He followed her, crossing halls of neat but ancient wood flooring and walls, the paint while not peeling, he could see was discoloured here and there. Forgotten about or simply not cleaned or painted over in the passing years.

Noah frowned, ‘do they even have paint?’

There was scant lighting in the hall, no sconces on the walls for torches—or candles he was quick to correct—nor any lighting fixtures on the ceiling. Just bare walls and the sun beaming in through the windows at the front and back of it. As they passed a table, he caught sight of what looked like an old oil lamp, though it didn’t have a reservoir for oil, just a glass dome surrounding a translucent red stone held at the centre.

Then they came to a doorway, Liore pushed it open and descended a single dipping step onto a stone brick floor, white in colour. Not marble and it certainly didn’t feel like a tile, too porous. Sandstone?

He glanced around the room, wood tables lined the wall on one side, right beside a shelf where the odd brown towel lay folded and neatly stacked atop each other. They weren’t like the towels Noah was used to, they were flatter and didn’t have any protruding pieces of fabric, more like a thick tea cloth than an actual towel.

Halfway in, Liora stepped up to a wicker basket shoved beneath the table and pulled it out. Inside he could see numerous pieces of clothing dresses and shirts and pants, all piled atop one another haphazardly, awaiting a time to be washed.

Once it was out, Liora stepped away, crossing her hands over her chest to grab the bottom hem of her nightgown and pulled it up and over her head. Noah stood stoke still, gaping as his cheeks flushed and watching as her pristine skin joined the open air. Taken aback for a moment as he was drawn to her bountiful breasts and watched them ripple as they fell.

Liora turned her head to him, paused with a questioning look before she realized a soft tent rising in his raggedy pants. Noticing her gaze, Noah jolted and turned away, “s-sorry.” Gulping he clamped his legs together and shot a hand to cover himself.

“N-no, it’s quite alright,” she said, “you should undress as well.” Tossing her nightgown into the basket she burrowed her thumbs under the sides of her panties and pulled them down.

A fire burned in Noah’s eyes, quite literally, his eyes were burning with a blend of wanting to look and wanting to turn away. “Uh, L-Liora,” he said, head twisting even farther to the side to completely blotch out her shapely, alluring body from his vision. “Why… why are you stripping?” it was an odd question to ask, the answer was obvious, she’d told him she was going to put a bath on, just not that she’d be joining him.

Liora’s brow rose, head tilting ever so slightly to the side, “I just want to get out of these dirty clothes.” Smiling she turned to him. “Do you need any help?” Asking that, Noah was quick to shake his head.

“No, I, uh, I can undress myself.”

“Alright then. Oh, and please don’t put those in the basket. Just put them to the side and I’ll toss them out in a bit.” Liora’s head perked up, “oh yes, I should probably turn on the water.” Spinning, she moved to a set of thin wood sliding doors and pulled them open. Noah turned, glancing over his shoulder to see what the noise was but quickly jerked away as Liora’s plump derriere came into view.

He heard a few whizzes and clunks from behind him before Liora’s footsteps joined the fray. Growing louder by the second.

“There we go.” She eyed his back with narrowed eyes and saw his arms crossed over his chest in a manner very obviously to cover something. She gulped, flushing at the cheeks as she suddenly felt uncomfortable. “Ahem, well, I’ll just go and see if I can find anything for you to change into,” she said, skirting past him to the doorway of the bathing room.

“Thanks,” Noah weakly said, lifting his head he gave her a smile but her back was already to him. His eyes darted wide, glued to her lean back and firm, hourglass body. Even turned away from him, he could see her breasts plumply peeking out the sides of her chest, blended with that gap between her thighs and wide, birthing hips, it was impossible to see how she called herself a hag. She was simply too alluring to be such.

The door closing behind her gave Noah the moments he needed to pant out a breath he didn’t know he was holding and uncrossed his hands from his crotch. He peered down his chest, past damaged artefacts of clothing and fell to the tent between his legs with a twitching cheek.

“I thought I was done with this after puberty…” he grumbled, tossing another glance back and seeing nothing shifting, he finally began to strip. Wincing as his layers clung like glue to his body, threatening to rip the hair out of his body, in some places, doing exactly that.

Stood in the nude, Noah brought a hand to his chest and gawked at just how pronounced his ribcage was. His skin clung to his bone, digging between the grooves of his ribs and even his stomach sunk in concavely into his body. At his thighs and calf, he could see some fat, not a lot but just enough that his muscles could still work.

“This body is messed up.” He mumbled and made his way into the bathing area where he could hear the steady trickle of water. Inside he pulled the sliding door shut and fully took in the size of the room.

It wasn’t a massive chamber, barely a few meters around, half of which was the bath, and even that was barely enough for two people to sit with knees connecting.

A spout poked out of the wall, copper from the looks of its colour, with a protruding top where a large blue gemstone lay indented into it. A regal knob, he thought approaching the side of the wooden tub. He looked around, finding off to the side a small stack of wooden bowls and guessed they were for cleaning oneself before getting in the bath proper.#

‘Japan?’ he thought in the moment. It reminded him of an onsen quite frankly. A closer look at the floor and his assumption were proven right, beneath the tub he could see a few holes and he realized there was a slight, almost unnoticeable slope to the floor, guiding any excess water into them.

“This seems out of place.” From the looks of the building itself he’d gotten a victorian, even early American vibe, but just entering this room, it was like an oriental spa—albeit quite small.

Reaching for one of the bowls, he picked up the largest one, made of slats and held together by some type of metal ring that hadn’t yet rusted. Sweeping it through the water filling half the tub, he collected a bowl full and swished it around then went still, trying to see if he could see himself in it but found he couldn’t. It was simply too clear to see anything.

The steam that rose off the water escaped through holes high up on the wall, exiting into the outside world. After watching it for a bit, Noah decided to get on with cleaning himself as quickly as he could. Guessing that Liora was wanting to wash just as well.

He began with his arms and hands, swapping the bowl here and there to pour over his grime ridden appendages and scrubbed harshly. The first bit of water clung to the grime, loosened it from his skin but otherwise spread it all over, turning him shades of brown. It was the second wave that truly washed it away, the third and fourth were for good measure.

Noah repeated this process for the rest of his body. Paying special attention to keep his muck ridden water out of the bath, even as he swished and massaged his scalp to clean it as well as he could without shampoo or soap.

With the last—well, most—vestiges of grime removed from his body, Noah reached for the side of the tub and pulled himself up and over the lip and into the water. The water was warm, not hot, not uncomfortable, just perfectly heated to such a degree he could feel his pores open and release the rest of the caked in dirt.

Letting out a contented sigh as his stiffness also faded, he rested against the back of the bath and tilted his head up. His empty mind lasted all of a few minutes before new thoughts came to him.

Sweeping his hand through his sodden hair, he winced as he broke some knots and thought back to that woman. The one he’d passed on his way to Liora. It was clear she wasn’t human, a dark elf if anything. Haughty as well. His mind reasoned that it was a kind of body modification but when those centaurs came to mind, he tossed that away and fell to the only reasonable answer to why half-human, half-horse people could exist. He’d known it earlier, but now in this lull where he was with himself, he could process everything to a degree he couldn’t when Liora was there.

“Can’t believe I’ve been isekaied…” he mumbled. “Don’t remember being hit by a truck… then again, I don’t remember dying… Did I even die? But then, why am I in a different body?” He scratched his beard, thin and patchy, like when he’d just come out of high school those years ago.

Leaning his head back, he shut his eyes and relished the comfort stroking his skin. When he next opened them he questioned how something like this could have happened. Isekai… world travelling, it was just something in novels and games. Not reality. He snorted, “watch me be the MC of a novel,” shaking his head he began to laugh. “God that’s such a stupid thought.”

Letting his chuckles die, his foot tapped beneath the water, ‘why bring me here… was I summoned? But then, why am I on a farm and not somewhere like a castle?’ Plenty of those stories like their kingdoms and adventurers, not plains and a field of yellow grass.

His mind soon fell to Liora. It was too much of a coincidence that he just so happened to arrive the day she’s lumped with debt so presumably insane that it had sapped the woman of all her energy to resist.

‘Am I supposed to help her?’ Peering up to the gap in the ceiling where the steam was streaming out, he frowned. “How ironic is it that I end up on a farm of all places.”

He wasn’t a farmer, but he also couldn’t deny he knew how to farm. His grandfather had owned one and he’d grown up there for the better part of his childhood not long after his mother divorced his father. It wasn’t his passion but his grandfather had ingrained in him enough know-how about plants to keep them in one piece till they fruited. But that was just one plant, a singular tree or a small garden of herbs at most.

Noah twisted in the bath, stretching his arms over his head and let out a little sigh. With a grunt he pushed himself higher into a seated position and squirmed his legs together, his thoughts taken aback as Liora’s form came into vision. There she stood, naked. Her breasts were large, perfect and round with hips wide that fell into curvaceous mounds that formed dimples and overhangs of her cheeks.

Soon he felt his lower half rising, he peered through the water down to it and frowned. “I’m a grown man. Stop that,” he clutched the sides of the tub and forced his head back in a feeble attempt to assuage those thoughts. No matter what though, a virile young man didn’t just forget the plump form of a veritable milf when presented before him.

Shutting his eyes for a minute, he let the steam open his pores and take with it the taint of whatever the previous owner of this body had been through. When he opened his eyes and peeked up to the hole in the wall where the steam was escaping, he frowned.

“I’m not going soft…”