Day 3 – Veylin Hollow
Ren Kisaragi had never learned a new language the normal way.
In his old life, he'd absorbed business English through shareholder meetings and angry foreign clients. He picked up Mandarin through operations audits in Shenzhen. Now, in a place where the alphabet looked like scratches made by a blind scholar with a grudge, he started again—from zero.
The books Lark gave him weren't books so much as stitched parchment manuals, filled with clunky translations and phonetic guesswork. One was titled "Basics for the Bystander: Surviving Without Speaking." Another bore only a single burned word on the cover: "Syntari." He assumed it meant "language," or possibly "warning."
He didn't care.
He started with nouns.
In the Morning
Every morning, Ren sat on a worn bench near the village well. It was the center of activity—children laughed, elders gossiped, and vendors bartered over withered fruit and smoked meat.
He watched.
He matched gestures with sounds. When a woman shouted "Aven!" and pointed to a loose chicken, he noted: Aven = that/there/loose animal?. When a man grumbled "Kesh varun" and thumped a broken barrel, Ren recorded: Kesh = break/broken, maybe.
At first, they glared. Then they ignored him. Eventually, a few nodded as they passed.
He didn't nod back.
He wrote.
in the afternoon
He tried words aloud. Quietly. Awkwardly. To chickens. To dogs. To fence posts.
Some villagers laughed. One boy mimicked him, but used the wrong tone and accidentally insulted a merchant's mother. The merchant threw a sandal at them both.
Ren thanked him in perfect Japanese.
The merchant threw another sandal.
Progress.
In the Evening
By lanternlight, Ren studied the more complex volumes. There were short myths, farming rituals, and a crude moral tale about a man who tried to sell counterfeit blessings to a blind priestess and got turned into a stump. The fable's moral seemed to be "Don't test holy women or trees"—Ren wasn't sure.
What intrigued him more were the margins. Annotated notes, corrections, even rebuttals scribbled by other readers. People in this world argued in the margins of their books. One section on burial customs had three contradictory practices crossed out and replaced with "Ask their mother. Always ask their mother."
He learned:
Shaking hands was a western Haldrith custom. Locals in Veylin Hollow tapped fingers to hearts instead.
Left hands were considered unclean during meals in Khorvayne culture. Ren noted his own left-handedness with a sigh.(Yes he is left handed)
Crows were respected here, not feared. In fact, the townsfolk left meat scraps on rooftops for them. "Messengers," one note said.
Ren didn't just read the words. He studied the implications.
This world didn't run on logic or order.
It ran on meaning—layered, tangled, symbolic. Every gesture had history. Every silence had weight.
And unlike his old world, people didn't fake understanding here.
They just pretended you weren't worth explaining things to.
In the Night
Sometimes at night, when the candle flickered low, Ren would take out the pen.
He hadn't written in it yet.
Not truly.
It pulsed only when it was near the truth. Lark warned him: "If you start using it like a journal, it'll bite back. That thing doesn't like assumptions."
Still, he sometimes uncapped it and whispered thoughts.
"The people here are poor. But they're not desperate." "They fear the eye. But they don't understand it." "They are ruled by ruins more than kings."
The pen didn't glow.
Not yet.
Day 6 –
On the sixth day, an old woman offered Ren a slice of bread. No words. Just a crooked smile and a hand calloused by years of kneading and toil.
Ren hesitated. Then took it.
"...Grak," he said carefully—the word he'd heard children use for thanks.
She chuckled. "Gra'hk," she corrected, emphasizing the guttural.
He repeated it.
She nodded once, and hobbled away.
It wasn't much.
But it was a beginning.