Darrow's mouth thinned. "Coincidence. The ground's wet."
Aiden opened his mouth to argue and realized he didn't have to. The crowd was already arguing on his behalf, oohing, pointing, assigning meaning at speed.
"See how the lines channel the dew? Divine engineering!"
"No, no, the second stroke faces east—the sun's favor!"
"It's the goat," someone said gravely. "The goat understands runes."
Aiden folded his hands into his sleeves like a monk to hide the tremor. Don't gloat. Don't gloat. Smile like you planned it. He managed a solemn nod that said, Of course the goat understands runes; I mentored it personally.
Darrow set the third cage before #PLEASEWORK. He didn't open it immediately. The hunter looked at Aiden, eyes cool. "Your mark. Your hand."
Aiden's mouth went dry. "Understandable," he said hoarsely. "We support… accountability."
He stepped forward. The goblin inside hissed and clawed at the bars, breath fogging the wood. His knees wanted to go the other direction. He went this one.
He knelt and, with deliberate ceremony, redrew the strokes of #PLEASEWORK: bold, clean, committing to the bit as if the lines were more than lines.
It's nothing, he told himself. It's thin mud on packed earth. It's theater. It's…
The last stroke settled. For a heartbeat the mark seemed to sit on the ground and also not sit on the ground, like heat shimmer over a road. The hair on his forearms prickled.
Aiden exhaled a breath he hadn't known he was holding. "Okay," he said quietly. "Okay."
Darrow leveraged open the cage.
The goblin exploded into motion, all tendon and blade. It sprinted straight toward Aiden, who discovered—right there—that his reflex for imminent death was not, in fact, stoic acceptance or dignified evasive footwork. His reflex was to scream and fall backward with such commitment that his heels carved a trench.
He hit the dirt. The goblin pounced, knife arcing—
—and struck air. Its feet had entered the mark. Its body had not. It flailed like a man trying to step into a room that stubbornly refused to be where it was. The knife waved through the empty space above Aiden's chest without touching him. The goblin yowled, confused and enraged, scrabbling at invisible edges.
Aiden lay there, locked between the urge to vomit and the urge to faint.
Darrow did not waste the beat. His arrow lanced through the goblin's collarbone, pinning it to the post. The creature went still.
Only then did sound return to the square: a single gasp, then many, then an oh-so-satisfying roar.
"Miracle!"
"The Oracle's mark!"
"He made a wall out of nothing!"
Aiden sat up slowly, dust in his hair, heart punching his ribs from the inside. The HUD chimed like a tip jar filling too fast.
System Notice:Minor Hashtag Dao Resonance AchievedEffect Learned: "Soft Boundary" (very small, very brief planar misalignment around active sigil when invoked with high crowd focus).Cooldown: Long.
His eyes widened. He looked at the lines he'd drawn. The ground looked like ground again. He touched it. Dirt. Mud. No shimmer. No wall. But his skin still buzzed like he'd put his fingers too close to a live outlet.
He lifted his gaze. The crowd stared at him with faces like sunrise.
Darrow's expression, to his credit, was not hatred. It wasn't even anger. It was something like a man building a railing and realizing he'd measured wrong—distaste at being wrong, curiosity at what was right, and the annoying tickle of relief that the railing might still keep someone from falling.
"One more," the hunter said gruffly, because admitting anything out loud would have cracked his jaw. "Last cage."
They set it before #COURAGE again. The goblin within was older, sly. When the door opened, it crept out low, sniffed, and—rather than charging the nearest throat—began to skirt the edge of the sigil, testing step by step like a man feeling for rotten planks.
Aiden fought the urge to shout tactical advice. He did the thing his System seemed to like: he stood on a box someone pushed under his feet, lifted his hands, and spoke nonsense with sincerity.
"People of—" He almost said Hashtag Village and realized that would become canon if he did. "—Stone-Gate! Consistency is key. Believe consistently."
The clapping started without prompting—two beats, then three, then voices rising, not frantic but steady. Darrow's bow lowered just a hair as a wind—no exaggeration, a literal breeze—drew a sketched veil of dust across the mark. The goblin blinked, hesitated, and made the kind of choice that keeps your species alive: it ran.
Darrow didn't bother with the arrow. He let it go. He was looking at Aiden.
"You didn't make a wall," he said, voice even. "You made the goblin think there was one."
Aiden swallowed. "Perception is ninety percent of battle," he said smoothly, like a man who had once lost a fight to a vending machine.
"Or you just made a wall and you can't do it again," Darrow said, because he had to say something grounded before his boots floated off the earth.
"Both can be true," Aiden said, which was very safe and also accidentally wise.
The cheer that followed rolled like river water through a sluice. Elders pressed forward to touch the mark's edges. Children imitated Aiden's strokes in the dust with serious tongues sticking from the corners of their mouths. Someone set up a little tray of offerings beside #PLEASEWORK, including a pear, a coin, and a very confused beetle.
The HUD settled on a new number.
Followers: 310
Aiden closed his eyes for half a second. He was dizzy with it: not just the number, but the way the empty patch inside his chest—where meaning and rent money used to rattle—felt a little less echoey.
He breathed in smoke and dew and goat and felt like he might, maybe, not be completely terrible at existing here.
Then the peddler arrived.
He came down the path with a mule jangling with cookware and bells, voice pitched to slice the murmur. "Tin pots! Fine needles! Rumors fresher than your mother-in-law's opinions!"
People laughed and swarmed. The peddler grinned, quick eyes cataloging the shrine, the mark, the crowd clustered around Aiden. Traveling merchants have a sixth sense: the fastest road to coin is gossip, and the fastest gossip is saints.
"What's all this?" he asked, laying out trinkets as if he didn't care about the answer.
"Our Oracle!" the old matron said, glowing so hard Aiden worried she'd combust. "He speaks and walls appear. He claps and thunder answers. The goblins fear him."
"Is that so," the peddler said, in the tone of a man already deciding how many villages would pay a premium to hear the story.
Aiden caught his eye and saw the calculation reflected. He didn't mind. Trends had to travel.
He leaned toward the mule and, because he couldn't help himself, said loudly, "Make sure to like and subscribe before you go."
The peddler blinked. The crowd parroted the sacred phrase. The peddler's grin widened. "I will," he said earnestly, because coin is coin. "And I have news in return: the frontier isn't the only place with goblins. Raiders struck a hamlet two valleys over. But—" He held up a ring, cheap brass polished prettier than it was. "—they ran from a watchtower fire that burned blue. Sound familiar?"
The old matron clapped her hands to her cheeks. "The blue flame we saw two nights ago!"
Aiden smoothed his face into something sage and distant while screaming internally, Oh, so lightning-oak is trending. Good to know.
The peddler leaned in for the closer. "And if the mountain road is clear, a sect envoy rides this way. They collect talent like you collect… what do you call them, likes?"
The square went still except for the beetle, who continued to be very confused.
Aiden's heart made a sound like a hashtag being carved into a tree. A sect? As in sword-immortal types who paid in jade and destiny? His mind cartwheeled through possibilities: training, protection, exposure to a bigger audience, being crushed like a bug for being a fraud in fancy robes.
The HUD, as if bored with his panic, offered a tiny chime.
New Algorithm Quest:"Trend Beyond the Village."Objective: Secure recognition from an external authority (1/3: traveling merchant reached).Bonus Objective: Convert skeptic (0/1).
Aiden's gaze slid to Darrow.
The hunter caught it, lifted his chin, and looked away like a man who has just realized his house cat is a tiger and refuses to show fear because pride is a kind of armor.
"Fine," Darrow muttered, mostly to himself, but loud enough for Aiden to hear. "If your marks keep children alive, I'll carve them until my hands bleed. But if you turn out to be smoke and tin bells, I'll be the first to drag you from that shrine."
"Fair," Aiden said softly. He meant it. The words surprised him by not feeling like a performance.
The peddler clanged two pans together, shattering the moment. "Who's buying rumors and soup spoons?"
Villagers laughed and surged again. Coins changed hands. The shrine collected bread and pears; #PLEASEWORK collected prayers. The goat ate the beetle's lunch, which improved the beetle's day.
Aiden knelt and redrew the strokes, this time slower, letting his breath settle in the lines. The mark didn't shimmer. That was fine. It didn't have to. He wasn't certain what he was building yet, only that building had begun.
When he rose, kids were waiting with sticks poised over fresh patches of dirt.
"Easy," he told them, half stern, half indulgent teacher. "Strong lines. Commit to the bit. Intention is ninety percent of… wall."
They nodded gravely as if he'd said something galaxy-brained. Maybe he had.
He stepped back, palms dusty, and faced a village that no longer looked quite as fragile as yesterday. It helped that they believed. It helped that he did, too, a little, in the strange Venn diagram space where faith overlaps with scams and becomes an honest attempt.
The sky rumbled—not thunder this time, just weather, plain and indifferent. Still, a few villagers clapped twice because habit was becoming culture, and culture is how you armor a place against the next storm.
Aiden's gaze drifted past the roofs, toward the suggestion of a road curling off into scrub and fog. Somewhere beyond it, men on cloud-riding cranes might be polishing their swords and rehearsing the phrase, We sensed an unusual Dao.
He swallowed. "Okay," he told the HUD and the wind and his own cowardly heart. "If they come… we'll improvise."
The System, in a rare fit of humor, offered nothing at all.
Darrow set down his bow and picked up a stick. He drew #PLEASEWORK with stiff, careful strokes like a man copying his enemy's handwriting. When he finished, he nodded once, the gesture as rough as bark. "Teach the boys," he said without looking at Aiden. "We practice until dark."
It wasn't a conversion hymn. It wasn't worship. But the quest ticker nudged.
Bonus Objective Progress: Convert skeptic (0.5/1)
Aiden bit back a grin. He could work with halves. Halves still round up if the crowd chants loud enough.
He climbed onto the box, raised his hands, and the chant rolled out of the square like a wave made of hands and hope.
"CLAP-CLAP!"
"CLAP-CLAP-CLAP!"
Goats bleated. Kids laughed. Aiden shouted terminology that meant nothing and—miracle of miracles—kept meaning something anyway.
The Misunderstood Prophet, it turned out, was misunderstood by himself most of all. But that was okay. He was very good at pretending he knew what he was doing until the world did, too.
Far off, a hawk turned in a slow circle above the forest. The line of trees watched back in green silence. Somewhere within, a larger horn waited in a larger throat, patient and hungry. Five days. The HUD ticked like a metronome.
"Consistency," Aiden whispered, drawing the last line on the last mark until the stroke felt right. "Consistency and… please work."
The line dried in the sun. The crowd clapped. The goat finally stopped trying to eat his sleeve.
And for the first time since waking on a straw mat in a stranger's skin, Aiden felt a little less like a man running from gravity and a little more like a man who might, with the right angle and enough cheering, learn to swing.