Chapter 594

The woman stared at the stone windbreak Ludger had raised, then at him, and her expression stayed stubbornly unchanged.

“I have no interest in teaching anyone anything,” she said.

Her tone wasn’t cruel. It was… final. Like she was closing a book.

“I’m sorry you wasted your time coming this far north,” she added, and the apology sounded more like a courtesy than regret. “But you should go back home.”

Ludger’s jaw tightened slightly.

“The winter is only going to get worse,” the woman continued. “People who don’t belong here get buried.”

Then she stepped back and closed the door. Just like that. Wood met frame. The latch clicked. The hut became a sealed object again, warmth and snoring trapped inside, leaving Ludger alone with the wind and the burned hill.

He stood there for a moment, staring at the door as if it might reopen out of guilt. It didn’t. Ludger exhaled slowly through his nose. He could skip this one. Move on to the third location. The ice shelf. The singing crack. Another “old goat” who might be more cooperative, or at least more coherent.

It certainly was an option. But he wasn’t someone who gave up that easily. Not when Sigrid had pointed him here for a reason. Not when the north had already proved that the weirdest arts were locked behind stubborn people, and stubborn people rarely opened on the first knock. Ludger looked at the sealed door again, eyes narrowing.

“Alright,” he muttered. “We’ll try it a different way.”

Ludger didn’t knock again. He didn’t threaten. He didn’t stomp off in a dramatic huff either. He sat down right in front of her door. Cross-legged on the snow, back straight, hands resting on his knees like he belonged there. If she wanted to ignore him, fine. He’d improve anyway.

He closed his eyes and let his breathing settle, reaching inward for the familiar reservoir he’d unlocked.

Vitality Well.

The moment he engaged it, his body warmed from within, steady, controlled, and efficient. The cold around him stopped feeling like pressure and became background noise. He focused on the subtle sensation of stamina being drawn and redistributed, the internal throttle, the tiny adjustments that turned “endurance” into something he could

steer.

He didn’t chase thoughts.

He didn’t rehearse arguments.

He just enjoyed the feeling of improving control over his own body, of doing something useful without filling his head with useless noise. Before long, the snow around him began to melt.

Not dramatically, not in a steaming crater, just a slow, quiet softening as his contained heat bled outward. A thin ring of slush formed beneath him, the frozen surface surrendering a few centimeters at a time.

Ludger ignored it. He didn’t care about the snow. He cared about the well. He cared about the calm. He cared about the sense that, for once, the only enemy was his own lack of precision.

Then… A snore rattled the door. Loud enough that Ludger felt it in the ground through Seismic Sense like a lazy earthquake. His eyelid twitched. He almost lost focus.

He forced the breath back into rhythm, pulled his attention inward again, and resumed.

Another snore followed a minute later, worse, like whoever was inside was determined to vibrate the entire burned hill out of spite.

Ludger’s jaw tightened slightly. He didn’t open his eyes. He didn’t move. But he couldn’t deny what it meant. She truly didn’t give a damn. Someone had come this far north, through empty snowfields and burned stone, asking to learn.

And she was sleeping through it like the world owed her silence. Ludger’s breathing stayed steady. His Vitality Well kept humming.

But each time the snoring shook the air, he felt a new kind of determination settle in, cold and stubborn as the north itself.

By the time night came, Ludger was annoyed. Not tired, annoyed.

His legs had gone numb twice. He’d warmed the snow beneath him into slush. He’d cycled Vitality Well until the sensation was smooth and familiar. He’d meditated until the useless thoughts got bored and wandered off.

And none of it mattered.

Inside the hut, the woman continued snoring without a care in the world, the sound rising and falling like the world’s laziest battle horn. She hadn’t opened the door. She hadn’t even

shifted

her breathing pattern in a way that suggested she’d noticed him existing outside.

Persistence was useless. Ludger stared at the door for a moment, eyes narrowed, and a ridiculous thought drifted through his head.

Maybe her class is NEET.

Because sleeping this much nonstop, this effortlessly, had to be a specialized talent. He didn’t laugh, but the thought had a certain bitter charm.

Regardless. He was done pretending brute patience would work. If the door didn’t open with politeness, and it didn’t open with persistence… Then it was time to change the strategy.

Ludger stood, joints popping softly as he straightened. He rolled his shoulders once, feeling the cold bite at exposed skin, then let Vitality Well stabilize his core warmth.

He looked around the burned hill area, scanning the snowfield and scattered bones like he was choosing ingredients.

There. A target. Perfect.

Ludger walked over, crouched, and began shaping the ground with a few quick, precise motions. Not building a shelter. Not building a wall. An experiment.

He glanced back once at the hut’s door, heard the snore rumble again like an insult, and felt his annoyance sharpen into something more productive.

His mouth curled. Then he grinned.

“Alright,” Ludger muttered to himself, eyes glinting in the dark. “Let’s see if you can sleep through

this

.”

When morning came, Shera woke up feeling… pretty good.

Her limbs were heavy in that pleasant way after a full night’s sleep. Her bones didn’t ache as much. Her head wasn’t buzzing with cold or hunger or the usual dull irritation that came from living where the world tried to freeze your thoughts solid.

That

had been a good day and night of sleep. She lay there for a few breaths, letting her mind rise slowly from the dark, and in that half-awake haze she remembered a dream.

A weird one.

A snot-nosed boy knocking at her door. Talking too calmly. Asking to be taught like her hut was a school and she was some kind of patient instructor.

Shera squinted at the ceiling and muttered, “That was one weird dream like no other.”

It made no sense. She never received visitors. Not out here. Not unless they were lost, desperate, or stupid, and she’d built her life so none of those were her problem.

She pushed herself out of bed, stretched her arms high until her spine cracked once, then rolled her shoulders. The air in the hut felt… normal. Not spring warm, but not biting.

When she stepped closer to the door, she noticed something else. The light around the house was weak. Muted. Like the sun was being filtered.

Shera frowned.

Cloudy days happened, sure, and she didn’t mind them. She even enjoyed them sometimes. But cloudy days up here were usually sharper, colder, meaner. The kind of weather that made the wind sound angry.

This didn’t feel angry. It felt… shaded. She hesitated for half a heartbeat, then unlatched the door and pulled it open.

Cold air slipped in. Not brutal. Just cold. Shera stepped out, blinked, and froze. For a moment, she honestly wondered if she was still daydreaming. There were trees around her home. Not a few scraggly shrubs fighting for survival. Trees.

A bunch of them, tall enough to throw shade, clustered close enough that the light

would

be weak. Their branches were heavy with needles and rough leaves, and the air carried the faint smell of sap and damp earth.

And the snow… The snow was gone. Not “thin.” Not “melted near the vents.” Gone.

A clean circle of bare ground stretched outward from her hut, easily three hundred meters in every direction. Black stone and brown earth exposed like someone had scraped winter away with a giant hand. The burned hill still loomed in the distance, but even it looked different with the white stripped off its scars.

Shera’s mouth opened slightly. Then closed. Her eyes narrowed, slow and sharp.

“…What,” she whispered, voice flat with disbelief, “the hell?”

Shera stood in the doorway for a few seconds, just turning in place. Trees. Bare ground. Shaded light. It was wrong in a way her skin could feel.

She stepped out, boots crunching on earth instead of snow, and walked a slow circle around the hut, eyes scanning for tracks, for some explanation, for anything that didn’t make her feel like the world had quietly rearranged itself while she slept.

Then she saw him. The weird boy. Not a dream. Real.

He was sitting under one of the trees, cross-legged, back straight, hands resting on his knees like he’d been planted there on purpose. His eyes were closed, face calm, breathing slow. He looked… annoyingly comfortable, like he belonged under that shade.

Shera’s brow furrowed. That didn’t make sense either.

The cold didn’t let trees grow in this area. Not like this. Not in clusters thick enough to cast shade. And the terrain here was bad, burned stone, ash-soaked ground, wind that stripped anything soft away. Even if you

could

grow something, it wouldn’t take easily. It would starve or freeze or get ripped apart.

She looked from the trees to the boy, then back to the trees. Her mind tried to connect the dots and failed. She couldn’t link it to the boy’s actions. Not logically. Not with what she knew. And yet he was there, meditating like a smug little statue beneath a canopy that absolutely shouldn’t exist, as if the world had bent itself into a forest just to prove a point.

Ludger opened his eyes the moment Shera’s shadow touched the edge of the clearing.

He looked up at her from beneath the tree, calm as always, like he’d been waiting for her to notice she’d stepped into a different world.

“Do you like the changes?” he asked.

Shera’s mouth tightened.

Ludger continued, conversational, almost cheerful in that deadpan way of his. “Even if you didn’t want to improve your home… improving the surroundings isn’t a bad idea, right?”

Shera stared at him, then looked around again—trees, bare ground, shade where there shouldn’t be shade.

“How,” she said slowly, voice edged with disbelief, “did you do this in a single night?”

Ludger pushed himself to his feet with an easy motion, brushing dirt off his cloak as if planting a forest was a minor inconvenience.

“I found saplings underground,” he said simply. “On the lee side of the hill. Protected pockets where the roots didn’t freeze completely.”

Shera blinked.

He added, “Then I used a lot of mana.” No apology. Just fact. “And some druid skills.”

Shera’s eyes narrowed. “Druid skills.”

Ludger nodded. “It’s not permanent. Not by itself.”

He gestured around the clearing with one hand. “The mana I used should stabilize the terrain for a few weeks. Keep the soil from failing. Keep the temperature slightly more forgiving. The trees should hold.”

He paused, then looked directly at her.

“But you can extend it.”

Shera’s brow furrowed.

Ludger pointed downward. “If you infuse your mana into the rune underground.”

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