Ninety-eight.
Ninety-nine.
One hundred.
William launched himself upward from a deep squat, his knees snapping straight as his boots left the uneven cobblestones of the castle courtyard in a final, explosive jump.
He landed softly on the balls of his feet, his chest heaving like a pair of blacksmith's bellows as his heart hammered furiously against his ribs. Every breath he blew out into the morning chill turned into a thick cloud of white vapor, while beads of hot sweat rolled down his temples and soaked through the collar of his black shirt.
Yet William barely noticed the burning lactic acid in his thighs or the biting cold on his skin.
His eyes were half-closed, his entire mind locked onto something deep inside his chest — his internal "pulse".
Over the past few days of pushing his body to the edge, William had discovered a fascinating link between his physical stamina and the Dimensional System. Whenever his heart rate crossed a certain threshold and his muscles approached total exhaustion, the dormant pool of Magic Power underneath his ribs began to hum with a low, rhythmic vibration.
He could feel it right now: a warm, electric current coursing alongside his blood, reacting directly to the physical stress and knitting his tired muscle fibers back together slightly faster than a normal human body ever could.
Standing up straight in the middle of the empty training yard, William rolled his shoulders back, tilted his head to the side until his neck bones let out a loud, satisfying crack, and tapped a finger against his temple.
Ding.
With a crisp, melodic chime that only he could hear, the translucent blue window materialized in the air a foot in front of his face:
[DIMENSIONAL SYSTEM]
User: [William]
Magic Power: 3 [Teleportation]
William's eyes skimmed quickly over his physical attribute lines, noting with a faint nod that the hidden decimal progress behind his Strength and Stamina was slowly creeping upward from all the heavy sword drills and calisthenics.
Inevitably, however, his gaze dropped to the bottom corner of the blue frame — and his expression soured into a look of pure, annoyed frustration.
There, sitting right beside his unlocked [Inventory] tab, was a second rectangular icon labeled [SHOP].
Just like on day one, the button remained completely dull, grayed out, and locked behind a wall of encrypted question marks.
What the hell is this stingy System waiting for?, William grumbled inside his own head, crossing his sweat-dampened arms as he glared at the unresponsive gray icon. We've been busting our asses in this medieval mudhole for over a week now! We survived the arrival, we made sure Anna didn't hang in the town square, we recruited Iron Axe, and Arthur basically handed Roland a complete five-year economic master plan on a silver platter! What else do I have to do to unlock a simple store menu? Beat a Hybrid demon to death with a wooden soup spoon?!
Waving a hand to dismiss the floating screen, William walked over and leaned his back against the rough, freezing stone wall of the castle barracks, closing his eyes for a moment to let his breathing slow down.
In the background, echoing from half a mile away, he could hear the distant, rhythmic clanging of iron pickaxes and heavy sledges striking rock along the base of the North Slope.
Roland's ambitious plan to erect an unbreakable defensive barrier before the first snow was no longer just charcoal lines on a sheet of parchment; it had become a living, breathing machine powered by hundreds of pairs of human hands. Down by the southern approach, teams of newly hired miners and laborers were already digging deep into the frozen mud, carving out a massive, straight foundation trench designed to close the gap between the steep cliffs of the mountain and the dark, churning waters of the Redwater River.
As the distant sounds of pickaxes echoed off the hills, William couldn't help wondering what that locked [SHOP] tab actually held inside it.
If it worked anything like the systems in the games he used to play, opening that menu would be like tearing a hole straight back to the twenty-first century.
For a brief, torturous five seconds, William let himself daydream about the simplest luxuries of Earth. The idea of trading the castle's rock-hard rye bread and lukewarm, unseasoned boar stew for a double bacon cheeseburger dripping with melted cheddar and an ice-cold can of soda felt like an impossible paradise. He missed the quiet hum of air conditioning, the soft leather pads of his noise-canceling headphones, a hot shower with real water pressure, and the bright screen of a smartphone.
Then, shaking his head, the fighter in him pushed the thoughts of junk food aside and focused on what really mattered: tactical firepower.
If that Shop sells modern gear, William thought, a dangerous glint returning to his eyes, I wouldn't just be Roland's military drill sergeant — I would be a literal god of war on this continent.
He pictured what he could do with even basic modern infantry equipment. High-altitude flare guns to light up the pitch-black sky during a night raid; high-lumen tactical LED flashlights to cut right through the blinding blizzards of the Impassable Mountain Range; or even a lightweight Kevlar carrier vest fitted with Level IV ceramic ballistic plates.
If he could pair ceramic body armor and a combat knife made of modern high-carbon steel with his instantaneous Teleportation jumps, neither the claws of a Demonic Beast nor the crossbows of the Church would ever be able to touch him. Border Town wouldn't just survive the winter — it would become a meat grinder for anyone stupid enough to attack it.
Grabbing the hem of his black shirt, William wiped the remaining sweat from his forehead, pushed himself off the stone wall, and looked across the courtyard toward the old castle gardens.
While the hundreds of recruited townsfolk were breaking their backs digging mud trenches outside the walls, the true industrial miracle that would keep them all alive was happening right over there, hidden behind a rising cloud of gray dust, white smoke, and the sharp smell of burning sulfur.
Having nothing better to do before his afternoon militia drill with Iron Axe, William decided to walk over and check on the progress of Roland and Anna's open-air laboratory.
As he stepped through the stone archway into the former garden, the sheer scale of the makeshift cement operation came into full view.
The production of early Portland cement was a messy, exhausting, and borderline obsessive process.
In the far corner of the yard, under the watchful eyes of two castle guards, a dozen muscular stonecutters and miners were swinging heavy iron mauls, smashing cartloads of pale gray limestone brought down from the North Slope until the rocks were reduced to fine, chalky dust.
Beside them, at a series of long wooden mixing troughs set up by Arthur and Roland, workers were carefully measuring out that limestone powder and blending it with precise ratios of river clay and crushed iron ore dust, adding water until it formed a thick, malleable gray paste.
To the illiterate laborers shoveling the wet mud into brick molds, it looked like nothing more than dirty potter's clay.
To William, Arthur, and Roland, however, that gray sludge was the literal DNA of modern civilization. Once that paste was roasted at extreme temperatures until it fused into hard nodules of clinker, and then ground down one last time with a small percentage of gypsum to control the setting time, they would have real hydraulic cement — liquid stone capable of hardening even under the freezing waters of the Redwater River.
Walking past the mixing tables, William spotted Anna standing alone in front of a newly bricked test kiln near the center of the yard.
Roland had just been called back inside the castle ten minutes earlier by Assistant Minister Barov to sign off on a timber requisition, leaving the young witch in charge of firing the latest batch of raw mixture.
Her vibrant orange-red hair was tied back into a neat, practical bun at the nape of her neck to keep it away from the heat, and there was a dark smudge of charcoal soot across her left cheek. Yet, standing there in her simple work dress, she carried a quiet, unshakable dignity that made the noisy laborers around the yard instinctively keep a respectful distance.
Anna had her right arm extended straight toward the open iron grate at the heart of the brick furnace.
From her pale palm, a steady, unwavering stream of pale-green fire flowed into the chamber.
What amazed William wasn't just the heat; it was her terrifying precision. A normal wood or coal fire fluctuated wildly every time the wind blew, creating cold spots that ruined the chemical reaction. Anna, however, was regulating the thermal output of her magic down to the exact degree, maintaining a uniform fourteen-hundred-degree zone inside the bricks that no medieval thermometer could even measure. She wasn't merely baking the clay; she was forcing the calcium silicates to synthesize at the molecular level, exactly as Roland's diagrams demanded.
Strolling up to the side of the warm brick structure, William leaned his shoulder casually against a thick wooden roof support pillar — standing close enough to feel the dry waves of heat radiating off the stonework while pretending the temperature didn't bother him at all.
— "Still turning plain old dirt into magic powder, Anna?" — William asked, flashing an easy, practiced smile meant to break the serious atmosphere.
Anna didn't turn her head, nor did her blue eyes blink or shift a single millimeter away from the glowing green core inside the kiln.
Over the past week, the quiet girl he had first seen on the gallows had completely vanished; in her place stood a focused, disciplined researcher who treated every task from the prince like a sacred mission.
— "His Highness explained that the final strength of the mortar depends entirely on the uniformity of the sintering phase," — Anna replied, her voice calm, steady, and clearly audible over the low roar of the flame despite the beads of sweat glistening along her collarbone. — "If I let the temperature inside the chamber drop or spike even slightly for ten seconds, the clinker nodules will not form properly. And if the clinker fails, the wall will crumble the first time a Demonic Beast slams against it."
— "Man, you really take every single decimal point seriously, don't you?" — William chuckled softly, crossing his arms as he watched the hypnotic reflection of the emerald flames dancing inside the deep blue of her irises.
Seeing that she still had a couple of minutes left on the burn, William tilted his head and tried a smoother angle:
— "You know, back in those 'ancient books' that Arthur and I studied in the south, I read all about how they used to make this stuff," — William said conversationally. — "In that lost era, they didn't have witches. They had to build massive iron cylinders — giant rotary kilns the size of a castle tower — that burned tons of coal just to do the exact same chemical job you're doing right now with one hand."
William flashed his best grin:
— "Those giant machines could process dozens of tons of rock an hour, sure... but honestly? Watching you do it is way better. You pull it off in a much more charming and captivating way than a rusty iron tube ever could."
For three seconds, the only sound between them was the crackle of the cooling bricks.
Then, having reached the exact time mark Roland had set on the sandglass beside the table, Anna slowly closed her fingers into a fist.
Instantly, the pale-green flame vanished inside the furnace. The superheated bricks let out a long, sharp series of clicks and hisses as the thermal pressure dropped, and a wave of dry, metallic-smelling heat wafted out into the cool autumn air.
Lowering her arm to her side, Anna finally turned her head to look directly at William.
Her soot-streaked face held no anger, no annoyance, and not a single trace of bashfulness. Instead, she looked up at him with that disarming, crystal-clear honesty that seemed to cut straight through any social mask.
— "This work has nothing to do with being pretty or charming, Mr. William," — Anna said softly, yet her voice carried the weight of solid iron. — "It is about being useful."
She glanced down for a brief second at her own small, calloused palms before meeting his eyes again:
— "For as long as I can remember, since the day this fire first appeared in my hands, everyone in the world told me that my existence was a mistake," — Anna continued evenly. — "The priests said we were filthy servants of the devil, and the townsfolk looked at us like a plague that needed to be cleansed by the rope. Even among other witches, all anyone ever talked about was running away and hiding in the woods until the pain killed us."
Anna turned her gaze toward the stacks of gray test bricks curing cleanly on the wooden racks beside the kiln:
— "His Highness Prince Roland is the first person who ever looked at my fire and saw a tool instead of a curse," — she said, a quiet, unbreakable light shining in her blue eyes. — "He gave me a reason to wake up in the morning that isn't just about surviving another day in the dark. He taught me how to build. If roasting these stones can keep the people of this town — even the ones who threw rocks at me in the square — from being torn apart by monsters this winter, then I will stand in front of this furnace and burn until there is nothing left of me but ash."
William stared at the seventeen-year-old girl for a long moment, the playful retort dying completely on his tongue.
He had originally opened his mouth to throw out another light, witty one-liner — something cheesy like "careful, or your resolve is going to burn hotter than that kiln" — just to keep his laid-back persona going.
Instead, he closed his mouth and let out a short, quiet breath through his nose, a genuine, respectful smile replacing his cocky grin.
Once again, his casual modern flirting had bounced harmlessly off the titanium wall of Anna's devotion and pragmatism. Yet this time, William didn't feel embarrassed or annoyed at all; if anything, he felt humbled.
Looking at her standing beside the smoking furnace, William finally understood something that reading a manhwa on a glowing screen back on Earth had never truly conveyed.
To Anna, working twelve hours a day in the soot wasn't a chore, and Roland wasn't just a handsome prince who had rescued her. She didn't want to be pampered, she didn't want silk dresses, and she certainly didn't want cheap compliments from a smooth-talking guy leaning against a pillar. She wanted to be an irreplaceable gear in the machine that changed the world — and in this entire kingdom, Roland Wimbledon was the only man whose mind operated on the exact same wavelength of pure, obsessive creation as hers.
— "Fair enough, Anna. Message received loud and clear," — William said, dropping the playboy tone completely and giving her a crisp, serious nod of respect — the kind of nod he would give a fellow fighter in the ring. — "You keep cooking the rock that holds the wall together, and I'll make sure the guys standing on top of it actually know how to shoot. Nobody's turning into ash on our watch this winter."
Anna blinked once, slightly surprised by the sudden drop of his joking demeanor, before offering a small, genuine nod in return.
— "Thank you, Mr. William. Now, if you will excuse me, I need to help the masons grind this batch while it cools."
As Anna turned back to pick up an iron shovel, William pushed himself off the wooden pillar and walked slowly over to the drying racks at the edge of the garden.
Reaching out with his right hand, he rapped his knuckles hard against a rectangular gray block that had been poured into a wooden mold forty-eight hours earlier.
Thock.
The block didn't crumble, crack, or leave gray dust on his skin; it felt as cold, dense, and unyielding as natural mountain granite.
Looking out past the garden wall toward the southern horizon — where the winter wind would soon bring the first wave of Demonic Beasts — William felt the restless energy of his Magic Power hum steadily inside his chest.
Forget the locked System Shop for now, and forget trying to act like some cliché harem protagonist from a comic book. Out here in the freezing mud of Graycastle, respect wasn't won with a charming smile — it was forged in fire, cement, and blood.
And as William turned his boots toward the barracks to meet Iron Axe and the new recruits, he knew that his real work was about to begin.