Kai was given a new name by the villagers: "Dayuhan"—foreigner.
At first, it wasn't spoken kindly.
He slept on a bamboo mat, beneath a nipa roof that leaked when it rained. He ate boiled cassava and dried fish beside men who didn't speak to him. He bathed in the river with others but stood alone.
The world around him was raw, laborious, and quiet in the way only a land without engines could be.
He worked under Timuay Banag, an older man with deep tattoos across his arms and a mouth always chewing betel nut. Banag was in charge of the nets and balangay (boats of the Visayan people). "No one eats without paddling," he grunted.
Kai tried. He learned how to tie fishing lines from abaca fiber, how to wade silently into knee-deep water, and how to watch the current before casting a net. On his first day, he scared away a whole school of bangus. Banag only shook his head.
"Dayuhan has hands but no rhythm."
But on the third day, Kai hauled in a decent catch. They didn't praise him, but they gave him more rice at dinner. In Madja-as, that was all the approval he needed.
By the second week, he began to listen more.
He learned that the Visayans who lived here came from Borneo, fleeing a cruel rajah. They had bartered land from the Ati, the dark-skinned original inhabitants of the island, trading gold and cloth for lowland access. But the peace was fragile.
"Some of us believe the land was never theirs to sell," a fisherman told him in secret. "The Ati live in the mountains now. Watching."
One morning, while gathering firewood, Kai saw two Ati children watching him from the edge of the trees—barefoot, quiet, and quick to vanish when he looked. He didn't chase them. He just raised his hand. They didn't wave back.
He learned the laws next.
Madja-as was not a kingdom, but a confederation—a network of settlements led by different datus who swore loyalty to their people, not to a crown. Everything revolved around honor, trade, and balance.
"Stealing from another's harvest is worse than killing," Banag once said. "You kill a man, that's a feud. You steal rice, that's war."
Kai kept his head down. He offered to help with every chore, from hauling bundles of nipa leaves to pounding rice. He watched how people greeted the datu with a small bow and how land disputes were settled by "husay"—a form of arbitration with witnesses, not violence.
At night, by torchlight, he listened to stories of great voyages, of datus who tamed rivers and warriors who died with honor but no grave. They spoke of a world without colonizers, without Spanish priests—only the sea, the ancestors, and the land.
For the first time, Kai realized he wasn't just living in the past.
He was living in a future that never came to be.