The Wood Family Castle

If the weather is fine, it takes only six or seven days to ride from Wenden Port to the territory of the Wood Family.

However, reality always deviates slightly from theory; spending the night in the wild is clearly not just unpleasant, but also quite unsafe. This is why both men chose to depart in the morning, aiming to reach a village or town as far as possible to stay the night before setting out again the next morning.

Some sections of the road remained muddy after the snow melted, and it was only two days after their departure that they stepped back onto firmer ground, with a thin shell of dried mud coating the outside of their cloaks. It took another six days of stopping and starting through the villages along the way before they finally returned to Wood Town on the evening of the ninth day.

Like most settlements, Wood Town was built in a place close to a water source, situated in a river valley flanked by low hills. With the mountains at its back and the river in front, the land was long and narrow. The river was about ten meters wide—not particularly broad, but difficult to cross nonetheless.

When Old Wood was still young, the town developed only on one side of the river. To cross, one had to take a long detour upstream to where the water was shallow, or choose between swimming and taking a boat.

Deeply detesting this, Old Wood, in order to make full use of the land on the other side of the river, used the leftover stone from building his castle to construct a stone bridge—a project that was truly a convenience for the people.

Now, Ryan and Kraft were crossing this very bridge; they had to pass through the town to reach the castle on the hill behind it.

The location of the castle was very comfortable. The low hill behind the town featured a gentle slope facing Wood Town and the river, while the back was a steep cliff. For defense, one only had to face enemies climbing the slope from an upward angle, significantly reducing the engineering requirements for the rear.

At the same time, this modest slope would provide an extremely uncomfortable experience for anyone attacking; while it drained their stamina, it also made an upward charge impossible. Conversely, the defenders could take advantage of a shift in momentum to rush downward, accumulating enough force in a short distance to send people flying.

Over the course of thirty years, Old Wood first cleared the trees from the top of the slope, used timber to fence off a wooden wall as a transition, built a sturdy tower against the cliff as the main body of the castle, and surrounded the tower with removable wooden structures like stables, workshops, and kitchens.

This phase lasted for more than a decade, accounting for half of the entire project; that is to say, until around the time Kraft was born, the outer perimeter of the Wood Family castle was still made of wooden walls.

The long construction period was primarily due to economic considerations and practicality. Although the territory theoretically included Wood Town and several surrounding small villages, and its economy was considered quite good among the minor nobility, a newly established family had more than just this one expense. Old Wood also had to provide properties for the old comrades who had returned with him, and the descendants of these people would serve the Wood Family.

Wood Town was not a military stronghold. While a family castle could effectively guard against various risks, there had to be such risks for it to be of any use. Even if a war were to break out one day, no one would bother to divert an army to attack this place; sending an envoy to symbolically accept the lord's surrender would be enough.

It was not until the timing was right, or rather, when Old Wood felt the family's economic situation had improved, that the Wood Family began to dismantle the wooden fences and replace them with real stone curtain walls.

The smaller scale of the work allowed Old Wood to stubbornly increase the height of the curtain walls to over three meters, which, combined with the crenelations on the walls, would be very useful once the Kraft family could stockpile enough crossbows and bows.

The auxiliary buildings that had been patched up over a dozen years were also replaced by an expanded tower, gradually merging into a solid fortress with a tower section. At this point, the entire castle had fully matured, becoming a disgusting thing that was both hard to attack and not worth attacking, making it very suitable as a foundation for family inheritance.

Time moved forward to when Kraft grew into adulthood. In recent years, the castle had paved the road from the gate to the town with gravel, which saved a lot of trouble with horses and vehicles slipping.

Kraft and Ryan headed upward along this zigzagging road. The setting sun slowly sank behind the castle, casting the building's elongated shadow onto the sparsely wooded slope. Its future enemies would be covered by its shadow every evening, preparing their difficult-to-maneuver siege equipment on the ramp, while bracing for the heavy boulders that would be rolled down.

Even a soul from another world had to marvel at the strength of this thing in the age of cold weapons. When water and food supplies were sufficient, it would take several times the manpower to besiege such a stone building complex.

Large siege engines could not even be brought here; in wartime, once that stone bridge over the river below was destroyed, it would be a hassle for anyone to even cross. Equipment made from timber felled on the spot would be hellishly difficult to push up the slope. And after all that effort, they would reach the front of the castle only to face a group of militiamen led by professional soldiers—it could be called the ultimate torture.

That's right, being prepared for danger in times of peace, the Wood Family did have non-farming armed forces. Although there were indeed not many—only a dozen or twenty people—they mainly came from the old comrades-in-arms who had retired with Old Wood.

As Old Wood prospered, they also received shares of the surrounding industries, and they were the type of people who, like Old Wood, enjoyed training the younger generation from a young age, forming a group of professional soldiers with a family tradition.

The men Kraft's father took to the battlefield were exactly this group of "personal guards" serving as his retinue, supplemented by some temporarily armed militiamen to fill the ranks; a small army was thus formed. Their ultimate misfortune was purely a matter of bad luck, not because these people trained from childhood lacked skill.

In Kraft's generation, there were also young people of the same age receiving training in the castle, though most of them were destined to guard the castle for their entire lives, with no chance to go to the battlefield to seek their fortune.

In the dim light, one could see fire flickering at the castle gate; those were the torches held by the guards on night watch. Faintly, one could also hear the clanking of metal.

"John? Or George? Don't close the gate yet!" Kraft shouted. "Don't, I don't want to wait outside while you fiddle with that damn winch."

"Aha, our little baron is back!" Laughter came from the other side of the gate, the clanking of metal ceased, and a young face leaned out from the wall holding a torch. "Come on in."

"I'll warn you one last time, George, there's only one person here who can be called Baron!" Kraft had a good relationship with these young men; after all, they had been trained by Old Wood together, and there wasn't much etiquette to speak of among country nobility. "Don't I have a name?"

Ryan and Kraft took their horses to the stables, then found Old Wood and Anderson enjoying dinner in the dining hall. Under the candlelight, the long dining table was set with bread, thick soup, and homemade sausages from the castle. The white-haired old man and the somewhat balding middle-aged man sat at the table, the atmosphere resembling a public service announcement about caring for empty-nesters on television.

"My dear Kraft, you've finally returned. Anderson and I were just talking about you." The burly old man put down the bread in his hand and warmly welcomed his grandson. "And Ryan, come over and sit down. You must be hungry."

"So you didn't end up seeing that person after all?" After the two had eaten their fill, Ryan remembered to take out the stone hand, and only then did Old Wood suddenly recall what else Kraft had gone out for.

A month had passed since they left and returned, from the snow falling to the snow melting; it felt like half the winter had passed. If Ryan hadn't brought back a gift, everyone might have forgotten about it.

"Indeed, he was just a clumsy fraud who burned his own hand and died before we even reached Wenden Port." Kraft crossed his arms, expressing his helplessness. "It wasn't as interesting as what Cousin Ryan bought; at least this hand won't set itself on fire."

"Haha, indeed." Anderson took the hand from Old Wood, examined it, but couldn't make heads or tails of it. "But this does look quite interesting. Did the seller say where it came from?"

"He didn't say, but I don't think it looks like something from within Norse territory." Ryan kept a straight face. "If you want to talk about something interesting, you have to look at Kraft. You would never guess what happened." He teased them, though the smile on his face was impossible to hide.

"It couldn't be that Kraft was admitted to Wenden Port Academy, could it?" Old Wood guessed in the most unlikely direction as usual, and this outrageous guess made even Anderson laugh.

"..."

"..."

"What's wrong? Why are you both silent? What kind of interesting thing is so mysterious?" The sudden silence made Anderson stop laughing, thinking his laughter had been inappropriate.