1 The Burning Gallows (1/2)
Chapter 1: The Burning Gallows
Translator: Kris_LiuEditor: Vermillion
Billows of black smoke burned Xiafeng’s throat and lungs while making hissing sounds like old broken bellows.
“Anyone… here? I don’t wanna… die...
“Xiafeng, wake up… don’t fall asleep...”
…
The endless flaming red light suddenly dimmed, followed by a deep darkness. Like a drowning man, Xiafeng tried his very best to grab onto anything that could save him from this darkness.
At that moment, like a rising sun, a red light appeared in front of him.
In that light, Xiafeng felt his strength recovering slightly, so he struggled desperately to get closer to the light. After taking a step forward, Xiafeng saw the light becoming brighter and brighter, changing from flaming red to pure white. The darkness was thoroughly entrapped by the light and completely dissipated in a second.
“Ah…” Xiafeng suddenly sat back up and was now panting with great effort. In his dream, the smoke of a terrifying fire had made him lose all means of resistance, leaving him unable to do anything but helplessly lie on the ground and wait for the flames to devour him. Like being constrained by a ghost, he knew that he was in a nightmare, but he just could not wake himself up.
The dream was so real that it took Xiafeng quite a while to recover. After his fast-beating heart calmed down, he finally remembered that he had been working on his essay for the whole night in the school library. “No wonder I dreamed about the fire, I’m practically burning my life here these days,” Xiafeng thought to himself in a self-deprecating way.
When he roused himself and was about to collect all the reference books and go back to the dorm, Xiafeng was stunned with the strange and unimaginable scene in front of him. Like being struck in the head, he was shocked and his mind went blank.
All the nice-looking wooden desks were gone. There were no piles of reference books, paper manuscripts, and laptops. The only thing left was an old black blanket with loose threads covering him.
Instead of sitting in the library chair, he was actually sitting on a narrow wooden bed.
“Where am I?!”
In this situation, even a person like Xiafeng, who was relatively quiet and slow, could feel things were going wrong. Even if he was caught in a fire and sent to a hospital, this place definitely did not resemble a hospital! Not even close!
His heartbeat rose up due to the shock. He looked around and tried to stand up on his feet, but as soon as he put his feet on the ground, a sense of dizziness and weakness spread over him and almost made him hit the ground.
Xiafeng hurriedly reached out and grabbed the handle of the bed to retain his balance. His face was pale and his heart was beating very fast. He was already aware of the surroundings from the quick look just now.
This was a small shack. Including the wooden bed, there was a wooden table, which could possibly fall apart at any moment, two relatively ok-looking stools, and a crate with a hole in it. On the other side of the deteriorated wooden door, there was a crock hanging, a worn old stove was under it. The fire had been put out for quite a while. Just chilly kindling was lying underneath.
Everything seemed strange to him. Xiafeng had no idea where he was. The weak and dizzy feeling was bothering him a lot as well:
“Where is this place?! It feels like I just recovered from a serious illness… like pneumonia I had in high school.”
…
Countless thoughts were going through his mind, but Xiafeng had never been in this extremely weird situation before. Panic was violently stirring up in his mind.
The only thing he felt lucky for was that there was nothing unpleasant or horrible that showed up. So, Xiafeng took several deep breaths and calmed himself down. Then, a loud shout came from afar outside the shack:
“Burn the witch! Aderon Cathedral is going to burn a witch!”
“Everybody!”
“Burn that damn witch to ashes!”
Fear and excitement were mingled together in that strange accent. Xiafeng was distracted from his panic and felt curious, he thought to himself, “Witch? What on earth is this world?”
As an adult, Xiafeng could definitely feel that something bad was going to happen there. But his thought was cut off by a sudden crashing sound that came from the door. A twelve or thirteen-year-old boy came rushing in.
“Lucien!” The brown-haired boy, wearing linen clothes reaching to his knees, was standing beside the bed as he exclaimed in surprise, “You’re awake! Thank god!”
Looking at the boy’s completely different-styled clothes, Xiafeng nodded his head unconsciously. A ridiculous thought arose in his messy mind: “Lucien… Witch… Cathedral… Burn… Am I in a different world or even in another dimension? It seems like… I am in ‘The Middle Ages’ of Europe now, at the time when witch hunting was prevalent…”
If things had to go wrong, they always would. Murphy's Law was reminding Xiafeng in a cold way. The color of the boy’s hair and his clothes were all proof of his guess. Xiafeng could instinctively understand and speak this unknown language, but he was far from being a linguist, so he could not even tell what kind of language they were speaking.
The small boy, with several dusty black marks on his face, was not surprised at all when he saw Xiafeng’s strange behavior. “Mom didn’t believe me. During mid-night she always cries, and her eyes would swell up with tears, she keeps murmuring, ‘my poor little Evans’, like you were already buried in the cemetery.”
“Daddy didn’t know what to do, so he asked that little bastard Simon to bring a message to Lord Venn’s mansion, asking for my brother to somehow come back. Now he is a Knight’s Squire. Of course, the charity doctor would not dare to claim his unreasonable, ridiculous price in front of a knight squire!” The boy talked with his chin slightly raised, feeling sincerely proud.
“But look, I was right! I knew you were gonna be fine! I knew it!”— he was talking, he grabbed Xiafeng’s arm — “Let’s go! They are gonna burn that vicious witch. It’s the very same witch who made you go to jail and be interrogated for the whole night by the church guards!”
Xiafeng wanted to think more about his current situation, so he was not interested in going out at all. Besides, they were going to burn a person to death. That was something completely unacceptable for the kind-hearted Xiafeng, at least, he believed he was. But the last thing the boy mentioned shocked him, “The witch had something to do with me?”
Xiafeng, therefore, changed his mind. With his arm in the boy’s hand, he stumbled out of the room and followed the boy towards the cathedral.
Xiafeng looked around the people on the way. It was warm outside. Most men were wearing narrow-sleeved linen clothes, the same color pants and shoes without heels, while women wore monotonous roughly cut long dresses with big pockets. It was simple and old.
Most of them had brown hair and eyes, while some outstanding-outlined faces had red or black hair with green or blue eyes.
“This is really Middle Age?” Xiafeng found out he himself was wearing the same clothes.
Soon after they came out of the slum filled with low and shabby shacks, they saw a not so large but solemn and grand cathedral with high arched ceilings in front of them. On the biggest ceiling hung a large white cross. The windows under it were very narrow and small.
Lots of people had gathered there already. Following the small boy, Xiafeng squeezed through the crowd and kept pushing forward. This made some people irritated and they stared at them angrily, but they knew that as adults, they could not misbehave on the square of Aderon.