"It won't... work," I murmured, turning the pen in my hand as if it might reveal its secrets under strict scrutiny. The ink stayed trapped inside, indifferent to my frustration. Hongbing met my gaze with a quiet grimace; his pen was just as useless in his grip. We were strangers here, even to something as small as this.
Maruyama watched us for a long moment before stepping closer. "You're holding it like a brush," he said softly, carefully adjusting my fingers. His hands were patient, but the correction felt like a verdict. This is how the world works now. Unlearn yourself.
The pen finally left a shaky line when it angled its way. The victory was rather hollow.
Some part of me wanted to snap that pen in half.
"Jincheng grip it with your thumb and index finger, let the middle finger rest lightly underneath for stability," he guided me as we wrote the first letter of the Japanese alphabet, or the Hiragana. Japanese was easy to understand since it was quite similar to ours, just looked a little odd at first, but the pen in my hand? It just refused to work in my favour.
Hongbing fared no better. His knuckles had gone white around his pen, his usual lethal precision reduced to the clumsy strokes of a child. The ink smeared sideways, rebellious. He exhaled sharply through his nose, a sound I knew well, the prelude to violence.
Maruyama sighed. "Again."
He guided my fingers to the "correct" position for the third time. The pen's barrel pressed into the crook of my thumb, alien and unwieldy. This is how scholars write now? No grace, no rhythm, just the rigid scrape of metal against pulp.
"It's not a brush," Maruyama muttered, as if reading my thoughts. "You don't flow with it. You command it like the soldiers in your army"
I dragged the pen downward. The line wavered like a drunkard's gait.
Then a CRACK!!!!!!
Hongbing's pen snapped.
It echoed through the study. The two halves of the plastic casing clattered onto the table, the ink bleeding over his knuckles. For a heartbeat, the room froze. Then.....
"That," Maruyama said drily, "was the last spare Hongbing!!!!"
Hongbing's jaw tightened. "These things are made to provoke men."
I bit back a bitter laugh. Centuries of warfare, assassination attempts, court intrigues, yet here we are defeated by mere stationery.
When evening rolled around, my fingers cramped. My pride frayed, our letters still looked like wounded birds, but Maruyama nodded. "Better. Tomorrow, we'll tackle numbers. And, God help me, the concept of weekdays."
Hongbing flexed his hand, scowling. "Weapons are simpler. Knives are simpler!"
"Everything here is a weapon," I muttered, staring at the pen. (Especially ignorance. definitely ignorance)
Maruyama massaged his temples. "Okay ....Let's... take a break. Switch to something simpler."
"This," he declared, thrusting two sleek rectangles at us smartphones, "is your lifeline."
My partner eyed it like a poisoned dagger. "More sorcery."
"Technology," the old man corrected. "Touch the screen. Gently, don't stab it!"
I poked it. The device lit up, and I nearly dropped it. "It.....t reacts..."
"Yes, yes. Here's your first lesson: calling." He demonstrated, and his phone rang across the room.
Hongbing lunged, sword hand twitching. "You summoned it?!"
Our old man could only groan.
I tried again. The screen lit up beneath my fingertips. I tapped tentatively.
"Why does it guess my words?" I squinted at the floating suggestions. (Sorcery?)
"Predictive text," Maruyama said. "It learns your habits when you're chatting with someone.
Hongbing leaned over, eyes narrowing. "So it kinda spies on you."
"No! Ugh." Maruyama groaned. "Look, just practice. We'll tackle calendars next."
My stomach dropped. Calendars. The way he'd said it earlier, "You don't know what April is?" like I'd confessed to breathing underwater.
The phone buzzed in my hand. A notification flashed: 'December 3, 2025 - 3:14 PM'.
The number alone was a punch to the gut. Centuries. My brother's face flickered in my mind. Would he even be dust now? The Night Guardians, the palace, and the war with the northern tribes are all reduced to footnotes in a scroll or a book somewhere in this world.
A hand clamped onto my shoulder. Hongbing's grip was vice-like, his voice low. "Breathe."
I hadn't realised I'd stopped.
Maruyama pretended not to notice, busying himself with stacking papers. "Once you're done," he said carefully, "we'll go shopping. You need clothes that don't scream 'feudal warlord.'"
Hongbing's lip curled. "I'd rather wear sackcloth than that cat abomination you gave me earlier."
"Too bad. The cat abomination is the least of your problems." Maruyama held up a pamphlet....Osaka University: Undergraduate Programs. "Because in under three months, you're both going to be college students."
THREE MONTHS?!
"You are serious, right?" I asked him, and Hongbing stiffened behind me. The pamphlet crinkled in my tightening grip. Osaka University's glossy facade stared back, mocking. Three months. Ninety days to unlearn a lifetime.
Maruyama didn't even blink. "Deadly. You think forging the identities was the hard part? You have to act like it, act like them!" He tossed another brochure onto the table, Modern Japanese for Beginners, its cheerful cover at odds with the Assassin's murderous glare.
"We are not children," Hongbing bit out. His fingers twitched toward his absent sword. "You expect us to sit in classrooms with kids who've never bled for anything?"
"College students..... not kids, they are full-grown adults! And now I expect you both to survive." The old man met his glare head-on. "Or do you prefer the alternative? No papers, no history, just two ghosts haunting convenience stores until the police or the yakuza take interest?"
I exhaled, rolling the tension from my shoulders. "What must we learn first?"
"One: Language. Not just hiragana...kanji, keigo, slang. Two: Basic math. Three: Science. Four..."
"Science?" I interrupted. "You mean alchemy?"
"Oh sweet Christ." He scrubbed a hand down his face. "Okay. Quick test. What holds planets in orbit?"
"The emperor's mandate....?" I ask tentatively
"GRAVITY, It's GRAVITY!!!!!"
He stormed towards the wall and ripped out a colourful grid. "This. Is. April." He stabbed a finger at the first square. "Today. Your new year starts here, not with cherry blossoms or whatever poetry you're used to."
I traced the numbers. So small. So rigid. In Daming, time had been measured in incense sticks and the slow turn of seasons. Here, it was caged in tiny boxes, relentless.
"And this?" I pointed to a red circle.
"It's Sunday. A day of rest."
Hongbing snorted. "A day without training is a day wasted."
"A day with training," The old countered, "is how you get arrested for 'kendo demonstrations' in public parks."
"And we have to learn all of this... in three months?" My voice cracked. The words tasted like ash on my tongue.
Maruyama exhaled, long and slow, as if breathing out decades of patience. "Yes. And before you ask, no, there are no shortcuts." He tapped the university brochure with a bitten-down fingernail. "This world runs like this. Without them, you don't exist."
Hongbing's knuckles whitened around his snapped pen. "In our time, a man was measured by his deeds, not... scribbles or whatever we are doing right now!"
"In your time," Maruyama shot back, "people died of toothaches. Progress isn't negotiable."
A clock ticked on the wall. My eyes traced its slow, mocking circle. Three months. Ninety revolutions of that indifferent hand to cram four centuries of advancement into our skulls.
I reached for the teacup, then froze. Porcelain. Qing dynasty patterns. A relic of home, cradled in this alien world. The heat against my palm was the only real thing left of my ho.me
Seeing me, his voice softened. " Listen, we'll start with language then...."
"Then what's the point?" The words tore out of me. Hongbing's head snapped up. I never raised my voice. Never. "Even if we learn, even if we pass..." I gestured wildly at the window, where neon lights pulsed like false stars. "This isn't our world. Our people are bones..... bones!!!."
Silence.
"Jincheng." Hongbing's calloused hand clamped over my wrist. Not restraint. An anchor. "The oath."
"What oath? Which oath?" I shot back at him
"You know which one I am talking about, " he snapped right back
"That one! Why now, of all times?" The oath I knew by heart, the oath I stood by for the first fifteen years of my life.
"Sing it..." Hongbing told me his voice was stern
"Night bleeds into day; rivers carve through stone." My fingers curled into fists, the old oath rising like a tide. The memories washed over me like the waves of the ocean. "We stand where time fractures. We endure what others cannot."
The words tasted of iron and frozen battlefields of mornings when the dawn came late, and the earth trembled under the weight of marching boots. I had whispered them in the battlefield of Liaodong, screamed them through the smoke of burning outposts. Now they hung in the stale air of Maruyama's mansion, a frayed rope tethering me to a world that turned to ash.
Outside, a train rattled past, its lights slicing through the dark. Four hundred years of progress, and the night still smelled the same of damp stone and gathering storms.
My fingers found the scar over my heart, that old, jagged piece of flesh where a Mongol arrow had punched clean through my chest armour. The wound should have killed me. The physicians had wept when I sat up on the third day. "A miracle," they'd whispered.
But it hadn't been divine intervention. Just stubbornness. The same stubbornness that made me swallow blood instead of death when the fever came. The same stubbornness that dragged me back to the front lines before the stitches dissolved.
The pen trembled in my grip now not from uncertainty, but from the sheer, ridiculous irony of it. I've faced barbarian hordes and killed the worst of my enemies. And now I quake before a writing tool? PATHETIC!!!! My mind screamed.
A grin split my face, the same reckless one that had terrified my lieutenants before a charge. "Alright, old man," I said, rolling up my sleeves to reveal the lattice of scars beneath. "Let's do this, we will survive, how about that?!"
Maruyama's laughter shook the teacups. " That's the spirit!!!!"Three months?" He slapped the table. "With that attitude? They won't know what hit them." But his laughter faltered as I leaned forward, gripping that cursed pen in my hand, the centuries of command as a general ringing in my voice:
" On one condition....If we survive this, you will tell us how our world fell."
Outside, a car horn blared, but all I could hear was the ghostly echo of palace bells from four hundred years of silence.
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