Dawn in the valley didn't arrive with fanfare, but with a leaden gray that promised a damp day. I got up before the sun managed to pierce the fog, but, as was now customary, she was already awake. Or rather, she had never slept. She was leaning against the doorframe, watching the mist crawl across the ground like a living animal.
"The canal needs doing today," I said, passing by her while carrying the shovel and the iron rake.
She didn't respond with words, but she followed me. Not at a polite distance, but with that silent closeness of someone studying a natural phenomenon.
The irrigation canal was the artery of my small plot. If it got blocked, the water would stagnate, the turnip roots would rot, and I would go hungry in winter. The work consisted of getting knee-deep into a mixture of freezing water, decomposed branches, and black mud that smelled of stagnant time.
I sank into the ditch. The cold bit into my calves immediately—a physical reminder that my body was still mortal and fragile. I began to shovel out clods of mud, throwing them onto the bank with a methodical rhythm. Strike, lift, turn. Strike, lift, turn.
"It's fascinating," she said from the dry bank. Her white silk boots didn't have a single speck of dust.
"What is? The smell of rot or how my feet are freezing?" I grunted without stopping.
"Your persistence. You use a metal tool to move earth, spending energy that your body can barely replenish with that stale bread. For a Fallen One, you have adapted far too well to the humiliation of matter."
I paused for a second, leaning on the shovel handle. Steam rose from my mouth.
"It's not humiliation. It's survival. In the world I came from..." I stopped myself too late.
"The world you came from?" she repeated, looking down at me. Her voice didn't have the urgency of an interrogation, but the precision of a scalpel opening a wound.
I froze, mud dripping from the shovel and hitting the water with a dull thud. My heart skipped a beat. In this world, saying you come from "another place" doesn't sound like madness; it sounds like celestial planes or forbidden dimensions. If I continued down that path, I was going to confirm her suspicions that I was some exiled supreme being.
"I was talking about before I reached the valley," I lied, trying to catch my breath and my composure. "Before waking up in that hut with the old man. I told you, my memories are... fragments. Images of places with too much light and too much noise. Nothing that makes sense here."
She jumped over the ditch with a movement that defied gravity, landing on the opposite bank without a sound. She leaned over, watching the water begin to flow more freely thanks to my work.
"The Fallen often yearn for their realms," she commented, ignoring my obvious nervousness. "Some speak of jade palaces, others of seas of stars. You speak of 'noise.' It is a curious way to describe power."
"It wasn't power. It was... exhaustion," I replied, and for the first time in a long while, I felt a pang of real nostalgia for Earth. Not for the work, but for the security of knowing the world functioned by rules I understood. Here, the rule was that if a woman with silver eyes decided I was a god, my life was over. "But that doesn't matter now. All that matters is that if I don't finish this canal before the sun is high, the water won't reach the back rows."
I forced myself to drive the shovel in with more spite. The black mud yielded under my strength, but my thoughts kept flying toward that small crack I had just opened. I had to be more careful. She wasn't looking for a conversation; she was looking for a confirmation.
"You know, Aethel?" she said, walking slowly along the edge of the canal as I advanced through the mud. "There is something that doesn't fit in your 'survival' story. A man who only seeks food does not have a soul so... anchored. Hunger weakens the spirit, makes it volatile, desperate. But you... you work as if you were building a monument, not just cleaning a ditch."
I stopped again, sweat mixing with the cold water on my forehead.
"It's just mud, ma'am. Don't go looking for more than what's there."
"To you, it is mud," she replied, and for a second, her silver gaze seemed to turn transparent.
I kept working in silence for the rest of the morning. The sun, though hidden by clouds, began to warm the air, making it heavy and humid. My arms trembled from the effort, but I didn't allow myself to stop. I felt that if I paused, she would fill the void with more questions I wouldn't know how to answer.
When I finally reached the end of the stretch, the water flowed with a cheerful murmur, clearing away the stagnant filth. I climbed out of the ditch, my boots weighing double from the accumulated mud, and collapsed onto the grass, exhausted.
It was in that moment of weakness, when my body could barely respond, that I heard the first strange sound that didn't belong to the valley.
A sharp whistle, like an arrow cutting through the wind, but much more persistent. She heard it too. She straightened up, looking toward the pass that connected my valley to the lowlands.
"My," she whispered; her voice still had that tone of boredom. "It seems the 'insects' are in more of a hurry than I thought."
"Insects?" I asked, trying to stand up. The mud felt like lead in my legs, and the sound of that whistle in the air made my skin crawl.
"Cultivators," she replied, without even turning around. Her posture was one of insulting relaxation. "At least, that is what they believe themselves to be. Tiny specks of dust that have learned to jump a little higher than the rest."
The whistling grew louder and, suddenly, three figures landed at the entrance of the pass. They didn't arrive walking; they glided down on iron swords that glowed with a rather poor blue light. They wore gray robes with cloud embroidery—the uniform of some local sect from the surrounding area.
To me, someone who only saw people like Joran, those guys looked like demigods. To her, they were simply noise.
"Why don't you... you know, get rid of them?" I whispered, wiping my hands on the grass. If she could erase mountains, three guys with glowing swords should be less than nothing.
She let out a sigh, a sound heavy with cosmic boredom.
"If I squash a fly against the wall, it leaves a stain, Aethel. And if I clean the stain, the smell of the soap will attract more flies. It is tedious." She turned to me, and for the first time that day, I saw a spark of malice in her eyes. "Besides, if I act, I will not be able to see how the 'stone' reacts to pressure."
"Are you going to use me as a shield?" I asked, incredulous.
"I am going to use you as landscape. If you stay there standing with that foolish face and your body covered in mud, to them you will be part of the scenery. Cultivators of this level have a selective blindness: they only see what shines. And you, right now, are the most opaque thing I have seen in a thousand years."
The three figures approached. The one in the lead, a middle-aged man with an expression of arrogance etched into his face, raised his hand and his sword returned to its scabbard with a metallic click.
"You, peasant!" he shouted, completely ignoring the woman standing three meters away from him.
I froze. Did he really not see her? I looked out of the corner of my eye and understood. She hadn't made herself invisible; she had simply "adjusted" the reality around her. She was there, but her presence was so subtle, so integrated into the shadow of the willow, that the cultivator's eye passed right over her as if she were just another bush.
"Y-yes?" I stammered, faking a fear that, to be honest, wasn't hard to feel.
"A star-fall was detected in this sector two days ago," the man said, stopping a few steps from the ditch. He looked at my irrigation canal with evident disgust. "A treasure or a remnant of pure energy. Speak, mortal. Have you seen anything that doesn't belong in this mud?"
I felt her gaze fixed on the back of my neck. It wasn't a gaze of support; it was the gaze of a scientist waiting for the test subject to do something interesting.
"I haven't seen anything, sir," I said, lowering my head and shrugging. "There's only been storms and wind. The garden almost flooded, as you can see..."
The cultivator frowned. He took a step forward, invading my personal space. His aura—a cold, stinging pressure—hit me. In any other peasant, that would have caused them to fall to their knees in terror. But when that energy struck my body, the usual happened.
Nothing.
My "stone rhythm" simply absorbed the impact. The cultivator's aura was like a wave hitting a cliff: a lot of noise, a lot of foam, but the rock didn't even notice.
"It's strange..." the cultivator muttered, narrowing his eyes as he analyzed me. "You are... too silent."
I could hear a mental giggle, a silken voice that resonated in my head:
"Careful, Aethel. The insect is beginning to notice that his stinger does not pierce your skin. Try to appear more... fragile. Little men are bothered when they cannot frighten those they consider inferior."
Dammit. How is someone supposed to pretend their soul isn't heavy?
I remained sitting in the mud, breathing with difficulty. My chest burned and I felt my arms as if they were made of lead. My heart beat forcefully, but it was a dull throb, a Thump... Thump... that echoed in my ears.
"They're gone," I said aloud, without getting up. My voice came out broken from exhaustion.
She stepped away from the tree and walked toward the bank of the ditch. She looked down at me with that neatness that was starting to irritate me.
"Mediocre performance," she declared. "But effective. Little men always believe what suits them."
"It hurt," I grunted. And it wasn't a lie. The guy's shove hadn't broken my ribs, but the impact against my chest had left a bruise that was already starting to turn purple. My body wasn't armor; it was flesh and bone, and flesh hurts.
"It hurt because you resisted," she said, looking down a bit further. "Your body is heavy, Aethel. That is why that insect's blow bounced back. Not because you are strong, but because you are... difficult to move."
I stood up with an effort that made my knees tremble. My boots sank deep into the mud, and every step out of the ditch was a battle against my own weight. I felt like the valley wanted to swallow me.
"Whatever," I said, picking up the shovel.
As I grabbed the wooden handle, I heard a small creak: crack. I looked down. My fingers, dirty with mud and numb from the cold, had gripped the wood with an unconscious tension.
"Great," I muttered, "another tool I'll have to fix."
We returned to the cabin in silence. The rest of the afternoon was a reminder of my fragility. I had to heat a lot of water to get rid of the cold that had gotten into my bones, and every movement cost me more than the last.
I ate the rest of the cold stew for dinner. She returned to her chair, watching the shadows. To her, the encounter with the cultivators had been a boring interlude. To me, it was the warning that my bubble of peace had cracks.
"Aethel," she said when the embers were dying.
"What?"
"Tomorrow, when you work... try to be lighter. If you keep moving like this, you will end up breaking your own house before winter arrives."
I looked at my hands, calloused and rough, under the dim light. I had no spiritual roots. I had no energy flowing through my veins. I only had this strange body that felt like a stone trying to learn how to walk.
"I'll do what I can," I replied, turning over on my pallet.
I fell asleep with my body aching from real physical effort, wondering how much longer I could go on being "just a peasant" before my own weight finally crushed me.