“Well, that bread’s only good point is how long it lasts, but it never hurts to be sure.”

Eugeo put his left hand above the piece of bread he held in the other. With his index and middle fingers, he traced a curvy figure in the air that was like a combination of an S and a C.

To my astonishment, he tapped the roll, and with a strange sound like vibrating metal, a glowing, translucent light-purple rectangle appeared. It was about six inches wide and three inches tall. From a distance, I could make out the familiar letters of the alphabet and Arabic numerals. It was a status window.

With my mouth wide open, I told myself, That settles it. This isn’t real life or a true alternate world. It’s virtual reality.

That confirmation brought a wave of relief to my mind, and my body suddenly felt lighter. I had been 99 percent certain before, but that last little bit of blank uncertainty had been weighing on me, I realized now.

Of course, the circumstances of my dive were still unknown, but with the reassurance that I was within the familiar embrace of a virtual world came a bit of comfort and confidence. I held out two left fingers to call up my own window.

I copied the symbol and tapped the bread. A purple window appeared with a bell chime. I leaned in for a closer look.

The contents were very simple: just a single line that said Durability: 7. It was clearly the life span of the bread. When that fell to zero, what exactly would happen to it, though?

Eugeo asked, “Kirito, you’re not going to tell me it’s your first time seeing the sacred art of a Stacia Window, are you?”

I looked up and saw him staring at me suspiciously, holding his bread. I tried to put on a reassuring smile and brushed away the window, which vanished in a little spray of light. It was a relief that I’d demonstrated some familiarity.

Fortunately, Eugeo seemed satisfied with that. “There’s plenty of life left, so no need to gobble it down. There wouldn’t be nearly as much left if it were summer, though.”

I guessed that the “life” he mentioned was the durability of the item. “Stacia Window” was the name for the status window. Based on how he’d described the act of calling up the window as a “sacred art,” Eugeo understood this not within the context of a computer system but as a religious or magical phenomenon.

There was a lot still to process, but I set that aside for the more pressing concern of my hunger.

“Okay, here we go.”

I opened my mouth wide and bit down. The toughness of the bread was astonishing, but I couldn’t just spit it out; I had to keep chewing. The sensation was more real than any virtual food I’d ever tasted, which I marveled at even as my teeth felt ready to loosen in their sockets.

It was similar to the whole-wheat bread that Suguha liked to buy, but harder and firmer. The effort necessary to chew it was a bit much, but there was a rustic flavor to it, and I was hungry enough to keep my jaw moving. If I just had some butter and a slice of cheese—even having it freshly baked would be a considerable improvement, I thought, rather rudely for one who was getting a free meal. I glanced over and saw Eugeo smirking as he himself struggled to chew.

“It’s not very good, is it?” he said.

I shook my head. “N-no, I didn’t say that.”

“Don’t try to hide it. I buy some from the baker as I leave every morning, but it’s so early that the only bread left is from the day before. And I don’t have time to go back to the village for lunch, so…”

“Ohh…Couldn’t you just bring lunch from home…?” I wondered idly. Eugeo looked down, bread still in his hand. I winced, realizing it was none of my business, but fortunately, he looked back up and smiled.

“A long time ago…there was someone to bring lunch fresh from the village. Not anymore…”

His green eyes wavered, brimming with the deep sadness of loss, and I was so absorbed in it that I forgot this whole world was a creation.

“What happened to them…?”

Eugeo looked up at the branches far, far above in silence. Eventually, he began to tell the story.

“…She was my childhood friend. A girl my age…When we were little, we played together from sunup to sundown. Even after receiving our Callings, she brought me lunch every day. But then, six years ago…in my eleventh summer, an Integrity Knight came to the village…and took her away to the central city…”

Integrity Knight. Central city.

The terms were unfamiliar, but the context of his statement suggested an agent for maintaining order and the capital of this virtual world. I held my silence, urging him on.

“It was…my fault. On a day of rest, the two of us went spelunking in the northern cave…and we got lost on the way back and wound up leaving through the other side of the End Mountains. You know what the Taboo Index says—the land of darkness that we cannot set foot in. I didn’t venture out of the cave, but she tripped, and her hand landed on the ground of the other side…And just for doing that, an Integrity Knight came to the village, tied her up in chains in front of everyone…”

The half-eaten bread crumbled in Eugeo’s hand.

“…I tried to save her. I didn’t care if he arrested me, too. I was going to attack him with the ax…but my hands and feet wouldn’t move. All I could do was stand there and watch as she was taken away…”

Eugeo continued to stare at the sky, his face devoid of emotion. Eventually, his lips curled into a self-deprecating sneer. He tossed the smooshed bread into his mouth and chewed it viciously as he lowered his face.

I didn’t know how to respond. I took my own bite of bread and chewed it as best I could as I considered the information.

The existence of status windows meant this was a virtual world created with modern technology, and that this had to be a test of some kind. But if that was the case, why was this story event occurring? I swallowed my bread and asked, “Do you know…what happened to her…?”

Eugeo didn’t look up. He shook his head weakly. “The Integrity Knight said she would be questioned and sentenced…but I have no idea what sentence she was given. I tried asking her father, Elder Gasfut, once…and he told me to assume that she was dead. But I still have faith, Kirito. I know she’s alive.”

He paused.

“Alice is alive, somewhere in the city…”

I sucked in a sharp breath as soon as I heard that name.

Again, an odd sensation raced through my brain. Panic. Desolation. And most of all, a soul-shaking nostalgia…

It was an illusion. I told myself that and waited for the shock to pass. I had no personal connection to this Alice, Eugeo’s old friend. My mind must have reacted to the generic name, that was all. In fact, hadn’t Asuna just been talking about it at Dicey Café yesterday? Rath, the developers of the STL, the Underworld virtual realm—they were all taken from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

The coincidence of the names repeating was startling but probably meaningless. More important was another piece of information contained in Eugeo’s story.

He said he was eleven years old as of six years ago. Which meant he was seventeen now, and as far as I could tell, he had full memory of all that time—about the same length of time that I’d been alive.

But that was impossible. If the FLA’s factor of time was three, it would take nearly six years of real time to simulate seventeen years’ worth of time for this world. But as far as I knew, it had been only three months since the STL’s test unit was set up.

How should I take this information?

If this was not the STL but some other, unknown full-dive machine, then it had been functioning for seventeen years. Or perhaps the time factor of three for the FLA was a lie, and they could run it over thirty times the speed of normal time. Neither case was believable in the least.

Anxiety and curiosity welled up within me in equal measure. Part of me wanted to log out at once and ask a human being what had happened, while another part of me wanted to stay on the inside and track down the answers to my doubts directly.

I swallowed the last bit of bread and hesitantly asked, “Then…why don’t you go search for her? In this central city.”

As soon as I said the words, I realized I had made a mistake. The suggestion was too far outside of Eugeo’s regular expectations. The flaxen-haired boy stared at me for several seconds without reaction, then whispered incredulously, “Rulid Village is at the very northern end of the Norlangarth Empire. To get to Centoria at the very southern end of the empire, it would take an entire week with the fleetest of horses. I mean, it takes two days just to walk to Zakkaria, the nearest town. You couldn’t even get there in a day if you left at sunrise on a day of rest.”

“Then if you prepared for a proper journey…”

“Listen, Kirito. You’re about my age—didn’t you get a Calling where you grew up? You know I can’t just abandon my Calling and go on a journey.”

“…Oh, g-good point,” I said, scratching my head. I watched Eugeo’s reaction carefully.

The boy was clearly not just a regular old NPC. His wealth of expression and natural conversation skills were absolutely human in nature.

But at the same time, his actions appeared to be bound by some limiting force far more effective and absolute than the laws of the real world. Just like a VRMMO NPC, forbidden to act outside his approved boundaries.

Eugeo claimed he wasn’t arrested because he didn’t venture into this area defined by what he called the “Taboo Index.” So that was the absolute standard he had to follow—probably hard-coded through his fluctlight. I didn’t know what Eugeo’s Calling (his job) was, but it was hard to believe that it could be more important than the life or death of the girl he grew up with.

Deciding to get to the bottom of this, I chose my words carefully as Eugeo put the waterskin to his mouth.

“So in your village, are there others besides Alice who broke the Taboo…Index and got taken to the city?”

His eyes widened again. He wiped his mouth and shook his head vigorously. “Oh, no. In three hundred years of Rulid history, the only time an Integrity Knight has ever come was that one time, six years ago. According to Old Man Garitta.”

He tossed me the water. I caught it, thanked him, and pulled out the stopper, which looked like a cork. The water wasn’t cold, but there was a pleasant aroma to it, something like a mix of lemon and herbs. I took three mouthfuls and handed it back to Eugeo.

While I wiped my mouth in feigned self-control, on the inside another storm of shock buffeted me.

Three hundred years?!

If that wasn’t just a piece of background writing but indicated three whole centuries of fully simulated time, then the fluctlight acceleration factor would have to be hundreds…over a thousand, even. If that was how quickly they had accelerated my personal time when I went on that recent continual-dive test, how long had I actually been inside the machine? I felt a belated chill crawl across my forearms, and I was too preoccupied to even marvel at how real it felt.

The more information I gleaned, the deeper the mysteries got. Was Eugeo a human being or a program? Why was this world built?

To learn more, I’d have to go to Eugeo’s home of Rulid and contact other people. Hopefully I would run into someone from Rath who could fill me in…

I managed to put on something resembling a smile and said, “Thanks for the bread. And sorry about taking half your lunch.”

“No, don’t worry. I’m sick of that stuff anyway,” he said with a much more natural smile, and quickly folded up the cloth. “Sorry about forcing you to wait. I’ve just got to finish my afternoon work first.”

Eugeo stood up easily in preparation for his duty. I asked him, “By the way, what is your job…I mean, your Calling?”

“Oh, right…You can’t see it from over there.” He smiled and beckoned to me. I got up, curious, and followed him around to the other side of the tree trunk.

Once again, my mouth fell open as I registered a different kind of shock.

Carved into the midnight-black trunk of the enormous cedar tree was a cut about 20 percent deep—nearly three feet. The inside of the trunk was as black as charcoal, too, and there was a metallic gleam among the dense growth rings.

Then I noticed that there was an ax standing against the tree, just below the cut. The blade was simple, clearly not designed for battle, but it was striking how both the large head and long handle were made of the same ash-white material. It looked kind of like stainless steel with a matte finish. As I stared at its strange, shining surface, it dawned on me that the entire ax was carved down from a single mass of whatever its material was.

The handle was wrapped with shining black leather, which Eugeo grabbed with one hand, lifting it onto his shoulder. He walked over to the left edge of the five-foot-wide cut, spread his legs and lowered his stance, then squeezed the ax with both hands.

His slender body tensed and spun, the ax thrust backward, and after a momentary pause, it shot through the air. The heavy-looking head landed firmly in the center of the cut with a dry krakk! It was indeed the very sound I had followed to this place. My instinct that it had come from a woodcutter was correct.

Eugeo continued his chopping with mechanical precision and speed while I watched his smooth form in total wonder. Two seconds to pull back, one second to tense, one second to swing. The whole motion was so smooth and automatic that it made me wonder if this world had sword skills, too.

He made fifty chops at four seconds each in exactly two hundred seconds, then slowly pulled the ax out after the last one and heaved a deep breath. He stood the ax against the trunk again and sat down heavily on a nearby root. Based on the pace of his breathing and the beads of sweat glistening on his forehead, the swings were much more laborious than I had thought.

I waited for Eugeo’s breathing to slow down then asked, “So your job…I mean, your Calling is a woodcutter? You cut down trees in this forest?”

Eugeo pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket to wipe his face, which bore a dubious expression. Eventually he answered, “Well, I guess you could say it like that. But in the seven years since I got this Calling, I haven’t actually cut down a single tree.”

“What?”

“This enormous tree is called the Gigas Cedar in the sacred tongue. But most of the villagers just call it the devil tree.”

…Sacred tongue? Giga…Seeder?

A smile of a certain kind of understanding appeared on Eugeo’s face in response to my confusion. He pointed up at the branches far, far above.

“The reason they call it that is because the tree sucks up all of Terraria’s blessings from the land around it. That’s why only moss grows beneath the reach of its branches, and all the trees where its shadow falls do not grow very tall.”

I didn’t know what Terraria was, but the first impression I got when I saw the giant tree and its clearing was largely correct. I nodded, prompting him to continue.

“The villagers want to clear the forest and plant new fields. But as long as this tree stands, no good barley will grow. So we want to cut it down, but, as the name suggests, the demon tree’s trunk is wickedly tough. A single swing from a normal iron ax will chip the blade and ruin it. So they saved up a bunch of money to get this Dragonbone Ax carved from ancient dragon bone shipped from the center capital, and they designated a dedicated ‘carver’ to strike at the tree every day. That’s me,” he said without fanfare.

I looked back and forth between him and the cut, which was about a quarter of the way through the giant tree.

“So…you’ve been chopping away at this tree for seven whole years? And that’s all you’ve managed in that time?”

Now it was Eugeo’s turn to be stunned. He shook his head in disbelief. “Oh, hardly. If you could get this far in just seven years, I might feel a little better about it. I’m the seventh-generation carver. The carvers have come here to work every day for three hundred years, since the founding of Rulid. By the time I’m an old man and I have to hand the ax to the eighth carver, I might have gotten…”

He held his hands less than a foot apart. “This far.”

All I could do was let out a long, whistling breath.

In fantasy-themed MMOs, it was a given that production classes like craftsmen or miners were doomed to a whole lot of tedious repetition, but spending an entire lifetime to not even cut down a single tree was taking it to a new extreme. Human hands created this world, so someone must have placed this tree here for a reason, but I couldn’t begin to guess what it would be.

It still left a crawling sensation down my back.

Eugeo’s three-minute break ended, and he stood up again and reached for the ax. On impulse, I asked, “Hey, Eugeo…mind if I try that?”

“What?”

“I mean, you gave me half your lunch. Doesn’t it make sense for me to do half the work?”

Eugeo was stunned, as if no one had ever offered to help him at his work before in his life—which could very well be the case. Eventually, he offered a hesitant, “Well…there’s no rule that you can’t get someone’s help with your Calling…but you’d be surprised how hard it is. When I was just starting out, I could barely land a hit.”

“Never know until you try, right?”

I grinned, then thrust out my hand. Eugeo offered the handle of the Dragonbone Ax, looking reluctant. I grabbed it.

Despite being made of bone, the ax was tremendously heavy. I added a second hand to the grip and shook a bit as I tested my balance.

I’d never used an ax as my main weapon in either SAO or ALO, but I figured I would at least be good enough with it to hit a stationary target. I stood at the left end of the cut and tried to mimic Eugeo’s form, spreading my feet and lowering my hips.

Eugeo stood at a safe distance, watching me with equal parts consternation and entertainment. I lifted the ax up to my shoulder, gritted my teeth, summoned all the strength I had, and swung for the cut in the trunk of the “Giga Seeder.”

The ax head cracked on a spot about two inches away from the center of the slice. Orange sparks flew, and a terrific shock ran through my hands. I dropped the ax and cradled my numb wrists between my knees, groaning.

“Owww…”

Eugeo laughed heartily at the embarrassing spectacle I’d put on. I glared at him, and he waved in apology but continued laughing.

“…You don’t have to laugh that hard…”

“Ha-ha-ha…No, no, I’m sorry. You put way too much tension into your shoulders and hips, Kirito. You’ve got to relax your whole body…Hmm, how to explain it…”

He awkwardly pantomimed swinging an ax, and I belatedly recognized my mistake. It was unlikely that this world was simulating muscle tension based on strict physical laws. It was a realistic dream the STL created, so the most important factor had to be the strength of the imagination.

The feeling was coming back to my hands, so I picked up the ax lying at my feet.

“Just wait, I’ll hit it right on the mark this time…”

I held up the ax again, this time using as little muscle tension as possible. I envisioned all the movement of my body and slowly pulled back the tool. Imagining the motion of the Horizontal slashing sword skill I used so often in SAO, I shifted my weight forward, adding the energy to the rotation of my hips and shoulders down to the wrists and ax head, slamming it into the tree…

This time it missed the cut in the tree entirely and twanged off the tough bark. I didn’t get the same numbing jolt in my wrists, but I’d been so focused on my own movement that I neglected to aim properly. I figured that Eugeo would laugh again, but this time he offered honest feedback.

“Whoa…that was pretty good, Kirito. But your problem was that you were looking at the ax. You’ve got to keep your eyes focused right on the center of the cut. Try it again, while you’ve got the hang of it!”

“O-okay.”

My next attempt was also weak. But I kept trying, following Eugeo’s advice, and somewhere a few dozen swings later, the ax finally struck true, producing that clear ring and sending a tiny little shard of black flying.

At that point, I switched with Eugeo and watched him execute fifty perfect strikes. Then he handed it off, and I attempted another fifty wheezing swings.

After a number of turns back and forth, I realized the sun was going down, and there was an orange tint to the light trickling into the forest clearing. I took the last swig of water from the large waterskin, and Eugeo set down the ax.

“There…that makes a thousand.”

“We’ve already done that many?”

“Yep. I did five hundred; you did five hundred. My Calling is to strike the Gigas Cedar two thousand times a day, over the morning and afternoon.”

“Two thousand…”

I stared at the large crevice cut into the massive black tree. It didn’t look like any damage had been done to it at all since we’d started. What a thankless job.

Meanwhile, Eugeo said happily, “You’ve got talent for this, Kirito. There were two or three good hits in that last set of fifty. And it made my job a whole lot easier today.”

“I dunno…if you were doing it all yourself, you’d have been done sooner. I feel bad; I was hoping to help out, but I only held you back,” I apologized, but Eugeo just laughed it off.

“I told you, I can’t cut down this tree for as long as I live. And after all, it will regrow half of the depth that we carve out over the course of the night…Oh hey, I’ve got something to show you. You’re not really supposed to look at it, though.”

He approached the tree and held up his left hand, making the usual sign with his two fingers, then tapped the black bark.

I raced over to get a closer look, realizing that the tree itself must have a durability rating. The status—pardon me, Stacia Window—appeared with a chime, and we peered in at it.

“Ugh,” I groaned. The number on the window was vast: over 232,000.

“Hmm. That’s only about fifty lower than what it said when I checked last month,” Eugeo noted, similarly disappointed. “So you see, Kirito…I could swing this ax for an entire year, and it would only reduce the life of the Gigas Cedar by about six hundred. I’ll be lucky if the total is under 200,000 by the time I retire. Do you get it now? A little bit less progress over half a day doesn’t make the least bit of difference. This isn’t any ordinary tree; it’s the giant god of cedars.”

Suddenly, something clicked, and I understood the source of the name. It was a mix of Latin and English. The split wasn’t after Giga, it was Gigas—there were two S sounds in a row. Gigas Cedar, the giant cedar.

Meaning that this boy spoke Japanese as his mother language, while English and other languages were treated as the “sacred tongue,” like spells. If that was the case, he probably didn’t even recognize that he was speaking Japanese. It was Underworldian. Or…Norlangarthian? But wait, when he talked about the bread, he had used the word pan, the Japanese word for it. But pan didn’t originate from English…Wasn’t it from Portuguese? Spanish?

My mind tumbled through a cavalcade of distractions, while Eugeo tidied up the things he’d brought.

“Thanks for waiting, Kirito. Let’s go to the village.”

As we walked to his village, Dragonbone Ax slung over his shoulder and empty waterskin hanging from his hand, Eugeo cheerfully told me about a variety of topics. His predecessor was an old man named Garitta, who was apparently quite a master woodcutter. The other children his age thought Eugeo’s Calling was an easy one, an opinion he resented. I muttered and grunted to show that I was listening throughout his stories, but my mind was racing as it considered just one topic.

For what purpose was this world envisioned and put into practical use?

They didn’t need to test the pneumonic visual system the STL used. It was already perfectly functional. I’d already experienced—to an unpleasant degree—just how indistinguishable from real life this world was.

And yet, the world had been internally simulated for at least three hundred years, and terrifyingly enough, extrapolating from the Gigas Cedar’s durability and Eugeo’s workflow, it was slated to continue running for at least a thousand more.

I didn’t know what the upper limit of the fluctlight acceleration factor was, but a person who dove into this place with their memories blocked was at risk of spending an entire lifetime in the machine. True, there was no danger to the physical body, and if the memories were all blocked at the end of the dive, it would all be nothing but a “very long dream” to the user—but what happened to the soul, the fluctlight that experienced that dream? Was there a lifespan to the photon field that made up the human consciousness?

Clearly, what they were doing with this world was impractical, implausible, impossible.

Did that mean there was a goal worth so much risk? Like Sinon had said at Dicey Café, it couldn’t be something the AmuSphere could already do, like making a realistic virtual world. Something created through a nearly infinite passage of time in a virtual world that was indistinguishable from reality…

I looked up and took stock of my surroundings. The forest was trailing off just ahead, replaced by a larger amount of orange sunlight. At the side of the trail close to the exit was a single building that looked like a storage shed. Eugeo walked over to it and pulled open the door. Over his back, I could see a number of normal metal axes, a smaller hatchet, various tools like ropes and buckets, and narrow leather packages with unknown contents, crammed messily into the shed.

Eugeo stood the Dragonbone Ax against the wall among them and shut the door. He immediately started back for the trail, so I hastily asked him, “Uh, shouldn’t you lock it or something? That’s a really important ax, right?”

He looked surprised. “Lock? Why?”

“Er, because…it might get stolen…”

Once I said my fear aloud, I realized where I went wrong. There were no thieves. No doubt in that Taboo Index there was an entry that said, “Thou shalt not steal,” or something along those lines.

Sure enough, Eugeo gave me the exact answer I had just been anticipating.

“That would never happen. I’m the only one who’s allowed to open this shed.”

I figured as much. Then another question occurred to me. “But…didn’t you say there were guards in the village, Eugeo? Why would that be a profession if there are no thieves or bandits?”

“Isn’t that obvious? To protect the village from the forces of darkness.”

“Forces of…darkness…”

“Look, you can see up there.”

He held up his hand to point just as we crossed the last line of trees.

There was a full field of barley wheat ahead. The heads, still young and green and not yet expanding, swayed in the breeze. They caught the full light of the waning sun like a sea of grass. The path continued on through the field, winding toward a hill in the far distance. Atop the tree-dotted hill, as small as specks of sand to the eye, was a number of buildings and one taller tower among them. That had to be the village of Rulid, Eugeo’s home.

But what Eugeo pointed at was far beyond the village—a range of pure-white mountains faded with distance. The line of peaks continued as far as the eye could see to the left and right, like the sharp teeth of a saw.

“Those are the End Mountains. On the other side is the land of darkness, beyond Solus’s light. Black clouds cover the sky, even in the daytime, and the light of the heavens was red like blood. The ground and trees were all as black as coal…”

Eugeo’s voice trembled as he recalled his experiences from the distant past.

“There are accursed humanoids in the land of darkness like goblins and orcs, and even more terrifying monsters…Not to mention knights of darkness who ride black dragons. Naturally, the Integrity Knights protect the mountain range, but every once in a while, some of them sneak in through the caves, from what I understand. I’ve never seen it happen myself. Plus, according to the Axiom Church, every thousand years, when the light of Solus weakens, the knights of darkness cross the mountains with a horde of enemies to attack. When that happens, the Integrity Knights will lead the village men-at-arms, the sentinels from larger towns, and even the imperial army in the fight against the monsters.”

Eugeo paused, looked at me skeptically, and said, “Even the youngest children in the village know this story. Did you even forget that when you lost your memory?”

“Uh…y-yeah. It sounds familiar to me…but some of the details are different,” I said, thinking quickly. Eugeo beamed in a way that made me wonder if he even understood the concept of doubt at all.

“Oh, I see…Maybe you really did come from one of the three other empires, outside of Norlangarth.”

“M-maybe I did,” I agreed, and pointed toward the approaching hill to steer the conversation away from this dangerous topic. “That must be Rulid. Which one’s your house, Eugeo?”

“The thing in front is the south gate, and my house is near the west gate, so you can’t see it from here.”

“Ahh. And the building with the tower? Is that the church with Sister…Azalia?”

“That’s right.”

I squinted and made out a symbol at the tip of the narrow tower, a combination of cross and circle.

“It’s actually…fancier than I expected. Are they really going to let someone like me stay there?”

“Of course. Sister Azalia is a very nice person.”

I wasn’t entirely convinced, but if Azalia was as much a personification of selfless virtue as Eugeo, then I could probably manage safely as long as I kept the conversation on sensible ground. Then again, I was totally in the dark when it came to knowing what passed for “common sense” here.

Ideally, Sister Azalia would be one of Rath’s stationed observers. But I doubted that any staff members charged with monitoring the state of their world would take on a vital role like the village elder or nun. It was more likely they’d take the role of a simple villager, which meant I had to find them. And that was assuming they had an observer in this tiny village at all.

I followed Eugeo across a mossy stone bridge spanning a narrow waterway and set foot into the village of Rulid.