6: Chapter 6 Post-War Reconstruction, Taking Over the Village

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The wind stopped. The entire valley was as quiet as if someone had pressed the mute button, leaving only the sound of sentries' footsteps in the distance as they changed shifts.

The battlefield cleanup lasted an entire day. When Lin Mo pulled Ergou's body from the pile of rubble in the corner, the teenager's body had not yet completely stiffened. He was wearing that coarse cloth garment that had just been altered yesterday—it was a size too large, the sleeves rolled up twice, and the loose collar revealed his collarbone. Lin Mo straightened his cuffs as naturally as he used to adjust the ID badges of new interns back at the company.

While moving the bodies, he forced himself not to look at their faces. But he remembered every single one of their names—Ergou, seventeen, an apprentice at the blacksmith shop at the east end of the village; Old Zhao, fifty-three, a hunter, the man who fired the first arrow; Liu Si, Aunt Liu's husband, forty-one, a carpenter who had been repairing a gap in the perimeter wall before the battle; Li Dazhuang, twenty-nine, a miner who used his body to shield Yang Shitou from flying rubble; and Old Zhou. He knew Old Zhou best—the one Rock had called to join the patrol on the first day; he didn't talk much, but his archery was so accurate that even Rock was impressed.

Five bodies were laid side-by-side in the clearing at the village entrance, covered with white cloths. There were no coffins—the village had no spare wood, and there was no spare time. Wang Defu placed a small bowl of water and a piece of rye bread beside each body. It was an ancient custom of Blackstone Village: the deceased must have water to drink and bread to eat to complete the long journey to the Emperor's side.

"Is it of any use?" Lin Mo asked.

In his mind, he was silently calculating: how many days of food reserves were left, how much ammunition had been consumed, and how many people were needed for the next patrol. These numbers meshed in his head like gears, each one connected to three others—change one, and everything had to be recalculated.

Wang Defu was silent for a moment: "It's of no use. But if we don't do it, the hearts of those left alive will suffer even more."

Lin Mo remembered those words.

In the evening, he visited the homes of the five fallen men one by one. Old Yang Tou's house was cold and desolate, with only a youth sitting on the threshold—Yang Shitou, sixteen years old, Old Yang Tou's son. Two sets of bowls and chopsticks were laid out before him. One for himself, one empty. Lin Mo stood at the door for a while without speaking. The youth looked up at him once, then lowered his head again.

"About your father..."

The way time passed on this planet was not quite the same as on Earth. There were no phones to remind him of meetings, no calendars to tell him what day of the week it was. There was only sunrise and sunset, battle and peace, life and death. He used vertical lines in a notebook to record the days, drawing a horizontal line across every five. This primitive counting method made him feel grounded—at least he knew which day it was.

He told himself not to rush. Impatience was a product manager's greatest enemy—it was true before he crossed over, and even more so now. Every hasty decision could result in a hole being torn in a defensive line tomorrow.

He stood there, looking at everything before him, and suddenly had a very strange feeling—if someone had told him a month ago that he would be on a planet an unknown number of light-years from Earth, using high school chemistry to make gunpowder, university club experience to build guns, and product manager logic to plan a village's defense system—he would have thought that person was insane. But now he was here, and every bit of it was actually happening.

"I know," Yang Shitou's voice was neither high nor low. "I saw it. He bit one to death."

A moment of silence followed.

Lin Mo pulled a spare part for a flintlock—a newly made ramrod—from his pocket and placed it on the threshold. "Militia training is tomorrow. Are you coming?"

Yang Shitou looked at the ramrod for a long time. Then he reached out and picked it up: "I'm coming."

Aunt Zhang's house was the last one. When Lin Mo knocked, Aunt Zhang was boiling a pot of water in the courtyard. Seeing Lin Mo at the door, she said nothing, but turned back into the house and brought out a bow—the one Old Zhao had used in life. The bow limbs were wrapped in non-slip coarse hemp rope, and the grip had been polished smooth by use.

"Take it," she pressed the bow into Lin Mo's hands. "Kill a few more for him."

Lin Mo held the bow; the warmth from Old Zhao's palm still seemed to linger on the limbs. He couldn't find the words, so he only nodded.

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The wind stopped. The entire valley was as quiet as if someone had pressed the mute button, leaving only the sound of sentries' footsteps in the distance as they changed shifts.

At night, Wang Defu called all the villagers to the plaza—that dirt-ground plaza usually used for drying grain, holding meetings, and occasionally executing criminals. The old village chief stood beneath a torch, the firelight casting deep shadows into his wrinkles.

"You all saw what happened today," his voice was raspy but steady. "Five. One of them had been with me for over thirty years. My heart aches. But once the aching is done, life must go on."

He paused.

"I am old, I can no longer fight. This village needs someone who can lead everyone to survive. I propose—from this day forward, Lin Mo shall have the final say over Blackstone Village's defense and farming."

No one objected. No one spoke.

Lin Mo stood on the other side of the torch. He was silent for a few seconds before speaking. His voice wasn't loud, but in the quiet night, every word was clearly heard: "I have three conditions."

"First, all resources will prioritize defense and production. We will be frugal with food, but we cannot be frugal with gunpowder."

"Second, all major decisions will be discussed openly. I will not make any decisions behind your backs, but regarding matters of defense, I have the power of the final word."

"Third—if one day you find my judgment to be wrong, anyone can oppose me publicly. There is no need to save face. Your lives are your own."

When the third condition was finished, someone in the crowd was stunned. Rock was the first to grin: "Are you trying to get us to drag you under the torch to roast as well?"

"Yes," Lin Mo said. "If my decisions will get people killed, you have the right to pull me down before I do."

The crackling of the torches echoed in the plaza for a while. There was no applause, no cheering—but no one left either. A woman in the crowd holding a child looked at him, the expression in her eyes shifting from 'here comes another one full of big talk' to 'perhaps this is different.' Yang Shitou stood at the very back of the crowd, clutching that ramrod so tightly his knuckles turned white.

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Under the grayish-purple sky, several flying creatures circled in the distance—he wasn't sure if they were birds or something else; he hadn't yet learned to distinguish most of the life forms on this planet.

After the meeting adjourned, Old Tom pulled him aside. The old man lowered his voice, acting mysterious: "That wall on the northern mountain—I went to take another look at it the day before yesterday."

He closed his eyes and arranged all the known conditions—just like he used to organize requirement documents, sorting each item by priority and then drawing out the critical path. No mistakes could be made on the critical path; the rest could have a margin for error.

"And?"

He counted to three in his head. This was a habit he'd developed as a product manager—giving himself three seconds before making any important judgment to check if any critical information had been missed.

"It's glowing. Very dimly, like the light of a firefly. I'm not sure if my eyes were playing tricks on me, but it was definitely glowing."

Lin Mo's hand instinctively reached for the chaos pendant in his pocket. The pendant wasn't hot, but he felt an indescribable connection—the ruins, the orc map, the chaos pendant—these things were quietly weaving into a map he didn't yet understand.

He walked very slowly on the way back to his quarters alone. Five new graves shimmered with the luster of damp earth under the moonlight. The way Old Zhou had pushed that young militia member out of the way replayed in his mind over and over—that wasn't the result of training; it was an instinct. A man who had spent his life protecting others made the final choice to protect someone else.

He stood before Old Zhou's grave for a while, without lighting a lamp or saying a word. He fished a mint out of his pocket—one of the few remaining brought from Earth—and placed it on the soil of the grave mound. He didn't know if Old Zhou liked sweet things, but this was all he could do.

The moonlight shone on the candy wrapper, reflecting a faint glint of light. Lin Mo suddenly thought that perhaps Wang Defu was right—those rituals weren't for the dead, but for the living. He needed these concrete, tiny actions to tell himself: these people lived, these people died, and these people deserve to be remembered.

Returning to his quarters, he lay on the wooden bed, reconnecting every piece of information he had acquired since crossing over. The thickness of orc bone plates, the golden flow of the mirror of the emperor, the temperature changes of the octagram pendant, the metal wall Old Tom mentioned—these fragments floated in his consciousness like a box of scattered puzzle pieces.

When he closed his eyes, a golden figure surfaced in the darkness for an instant—a bit clearer than last time. He saw the outline of a hand. The fingers were slender, wearing a plain metal ring with no decorations on its surface.

That wasn't the Emperor's hand. That was another hand.

He didn't know who that hand belonged to. But he remembered the appearance of the ring—plain, without any insignia, like an item that had been deliberately stripped of all identifying information. This erasure itself was a stronger identifier than any insignia.

He rolled over and whispered a sentence in the dark. It wasn't to the Emperor, nor to the owner of that hand—it was to himself.

"Regardless of whose hand it is, since it's been extended, I'll take it."

Outside the window, a night wind blew from the north, carrying the scent of sulfur from beneath that metal wall. Someone was changing shifts at a distant sentry post, footsteps crunching on the rubble, rustling and light. But in this silent night, that sound traveled far—like a heartbeat, confirming that this small village was still alive.

A piece of wood in the fire popped, splashing a few sparks. He watched those sparks extinguish in the cold air—just like the comrades he had lost on the front lines, brightening for a moment, then going dark. He swallowed the last bite of dry rations and leaned against the wall. Tomorrow would be another day.

*[Though I know all things end in emptiness upon death, my only grief is not seeing the unification of the nine provinces.

On the day the King's army recovers the Central Plains in the north, do not forget to tell your father during the family sacrifice.]*

*—Lu You, "To My Son." Memory fragments sealed within the mirror of the emperor quietly surfaced in the darkness.*

Old Tom's forging hammer stopped. It wasn't because he was tired—it was because in that moment, he felt a vibration he had never experienced before, coming from deep within the rock layers beneath his feet. It was as if something had just momentarily awakened.