House of Cadell

At the northeast corner of the Middle City stood a three-story building, its green-tiled roof and white-framed windows exquisitely decorated. A wooden fence enclosed an exceptionally spacious yard below, and above the gate hung a crooked signboard.

A vegetable patch had been cultivated on the left side of the yard, filled with seasonal produce. Withered yellow vines crawled over the house's side wall, and through the gaps between them, one could see colorful, crooked graffiti—the childish handiwork of young students.

At the center of the yard stood a Horn Tree over forty feet tall, its lush branches shading half the courtyard and the rooftop. Several rectangular tables large enough to seat twenty people stood beneath it, covered in weathered stains left by wind and rain.

Roy stopped beneath the Horn Tree and studied it for a while, reaching out to touch its rough bark, his expression stirred. The tree had to be at least a century old. Strange symbols had also been carved into its trunk, though he had no idea which mischievous student had left them there.

Roy gently pushed open the wooden door on the first floor. Through the crack came a warm female voice. In his sight appeared a group of children sitting upright, along with a thin middle-aged woman writing on a small blackboard with charcoal.

"Our homeland, Aedirn, lies east of the Mahakam Mountains and borders Temeria. To the south, it adjoins Leria and Livia, while Kaedwen lies to the north. Its eastern border is formed by the Blue Mountains..."

"Aedirn's current King is Demavend III, son of Vyr. His heraldry is a golden-red arrow pattern on a black field, and the capital, Fangerburg, is located at..."

"Aedirn has always been a frequent site of peasant revolutions. In order to change the exorbitant taxes, harsh to the point of cruelty, the Revolutionary Army has waged fierce struggles against the nobility and the upper ranks of the kingdom..."

Hearing this, Roy could not help frowning. Something about it felt strange.

"Teacher Cadell! Someone's eavesdropping at the door!"

A skinny blond boy with a large head and small body, seated in the last row, suddenly raised his grimy little hand and interrupted the woman. At once, more than sixty pairs of curious, bright eyes turned toward the person at the door.

The children were split roughly evenly between boys and girls. The youngest were only five or six, while the oldest were fourteen or fifteen. They wore simple clothes and all looked thin. In the last row sat one person who stood out from the rest. The moment she saw him, her eyes curved with undisguised delight.

"Roy, what are you doing at school?" Faywen waved him over. During class, she was dressed far less flamboyantly than last time, wearing only a clean, simple gray dress. Her wine-red hair was tied into a ponytail, making her look much younger.

Roy hesitated for a moment, then sat in the empty seat beside her.

"Uncle Tross said you were a teacher at House of Cadell. I happened to want to learn something, so I came here."

Faywen nodded lightly, her beautiful eyes full of approval. "You made a wise decision. Only knowledge can change one's fate. Welcome to House of Cadell."

"My name is Tom. Hello, Roy!" The boy who had shouted earlier enthusiastically held out his hand. His features scrunched together as he flashed his prominent front teeth, smiling with both sincerity and a touch of comedy.

Roy shook his hand.

"Children, keep quiet. Review what you learned in history class. Teacher needs to go out and discuss something."

The middle-aged woman then led Roy up to a second-floor room used as an office.

"Child, you can call me Teacher Cadell. And you? What is your name? Let me guess—you came to House of Cadell to learn the Common Script?"

"My name is Roy. I'm not from around here. Can I still enroll?" Roy nodded and asked with slight nervousness. He did not want to have made the trip for nothing.

"Any student under sixteen is welcome here, and you look like you meet the requirement. You need to pay twenty Crowns in tuition each month, then cooperate with me in filling out a detailed identity registration. Do you understand? Most of the students here are children." Cadell's eyes were gentle, but her large hooked nose, deep nasolabial lines, and thin lips still made her look stern and intimidating.

"One more question. Do you have enough money?" There was a trace of doubt in Cadell's eyes. Few students came to the school alone; they were usually accompanied by an elder.

"I have work at the market... enough to cover the tuition. Oh, Teacher Cadell, because of my work, I'll only be able to come to school in the afternoons from now on." Twenty Crowns was indeed far cheaper than Roy had expected. Even without a side job, the money he had originally would have been enough.

"Morning or afternoon, whichever you prefer, as long as you can keep up."

With Cadell's help, Roy finished registering. She tucked the form into the cabinet beneath her desk.

Roy glanced over and saw several thick stacks of forms arranged neatly inside the cabinet. After paying the tuition, he followed Cadell back to the crude classroom, where he was assigned a seat between Faywen and Tom.

The moment Roy sat down, he felt several unfriendly gazes beside him.

Looks like not everyone welcomes my arrival!

A few sturdy boys seated to his upper right suddenly looked at him with the aggressiveness of wolf cubs after he joined the class. The oldest one, around fourteen or fifteen, especially seemed to regard him with jealousy and warning, as though Roy had stolen his favorite toy.

Roy did not take it seriously. There was no need to compete with a bunch of little brats over attention.

"Twenty Crowns a month, and local children probably pay even less. Is House of Cadell a charity? In the Middle City, that amount would barely cover the children's food." He counted roughly... besides himself, there were sixty-five students in the classroom and two teachers: Faywen and Cadell.

Food alone would cost a considerable sum every month. Learning to read and write was practically free, and the school even provided lodging for special cases.

"What are you thinking about, Roy?" Faywen cast him a concerned glance. "Not used to the environment here?"

"I think it's pretty good..." Roy lowered his voice. "Are all the children from the Lower City?"

"Mm, they're all children from ordinary families." The woman joked, "Get along with everyone from now on. Don't bully them just because you're older. If there's anything you don't understand, ask me."

Roy nodded and threw himself wholeheartedly into studying.

This so-called "school" had extremely crude teaching conditions. There were no desks or chairs; the students sat shoulder to shoulder in rows on a thin carpet. There were no quills or ink, only charcoal left over from burned firewood. They wrote on wrinkled, poor-quality straw paper, or simply wrote on the ground, erased it, and wrote again.

The conditions were harsh, but the opportunity was hard-won. Most of the students listened very attentively.

Making a slight concession for the new student, Cadell began teaching the basics of the Common Tongue popular in the Northern Kingdoms—a "new language" that had emerged after the Conjunction of Spheres, with letters and grammar resembling the Slavic language family.

Roy found the feeling strange. For a moment, it was as though he had returned to his old world, where he was still that ignorant, green high school student sitting in a classroom.

The original Roy had survived in this world for more than ten years and possessed some understanding of the local language, which improved his learning efficiency to a certain extent.

His mature thinking, mental capacity, and forward-looking perspective were all tremendous advantages. His Spirit of 6, beyond that of ordinary people, allowed him to stay focused for longer. Most importantly, he had once been a high school student baptized by the brutal trials of compulsory education. When it came to memorizing knowledge, he was inferior to no one in this world.

With several factors overlapping, an astonishing chain reaction took place. Roy became increasingly adept at learning this new writing system.

Near noon, the large branches of the Horn Tree in the yard shaded several rectangular tables surrounded by people.

A biting cold wind stirred the steaming food on the tables. Amid the wafting aroma, the quietly seated children swallowed in unison.

Yet no one moved. Their eager gazes were fixed on the middle-aged woman at the center, waiting for her command.

Cadell stood ramrod straight like a commander before battle. She surveyed the restless students around her, nodded with satisfaction, and began speaking.

"Prophet Lebioda lit three fires for the common people. One is called justice, one is called equality, and the last is the fire of ideals... Every child here carries ideals in their heart... Our parents are all farmers. Cherish every grain they have painstakingly cultivated and watered with blood and sweat..."

Cadell abruptly swung her arm, and the dining tables instantly boiled over like a pot of water.

The food on the tables was nothing more than a serving each of coarse bread made from barley and other grains, vegetable soup, pickled vegetables, and salted dried fish.

But the hungry students rejected nothing, desperately stuffing food into their mouths as though anything left a moment too late would be gone.

Roy, who had been slowly chewing his bread, was startled by the students' frantic scramble. Influenced by them, he inexplicably sped up his own eating.

In less than fifteen minutes, every scrap of food on the tables had been swept clean. Even the vegetable soup was licked until not a single drop remained. Leaves that drifted down from the Horn Tree into the dishes had been swallowed by some mischievous little devil.

Yet Roy was only six-tenths full, and he could tell that most of the students were much the same. Tom, the blond boy nearby, pouted miserably. With his skinny arms and legs, he simply could not compete with the others, even though he sat near the center.

Still, this was the most delicious meal Roy had eaten since crossing over, surpassing even the mountain delicacies and seafood Seville Hogg had treated him to.

"Sure enough, food snatched into your own hands tastes best."

Roy suddenly felt that Cadell's words before the meal carried a deeper meaning. She praised equality and justice, yet at the table, she let a group of children fight for food based solely on their own ability.

Was she teaching them the cruelty of reality from a young age?

After lunch, the students had a brief rest. They split into more than a dozen little groups, chasing and playing in the yard or chatting noisily. Their youthful faces shone with smiles, and Roy once again felt that illusion, as though he had returned to a physical education class at his old school.

He could not imagine that in this turbulent magical world, in a place where the Revolutionary Army was flourishing, there could still be a sanctuary like House of Cadell. There were indeed things about this school that earned his admiration.

But even within a "sanctuary," there were discordant elements. Every group inevitably had popular people and those who were ignored.

The little brat named Tom, who had enthusiastically greeted him at the beginning, was one such unlucky child. He stood alone in a corner of the yard, absentmindedly playing with his fingers, occasionally casting envious looks toward the lively scene around him.

"Roy, aren't you going over to join them?" A fragrant breeze drifted over as Faywen quietly came to his side, encouragement in her beautiful eyes.

A chill ran through Roy, and he could not help shaking his head. "I don't have anything in common with them... What's with that little brat Tom? Isn't he a bit pitiful?"

"Tom... is an orphan. Unlike the other children, he doesn't have parents to love and protect him. The school is his home." The woman sighed, her tone turning subdued. "He's small and skinny, so he's often bullied by several bigger children and deliberately isolated. Principal Cadell and I have tried to stop it many times, but it hasn't worked. There are too many things for us to manage, and we can't keep an eye on him every moment. We haven't cared enough about him either."

"He's a neglected child."

Roy nodded. Bullying was a thorny problem even in modern society, let alone in this backward, dilapidated school.

"Come on, Roy. Let's go keep him company..." Faywen suddenly grabbed Roy's hand and, without giving him a chance to resist, pulled him toward Tom.

After playtime came half an hour of napping. In the afternoon, it was Faywen's turn to teach: simple arithmetic, basic common sense for daily life, mixed with explanations of Common Tongue vocabulary. A beautiful woman with a sweet smile and a gentle voice made even dry, boring knowledge interesting.

At the very least, Roy and the boys listened without blinking.

Once the battered clock in the classroom passed five, people gradually began arriving at House of Cadell to take the children home to the Lower City.

"Is it safe? The Sparrow Gang's traffickers won't target these children?" Roy watched the students leave, then walked to Faywen's side and asked curiously.

"Five years ago, the Sparrow Gang abducted a girl from the school. The next day, someone found her body in a foul ditch. Her desperate parents spent all their savings on lamp oil, then set fire to one of the gang's hideouts under cover of night. They charged into the flames too, perishing together with the sleeping thugs. I still remember it clearly—the sight of more than twenty charred corpses being carried from the blackened ruins." Even years later, Faywen still had a trace of shock in her eyes as she spoke. "Afterward, the school and all the residents of the Lower City put pressure on the Sparrow Gang. Even Baron Tavik was alarmed. The Sparrow Gang compromised and never dared touch that bottom line again."

After hearing that, Roy could not help recalling something Seville Hogg had once said: "The anger of honest people can burn down all of Mahakam." When he returned that evening, he would have another story to tell Toya.

"Come on, Roy." Faywen suddenly seized his arm and pulled him involuntarily toward the classroom. "It's your first day, so there must be plenty you didn't understand. I'll review it with you again."

Roy was truly flattered. Since their first meeting, he had felt that this woman treated him strangely well. Still, there was nothing inappropriate about it at the moment. If he could learn the Common Script sooner, he was willing.

"Hey, Roy, why are you back again?" Tom, who had been leaning by the doorway and staring enviously at the passing people, came bouncing over. He grabbed Roy's other hand, his blond hair bobbing as he grinned and showed his two large front teeth like a puppy trying to please its owner. "Are you homeless too? Want me to play with you?"

Faywen grabbed his ear, yanking the skinny boy into a howling bend at the waist. "Little Tom, Roy is going to review today's lessons. Since you've volunteered, you're coming too!"

The boy's face stiffened at once. He struggled desperately like a lively little squirrel, but Faywen still dragged him into the classroom by the ear.

"Don't you usually complain that no one plays with you? From now on, after school, you'll keep Roy company and learn a little more."

The bleak autumn wind carried the boy's wails far away. The towering Horn Tree in the yard swayed its branches in the wind, dead yellow leaves rustling down. The entire school seemed to wither along with them.