The comment was made when the character was level 23 with only 16 hours on the character. Looking at some recent PBF's of previous villagers/one time villagers you can find the following stats:

Fhaen 12 hours to level 20 with a 0 pk

Hielikekl 8 hours to level 20 with 0 pk
Kaasi 12 hours to level 20 with 0 pk (Class given detect invis)
Twilakon 14 hours to level 20 with 1 pk (Had inherent detect invis)
Thakazhaar 10 hours to level 20 with 1 pk

My point of this is that it does not look like many village applicants have a large number of pk's let alone mage kills early on. While I'm not defending the merits of Fhaen as I didn't interact with him I think the stats would indicate he was pretty much the norm when it comes to pk's at that leve/# of hours.