After returning with the water, Jessica set about convincing her hosts about gut-devouring micro-demons. This proved relatively easy since, as it turned out, adventurers were assumed to be correct at all times.
“I dunno how they escaped our notice, but ain’t no demons gettin’ in us, rest assured,” Rosemary said, slapping her belly.
“And you said boiling kills ‘em?” Charles asked.
“They can’t stand the heat. Actually, do you all drink milk?” Jessica asked.
“Trade some of our barley allotment for the Ankenbauer’s milk. They got some milkers down there. Oh no, don’t tell me there’s demons in the milk too!?”
Jessica frowned. “I’m afraid so. They’re everywhere. Fortunately, you can heat the milk too and… do you have any soap?”
This spawned a whole other branch of discussion wherein she learned no one made any lye to make soap with. So began her first chemistry project: Sodium Hydroxide.
Since their firewood came from oak and elm trees there was a near-limitless supply of hardwood ash. Mixing that into water and letting it stand would give her caustic potash and then all she needed was fat to suspend it in. She could have soap by that evening.
“And your lard and ash really kill micro-demons?” John asked, scratching his head.
“I promise. Better still, you can make and sell a surplus of soap and raise yourself out of serfdom,” Jessica said, flashing them a double thumbs up.
“Pretty sure that ain’t how that works, but what the hay, I got time to burn rocks,” Rosemary said.
After the soap-making plans were made, Jessica and her hosts scarfed down a breakfast of gummy bread and marched down to the fields with sharpened wooden scythes. A nervous and bewildered Jessica tagged along behind.
“I know everything there is to know about being a serf, so just follow my lead,” John said.
Jessica resolved, as soon as she was able, to pull John and his family up out of their circumstances. Dissolving an entire system of agricultural labor might be beyond her, but she could at least help them.
More immediate than that was the barley. Mid-summer was the time for spring barley harvesting, though it had been early October when she was reincarnated here. There was a sense of wrongness about doing summer over again. By the time they joined the main road, Jessica was already fanning herself.
The ‘main road’ was a dirt path which ran into a cluster of hovels with a windmill and a chapel. There were some columns of smoke going up which might be from a bread oven or pottery kiln. All very banal.
“So… There are like, fantasy races and all that, right? Like elves?” Jessica asked.
Her host family burst into laughter. Jessica blushed.
“Sorry, sorry. It’s a stereotype that adventurers always ask about the elves,” Rosemary said. “But yes, dear, we’ve got non-human races. Not here though! Goodness no. Elves and dwarves and animalars and such all live in fantastical lands that only adventurers go to. When they come to human lands they’re usually clustered around adventurers’ guilds. Our little hamlet is too small for a guild office. The closest one’s in Elsifeya City, but there ain’t much questing to do nowadays on account of the Demon King being slain.”
“How far is Elsifeya City?” Jessica asked.
“About a week’s walk north. Less if you’re on a horse. Or you got magic,” Rosemary replied.
“And how do you get magic?”
“Ya gotta kill things to get experience!” John said with undisguised enthusiasm.
Jessica wondered if the system hadn’t populated because she hadn’t killed anything yet. The thought made her nauseous. But if that’s what she needed to do to convince Sir Hayek she was an adventurer, so be it. She would find something to kill later.
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John gestured at a figure walking towards them.
“That’s the earl’s son, Jaxson. Do what we do.”
Jessica was in the middle of asking what he meant when John, Rosemary, and Charles all moved to the side of the road and prostrated themselves in the dirt. The act was so ridiculous her brain froze. This won her a sneer from Jaxson who looked like the exact kind of obnoxious frat bro she saw everywhere at Clansend.
“So! You’re the serf pretending she’s from another world?” Jaxson said, stroking his peach-fuzz mustache.
“Because I am. I’ve already organized a soap-making operation based on my real world knowledge. Your dad stands to earn a tidy cut from taxes too,” Jessica said.
“Soap!? You want a pat on the back for soap? We can buy all the soap we want. If you were a real adventurer you’d know you can make a year’s worth of soap money by completing a quest. You want in my dad’s good graces? How's about donating some coin, eh? Soap! Hah! Unless you show me some job ability, you better start kneeling.”
He drew up on her. He was a few inches shorter but firmer around the waist. Her height advantage meant nothing against 100lbs. With burning ears, she knelt and prostrated in the dirt. A second later she felt a boot on her head.
“Look how natural that was! No adventurer would do that. You’re definitely not from the same world as Emperor Magnus.”
Screw chemistry. Jessica was going to get a job class and then she was going to have Jaxson under her boot.
Once he moved along, the Serf family pulled themselves back to their feet. Jessica rubbed dirt off her forehead with the back of her arm.
“Ugh! You have to do that every time!?” she asked.
“Well yeah! He’s a noble, ain’t he?” John said.
Napalm. Maybe napalm was the first thing she needed to manufacture. What would it really take? Some oil and some polysulfides? She could find that in a medieval world. Maybe dwarves had some.
Jessica fumed and plotted all the way to the field. After that she was too busy trying not to boil. Harvesting wasn’t difficult (grab the heads, slice the stems, wrap in a bundle) but the sun cooked her alive in her lab coat. Eventually she wrapped it around her waist, leaving her in a t-shirt that was 50% sweat by weight.
“What’s your shirt say?” John asked, looking fine despite reaping three times as much.
Jessica panted. “Graduate Assistants Union.”
“What’s that?”
“Like an adventuring guild but for overworked wizards’ apprentices.”
“You were a wizard’s apprentice?”
She thought about Dr. Yoneda and his little buzzcut and pinched face.
“More like a wizard’s co-author. Undergrads are the apprentices.”
“Undergrads?”
On a normal day, Jessica would have been irritated by the endless questions, but reaping barley was so mind-numbing she actually welcomed the impromptu office hours. She enjoyed the challenge of coming up with explanations for real world concepts that would make sense to a medieval serf.
“So this other co-author, he used illusion magic to enchant your head alchemist into believing his false proficiency?” John asked.
“Yep. And his screw-up sent me—urk!—here,” she said, straining against a particularly tough barley stem until she fell backward.
“That’s crazy. Usually when adventurers reincarnate here it’s cuz they get hit by trucks!”
Jessica rubbed her butt. “You know what a truck is?”
He shook his head with a wide smile. “Nope!”
As the day dragged on Jessica slowly abandoned more clothes. The lab coat came off her waist and her rubber boots were not far behind. Her sweatpants she rolled up to above her knees. Right as the weather was at its hottest, the peasants put up their tools and went to eat a lunch of barley bread and cheese made with what she hoped was the good kind of mold.
“Gettin’ the hang yet, dear?” Rosemary asked, sitting beside her husband on a log.
“Slowly,” Jessica replied. “Any tips?”
Charles chuckled. “Yeah, watch out for the snakes.”
Jessica shuddered. She hated snakes. Back home she was her apartment’s roach and spider catcher. She had zero problems with them. Snakes were a different story.
“That’s a joke, right?” she asked.
“Oh no, Charlie’s not kidding. We get little black ones from time to time. Don’t you worry though, they ain’t venomous. They hardly hurt worse than a wasp sting,” Rosemary said.
That did not make Jessica feel better. She went back to the field trembling violently and reminding herself the Serf family would be executed if she ran away.
“You’re not cold are ya?” John asked once they were back to their row of barley.
“Cold? Are you stu— no, I’m not cold,” she said, fighting her urge to be ornery. John didn’t deserve that. “I’m just afraid of snakes.”
“Oh they ain’t that bad! Tell ya what, if ya see one, I’ll kill it for ya!” he said, waving around his scythe.
She gave a small smile. “Thanks.”
The work resumed and soon the beating heat and muscle aches flushed all memory of snakes from her mind. About an hour later, this concentration was broken by stepping on something slimy. She screamed and swung the scythe wildly in every direction before falling over. Amidst the panic and adrenaline, her brain latched onto four symbols, floating like clouds out of the barley:
+1xp
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MIRROR KING
A LitRPG Adventure
Gregory Zell is a relatively normal, thirty-year-old paramedic living in Northern California.
Life is good. He owns his own home, has a wonderful wife, a couple of dogs, and plenty of friends. Until the day he drops an ancient mirror down a staircase in San Francisco.
In trying to catch it, he falls.
The mirror does not break.
It swallows him.
Greg awakens in a world where magic is real, power is earned through mysterious books, and nearly everything is trying to kill him.
His goal: grow powerful enough to return home… and bring those he loves with him.
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What Awaits Within These Pages
? 2–3.5k words per chapter
? Mature, weak-to-strong progression
? RPG-lite system
? Skill-focused advancement
? Language, gore, horror elements
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