A circle of small gifts had been arranged around my bedroll — fresh fruit, a jar of honey, a hand-carved wooden duck, and a note that read: "For the one who freed our tongues. May your words always find their mark."
The wooden duck was slightly cross-eyed. One wing was longer than the other. Its expression was somewhere between "profound confusion" and "I have seen things I cannot unsee." I loved it immediately.
I also received three eggs, a bundle of dried herbs whose purpose I could not identify, a slightly used cooking pot, and a drawing of me that a child had rendered in charcoal. In the drawing, I was twice as tall as the village buildings and had a shovel that was shooting lightning. The child's artistic vision was ambitious, if inaccurate. I kept the drawing too.
I tucked the duck into my bag and stepped outside.
Han was already surrounded by a crowd of villagers. He had developed a survival instinct over the past few days — he was answering in short sentences and pointing at me whenever he needed a moment to breathe. His logbook was open, and he was writing while simultaneously nodding at an old woman who was telling him about her son's wheat farm.
"The stranger awakens!" the village elder announced. His voice carried across the entire square. A cheer went up. I had not been awake long enough to handle a cheer.
"Morning," I said.
"The morning is blessed! For we have our voices back! Tell us, honored one — is there anything else you can do? Can you fix our plows? Our roofs? The mill has been grinding counterclockwise for two generations."
"Counterclockwise?"
"The grain comes out less ground than when it went in. We've accepted this as normal because we assumed it was a property of grain."
I looked at the mill. Behind the physical structure, the code was visible to my system — a floating web of scripts and calculations. One line stood out immediately: a physics equation with a flipped operator. rotation = -1 * standard_rotation. A single negative sign that had been wrong for decades.
"Yeah, I can fix that."
I fixed the mill. The gears reversed direction with a groan of ancient machinery. Grain began to flow properly. The miller burst into tears.
Then I fixed the well pump. The water had been running with a three-second delay — you'd pump, wait, pump again, wait, and eventually water would arrive, confused and apologetic. The timing script was off by a single digit.
Then I fixed a door that had been rejecting anyone taller than five feet. The collision box was misaligned by half a unit. I nudged the coordinates and the door swung open freely for the first time in years.
Then I fixed a chicken.
The chicken was walking backwards. It had been walking backwards since the curse began — a full four years of reverse locomotion. Its owner had accepted this as a quirk of poultry. I opened the chicken's animation loop, found a negative sign where a positive one should be, and flipped it.
The chicken took one step forward.
It stopped.
It looked at its feet.
It took another step forward, very slowly, as if testing the concept.
Then it stood completely still, overwhelmed by the sudden freedom of forward motion, and refused to move for the rest of the day.
"You broke a chicken," Han said.
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"I fixed a chicken."
"It won't move anymore."
"It's processing. Give it time."
By noon, I had become the village's unofficial repairman. The elder followed me everywhere, clutching a piece of parchment covered in his own notes. I think he was trying to understand my methods. He watched me stare at a broken plow for thirty seconds, tap the air twice, and walk away while the plow reassembled itself. He wrote something down. I didn't ask what.
The fisherman found us at lunch.
We were sitting by the village well, eating bowls of rice that a grateful family had provided. The rice was grey. Of course it was grey. But it was hot, and there was enough of it, and no one was trying to kill us, which made it the best meal I'd had in days.
The fisherman was an old man with a weathered face and a pipe that he puffed on between sentences. He sat down across from us without an introduction, as if we'd been expecting him.
"Up in the mountain," he said, pointing toward a peak in the distance, "there's a cave. Hermit lives there. Healer, they say. Powerful pills. Mysterious methods."
Han and I exchanged a glance.
"A healer," I said.
"Powerful pills," Han added.
"Mysterious methods," I finished.
The fisherman nodded, pleased that we understood the gravity of his information. "He's helped travelers before. For a price."
"What kind of price?"
"Spirit stones, mostly. He's not cheap. But they say his pills can cure anything."
I looked at my arm. The purple veins had spread past my shoulder and were creeping toward my collarbone. The skin around the wound was hot to the touch. I'd been hiding how much it hurt from Han, but I could tell he knew. He had that look — the one that said "I am calculating how long you have left and I don't like the answer."
"A healer in a cave," I said. "With mysterious methods. Who charges in spirit stones."
"That's the one."
"Han."
"I know."
"Did you just develop a headache too?"
"Simultaneously, yes."
I thanked the fisherman and told him we'd check it out. He walked away, satisfied, puffing on his pipe. I waited until he was out of earshot.
"It's a scam," Han said.
"Almost certainly."
"A scammer who heard about the mysterious stranger who fixes things and set up a fake healer operation to bleed us dry."
"That's my read too."
"Are we going anyway?"
I looked at my arm again. The purple was creeping higher. The pain had settled into a dull, constant presence, like a tenant who had stopped paying rent but refused to leave.
"Yeah," I said. "We're going anyway."
The elder caught us before we left.
He appeared at the edge of the village with a solemn expression, a young woman in traditional robes at his side. She looked uncomfortable. He looked determined. The kind of determined that only a village elder with a plan could achieve.
"Honored stranger," he said, "before you depart, I must make an offer."
"Elder, I really don't think—"
"My daughter. She is of age. She is skilled in cooking, cleaning, and the basic arts of cultivation. I offer her hand in marriage as a token of our village's eternal gratitude."
The daughter looked at me. She looked at her father. She looked at the ground. I felt for her. She hadn't asked for any of this.
I took a breath.
"Elder. I appreciate the gesture. Truly. But I can't accept."
"Why not? Is she not beautiful enough? Skilled enough? Worthy enough?"
"She's probably all three. But I'm about to walk into a mountain to confront a potentially fraudulent healer, I'm poisoned, my companion's only weapon is a shovel, and I have no idea where I'm going to sleep next week. I am not marriage material."
"Those are just temporary concerns—"
"I also don't know how marriage works in this world. Is there paperwork? A contract? A waiting period? What are the divorce laws? What happens to shared property if one spouse dies in a cultivation accident? I can't sign up for a legally binding lifelong partnership without reading the fine print first."
The elder stared at me.
The daughter stared at me.
Han wrote something down. I heard the scratch of the pen. He was going to savor this entry.
"Your world is very strange," the elder finally said.
"My world has insurance paperwork. You have no idea how complicated things can get."
The elder conceded. His daughter smiled — just a little, just for me — and walked back toward the village. I think she was relieved. I know I was.
We left as the sun began to set.
The mountain loomed ahead, dark against the orange sky. My arm throbbed with every step. The "healer" was probably a scam. But at least we were moving forward.
Han walked beside me, logbook open, the scratch of his pen keeping time with our footsteps. "I'm noting that you rejected a marriage proposal by citing hypothetical divorce legislation."
"Put it in the logbook. Future scholars will need to know."
"I'm putting it in the logbook. Future scholars are going to think I made you up."
Above us, the sky rendered a flock of birds in a perfect V-formation, every bird exactly the same size and distance apart. Even the birds couldn't be bothered to render properly in this world. They moved as a single unit, a prefab flock with no variation, no life.
Somewhere in the village behind us, the festival restarted. Music drifted up the mountain path, faint and cheerful. I could hear the elder's voice shouting something about more roasted meat.
I let myself smile, just for a moment.
Then I checked my system and saw my arm. The purple had reached my collarbone.
The smile faded.
We kept walking.