Thick smoke billowed in dense clouds, each ragged breath sounding like a broken bellows scraping against his throat and lungs. Xia Feng's consciousness blurred rapidly.
"Can't—can't fall asleep. I'll die."
"Stay awake. I have to stay awake!"
……
The boundless crimson dimmed abruptly, and the deepest, heaviest blackness rose to take its place. Xia Feng flailed like a drowning man, grasping at anything he could reach, desperate to break free from that powerless drifting and escape the unspeakable darkness.
Suddenly, a faint reddish glow appeared ahead, like the morning sun rising.
Under its radiance, Xia Feng felt a sliver of strength return, and he threw himself toward the red light with everything he had.
The moment Xia Feng took that step forward, guided by the glow, the light grew brighter, shifting from crimson to pure white, shattering the darkness into fragments that dissolved in an instant.
"Phew." Xia Feng jolted upright, gasping in huge, heaving gulps. He had just dreamed of a terrible fire—and before the flames even reached him, he had already lost consciousness in his sleep from inhaling too much smoke, left to wait in blurry, desperate terror as the fire crept closer. It was just like those episodes of sleep paralysis he'd had before: fully aware he was dreaming, yet unable to break free, powerless to do anything.
The dream had felt unnervingly real, leaving Xia Feng shaken. Since he couldn't feel any trace of a real fire, he just sat there blankly, unable to regain his bearings for a long time.
As his racing heartbeat gradually steadied and his mind sharpened, he remembered he had been in the university library's overnight reading room, rushing to finish his graduation thesis. He muttered a self-deprecating line to himself: "Pulling consecutive all-nighters like this lately—no wonder I'm having such realistic nightmares."
But when Xia Feng looked up, intending to pack his reference books and head back to the dormitory, what greeted him was a scene so strange and beyond imagination that it struck his mind like a sledgehammer, leaving him frozen in blank disbelief.
The library's polished wooden desk was gone. The messy pile of reference materials was gone. The thesis draft he had been about to type into his computer was gone. In their place was a dark, tattered blanket with frayed edges, and that blanket was draped over his body.
He wasn't sitting in a library chair. He was on a narrow wooden bed.
"Where am I?!"
Though Xia Feng was by nature a bit introverted and shy, with reactions that weren't especially quick, even he could tell that something was deeply wrong. Even if there really had been a fire and someone had brought him to a hospital—this didn't look like any hospital!
His heart clenched. He glanced around in a panic and instinctively scrambled to his feet.
The moment his feet touched the ground, Xia Feng was hit by a wave of extreme weakness and dizziness. His legs buckled and he nearly collapsed sideways.
He quickly threw out a hand to brace himself on the bed, steadying his pale, ashen frame. In that fleeting glance he had already taken in his entire surroundings.
A dilapidated, cramped little room. Aside from the wooden bed beside him, there was only a rickety wooden table that looked ready to fall apart at any moment, two stools in passable condition, a slatted crate with a hole in it, and on the other side of the precariously hanging wooden door, a stove whose original color was impossible to make out, with an earthen pot hanging over it. The firewood beneath the stove had gone out who knew how long ago—not a trace of warmth emanated from it.
Everything was utterly unfamiliar. Xia Feng had no way of figuring out where he was, and the relentless waves of weakness left his mind in complete chaos.
"Where on earth am I?!"
"My body feels like I've just recovered from a serious illness—similar to how I felt right after that bout of pneumonia in high school."
……
Countless thoughts churned through his head, but Xia Feng had never encountered anything remotely like this. His introverted nature left him momentarily paralyzed, unsure of what to do next, and a thick tide of panic was fermenting rapidly inside him.
The only thing to be grateful for was that nothing overtly menacing had appeared, allowing Xia Feng to take several deep, habitual breaths and slowly rein in his fear. Just then, shouts echoed from outside the little room:
"They're burning a Witch! The Adheran Church is burning a Witch!"
"Hurry, everyone, go watch!"
"Burn that damn, evil Witch!"
Fear and excitement—two diametrically opposite emotions—were unmistakable in the strange-accented cries. Xia Feng's panic was interrupted by a surge of curiosity, and he muttered to himself: "A Witch? What kind of world is this?"
As an adult who loved novels, a vague premonition of dread stirred in Xia Feng's chest. But before he could dwell on it, the poor, decrepit wooden door was shoved open with a crash, and a boy of twelve or thirteen burst in.
"Big Brother Lucian…" The boy—with short brown hair and wearing a knee-length linen tunic—spotted Xia Feng standing by the bed and lit up with surprise and delight. "You're awake?!"
Xia Feng stared at the clothing, so different from anything modern, and nodded numbly. A preposterous thought bubbled up through the clutter in his mind: "Lucian, Witches, a Church, burning at the stake—could it be that I've actually transmigrated? And into the Dark Ages of European witch hunts?"
Things always tended toward the worst outcome. Murphy's Law ruthlessly reminded Xia Feng of that, and the boy's hair color, the grimy old linen clothes he wore—everything confirmed it. As for the language the boy spoke, Xia Feng's body understood it instinctively and seemed capable of using it, though with his linguistic abilities being far from expert, he couldn't identify which language it was.
Seeing Xia Feng looking dazed and vacant, the soot-streaked little boy wasn't surprised: "Mom kept refusing to believe me. She'd sneak off crying in the middle of the night, her eyes all swollen, muttering about poor little Evans—as if you'd already been buried in the cemetery, Big Brother Lucian."
"Dad couldn't take the noise, so he sent that troublemaker from the Simon family first thing this morning with a message to Sir Vein's estate, asking your brother to find a way to come back. He's already a Knight Squire, you know—the charity hall's physician wouldn't dare stand firm on that outrageous, laughable price in front of him."
The boy's chin lifted slightly with genuine pride as he spoke of his older brother who had become a Knight Squire.
"But it's fine now! They were wrong and I was right—how could anything happen to you, Big Brother Lucian!"
As he spoke, he grabbed Xia Feng's arm: "Come on, Big Brother Lucian, let's go to the church square and watch them burn the Witch—that's the very one who got you dragged off by the Church guards for a whole night of interrogation!"
Having just been thrust into this bewildering upheaval, Xia Feng had originally wanted some quiet time to think things through. He had no interest in tagging along with this boy to gawk at a crowd, and the idea of watching a living person burned alive at the stake was something his conscience—still holding to a baseline of decency—couldn't stomach. If he couldn't stop it, he'd rather not witness it at all. But the boy's final words froze him in place.
"This Witch is connected to me?"
His mind made up in an instant, Xia Feng suppressed his astonishment, let the boy pull him along, and stumbled toward the Adheran Church.
Along the way, Xia Feng seized every opportunity to study the people heading in the same direction.
The weather was fairly warm. The men wore short-sleeved linen tunics, matching long trousers, and heelless shoes. The women wore dull, uniform long skirts, each with a large pocket stitched onto it. The common thread was simplicity and shabbiness.
Among them, brown hair and brown eyes were dominant, interspersed with blond, red, and black hair, as well as green, red, and blue eyes. Their features were sharp and well-defined, giving their faces a strong sense of depth.
"Could it really be the Middle Ages?" Xia Feng glanced at himself—the same linen tunic, the same long trousers, the same heelless shoes.