Reborn in Another World: I Became a God

Chapter 6: Chapter six: The Remote Town



Morning mist draped the mountain-locked town like a curtain soaked in milk, heavy and silent, It condensed into droplets on the crooked thatched rooftops, slid slowly down the moldy oak beams, and splashed into the muddy ground, forming pits of varying depths.

Raine Crow awoke abruptly atop a straw heap reeking of rot, his ten fingers deeply sunk into the damp stalks. Instinctively, he pressed his left chest—the crystal heart still beat, but its rhythm had slowed to that of an ordinary man. The once responsive vine tendrils had vanished completely, leaving only faint green markings on the inside of his right wrist, like ink bleeding through rain.

"Finally awake?" rasped a voice through the gap in the door.

An old hunter with a missing left ear was stirring embers in the hearth with a rusted iron hook. The earthen pot above it bubbled with a dark green brew, reeking of wormwood and rotting flesh.

"Found you three days ago near the edge of the Grey Mist Woods, Thought you were dead, Your clothes were shredded—couldn't even cover a rabbit—but your skin was clean as a newborn lamb."

Raine tried to push himself up, but a sudden dizziness knocked him flat into the straw again. This was the same body that had once torn shadow fiends apart barehanded, yet now it trembled from simply raising an arm. He finally noticed he was dressed in a rough linen robe; the coarse fibers scraped against his skin like needles.

"Don't waste your strength," the old hunter muttered, bringing over a ladle of the brew. His right hand, missing a ring finger, trembled slightly. "Old Martha in town says those glowing marks on you are 'curse scars'—only the Elves curse people like that..."

He fell silent suddenly, staring at the faint green lines now shimmering faintly in the morning light where Raine's wrist was exposed.

The burning bitterness of the brew made Raine cough violently.

Through watering eyes, he took in the room for the first time. The cracked pine walls were nailed with dozens of dried weasel pelts. Rusty bear traps and blackened bones cluttered the corners.

The only light came from a half-burned beeswax candle on the windowsill. Melted wax pooled into amber-like droplets on the wooden frame.

Outside, waves of coughing echoed, occasionally punctuated by the dull clank of packhorse bells.

"This place..." Raine rasped.

"Black Swamp Town," the old hunter replied, pulling aside the oilcloth curtain with a stick, leaden daylight spilled in, illuminating the dust dancing in the air.

"Thirty miles west lies the Rotbone Marsh, even the Thieves' Guild won't set foot there." He spat into a corner tin, the yellow-brown phlegm hitting dead center.

By midday, Raine had made his way onto the street, leaning heavily on the oak staff the old hunter gave him.

The muddy main road writhed like a black serpent,the leaning timber houses flanking it were like its rotting scales, thick moss blanketed every wall, crawling with pale fungal threads of unknown origin.

The townsfolk flitted past like faded ghosts,women clutched patched aprons filled with moldy oats, men lugged rusted pickaxes—everyone's nails were packed with grime that wouldn't wash away.

"Move! Out of the way!"

A hoarse shout burst from behind.

Four farmwives rushed by, carrying a convulsing boy on a makeshift stretcher of doorboards, dark red blood trickled from the gaps, leaving a broken red trail in the mud.

Raine looked, a shattered plow blade jutted from the boy's abdomen, the exposed metal tainted with an eerie green patina.

"Where's Old Martha's apothecary?" one of the women grabbed Raine by the sleeve, cracked nails digging into his flesh, she reeked of years-old grease and despair.

Suddenly, Raine's gaze pierced the boy's pale skin, he saw clearly the rust-colored poison spreading through his veins, his liver was already blackening with necrosis, his spleen swollen like an overripe plum—this sort of anatomical vision should've been impossible, but it felt horrifyingly real.

"Lay him flat," Raine said, his voice unfamiliar in its calmness. "I need boiled water, clean linen, and—"

"Who the hell are you?" the woman sneered, eyeing his ragged clothes and pallid face, her lips drawn down in deep, suspicious lines.

"A physician," the word slipped from Raine's lips before he could stop it.

He froze, he didn't remember studying medicine—but the curvature of the ribs, the precise location of the spleen—it was all etched into his mind like a textbook diagram.

Even stranger, the green markings on his wrist began to stir again, pulsing beneath the skin.

Under the villagers' skeptical stares, Raine used the hunter's small knife to debride the wound, as his fingertips touched the torn flesh, the green lines on his wrist glowed faintly, the necrotic tissue shed like autumn leaves. New, healthy flesh began to knit together visibly.

No one noticed that the boy's bleeding droplets turned to tiny red crystals before hitting the ground,

instantly absorbed by the dirt.

By dusk, Raine had hung a piece of birch bark from the old pigeon shed in the town square, with a crude serpent staff drawn in charcoal.

The first visitor was a cataract-blinded miner, his pupils clouded in milky white. Then came a shepherd girl with ulcerated ankles crawling with maggots. Even the madam from the brothel came, cradling a baby covered in purple pustules and blisters.

"You oughta charge for this," the old hunter said late that night, watching Raine rinse blood from his hands under the flickering oil lamp, the shadows danced across his weathered face like cuts in old bark.

Raine glanced at the "payment" piled in the corner: a black loaf covered in green mold, a chipped clay pot, a string of mouse teeth tied with twine, and even half a dried wolf's heart. 

His crystal heart pulsed sharply, he remembered the Mother Tree's final whisper—A gardener is but a part of the forest.

"Tomorrow..." Raine wiped the rusted blade clean, catching his own reflection on its edge—a stranger's face staring back, with a few green strands now woven into his silver hair.

 "Can you take me to the Grey Mist Woods?"


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