The castle hall was a spacious chamber used for receiving guests and holding banquets.
Huge, brightly colored embroidered tapestries hung on its walls, with all manner of weapons displayed between them as decorations.
They were all real weapons, with signs of careful maintenance.
Nausicaä's gaze swept across one side of the hall, where a polished armor stand stood gleaming, but looked empty without the armor itself.
Just then, a kindly old woman in a brown hooded robe came down the stairs.
"Nausicaä, you're back."
The old woman had the same red hair as Nausicaä, though its color had faded with age.
Mu En recognized her as one of Nausicaä's few remaining relatives, as well as the oldest and wisest person in the Valley of the Wind.
"Great-granny."
Nausicaä hurried forward to help the old woman.
"Mito and Gol are here too. Good, let's all have dinner together."
Great-granny gently patted the back of her hand, but looked past her at the two elders following behind.
"B-but..."
The two elders, who could only be called young men in Great-granny's presence, awkwardly tried to refuse.
"That boy Jihl took so many people off to war. This castle is getting quieter and emptier by the day."
Mito rubbed the back of his head and accepted on his companion's behalf.
"Yes, we'll do as you say."
A little later, on the upper floor of the castle.
Inside the bedroom belonging to the chieftain, Jihl.
In the sunken hearth at the center of the room, flames licked at a black stewpot.
The dancing firelight dispelled the chill, bringing light and warmth.
Though it was the chieftain's bedroom, its furnishings were quite simple.
The entire room seemed to have been carved from a single piece of stone. Aside from a magnificent gold-and-red tapestry and a family heirloom suit of half-armor used as decoration, there were hardly any ornaments.
The other furnishings had also been chosen entirely for practical and functional reasons, with none of the luxury of a noble residence.
The room's owner, however, was absent at the moment. Only Great-granny, Nausicaä, and the two elders sat around the hearth.
"What a shame Chieftain Jihl didn't take me along this time. Back when I was flying, I was every bit as good as Her Highness the Princess is now."
Gol reminisced about the past as he stretched his short, thick, slightly stiff hands toward the fire.
It was the transition between the warm wind season and the still wind season, and the valley's nights had begun to turn a little chilly.
"Hah, keep bragging!" Mito mercilessly exposed his old friend's boast.
"Who was it that kept clamoring to fly, only to nearly crash once he got up there because he was too short to reach the throttle? If you ask me, the chieftain should've taken me as his wingman!"
"You! You... Watch your head when you go out!"
Both men were veterans who had fought alongside the chieftain for years, and joking and bickering had long since become a habit.
Great-granny held a long spoon, slowly stirring the bubbling gray-white wheat porridge in the pot and sprinkling in a small pinch of fine salt.
"Hehe... You two are getting on in years, and you're still so competitive. One of you has only one eye left, and the other can barely use his hands. If you really went to the battlefield, I'm afraid you'd both be stuck there, never to return."
She chuckled as she scolded the two old characters.
In this bleak and brutal post-apocalyptic world, men like Mito and Gol, who had only been left disabled and could still sit in a warm room and have a mouthful of hot porridge, were already extraordinarily fortunate.
"Granny, you can't say that. No matter how feeble these old bones of ours get, we're still better than those boys who've only just picked up a gun, aren't we? Besides-"
The two were a little indignant and were about to argue, but Great-granny cut them off.
"Nonsense! Do you think those children went of their own free will? If they hadn't had guns pointed at them, who would be willing to leave home and risk their lives for outsiders?" The old woman raised her head and glared at them with her cloudy gray-white eyes.
Hearing the displeasure in Great-granny's voice, Gol promptly took the hint and changed the subject.
"Yes, yes. Even if we cut the rations, the grain in the storehouse will only last until the wheat harvest in the still wind season."
Mito chimed in as well.
"Right, right. It's all those hateful Tolmekians' fault. Even Her Highness the Princess can only have wheat porridge without a scrap of meat in it..."
Looking at the thin wheat porridge bubbling in the pot, Mito's voice grew low.
The seasons in the Valley of the Wind were naturally named after the wind.
There was the awakening wind season, when everything came back to life; the warm wind season, with its scorching sun; the still wind season, the time of harvest; and the storm season, which could sweep away all pollution.
Mito suddenly recalled the arrival of the Tolmekians a few months ago, during the hot warm wind season.
Soldiers clad in heavy ceramic-steel armor had waved battleaxes as they herded all the valley's livestock into transport planes, and had used tanks to load and haul away piles upon piles of grain.
They had looked no different from bandits.
"Don't worry too much. Another grain caravan will be here soon. We can make it through."
Nausicaä picked up the conversation. Having changed into loose blue pajamas, she lay lazily beside Great-granny.
Hearing that, Mito let out a heavy sigh.
"But... Sigh, I don't think they'll be able to bring anything new."
In Mito's view, though the princess was far more mature than others her age, she was still a little too young as a leader.
As a veteran, he might not understand the rules and procedures of governing a territory, but he understood Tolmekia.
The Valley of the Wind was nominally an autonomous border state and an ally of the Torumekian Empire, and it did not have to pay taxes.
But because of that so-called "offensive and defensive alliance" treaty, whenever the empire went to war, the Valley of the Wind had to send troops to join it.
Whenever that happened, their "ally" would use the alliance as a pretext to brazenly plunder the resources of small vassal states like theirs.
For some reason, the conscription officer had been particularly ruthless this time.
The Valley of the Wind itself produced more grain than any of the other nations around the Sea of Corruption. If even it had been stripped bare, things were probably no better elsewhere.
It was almost impossible to get through this crisis by buying grain.
Mu En, who had been listening to the entire "meeting," fell into thought.
The name Torumekian Empire was not unfamiliar to him.
It was a vast empire in the eastern part of the continent, southeast of the Valley of the Wind, which had unified the entire peninsula through its formidable military might.
He clearly remembered that, in the "original work," Tolmekia's army had brought a Giant God Warrior embryo.
They had not only polluted the valley's land and forests, but had also seized the castle for use as an incubation base. To protect the villagers, Nausicaä had been forced to join the army in her father's place.
But what he had learned now was completely different from the "plot" he remembered.
Piecing the various clues together, Mu En had arrived at a firm conjecture.
The Valley of the Wind he was in belonged to a world whose course was vastly different from that of the "original work."
What was more, the timeline here was not "after everything had ended," as he had previously guessed, but before the events of the film.
The reason was simple: not only was Nausicaä younger than he remembered, but the one who had gone off to war was Chieftain Jihl, who should have been bedridden.
That conclusion left Mu En feeling somewhat troubled.
Because it meant that, as a transmigrator, his foreknowledge of the plot was no longer useful.
Beside them, Great-granny, who was stirring the wheat porridge, seemed to sense something and suddenly paused.
She raised her head and turned toward the girl, her unfocused gray-white eyes full of wariness.
"Nausicaä, why is there a stranger's scent on you?"