Episode-203

Words : 1521 Updated : Sep 27th, 2025

Chapter: 405 Memories, a torrent of them, flooded his mind, overwhelming the sights and sounds of the bustling market. Anastasia, laughing, her head thrown back, as they danced in the rain after their first promotion. Anastasia, her face smudged with grease, her eyes shining with fierce intelligence, arguing with him over a faulty schematic for an engine prototype. Anastasia, sleeping, her face serene and peaceful, her hand tucked into his. Anastasia, in her dress uniform, her smile proud, brave, as she prepared for that final, fateful deployment. And then... the cold, sterile finality of the notification. The flag-draped coffin. The crushing, absolute, and eternal, silence. He had lived a whole other life after her. He had loved again. He had built a new family, a new legacy. But he had never, not once, forgotten her. She had been his first true north, the compass of his heart. And the piece of his soul that had died with her had never, ever, truly been resurrected. Until now. And she was here. Selling radishes. The sheer, soul-shattering absurdity of it, the impossible confluence of time, of worlds, of souls, was too much to bear. The careful control he had cultivated over three lifetimes, the stoic mask of the nobleman, the cold focus of the general—it all crumbled to dust. He stumbled forward, his movements clumsy, uncoordinated, his legs feeling like they belonged to someone else. The bustling market, the curious stares of the passersby, the very reality of the world around him, ceased to exist. There was only her. A beacon of impossible hope in a sea of grief. Tears, hot and unfamiliar, welled in his eyes, blurring his vision, turning the vibrant colors of the market into a shimmering, watery haze. He hadn’t cried, not really, not since he was a boy. The Major General did not cry. Lord Ferrum did not cry. But KM Evan, the heartbroken widower, the man who had buried his first love and then buried his grief for fifty years... he was weeping. Openly. Unashamedly. A raw, ragged, lifetime of sorrow finally breaking free. The young woman behind the stall, whose name was Airin, looked up from her neat pyramid of radishes, her work interrupted by the strange, stumbling approach of the handsome, well-dressed nobleman. Her initial expression was one of mild, professional curiosity, a customer, perhaps. But then she saw his face. She saw the tears streaming, unchecked, down his cheeks. She saw the look in his eyes—a look of such profound, agonizing, almost unholy recognition, of a grief so deep it seemed to carve canyons into his young features. Her own smile faltered, replaced by a look of startled, almost fearful, confusion. She took an involuntary half-step back, her hand instinctively going to the simple wooden counter, a fragile barrier against this sudden, overwhelming storm of emotion. Who was this man? Why was he looking at her like that? Like he was seeing a ghost? Lloyd reached the stall, his breath coming in ragged, shuddering gasps. He didn't see the radishes. He didn't see the other customers who were now beginning to stop, to stare, their own conversations forgotten in the face of this bizarre, public spectacle. He saw only her face. The face of his past. The face of his heart. He reached out, his hand trembling, his fingers brushing against the rough, worn wood of the stall. He wanted to touch her, to confirm she was real, that she wasn't just a cruel, beautiful hallucination conjured from the depths of his own lonely soul. But he was afraid. Afraid that if he touched her, she might dissolve, vanish like a dream upon waking. So he did the only thing he could. He reached for her hand. The one that was resting on the counter, stained with a bit of honest earth. His own fingers, pale and trembling, closed around hers. Her skin was warm. Solid. Real. A jolt, more potent than any of Fang Fairy’s lightning, shot through him, a jolt of pure, impossible, life-affirming reality. She was real. Airin gasped, snatching her hand back as if burned, but not before he had felt the solid warmth of her. She stared at him, her eyes wide with a mixture of terror and profound bewilderment. And then, he spoke. His voice was a raw, broken, unrecognizable thing, thick with a century of unshed tears, a single name ripped from the very core of his being, a name that held a universe of love, of loss, of impossible, heartbreaking, reunion. "Anastasia." Chapter: 406 The name, a ghost from another world, hung in the air of the bustling Riverian marketplace, a testament to a love that had somehow, impossibly, transcended time, death, and the very boundaries of reality itself. And in the stunned, confused, and slightly terrified eyes of the young vegetable seller named Airin, Lloyd Ferrum saw not just the face of his past, but the beginning of a new, and infinitely more complicated, and potentially far more painful, future. --- The name—Anastasia—a ghost of a forgotten world, a whisper of a buried heart, hung heavy and impossible in the bustling air of the Royal Market. It was a key that fit no lock in this reality, a word of profound, personal significance that, to everyone else, was just a strange, foreign sound. Airin, the young vegetable seller, stared at the weeping nobleman before her, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird. Anastasia? What was that? A name? A curse? A word in some strange, forgotten tongue? She saw only a handsome, well-dressed, and clearly, profoundly, unhinged young lord, his face a mask of grief so raw it was almost terrifying, his dark eyes, swimming with tears, fixed on her as if she were the ghost of a long-lost salvation. Her first instinct, a primal, self-preservation instinct honed by a life of fending for herself in the rough-and-tumble world of the market, was to scream. To call for the City Guard. This was not normal. This was not sane. She snatched her hand back from his trembling grasp, the brief, warm contact leaving a strange, tingling sensation on her skin. She stumbled backwards, her hip bumping into a basket of purple turnips, sending them scattering across the floor of her stall with a series of dull, earthy thuds. “I... I don’t know who you’re talking about, my lord!” she stammered, her voice a thin, reedy squeak. She held her hands up, palms out, a universal gesture of negation, of ‘stay back’. “My name is Airin! I... I’ve never seen you before in my life!” But Lloyd didn’t seem to hear her. He was lost, adrift in the turbulent ocean of his own resurrected grief. The sound of his own heartbroken whisper of her name echoed in his ears, a sound that had been buried for eighty years. Anastasia. He had said her name. He had touched her hand. She was real. The carefully constructed composure of the Major General, the cynical armor of the eighty-year-old survivor, was gone, shattered into a million pieces. All that was left was the raw, bleeding wound of the young widower, KM Evan, face-to-face with an impossible, heartbreaking miracle. The logic circuits of his mind, which had coolly analyzed military strategy, economic theory, and alchemical formulas, were completely, comprehensively, overloaded. All they could process was: Her. Here. Alive. He took another stumbling step forward, his hand reaching for her again, his face a mess of tears and bewildered, joyful, agonizing disbelief. “Anastasia,” he choked out again, the name a prayer, a plea. “It’s me. Don’t you... don’t you know me?” And that was when the scene, which had been merely a bizarre, personal drama, escalated into a full-blown public spectacle. The passersby, who had initially just noted the odd sight of a nobleman at a vegetable stall, now stopped completely. Their casual curiosity sharpened into focused, fascinated, and deeply judgmental, interest. A crowd began to form, a ripple of whispers turning into a rising tide of gossip. “Look! It’s that nobleman! He’s... he’s crying!” “Crying? At the vegetable seller? Has he gone mad?” “Look at her face! She’s terrified! Is he accosting her?” “I heard he was one of the Ferrums... the Arch Duke’s heir, isn't he?" The whispers grew louder, more pointed. Faces, alight with a mixture of pity, mockery, and the sheer, delicious glee of witnessing a high-born person having a very public, very un-dignified, emotional meltdown, pressed in closer. The space around Airin’s small stall, usually just a part of the market’s general flow, had become a theatre, and Lloyd was its unwilling, tragic, and slightly hysterical, star. The rising murmur of the crowd, the pointed stares, the sharp, cruel edge of the whispers—it was a wave of cold, harsh reality, finally, mercifully, beginning to breach the thick, insulating fog of Lloyd’s grief. He blinked, the tears momentarily clearing his vision, and he saw them. Dozens of faces, all staring at him. He saw their expressions—the shock, the amusement, the contempt.

Episode-203

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