve never heard of you either,” she added, looking him up and down like she was deciding whether he was real or just a cold hallucination. “Also… this isn’t a school.”

She gestured vaguely at the hut behind her, blankets visible like a nest built by something that hated winter.

“So if you came here to learn anything, you came to the wrong place.”

Ludger stared at her for a beat, then asked, carefully, “Do you know an art… a skill… that’s hard to teach others?”

The woman’s expression shifted, subtle, but noticeable. Her sleepiness didn’t vanish, but something behind it sharpened.

“Yes,” she said simply.

Ludger nodded. “What about it?”

Ludger’s mouth opened, then closed, then he tried again.

“What if I could be taught that?” he asked. “If I can learn it, and—”

The woman stared at him for a long moment. Not angry. Not amused. Just… blankly assessing.

Then she tilted her head slightly and asked, “Why should I teach it to a random person knocking at my door?”

Ludger froze.

He ran through the obvious answers and found none that weren’t either insulting or useless.

Because “I’m talented” sounded arrogant. Because “it might die with you” sounded manipulative. Because “Sigrid told me to” clearly meant nothing to her. And because “I need it” wasn’t a reason that benefited

her.

Ludger swallowed once, mind annoyingly empty. He had no logical answer for that.

So he just stood there in the cold, looking at a half-asleep woman wrapped in blankets, realizing that for all his experience negotiating with nobles and chiefs, he was suddenly unarmed in the face of one simple question:

Why should I care about your goals?

Ludger stood there for a moment too long, letting the silence stretch until it started to feel like an accusation.

Then he tried anyway.

“Since you live in a place like this,” Ludger said carefully, “you clearly don’t want money.”

The woman blinked at him.

Ludger continued, because he didn’t have a better opening. “So… Do you want a better house? Or something?”

Her left eyebrow rose, slow, sharp, and deeply unimpressed.

“This one,” she said, flat as stone, “I inherited from my parents.”

Ludger paused. Ah. That came out wrong. He rubbed the back of his neck once, a rare tell of mild discomfort.

“That came out wrong,” he admitted. “I didn’t mean it like that.” He gestured toward the hut, then toward the burned hill. “I meant… if you want to improve it. Reinforce it. Make it warmer. Safer. Less miserable.”

The woman’s expression didn’t change. Not even a flicker. Ludger exhaled through his nose, then decided to show instead of talk. He stepped to the side, placed his palm on the snow-packed ground near the door, and let mana flow.

Earth answered.

Stone rose in a clean line, forming a low wall that curved around the hut’s entrance like a windbreak. He shaped the rock smooth, dense, and tight, then extended it into a shallow canopy that would block drifting snow without trapping smoke. A second pulse thickened the hut’s base, sealing gaps in the foundation. He smoothed the ground into a firm, leveled path, then shaped a small trench to redirect meltwater away.

It was quick. Efficient. The kind of improvements that would take a normal crew days.

Ludger stepped back, dusting his hands as if he’d just finished a small chore.

“There,” he said. “Warmer. Less wind. Better drainage. If you want, I can add insulation channels in the walls and…”

He stopped. Because the woman’s face hadn’t moved. No surprise. No interest. No gratitude. Just that same blank look, like he’d performed a magic trick with a coin and she’d seen it a thousand times.

She stared at the new stonework as if it was a mildly annoying decoration. Then she looked back at Ludger, eyebrow still slightly raised. Ludger felt a slow, familiar irritation creep in.

This one will be hard to convince.

Harder than Valk, in a different way. Valk was stubborn and silent. This woman was unimpressed and awake enough to make it his problem.

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