Sitting near the village entrance, on a smooth rock beside the main road, Joel closed his eyes and focused all his hearing on the people passing by. Since his arrival, this unfamiliar language had left him completely disoriented. The first time he heard it, it sounded harsh, strange, and full of inflections he couldn't place… and yet, he soon realized it wasn't as exotic as he had thought. There was a familiar rhythm in the syllables, a gentle cadence that vaguely recalled the Latin languages.

  While peeling one of the oranges he kept in his pockets, an almost automatic gesture to keep himself occupied, Joel spent a long time listening to the conversations mingling at the village entrance. Several guards watched over the main access, occasionally stopping a traveler, checking cargo, or asking only what was necessary. There was no hostile atmosphere; The people were used to the procedure, especially the transporters who, because of the size of their carts, probably had to pay some kind of tax to enter the market.

  Among the voices that rose and fell with the coming and going of travelers, one word began to be repeated more than the rest: "Efjaristó."

  Another, softer, gentler sound, also repeated itself regularly: "Kalimera."

  He heard them so many times that they began to settle into some forgotten corner of his memory. There was something unsettlingly familiar about those sounds, a sense of déjà vu that made him frown. From where…?

  Joel squeezed the orange's rough skin between his fingers, trying to sift through his memories. But with so many dreamed lives overlapping one another, finding the right one was like searching for a needle in an ocean of needles.

  He took a deep breath and began to list, one by one, the lives he remembered, paying particular attention to the language used.

  English.

  French.

  Spanish.

  Portuguese.

  German.

  Arabic.

  Russian.

  Bulgarian.

  Czech.

  Chinese.

  Korean.

  Japanese.

  Hungarian.

  Italian…

  And then, as if a light had switched on… Greek.

  There was a life… yes. A life in which he had been a Greek merchant. A middle-aged man who spent much of his life trading in Italian ports, where he ended up adopting the local language more than his own. Perhaps that's why his Greek now seemed rusty, distant… but not so distant that he couldn't recognize it.

  His heart skipped a beat. It was impossible. Two completely different worlds, separated by more than just distance. And yet, there they were, those words. Not identical, far from exact… but close. As if they belonged to a distant dialect, warped by centuries or perhaps by a divergent evolution.

  Joel unconsciously sucked the last drop of orange juice from his fingers and refocused, this time dusting off his old Greek. Forcing his memory, comparing the structures of both languages, melodies, accents.

  And he soon confirmed it: The people of this place spoke Greek. A strange, mutated, almost unrecognizable Greek… but Greek nonetheless. The most basic words were there. Greetings. Courtesies. Some roots he could still understand amidst the different accents.

  With that, at least, he could understand fragments. Not much… but enough to begin.

  And as the village murmur continued to flow around him, Joel felt a pang of unease mixed with something deeper: an intuition that this world might be connected to that place called Earth. That enigmatic place brimming with modern knowledge.

  If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  There came a point when Joel, after more than an hour listening to and deciphering the conversations at the village entrance, felt he had what it took to attempt basic communication with the locals. What had convinced him most was not only recognizing in their voices the distorted fragments of the Greek he had once spoken in a dreamlike life, but also discovering that many of those present used the language far too imperfectly, as if it were a secondary language and not their mother tongue.

  That detail gave him something invaluable: the possibility of passing as a foreigner without arousing suspicion. If the locals mixed languages, distorted words, and spoke with such varied accents, then one more stranger amidst the bustle wouldn't attract attention.

  With the sun still high and a gentle warmth beating down on the paths, Joel got up from the rock where he had been sitting and joined the flow of pedestrians. He walked toward the main entrance of the village with a calm gait, his gaze lowered, and the humble demeanor of a weary traveler. He greeted the guards with a slight nod, a universal courtesy that rarely failed, and the men barely glanced at him. His appearance as a poor peasant, coupled with his power concealed by the medallion, made him an insignificant figure among so many others.

  Ironically, had they given him a cursory search, they would have easily found an arsenal under his thin clothes: his two revolvers secured against his torso and several grenades hidden in his pockets. Only his katana was missing, almost impossible to conceal under such light clothing, and which he had left hidden at the edge of the forest, confident that he could easily recreate a copy if needed.

  As Joel crossed the threshold, he was struck by the sheer vibrancy of the place. The village was far larger than he had imagined from a distance. Entire streets sprawled out like the arteries of a living organism, teeming with stalls, people haggling, animals pulling carts, and a constant ebb and flow of voices mingling in a chaotic symphony.

  The air was thick with aromas: the sweetness of ripe fruit, the earthy scent of sacks of grain, the dampness of freshly harvested vegetables, and even the metallic scent of iron being worked by the local blacksmiths. At every turn, he encountered something new: a meat vendor shouting across prices, a woman haggling over a bunch of onions, an old man displaying rows of white cheeses.

  Joel made a quick calculation and estimated that there were easily more than a thousand people in the market alone. This was far from being a village. It was a proper town, perhaps even a small commercial center, which explained the abundance of goods and the wholesale warehouses he saw a little further on.

  The market was clearly divided into two sections. The southern part, dedicated to wholesale trade, was an organized chaos of enormous carts, draft animals, and warehouses where buyers negotiated large purchase volumes with burly administrators. The northern part, in contrast, was a narrow corridor filled with makeshift tables, blankets spread on the ground, and small awnings where retailers offered a more diverse range of merchandise.

  Joel explored the place from end to end for about half an hour, hoping to find something interesting, perhaps even magical. But all he found were agricultural products and tools. Nothing that would help him understand the world's true technological level.

  But it wasn't all for nothing: on a side street, almost hidden between a leather stall and a clothing store, he found a small establishment with a simple facade and a sign with symbols he vaguely recognized as a currency exchange.

  It was exactly what he needed.

  Adopting the role of an illiterate and lost traveler—slumped shoulders, confused gaze, slurred words—Joel sold a few gold nuggets and a couple of silver rings.

  He knew perfectly well that he would be scammed somehow; the money changer's eyes gleamed with greed the moment he saw the metal. But he also knew it was best not to correct him. The most important thing was to get a few local coins without attracting attention.

  He left with a leather bag and a few copper and silver coins, obviously far less than he should have gotten, but satisfied. He had paid for information, not for coins: now he knew what the local currency looked like and confirmed that gold and silver held the same undeniable value as in other worlds.

  Seeing that the sunset was beginning to paint the sky in shades of orange, and that the market crowd was starting to disperse, Joel decided it was time to return to the shelter. Before leaving, however, he took advantage of the last transactions of the day to buy a wheel of cheese and a generous cut of fresh meat. He knew Oscar's tastes well, and he knew that this small luxury would be received almost like a gift from heaven.

  The return trip was surprisingly quick. Now that he had walked the path once and had a clearer idea of ??the terrain, Joel moved confidently through the trails and clearings of the forest. It took him no more than an hour to cover what had previously taken him twice as long, and when the sun was barely touching the horizon, he was already standing before the hill where the shelter's entrance was hidden.

  It was then that he experienced an unexpected annoyance: finding the entrance became a frustrating task. The rocky hillside, once marked by visible cracks and a couple of easily recognizable geological formations, was now covered by a dense layer of vegetation. Bushes, roots, and even small vines seemed to have sprouted out of nowhere. Joel quickly deduced that this was Nana's work; she had transplanted plants from other parts of the forest to further camouflage the entrance. The result was perfect… too perfect. If he, who knew the entrance was there, had taken so long to locate it, no one would be able to find it easily. A minor inconvenience, Joel thought, in exchange for an even safer refuge.

  When he finally returned, carrying his purchase wrapped in cloth, the group's reaction was immediate. The tension that had accompanied the uncertainty of his first exploration dissipated instantly upon realizing that the region's inhabitants were, without a doubt, human. Moreover, they seemed to live in an organized, stable, and prosperous society, with access to basic goods and a functioning economy. It was far more than anyone had expected to find so soon.

  Liam, his excitement practically bursting from his eyes, insisted that he wanted to join him on the next expedition. Joel, however, had to reassure him, explaining that even he couldn't yet communicate completely fluently. The language barrier remained a real obstacle, and until he mastered it better, bringing someone else would only increase the risks.

  After dinner, which became more festive thanks to the roast meat and the newly acquired cheese, Joel took out his notebook and began meticulously recording everything he had learned that day. He described rough maps, the market layout, the idioms he'd recognized, and the most useful words in the local pseudo-Greek. He knew mastering the language would take time, but he also knew that each new word was a step closer to living safely with the people of this new world.

  His enthusiasm was evident, and as so often before, his spirits were contagious. Ariel prepared a sweet infusion for a toast, Nana allowed herself to relax for a moment, Liam could barely sit still, and even Connor, without taking his eyes off his book, raised an eyebrow in surprise upon learning what had happened.

  Almost spontaneously, everything transformed into a small celebration: a modest commemoration of the new milestone reached by this strange, makeshift but close-knit family, who now moved fearlessly between worlds.