Stop Messing Around on Snowy Days

This time, Kraft woke in faint natural light, seeing only the rays squeezing through a narrow gap.

This world already had glass, yet its technology had landed at just the awkward point where a transmigrator could not easily profit from it, while mass production remained out of reach. Glassware was still considered a rarity, let alone the more technically demanding glass windows.

For now, most houses used wooden windows. If one wanted to wake up to a room full of sunlight, one could only leave the windows open in summer—and that was clearly not an option now.

The house Kraft was currently staying in had probably belonged to the village chief.

The reason for saying "probably" was that the position had never been officially recognized. There was no local lord or other ruler to make a declaration. As long as the other villagers thought the man handled things well enough, he took on the duties of receiving outsiders and mediating disputes between neighbors.

After seeing Kraft and his cousin's clothing, the village chief had naturally taken his family to squeeze into the house next door, giving up his own home in exchange for a handsome payment—two privately minted, blackened silver coins.

Of course, when Kraft returned to settle accounts with his grandfather, he would report two full-weight silver coins, the kind officially issued by the kingdom.

Even for the village chief's home, expecting decent conditions was unrealistic. The walls were made from a mixture of stone and clay, held in place by frames of local spruce. Combined with poorly fitted wooden windows, its insulation existed in a mysterious state somewhere between present and absent, teaching a profound lesson to anyone used to sleeping without clothes.

The rooms were separated by single-layer wooden boards, greatly simplifying the process of waking one's companion.

Kraft rolled out of bed and slapped the wooden partition between the two rooms. "Ryan, are you awake? You still have to leave for Wenden Port today."

"If you want me buried in snow halfway there, I can set off right now." The window in the other room was lifted from outside, and a blond head speckled with snow poked in. "Besides, people are supposed to urge others to leave in the morning, not at noon."

"It's already noon? What were you doing outside in such heavy snow?"

"I went to take a look at that Black Stone Pillar. I think we can give up on taking it back." Ryan shook the snow off himself. Though he had been outside all morning, he seemed none the worse for wear.

Back when no one believed Kraft would grow up safely, Ryan had been treated as half an heir to the family. Training through all four seasons had long since accustomed him to the cold.

"Why? I think Grandfather would be delighted to put it in the courtyard. Grandfather and Teacher could circle around it for a month. If nothing else, we can wait a few more days." Kraft wanted to insist a little longer.

"I suggest you go see it for yourself. Maybe you can knock it loose with your sword?" Ryan smiled and patted the scabbard at his waist.

Kraft arrived at the excavation site with his sword.

Not that he truly intended to pit a sword against a giant stone pillar. Carrying a weapon at all times was simply a proper habit.

Whether out of the professional discipline expected of an heir to a skull-splitting family, or because he valued the most precious property on his person, a weapon should at least remain within sight.

The large pit around the Black Stone Pillar had expanded another ring. Even someone who had never personally worked the land in his life knew that dealing with frozen soil on a snowy day was no easy task.

Several men, shivering from the cold, stood around the edge of the pit. Their expressions could not be seen through the dense snowfall. When they saw Kraft and Ryan approaching, they quickly moved aside and yielded their places.

The prism-shaped black stone still stood firmly in the center of the pit, perfectly upright and pointing straight toward the sky. At least two meters of it had been exposed.

At first, only a black corner had protruded from the ground. A child from the village had discovered it after tripping in the fields. Angry, he dug at it for an entire afternoon. When the adults came to find him at dusk, they found a large object that looked remarkably regular and bore patterns.

The villagers, thinking it might be something valuable, dug farther down and only then discovered that it was a pillar.

Now, looking toward the bottom of the pit, beneath scattered clods of earth lay a rough black horizontal surface made of the same material as the pillar.

The joint between the pillar and that surface had already been cleared. There were no traces of assembly whatsoever. It looked entirely like a single whole, without breaking the continuity of the patterns.

The person who had carved the upper half was probably an extremely meticulous obsessive. Starting from the pillar's flat top, the incised patterns gradually deepened at a uniform rate, linking together across all six sides to form shapes resembling characters.

Near the bottom, the lines spread out again in an unrestrained yet orderly fashion, emphasizing the motion of flowing liquid. Like cascading water, they struck the surface, scattered across it, and wound away into the distance. At a glance, one could even mistake them for living snakes slithering about.

Kraft took a step back from the edge of the pit. Loose soil crumbled from the rim and rustled as it rolled downward.

He watched in silence as it slid down the pit wall like a miniature mudslide, finally landing atop the snake-like patterns at the bottom and covering a small section.

"Could this just be a rather large base? What if we try digging farther out to the sides?" he said.

His voice was somewhat indistinct in the cold wind mixed with snowflakes. Even he was not sure what he had said.

"Even if it's only the part we can see now, the freight wagons at the port can't handle it." Ryan shifted his gaze from the pillar. "Maybe you really want to see if you can cut the pillar down? Even if you could, that would be such a waste."

That was true. Even among his grandfather's extensive collection, it would be hard to find anything quite so... difficult to describe.

Kraft knew he could not split it apart, but merely imagining it made the act feel unacceptable.

The shivering villagers beside them had not left yet. Kraft paused, then took out his money pouch and gave each of them a blackened silver coin—the payment they had agreed upon after the work was finished.

Ryan watched the villagers thank Kraft before jogging all the way back toward the village, their figures soon blurring into the wind and snow. The low clustered outlines in the distance were the village, less than two hundred paces away, which had still been clearly visible when they arrived.

"The snow seems to be getting heavier. Should we head back?" Ryan looked at Kraft, who was still standing there in a daze, and felt that this treasure hunt was probably over.

Perhaps they could return to Wenden Port and pick up some pleasing little trinket from a street stall. In Ryan's view, the Stone Carved Rune Eyeball he had brought back last time had been pretty good.