The Anomaly's Path-Chapter 58: The Gardener’s Touch

"NO! The water goes FIRST, then the leaves! How many times do I have to explain this?!"

I threw my hands up in exasperation, nearly knocking over the pot of boiling water beside me. Three children stared up at me with identical expressions of innocent confusion, their heads tilted at the same angle like a flock of confused baby birds.

"But the leaves smell nice," the smallest one—Lily, the girl with messy braids—protested, clutching a handful of greenery to her chest like it was a treasured possession. "If we put them in first, the water will smell nice too!"

"That’s not how cooking works!"

"It could be how cooking works if we try hard enough!"

I opened my mouth to argue, then closed it. Then opened it again.

Nothing came out.

Because somehow, despite all logic and reason, she had a point.

I pinched the bridge of my nose and counted to five. "Lily, I’ve been cooking for myself since I was probably younger than you. Alone. In my own kitchen. With no one to help me and no one to clean up my mistakes. I know what I’m talking about."

She blinked up at me with those big, innocent eyes. "But you’re a demon lord. Demon lords don’t cook."

"I’m not a demon lord! How many times—" I stopped and took a breath. "Fine. Put the leaves in first. See if I care. But when your porridge tastes like a forest floor, don’t come crying to me."

Lily beamed triumphantly and dumped an entire handful of random leaves into the pot.

The other two children—Tobin and Sera—watched with keen interest as the leaves floated on top of the water like tiny green boats.

"It looks pretty," Sera observed.

"Pretty doesn’t mean edible," I muttered.

Tobin poked at the pot with a stick. "What happens now?"

"Now we wait for the water to boil, then we add the grains, then we stir until it becomes something resembling food. Assuming the leaves don’t ruin everything." I leaned against the wall of the orphanage’s small kitchen, crossing my arms.

"You’re so negative," Lily said cheerfully.

"Tsk! I’m not a kid."

She stuck her tongue out at me. I stuck mine back.

The other two giggled.

I sighed and ran a hand through my hair.

It had been a week since my talk with Elder Marta. That night, after the kids went to bed, I sat in my room and asked question after question until my voice gave out and my head spun with answers I still couldn’t fully wrap my mind around.

She told me about the war, about the demon followers, about the alliance of races that had been fighting for longer than anyone could remember.

She answered everything I asked with a patience that felt almost unnatural, her voice calm and steady, never once making me feel like an idiot for not knowing things I probably should have.

...And when I finally ran out of questions, she simply smiled and told me to rest.

That was seven days ago.

My wounds had started closing. Mia still hadn’t stopped bossing anyone around. The kids still called me "handsome demon lord." And I still didn’t understand half of what Marta told me that night.

In that time, I’d learned a few things. First, children have no concept of personal space or sleeping in. Second, no matter how many times I explain that I’m human, they keep calling me a demon. Handsome demon. Demon lord. Handsome demon lord. Occasionally "scary pretty man," which I still don’t understand.

Third, Mia runs this place like a general commanding an army, and everyone—including me—is just a soldier following orders.

I tried to correct the demon thing, I really did. On my second day, I gathered the kids around and gave them a whole speech.

"Listen carefully," I said, trying to look as serious as possible while sitting on a pile of furs with bandages wrapped around my chest. "I am a human. A very handsome human, yes, but still human. Not a demon. Not a demon lord. Just a regular person who happens to have excellent bone structure."

They nodded seriously.

Then Lily raised her hand. "So you’re a handsome human demon?"

"That’s not—no. That’s the opposite of what I said."

"But you said you’re handsome."

"Yes."

"And you’re a demon."

"I am NOT a demon!"

She tilted her head. "Then why do you look like one?"

"I don’t look like a demon! Have you even seen a demon?"

"No, but you’re pale and have weird eyes."

"My eyes are not weird! They’re ocean blue! That’s a perfectly normal color!"

The kids exchanged glances. Tobin shrugged. Sera whispered something to Lily that made her giggle.

After that, they started calling me "Handsome Demon Lord" and I gave up entirely.

Now, a week in, I’d stopped bothering to correct them. What was the point? They’d just laugh and call me something even more ridiculous.

At least the cooking was coming along. Despite Lily’s leaf obsession.

The porridge actually turned out decent, somehow. The leaves added a weird earthy flavor, but it wasn’t terrible. The kids ate it without complaint, which I took as a win.

After breakfast, I stepped outside and took a deep breath. The air was thick and humid, full of jungle sounds and the distant murmur of village life.

I learned a lot about this place.

I asked questions. I listened. I pieced together what I could from Marta, from Mia, from the villagers who talked too much when they thought no one was listening.

...And after a week of all that, I reached a simple conclusion.

I was completely, utterly, royally screwed.

The picture Marta painted wasn’t pretty.

The village was called Wayford. A normal-sized place, tucked away from the main routes where the war was being fought. Most people came here to hide, to escape the fighting that had swallowed everything else.

The front lines were far from here.

The land was good, blessed with resources that made farming possible even in times like these. Merchants and travelers passed through often enough to keep things running, trading what they could for what they needed.

The forest that surrounded it—the same jungle where I’d washed up—was large and wild, home to monsters that wandered too close sometimes. But the village had survived this long. It had walls. It had people who knew how to fight.

There were smaller villages nearby, too, places that looked to Wayford when things got bad.

It wasn’t safe. Not really. No place was safe anymore. But it was safer than most.

I also figured out where I was. This was the era when the followers of demons and the followers of other races were at war—the war that happened after the Abyss King was defeated.

The War of Faith.

I remembered it from the game. Fragments of lore, mentions in old texts, hints at a conflict so devastating that most records were destroyed. Now I was living in the middle of it.

The situation was bad. Really bad.

Fuck you, fate. Just fuck you.

There was something else I noticed before—the mana in the air was thin. Back home, even with my low rank, I could feel it flowing like a steady current. Here, it was like trying to breathe at high altitude. Same effort, half the result.

I’d asked Mia about it yesterday, trying to be casual.

"The mana here," I said. "Is it always this thin?"

She gave me a strange look. "What do you mean? This is normal."

"Normal?"

"Yeah. It’s always been like this." She frowned. "Why? Is it different where you’re from?"

I hesitated. "Something like that."

She shrugged and moved on, but the answer stayed with me.

Another piece clicked into place, and my stomach dropped. There was no System. No status screens. No one walked around with glowing panels showing their stats or skills.

They could use mana freely too—no waiting until age ten to awaken a core. Most people developed their cores around that age anyway, but they weren’t bound to it. There were no restrictions. No rules.

Hell, they didn’t even have Paths. The same thing I was risking my life in a trial to awaken.

"This is strange," I muttered under my breath. "Very strange."

The more I dug, the stranger it got. They did have something, though—special abilities. The kind of thing you could call a Path, if you squinted hard enough.

However... no one had to enter a trial to earn them.

Some people were simply born with their abilities. Others awakened them later, triggered by something—trauma, desperation, a moment where they needed something more than they needed to breathe.

And those abilities could grow, they said. Bloom when the person needed them most. I didn’t fully understand what that meant.

But it was close enough to a Path to make my head hurt.

Elder Marta had one of those abilities. She called it The Gardener’s Touch.

I still don’t fully understand how it works. What I do know is this: she can’t heal like a normal healer. She can’t stitch wounds or cure sickness. What she can do is listen to the land.

The soil remembers everything—the village being built, the first seeds planted, the paths worn down by children running barefoot. It remembers how things were supposed to be.

When I was lying on that riverbank, bleeding out, I was barely conscious. I don’t remember much from those moments. Faces blurring. Voices fading in and out.

But Marta told me later what she did. She knelt beside me, placed her hands on the earth beneath my body, and asked the soil to hold me steady. To keep my heart beating long enough for my own body to catch up. She didn’t fix me.

She just... borrowed time from the ground.

Let the land do the rest.

She does the same with the crops. When the soil gets tired, she nudges it. When the rains don’t come, she coaxes the roots to dig deeper. When the jungle pushes too close to the village walls, she asks the old trees to stand a little firmer.

She’s not a fighter. She’s not a healer. She’s a gardener. She tends to the land, and the land tends to the people who live on it.

That’s why the village is still standing. That’s why they’ve survived this long.

The soil remembers.

...And Marta remembers how to listen.

_

I sat on a log near the orphanage, watching the children play. Tobin and Sera were chasing each other around a tree while Lily supervised from a safe distance, occasionally throwing leaves at them.

A boy with scale-like patterns on his arms sat nearby, drawing in the dirt with a stick. A girl with pointed ears and amber skin helped Elder Marta hang herbs to dry. Two small twins—one with unusual violet eyes, the other looking completely human—argued about something near the well.

All of them were carrying something. You could see it in the way they laughed too loud or went quiet too fast.

Most of the kids here had lost their parents. Some had been taken by Royal armies, drafted into a war they never asked for. Others had been killed directly by demons or demon followers. A few had simply disappeared, swallowed by the chaos.

...And yet they laughed.

They played. They fought over bread and argued about frogs. They made terrible porridge and called me a handsome demon lord like it was the most normal thing in the world.

I watched them and wondered how they did it. How they could still smile when the world had given them every reason not to.

Maybe... that was the real answer.

War didn’t care which side you were on. It didn’t care how old you were, or what you’d lost, or how much you had left to lose. It just took. And took. And took.

My eyes drifted to Mia, who was now trying to stop Lily from putting honey in her hair again.

She moved through the chaos like she’d been doing it her whole life—bossing, scolding, fixing, holding everything together with sheer stubbornness and spite.

Elder Marta had told me about her.

She told me how Mia’s parents had been healers. Good ones. People came from miles around for their help. They were happy. But one day, the Royal army came and said they needed capable healers on the war side. They were collecting healers from everywhere to heal their soldiers.

Mia was nine years old when they took them.

She never saw them again. Whether they were still alive or not, no one knew.

Some said the army moved them from camp to camp. Others said they’d been killed when a field hospital got overrun. Mia never stopped hoping. But she also never stopped preparing for the worst.

And somehow, after that, she just... kept going.

She kept fighting, kept taking care of everyone else. Like if she stopped for even a moment, she’d fall apart.

I know this Mia isn’t my sister, but she reminds me of my sister so much. I can’t help but think of her as my sister. A person I want to protect.

I clenched my jaw.

Fate was a real bastard sometimes.

I was still sitting on that log when Mia’s voice cut through my thoughts.

"Leo!"

I turned. She was storming toward me, her amber eyes blazing with their usual intensity. She had a basket of herbs under one arm and a look on her face that promised pain.

"What did I tell you about resting?"

"Um... Well, I rested enough. Besides that, I needed some fresh air."

Her eye twitched. "That’s not—you can’t just—" She took a breath. "Sit down. Now."

"I’m sitting."

"You’re sitting up. Lie down."

"I’m fine."

"You’re not fine. You have wounds that should have killed you. You lost enough blood to fill a bucket. You—"

"Okay, okay!"

I stretched out on the grass instead, arms behind my head. Mia stared at me like I’d just insulted her entire family line.

"Better?" I asked.

She muttered something that sounded like "insufferable" and sat down beside me, pulling herbs from her basket with unnecessary aggression.

For a moment, we just watched the children play. Lily had now joined the chase, screeching with laughter as Tobin chased her around the tree. Sera was trying to mediate, with limited success.

We sat in comfortable silence for a while. Then I spoke.

"Mia."

"...Yeah?"

"I’ve been hearing about someone. A swordsman. They say he’s quite strong and protects the village... sometimes."

Her expression soured instantly. "Ugh. Him."

"You sound disgusted."

She crossed her arms, her jaw tightening. "He’s strong. Really strong. Strongest person in the village, probably. But he doesn’t do anything with it. Just sits around, drinks, gambles, mopes. Occasionally fights off something that gets too close. Then goes back to sitting and drinking and gambling and moping."

I raised an eyebrow. "Sounds like a real hero to me."

"Hero my foot." She kicked at the dirt. "He gambles and drinks all day. He’s pretty much useless."

Tobin had wandered over during the conversation, drawn by the mention of the swordsman.

"He’s not useless!" the boy protested. "He killed a whole bunch of demons once! He told me!"

"He exaggerates," Mia said flatly.

"But he’s cool! He has a big sword and everything!"

"A big sword he never uses."

Lily joined us, tugging at my sleeve. "The scary swordsman is really strong! Mama used to say he was the best fighter in the whole region!"

"Your mama was being kind," Mia muttered.

"She wasn’t! She said he saved our village twice!"

"Before he gave up on everything."

The kids fell silent, sensing the shift in Mia’s mood. Sera came closer too, her golden eyes curious.

I looked at Mia. "...What happened to him?"

She hesitated for a moment. "That’s... you have to ask Elder Marta or that guy himself. I can’t tell you."

I nodded slowly. "I see. It’s okay if you can’t tell me. Just tell me then where can I find him?"

She blinked. "Why?!"

"I mean, I want to meet this guy so I could talk with him."

"He won’t talk to you."

"Don’t worry. I am the most honest, divine, beautiful, and trustworthy person in the entire world. He’ll love me."

She stared at me for a long moment. Then, flatly: "You’re an insufferable narcissistic bastard."

"I prefer ’confident.’"

She opened her mouth, probably to argue, then seemed to think better of it. Instead, she just shook her head and let out a long, tired sigh.

"You know what? I don’t have the energy for this." She crossed her arms. "He’ll be at the Rusty Mug. It’s a tavern near the edge of the village. Probably gambling or drinking or something like that."

"I can take you to him. I know the way!" Tobin jumped up, bouncing on his heels.

"Me too!" Lily grabbed my other sleeve. "I want to see the scary swordsman!"

Sera just looked at me with those golden eyes, not speaking, but clearly interested.

I held up my hands. "Whoa, whoa. No. You three have things to do. Chores. Learning. Terrorizing the village."

I looked at Mia. "Right?"

She crossed her arms. "Right. Tobin, you’re supposed to be helping Elder Marta with the herbs. Lily, you promised to organize the storage room. Sera, you have reading practice."

They deflated instantly.

"But Leo—" Lily started.

"Leo will be fine. He’s a big boy. He can find a tavern by himself." Mia gave me a look. "...Probably."

"Gee, thanks for the vote of confidence."

"Don’t mention it."

I stood up carefully, stretching my arms over my head. My muscles complained, but it was getting better. Stronger. The rest had done me good.

"Alright. Time to meet this so-called protector." I looked at the kids. "You three behave, okay? No burning down the orphanage while I’m gone."

"We wouldn’t do that!" Lily looked offended.

"Lily, you literally tried to cook leaves."

"Hmph!"

I laughed and ruffled her hair. She squawked and tried to fix it, which only made it messier.

I turned and started walking toward the edge of the village, following the path Tobin had pointed out.

Time to meet this scary swordsman.