Greetings, readers:
Thank you for reading this fan-made work...
I hope you enjoyed the chapter. I, Wissumi Wizaki, wish you a happy reading
1050 B.N.
July 7th
Giotto and all the soldiers returned to the village together.
He walked after the mission: firm, measured, without haste. But inside him, something was stirring with more noise than usual.
Behind him, Lord Bravar's soldiers advanced in formation, the dust of the road rising softly beneath their boots. Little Reijiro—the chief's son, the reason for all of this—walked among them, unharmed, wearing the dazed expression of someone who still cannot quite believe he is alive. And ahead, at the entrance of the village, a crowd waited. Villagers, guards, elders. The chief himself had come out to receive them.
Giotto hardly noticed him. His eyes went directly to two small figures slipping through the legs of the adults like water between stones.
Haru. Sana.
He had left them at home. With clear instructions. And yet there they were, their cheeks flushed from running and their eyes shining with that rebellious excitement only possessed by children who do not yet understand discipline.
Giotto exhaled slowly through his nose. He closed his eyes for a second. He searched for something resembling patience somewhere in his chest, and he found it, though it was a struggle.
Haru was already screaming.
—"Reijiro! Reijiro!"
The boy's voice broke the ceremonious silence of the entrance like a stone in a pond. Some soldiers blinked in surprise. Reijiro himself stopped short and turned his head toward the source of the racket, and something in his expression softened suddenly—the stiffness of someone who has spent too much time thinking giving way to recognition.
He knew him. Of course he knew him. Haru was the boy who appeared everywhere, greeting him cheerfully ever since he had helped him when he was abandoned after the death of his parents; he watched him every day running around the village regardless of the hour or the season, talking to anyone who would listen and playing with whoever wanted to.
Reijiro did not have many friends his age—the status of being the "chief's son" built walls that few dared to cross—but Haru crossed every wall without even realizing it. That was, Reijiro thought, one of his most dangerous virtues.
—"Haru," he said in a low voice, almost to himself.
The soldiers made way toward the front, where the chief of Razol Village waited with crossed arms and an expression that mixed relief with the authority that never leaves men accustomed to command. His gaze scanned his son from head to toe: no visible wounds, no limp, without that emptiness in the eyes often left by men from whom no one returns.
Captain Bravar stepped forward and bowed before his lord.
—"My lord," he said in a grave voice. "Your son is whole. The mission was a success."
—"Captain." The chief's voice was serious, but relief pierced through it like light through a crack. "You have fulfilled your duty. You have my full gratitude."
Bravar raised a hand with a calm gesture, almost uncomfortable with the praise.
—"With all due respect, my lord, the gratitude is not mine." He made a calculated pause and then stepped aside. "Allow me to introduce the person truly responsible."
A strange silence fell over the entrance. The villagers craned their necks. The chief frowned slightly.
Giotto did not move. He waited, still, with his hands crossed behind his back and his gaze fixed forward, as if the situation did not bother him at all. Though he had expected this reaction.
—"This boy," Bravar said, pointing to him with a respectful gesture that seemed slightly surprising to Giotto given the shock of others, "is the reason your son stands before you without a scratch. He designed the rescue plan. He executed it with his own hands. And young master Reijiro saw with his own eyes how he knocked out the leader of the bandits with a single blow."
The murmur that swept through the crowd was immediate. Chief Razol did not murmur. He remained completely still, studying Giotto with a heavy intensity.
He had assumed—and it was logical to assume—that the plan had belonged to his men or, more obviously, to Bravar. That someone with experience, with years of service, had mapped out the strategy. That a boy had been the strategist behind all of it did not fit into any reasonable scheme. And yet, Bravar was not a brainless or delusional man.
Razol looked at his son. Reijiro held his gaze and nodded to his father for a moment, then shifted his eyes toward Haru, whose cheeks by then were a red so intense he seemed to have run a league. Whatever that look meant, the chief received it in silence.
He cleared his throat.
—"Boy." His voice was deep but not harsh. "Do you live near here?"
—"Yes, my lord, near the river forest," Giotto replied. His tone was plain, without false humility or affectation.
—"Then you know who I am." It was not a question. "What they tell me is significant. A man in my position cannot leave such a thing without a reward. Ask for what you want. Within reason, it is granted."
Giotto bowed his head with simple courtesy.
—"You are very generous, my lord. But I must be honest: the merits attributed to me are largely borrowed." His eyes briefly slid toward Haru. "I acted because a companion of mine owed a debt to the kindness your son showed him in the past. I was the instrument. He was the reason."
The chief followed the direction of that gaze. He found Haru—the same boy his son had looked at—and understood everything; at that moment, Haru would have preferred to become invisible. The boy opened his mouth, closed it, and opened it again.
—"I…" he began.
—"I understand now," Razol said, and something like a smile crossed his lips, brief as a shadow. "Even so, you are the leader of these children and you shall advocate for them as their head. And I am speaking of the reward or request."
Giotto did not respond immediately. In his head, the gears turned with the same calm precision they always did. He had thought about this. He knew what he wanted to ask. But he also knew it was not the kind of request one makes with much certainty or arrogance—especially not in public with so many people.
—"If you permit me, my lord," he said at last, "I would prefer to state my wish in private."
No one objected. Razol studied him for a moment longer—that quiet scrutiny of men who have spent years measuring people—and then nodded once.
—"Follow me."
At the house of Razol (Village Chief)
The village chief's house was not a palace. But in East Wind Village—the place where Giotto had been reborn, where he had learned once again to breathe the air of a world that was not his own—it was, without a doubt, the building that held the most weight. Not because of its size, but because of what it represented: the center of everything, the stone upon which the rest rested.
Two stories of dark wood and gray stone composed it, with thick beams that creaked softly when the east wind—faithful to its name—pushed against the walls. On the porch, flanking the entrance, were two pots of ochre-colored flowers that on another occasion might have seemed welcoming. That morning, however, they looked out of place. Like party decorations forgotten after a tragedy.
In front of the door, two men stood guard with the unmistakable look of those who have gone too many hours without sleep. They had axes at their belts, which they held with the insecurity of those who use them more for intimidation than for combat. Captain Bravar saw them from a distance and clenched his jaw.
—"What is this?" he muttered, and the "this" carried all the weight of the disappointment of a man who knows how to distinguish a guard from someone who simply occupies the space of a guard.
He reprimanded them in a low voice, but with a measured ferocity, the kind that does not need shouting to cut to the bone. The two men straightened up, visibly ashamed, and Giotto watched them from the corner of his eye as he passed between them without saying a word.
Even the guards of a house like this, he thought, need someone to teach them how to stand.
The interior smelled of old wood and cold tea. A spiral staircase ascended toward the second floor, and from somewhere came the muffled murmur of voices that had gone quiet just before they entered—that silence which is not silence, but the way tension has of staying still.
The chief was waiting for them in his office.
Razol was not the type of man one would expect to find at the head of a village. He did not have the build of a warrior nor the gaze of a military strategist. He was, deep down and on the surface, a merchant. The most productive in the area when it came to apples, if one asked any villager with time to chat. But there was something in the way he organized things—the distribution paths, the care shifts, the exchanges with neighboring villages—that had ended up creating, almost without realizing it, something resembling a living economy. A system that sustained itself, that generated results without anyone having to impose them. Razol had never put a name to what he had built. He had simply done it, moved by the practical instinct of someone who knows that things must work or they are useless.
He was a burly man, with broad hands and a smile that came easily but hid, behind it, the perpetual calculation of someone who rarely does anything without a reason.
—"Sawada!"
The voice came from behind, firm and a bit tense, like that of someone who had been catching their breath to say something for several minutes. Giotto stopped.
He nearly lost his footing. Because of the new way of being addressed. None of the kids called him that: by his last name, without diminutives, without "boy," without the kind titles adults used to soften the fact that they didn't quite know how to treat him.
He turned around.
Reijiro was standing at the threshold, his hands at his sides and the posture of someone who has decided something and now has to live with having said it out loud. His eyes were fixed on him, direct, without the usual discomfort boys his age felt when looking at him for too long.
—"What do you want, Reijiro?" Giotto asked calmly.
The other took a deep breath. As if adjusting something inside.
—"I want to be part of what you are going to build." He said it bluntly, without flourishes. "Whatever it may be. I know it is bigger than the goal my father just accepted. I heard it, in part. And what I didn't hear, I felt." A pause. "I want to be there."
Giotto studied him in silence.
He saw what lay behind those words: not just ambition, although there was some of that. There was also the weight of being the son of a man who would soon have much more power, and the certainty that this power would absorb everything around it if one did not first find their own place within it. Reijiro did not want to remain in his father's shadow. He wanted something that was his, even if he didn't yet quite know what form it would take.
This type of person, Giotto thought, if misdirected, becomes a problem. But directed well, they are among the most loyal that exist.
And Luciano, somewhere inside him, recognized the pattern. He had seen it before. He had used it before. And he knew exactly how to receive it.
—"All right," he said. "I accept you. But you are going to understand from now on how this works."
Reijiro did not blink.
—"Within the group, I am the boss. The rest are at the same level as each other, including you, regardless of who your father is outside of here." Giotto made a short pause. "What is coming is not easy. Training. Study. Demands you haven't seen before. No one will sugarcoat it for you. Those who do not push themselves do not last. Do you understand?"
Reijiro clenched his fist at his side. A small, almost involuntary gesture. Then he nodded slowly, with the solidity of a decision that was no longer going to change.
—"I accept, Sawada. I will be your subordinate."
Giotto extended his hand. Reijiro took it, and the grip was firm, without hesitation.
—"Welcome to the Vongola."
As they walked back, with Reijiro now at his side, Giotto let the weight of what had just occurred settle in silence.
In the eyes of this world, he was still a child. And it did not matter how many centuries of experience his soul carried, how many wars he had seen, how many errors and victories he had sewn inside him: his steps had to be measured. If he intended to build something that would last—something bigger than a group of followers and more solid than a promise—he would need something that power alone cannot buy.
He would need them to follow him out of conviction.
Not out of fear. Not out of debt. Not because there was no other option.
But because they truly believed it was worth it.
And that, he thought, is the hardest thing of all.
The true foundation of any legacy was not the power one held. Giotto knew this with the certainty of someone who has built and lost great things, of someone who carries centuries of compressed experience in a seven-year-old body. It was not power. It was loyalty. And more than any other kind of loyalty, it was the loyalty of those who grow with you, who understand your internal battles without you having to explain them, who share your dreams because they have seen them form from the beginning.
Those of your own generation.
That was what he was building. Piece by piece, with the patience of someone who knows that things that last are not built in an afternoon.
The fever arrived that very night, without warning.
Giotto woke up with his hands burning, a pain so deep and so specific that it did not resemble any ordinary pain. It was the body collecting the debt for the use of the Sky Flame, for which he had low control and compatibility with his body: the backlash of the Dying Will Flames, the price that had arrived. His fingers went numb until they became useless. Every attempt to move them was like putting his hands into glowing coals.
Haru was by his side before dawn, with that capacity of his to appear where he is needed without anyone calling him.
—"How bad is it?" he asked in a low, worried voice, the empathy of a companion with eyes that were far too attentive.
—"Bad enough," Giotto said, his voice raspy from the fever. "But everything will be fine; I won't die from this."
—"That is not a reassuring answer," Daiki said with sarcasm.
—"It wasn't intended to be."
Sana brought water and damp cloths without saying anything, as always. Daiki stood at the threshold of the door with his arms crossed and an expression that wanted to seem indifferent but didn't quite manage it.
The fever lasted three days. The numbness in his hands, a full month.
A month without using your hands is a month in which you learn exactly how much you depend on them, and you also learn to do without. Giotto reorganized his training without drama: legs, abdominals, endurance, balance. He ran at dawn while the village was still sleeping, with the fog clinging to his knees and his breath forming small clouds in the cold air. The children, who at first watched him with a mixture of concern and fascination from seeing someone training with bandaged hands, ended up joining in silence, one by one, without anyone ordering it.
They did not say it. But Giotto saw it.
Good, he thought. This is how it begins.
While the body recovered, the mind did not rest. The strategy he had outlined before Razol needed roots before it could grow, and roots are built with small, concrete, everyday gestures. He began to resolve conflicts within the village: boundary disputes between neighbors, outstanding debts between merchants, disagreements over water turns during the dry season. He did not do it out of pure altruism, but it served Giotto's perception. He did it with the same precision with which a craftsman works: every problem resolved was a thread of trust woven, and threads, over time, become fabric.
The payment was not in coins. It was in rice, in dried meat, in tubers that people had left over in winter and offered with the expression of someone who knows they are paying for something more than a service. Giotto accepted it all without making unnecessary gestures.
With that food, he fed the orphans.
They had started as few: three, four, a dozen. Children who slept on the edges of the village, who ate when there was food and did not eat when there wasn't, who learned early on that the world was not organized to receive them. Giotto gathered them without announcing what he was doing. He gave them food. He gave them shelter. He gave them, above all, the feeling that someone had counted them and that the number mattered.
By the time the leaves of the trees began to turn orange, there were thirty.
Whatever was left over after feeding them, he used for trade. Small movements at first, modest exchanges between the village and the merchants passing through the valley roads. But small movements, made with consistency, generate flow, and flow generates money, and money in the right hands generates options.
September brought the first real coins.
Giotto looked at them for a moment, in the palm of his already recovered hand, and then began to plan the house.
The one he had was falling apart. Not in a dramatic or immediate way, but it was falling: the roof beams creaked with the wind, the north wall had absorbed so much moisture that the wood had darkened and softened, and on rainy nights, the cots had to be moved to stay away from the leaks. It was not worthy of what it was meant to become. He began the construction of something more solid, more spacious, more well-thought-out. Not a palace, but a base: good wood, stone in the foundations, enough space for the children and for what would come after.
It was one of the requirements. The Mission of the Seed of the Storm had made it clear: establish a functional and secure settlement. Giotto did not need a system to remind him to understand why it made sense. But having it confirmed in writing, in that light that sometimes appeared when something important was fulfilled, did not bother him.
...
The room that Razol had assigned to him as a workspace was not large, but it had everything Giotto needed: a solid table, an east-facing window that let in the morning light at a right angle, and enough silence to think.
On the table were three things: a rough map of the East Wind territory hand-drawn by Reijiro, a record of conflicts resolved in recent weeks written in Sana's tight, orderly handwriting, and a cup of tea that was already cold because Giotto had gone too long without touching it.
Razol had placed him in that role without giving it any formal name. He had simply spread the word, with the calculated discretion of a merchant who knows that things work better when they seem natural: that if anyone in the village had a problem that found no solution through the usual channels, they could go talk to the boy in the new house. The boy listened. The boy found ways out. And what he asked for in return was, compared to what he delivered, almost nothing.
Almost.
Giotto knew exactly what he was building with every conflict resolved, with every neighbor who left that room feeling heard and treated with justice. It wasn't altruism. It was a foundation. Every debt of gratitude was a thread, and threads, woven with patience, become a web.
He was reviewing Sana's record when he heard footsteps.
He recognized them before the door opened: the quick, light step of Haru, who never walked slowly if he could avoid it, and the measured, silent step of Sana, who never made unnecessary noise. The combination meant they were bringing something. And that "something" held a certain urgency, or Haru wouldn't have run.
The door opened.
Haru entered first, his cheeks slightly flushed from walking fast and his eyes wearing that expression of someone who has information and needs to deliver it before it escapes him.
—We have a problem —he said, direct, without preamble.
Another problem had started, as most problems in small villages tend to start: through a neighborly quarrel.
Sana entered behind him with her usual calm, closed the door, and remained leaning against the wall with her arms crossed and the expression of someone who has already evaluated the situation and is waiting for the others to reach the same point.
Giotto laid the record on the table.
—Who is it this time? —he asked.
Haru knew everything that happened within a half-day's walk of his training and errands with a speed that defied any reasonable explanation. He had a gift that many a housewife would envy.
—The Moris and the Hayases —Haru said, sitting on the edge of the chair in front of the table without anyone offering it to him—. They haven't spoken to each other in weeks. They've shared a boundary for two generations and now neither of them wants to use the same well.
According to the history, the Moris and the Hayases had shared a boundary for a long time and had fought since forever: the tree whose branches fell on the wrong side, the irrigation channel that diverted a handspan more than agreed, the families' dogs barking at each other across the fence at night—exactly those dogs that watched the wrong direction. But from every fight, they had found creative ways not to make life impossible for one another.
—What caused the breakdown this time?
—No one knows for sure —Sana said, before taking a sip of water—. The Moris' eldest son pushed the Hayases' eldest son in the market. Or the other way around. It depends on who you ask, and now the two patriarchs refuse to use the same well.
—It always depends on who you ask, and now there is another problem with them and with me here to solve it —Giotto murmured.
—What is certain —Sana continued— is that Mr. Mori has the largest granary in the northern sector. And Mr. Hayase controls the water rotation in the irrigation ditch that waters the fields in that area.
Haru leaned his head forward with the urgency of someone who wants to make sure the point lands completely.
—If they don't talk, they both lose. And the village loses with them.
In a village where every resource is valuable in the face of necessity, that kind of stubbornness had consequences for everyone.
Giotto looked at the map on the table. He found the northern sector with his eyes, traced the line of the irrigation ditch with his finger without touching it, and located the two lots marked by Reijiro with darker ink.
—How long has it been like this?
—Three weeks —Haru said—. The information became visible when they noticed their resources weren't arriving; there are people in the village starting to take sides. If it's left for another month, it stops being a problem between two families.
—And it becomes a problem for the village —Giotto said.
—Exactly.
Giotto leaned back slightly in his chair. It wasn't the gesture of someone resting, but of someone organizing.
—Has either of them asked Razol for mediation?
—Mr. Hayase went to see him last week —Sana said—. Razol listened to them, tried to propose an agreement, and Mr. Mori refused to sit at the same table. He said he wasn't going to sit with someone who had raised a son without manners.
—And Hayase?
—Hayase said he wasn't going to apologize for something his son didn't do.
Giotto nodded once. It was the most common and most difficult pattern: two men who weren't fighting for the resource itself but for not yielding first. The resource was the excuse. Pride was the real problem.
—I'm going to go see them —he said.
Haru opened his mouth.
—Alone?
—Alone.
—Giotto, Mr. Mori kicked out two of Razol's men when they went to talk to him the second time. He literally kicked them out.
—He kicked out Razol's men —Giotto said, taking Sana's record from the table and closing it—. I am not one of Razol's men.
Haru looked at him for a moment with that expression of someone who wants to object but knows he doesn't have enough of an argument. Then he leaned back in his chair with a sigh that was his way of accepting things he couldn't change.
Sana, from the wall, watched him with that stillness of hers that was never passivity.
—What do you want us to do in the meantime? —she asked.
—Nothing, I know I will solve it; I already read a bit of the background you wrote —Giotto said, standing up—. Not what they are fighting over. What they truly need. There is something that each one has that the other wants, and it's not the well.
He headed toward the door.
—When are you going? —Haru asked.
—Now —Giotto said—. Before Mr. Mori has the rest of the day to convince himself that he is right.
Giotto went alone.
Not because he was reckless, but because two children at an angry man's door generate more suspicion than one, and one alone with that expression of total calm generates, instead, a curiosity that most don't know how to shut down without first hearing what he has to say.
Mr. Mori was a man broad of shoulder and narrow of patience, with the hands of a farmer who has spent more years plowing than resting and the permanent expression of someone who expects the world to owe him something. He received him at the threshold with his arms crossed and a scowl already in place.
—What do you want, boy?
—To talk —Giotto said.
—I don't have time for—
—I know that Mr. Hayase diverted the channel two handspans to the east last summer —Giotto interrupted him, with the same calm with which he might have commented on the weather—. I also know that you sold to the Kita-mura market last month without declaring the surplus to the village, which, according to the communal agreement from three years ago, you would be required to distribute in a ratio of one to four. —A pause—. I'm not here to talk about either of those things. I'm here because both families are losing more than they think they are protecting.
Mr. Mori said nothing for a moment that stretched long enough to be uncomfortable. Then he opened the door all the way.
—Come in.
It took three more visits: two to Mr. Mori, and one to Mr. Hayase. It was not fast and it was not simple, because proud men do not change their position from one day to the next, even if they have all the reasons in the world to do so. What Giotto did was not convince them that the other was right, because that was impossible. What he did was find the exact point where the interest of one and the interest of the other overlapped, and point it out with the precision of a surgeon who does not cut more than necessary.
The final agreement was modest: the channel returned to its original position, the well shifts were redistributed with a schedule that neither of them had proposed but that both could accept without feeling they were giving in, and the surplus from the Mori granary was partially declared to the common fund in exchange for a reduction in the water shift rate during the winter.
When Giotto left the last meeting, the sun was already lowering toward the western mountains and the air had that specific smell of late autumn: cold earth, damp wood, cooking smoke.
Mr. Hayase caught up with him in the street before he reached the corner.
He was a thinner man than Mori, with quick eyes and the hands of someone who works with fine tools as well as with the earth. He looked at him for a moment with an expression that was difficult to read and then, without saying anything, disappeared inside his house.
Giotto continued walking.
Thirty steps later, the door opened again.
—Wait.
Mr. Hayase came out with two small sacks over his shoulders, made of that thick, ocher-colored fabric used for reserve rice. He left them on the ground in front of Giotto with the gesture of someone delivering something that is hard to give and does not want it to be noticed how much.
—I don't know how you did it —he said, with a voice that tried to be neutral and didn't quite manage it—. That man is more stubborn than a soaked rock. —A pause—. Take this. For you and yours. It's not much, but it's from the good reserve.
Giotto looked at the sacks. Then he looked at Mr. Hayase.
—It isn't necessary —he said.
—Neither was what you did —the other replied, and in his tone there was something that was more respect than gratitude, although the two things were mixed—. So take it.
Giotto took it.
And he did not look back, because he knew there was nothing more to be said about this finished work…
To be continued...
Until the next chapter!