Something had shifted in the very walls of Maida's humble dwelling. The familiar scents of her trade—dried herbs hanging in bundles from the rafters, the perpetual curl of woodsmoke from her hearth—now mingled with new aromas that spoke of a different kind of healing. The sharp, clean smell of water that had been boiled until it steamed, and beneath it all, the faint but unmistakable scent of antiseptic salves that no village herbalist should have known how to prepare.
Word travels fast in small places, and Maida's reputation had grown like wildfire in dry grass. Where once villagers had approached her door with the hesitant shuffle of those seeking help for everyday ailments—a persistent cough, a fever that lingered too long—now they came with something approaching reverence. The remedies she provided weren't just effective; they worked with a speed that left people whispering about miracles. Her treatments didn't simply ease suffering—they conquered it entirely, leaving behind healthy flesh where infection had threatened to spread, clear lungs where congestion had settled like fog.
This transformation came with its own burdens. Maida's door saw visitors from dawn until well past sunset, each bringing their troubles, their pain, their desperate hope for relief. The constant stream of need was exhausting, but it brought compensation that made her old life seem like poverty. The leather pouch she kept hidden beneath a loose floorboard in the corner of her hut grew heavier with each passing week, the weight of copper and silver coins a tangible reminder that knowledge, properly applied, was perhaps the most valuable commodity of all.
Darren understood the delicate nature of influence better than most grown men. He'd learned early that wisdom spoken by a seven-year-old boy would be dismissed as childish fantasy, no matter how sound the reasoning behind it. But those same ideas, filtered through the respected voice of the village's most successful healer, became profound insights worth remembering and sharing.
"The women who gather at the well each morning," he said one afternoon, watching Maida grind willow bark with the focused intensity she brought to everything now. "They listen to you more than anyone else in the village."
She paused in her grinding, the pestle silent in her weathered hands. "They do. What of it?"
"If you were to mention that washing hands with soap and hot water before preparing meals could prevent the stomach sickness that's been plaguing so many families..." He let the suggestion hang in the air like incense.
Maida set down her pestle entirely and fixed him with the kind of look she'd been giving him more frequently lately—part curiosity, part wariness, part something that might have been awe. A year ago, she would have waved away such advice as the nonsense of a child who knew nothing of the real world. Now, she found herself hanging on every word.
"Hot water specifically?" she asked. "Not just any water?"
"The heat helps the soap work properly," Darren explained, his voice carrying the patience of someone who had explained this concept many times in his mind. "It helps scrub away the invisible corruption that causes the sickness. Just a quick splash of cold water won't do the same work as proper washing."
She absorbed this information like dry earth drinking rain, her weathered face creased in thought. "This invisible corruption... it's like what you told me about the well water, isn't it?"
He had been careful never to use words like 'bacteria' or 'germs'—concepts that would have no meaning in her world. Instead, he'd spoken of invisible forces of decay, of corruption that could spread from person to person like a whispered secret. She was beginning to understand, to see the connections between cleanliness and health that had taken his original world centuries to fully grasp.
"Yes," he said simply. "It's everywhere, but we can fight it if we know how."
Maida nodded slowly, her expression thoughtful. "I'll speak with them tomorrow morning. They trust what I tell them now."
She had become his most effective tool for change, though he suspected she was beginning to understand that truth herself.
The real test of their partnership came the day Darren finally revealed his most ambitious project. He'd been working on it in secret, tucked away in the darkest corner of what he'd come to think of as his laboratory—really just a section of the orphanage's storage room where no one bothered to look. He carried the results to Maida in a small clay pot, covered with a piece of cloth that had been boiled clean.
When he lifted the cloth, Maida's first instinct was to recoil. Inside the pot, growing on a bed of what looked like spoiled grain mash, was a patch of mold in an unappetizing shade of blue-green.
"Kael," she said, her voice carrying the tone of someone addressing a child who'd brought her a dead rat as a gift, "you're showing me spoilage. This is exactly the kind of thing I teach people to throw away before it makes them sick."
"I know how it looks," Darren said, lifting the pot so she could see it more clearly. "But this isn't ordinary spoilage. I've been cultivating this for months, keeping it pure, learning how it grows."
He took a clean pottery shard and carefully scraped a tiny amount of the mold from the surface, holding it up to catch the light filtering through her window. "This substance doesn't just treat sickness from the inside, Maida. I believe it can fight the invisible corruption itself. It can kill it before it has a chance to take root in a wound."
For the next hour, he walked her through his experiments with the patience of a natural teacher. He showed her how meat treated with the substance resisted decay far longer than untreated meat left in the same conditions. He explained his theory about wounds that festered, about the fevers that came when cuts went bad, about how this humble mold might be more powerful than any herb in her considerable collection.
Maida stared at the unappetizing growth, her world tilting on its axis. For her entire adult life, mold had been the enemy—the sign that food had gone bad, that herbs had been stored improperly, that careful work had been ruined. To be told that this same force of decay could be harnessed as a medicine more potent than anything she'd ever known... it was like being told that fire could freeze water, or that stones could be taught to fly.
"You're asking me to believe that rot can heal," she said finally.
"I'm asking you to trust what I can show you," Darren replied. "Tomorrow, I'll bring you a rat with a cut on its leg. We'll treat half the wound with your usual salves and half with this. Then we'll see which heals faster and cleaner."
That evening, as the sun painted the sky in shades of orange and deep purple, Maida finally asked the question that had been building in her mind for months.
"I need to understand something, Kael," she began, her voice low and serious. She'd sent away the last of the day's patients and barred her door, creating the kind of privacy that serious conversations required. "I've lived for more than fifty years. I learned the healing arts from my mother, who learned them from hers. I've seen birth and death, sickness and health, and I've accumulated what I thought was a lifetime's worth of knowledge."
She moved to stand directly in front of him, her weathered hands folded across her chest. "But you... a child who should be playing with wooden toys and learning his letters... you possess understanding that I've never encountered. You know things that no one has taught you, things that no child should be able to discover on his own. I need you to tell me how this is possible."
Darren felt his heart hammering against his ribs like a caged bird. This was the moment he'd been dreading and preparing for since the day he'd first spoken to her about boiling water. Any sign of panic, any crack in his composure, would confirm her suspicions that something was deeply unnatural about him.
He kept his voice steady and looked directly into her eyes. "You're right that I shouldn't know these things in the way most people learn. But maybe that's exactly why I do know them."
She frowned, clearly not satisfied with riddles.
"Think about it this way," he continued. "You learned from your mother, who learned from hers. That's good knowledge, tested knowledge. But it's also limited knowledge. You know what plants do because you were taught what they do. You know which remedies work because they've been passed down through generations."
He gestured toward her collection of herbs and implements. "But when was the last time you looked at a common weed that everyone ignores and wondered what it might be capable of? When did you last try to create a remedy that had never existed before?"
Maida's expression shifted slightly, curiosity beginning to overcome suspicion.
"I'm young," Darren said simply. "My mind isn't filled with the certainty of how things have always been done. When you see a plant, you know what your mother taught you it was for. When I see the same plant, I wonder what else it might do. You see mold and think 'spoilage.' I see mold and think 'what if this corruption can fight other corruption?'"
It was a dangerous explanation, balanced on the knife's edge between plausible and impossible. But it reframed his knowledge not as something supernatural, but as the product of a mind unconstrained by conventional wisdom. It was the kind of explanation that an intelligent woman could accept, even if she didn't entirely understand it.
Maida studied his face for a long moment, searching for deception. Finally, she nodded slowly. "An unusual mind, then. One that sees possibilities where others see only what has always been."
"Something like that," Darren agreed.
Three days later, he sought out Torvin, the man with the slingshot. He found him at the edge of the village, working a small patch of turnips that seemed to grow more weeds than vegetables. The hunter was bent over his crops, pulling stubborn intruders from the soil with the methodical patience of someone who'd learned that good food required constant vigilance.
"Good afternoon," Darren called out as he approached.
Torvin grunted without looking up, his attention focused on a particularly stubborn thistle that seemed determined to keep its roots.
"I noticed your slingshot the other day," Darren said conversationally. "Do you hunt birds with it?"
That got the man's attention. He straightened up, wiping sweat from his forehead with a dirt-stained sleeve. "When I can manage it," he said, his voice carrying the cautious tone of someone who wasn't sure what a child might want. "Birds make good eating when you can bring them down. Not easy, though. Quick little things."
"I might have something that could help with that," Darren said.
Torvin's skepticism was written plainly across his weathered face, but beneath it, Darren could see the flicker of interest that comes whenever someone offers to make a difficult job easier.
From the large leather satchel he'd been carrying, Darren withdrew a slingshot unlike anything the village had ever seen. This wasn't a simple forked stick picked up from the ground and fitted with whatever cord happened to be available. This was a tool crafted with the precision of someone who understood both the physics of projectile motion and the importance of consistent materials.
The frame had been carved from a single piece of hardwood, chosen for its resilience and shaped with careful attention to ergonomics. Hours of sanding had left it smooth as silk, comfortable in the hand even during extended use. The pouch that would hold the stones was cut from thick, uniform leather and sewn with thread that wouldn't snap under pressure. Most importantly, the bands that would provide the power weren't simple cords but strips of carefully prepared animal sinew, treated with techniques Darren had learned through painful trial and error to achieve maximum elasticity and strength.
"May I demonstrate?" Darren asked politely.
Torvin nodded, his skepticism beginning to give way to genuine curiosity.
Darren selected a smooth, heavy stone from the ground and made sure he was facing the empty fields, well away from any people, animals, or structures that might be damaged. He fitted the stone into the pouch, gripped the frame properly, and drew the bands back much farther than Torvin's simple sling would have allowed.
When he released, the stone didn't just fly—it screamed through the air with a sound like tearing cloth. The projectile became a tiny dark speck that traveled an almost impossible distance before finally disappearing from view entirely.
Torvin's mouth fell open slightly. "How in the name of..."
"It's all about the construction," Darren said simply, offering the weapon to the hunter. "Stronger materials, better design, more consistent power."
Torvin took the slingshot with the reverence of someone handling a masterwork tool. His rough, calloused hands turned it over and over, feeling the smooth finish, testing the tension of the bands, appreciating the quality of the craftsmanship.
"Try it yourself," Darren encouraged.
The first few shots went poorly. Torvin was accustomed to the limitations of his old sling, and the increased power caught him off guard. His first stone wobbled badly and fell short. His second went wide. But he was a man with years of hunting experience, and good instincts adjusted quickly to new tools.
On his fourth attempt, he sent a stone flying almost as far as Darren had, and a grin split his weathered face like sunrise.
At that exact moment, as if summoned by some cosmic sense of timing, a small flock of crows took flight from a nearby tree. Acting on pure hunter's instinct, Torvin loaded another stone, tracked the birds' flight path, and fired in one smooth motion.
To everyone's surprise—including Darren's—one of the crows tumbled from the sky and hit the ground with a soft thud.
Torvin lowered the slingshot and stared at it as if it had performed actual magic. The shot had been excellent, but the tool had made excellence achievable.
"Can I..." he began, then stopped, clearly struggling with the presumption of the request. "Would you consider... that is, might I be able to purchase this?"
"Five copper coins," Darren said without hesitation.
Torvin didn't even pause to consider the price. He dug into his pocket and produced the coins immediately, counting them out into Darren's palm with the eagerness of someone who recognized a bargain when he saw one. For a tool that could put significantly more meat on his family's table, five copper coins was practically theft.
As Darren walked back toward the orphanage, the weight of the coins warm in his palm, he reflected on the elegant simplicity of what he was building. A salve that healed cleanly and quickly. A loaf of bread that nourished more completely than grain alone. A tool that made a skilled hunter even more effective. Each innovation was a single transaction, but those transactions were accumulating into something larger.
He was creating not just individual improvements, but the foundation for systematic change. Each person who benefited from his knowledge became a vector for spreading new ideas, new standards, new possibilities. Maida would teach other healers. Torvin would show other hunters. The baker's improved bread would raise expectations about what food could be.
The coins in his pocket represented more than payment—they were proof that innovation had value, that knowledge could be transformed into influence, and that influence, properly applied, could reshape an entire world.
The only question now was what he would choose to build next.