Salem sighed. He seemed to do that a lot. “Do you study physics in your world?” His tone had turned patronizing and peevish.
“Yes.”
“Do you understand the concept of potential energy—such as when you lift a stone off the ground it holds the potential energy to return it to the ground?”
“Yes.”
“Think of the coins you are holding as potential magical energy. It is waiting in that state to be converted into something else.”
“Like what?”
“The village behind us is a simple example. Establishing it cost the potential magical energy trapped within 25,000 gold crowns. Once that energy was expended the coins vanished. Each level of expansion cost additional gold.”
I frowned. “How do you still have money if your coins keep disappearing?”
“There are classes that create currency and classes that use it, so the sum total of all the coins in the kingdom fluctuates. On good years, people produce more coins than they use. When this has happened for several consecutive years the kingdom can try to expand. That’s how villages like Blackwood are built. Sometimes the kingdom recuperates its investment, and other times, like here, for instance, they lose it. Now, that is all an overly simplified version of how the system actually functions, but it is all the time we have to discuss this. We need to get a room at the inn.”
“Why are you so grouchy?”
Salem glared at me. “I am grouchy because your ignorance has taken me to a backwater level three village in the middle of nowhere. There is no library, no restaurants, no theatre, and there isn’t a teleportation circle anywhere within half a week’s travel. I have access to none of the comforts of civilisation. And now you can’t even do a simple task like securing us a room at the inn so I can educate you the way I should have been doing for the past ten weeks. That is why I am grouchy.”
That was fair, I guess.
“Okay, let’s get a room.”
We turned around and started walking back to the village. Now that I knew the village's history, I could understand why so much of everything looked abandoned, why every structure was almost pressed up against the palisade. The people here were scared.
I’d been through a ghost town with my parents when I was a kid. The factory in the town had closed forty years earlier and most people had left. There were abandoned houses and empty shops. This reminded me a lot of that.
The guard in the tower smiled when we walked back through the gate. “How was the tour of the village?”
“Short,” I said.
He chuckled. “Well, that is because we have plenty opportunity for expansion.”
“More than most places. I’m looking for an inn.”
“You will only find the one. The other closed last year. Just go to the main square and you will see it. Gretel might be a village appointed innkeeper, but she runs a good place, cheap one too.”
“Thanks, Brill.”
“You are welcome, Arnold.”
The village inside the wall was barely two hundred yards from start to finish. A massive warehouse was to the left of the gate, with what looked like workshops to the right. I could hear hammering coming from behind some houses and saw a sign that had a hammer hitting an anvil. I took a wild guess and figured it was probably a smithy.
Salem led me down the main street. The outer industrial area gave way to housing and a few small shops. Most of the shops were closed, however, the entrances boarded up. The line of abandoned buildings gave way to a large open square that was cobbled.
There was a fountain in the middle with clean, clear water. A building that looked like it might be a guard’s barracks sat on the far side. A boarded-up wooden temple with a faded yellow serpent image above the entrance was on the left side of the square, and a large stone house—which was very nearly a manor with its own wall and iron gate—was on the right. The inn was the building closest to the gate. It had three floors with whitewash weatherboarding and a thatched roof.
I only knew that it was the inn because Salem headed straight for the door, pressing his shoulder against the wood to indicate we needed to go inside.
I entered what could easily have been mistaken for an Irish pub. There were a lot of polished dark wooden panels and furniture. Opposite the door was a bar with a wall of bottles behind it and a countertop that had seen better days. Between that and the door were tables and chairs. A large fireplace sat along one wall, and a small stage sat against the other, beside a staircase that led to higher levels. Apart from the lanterns fixed on the wall, the interior looked almost modern.
A cougar of a woman stood behind the bar reading a book. She had curly red hair with a touch of grey and a few freckles on her cheeks. She looked up and smiled at me as I closed the door. She had a dress that was a tad too tight and a neckline that was invitingly low. She was eyeing me up more than I was her. “Welcome to Gretel’s Inn. I’m the illustrious Gretel. How may I be of service, Arnold?”
I crossed the room. “I need a room for a few nights for me and Salem.” I nodded to the familiar to show who I was talking about.
Gretel’s smile faltered as I got closer and she dropped the flirtatious tone. “The cat is welcome, but if you are staying in my inn, you will need to have a bath before you use my sheets.”
The cleanliness of the place and her comments made me notice that the sour smell, which had been following me around, didn’t belong to the village, but was in fact me.
My smile went a little shaky. “A bath would be great. Do you have a bucket and some soap that I could use to wash my clothes? And maybe somewhere to hang them up?”
“I can have your clothes laundered for you…but if you are a bit tight on funds to pay the five coppers, I can sell you a bar of soap for three and lend you a wash bucket and show you where to get some water.”
“I’ll take the bar of soap. How much do I owe you?”
“A room costs eleven coppers a night, which includes breakfast. A hot bath will cost you three coppers. A cold bath will cost you two. Our water comes from a deep well, so I suggest the hot. Dinner is five coppers, but that includes a couple of ales. House ale is one copper a jug which is a passable local brew. If you want something branded, that will set you back a copper a tankard.”
“So, twenty-eight coppers for two nights, a hot bath, and a bar of soap,” I said before she could list off any more prices.
Gretel smiled. “I took you for a farmer.”
I tried to hide my disappointment. “I am a farmer.”
“That’s a surprise—most of the ones around here can’t add in their heads. That puts you a step above the locals.”
I nodded as I put my backpack down and opened the leather buckles to get inside. I’d tucked my smaller purse back under the dirty clothes which I noticed smelled even worse than the ones I was wearing.
I counted out twenty-eight coppers and handed them over.
Gretel counted them again and then put them in her apron pocket. “I can show you to your room…or I can show you where you can do your laundry while I fix that bath? I strongly suggest the second.”
I glanced down at Salem. He was glaring at me. Glancing at him, however, brought my nose closer to my armpit—which chose for me. “Laundry first.”
A sharp pain burned my ankle and I looked down to see Salem pulling back his mouth from a nasty bite.
Gretel eyed Salem uncertainly. “Is he always like that?” I could hear the hesitation in her tone.
“No, he just hates water and recognises most of the words associated with it,” I said, fumbling through a lie. “He’ll behave once I’ve finished my laundry and have bathed.”
“He’d better. This way.”
Gretel led me to a hallway and the back of the inn. Halfway down, I froze. There was a map of North America on the wall that went from floor to ceiling. Varla had repeatedly told me I was in another universe, a different version of Earth than where I came from, but that hadn’t made its way into realit
y the way seeing this map did. I was looking at North America, but everything about it was wrong. A forest took up almost the entire centre and east coast of the continent. The only signs of civilisation in the north were along the west coast near the ocean. Texas and Mexico contained hundreds of cities making up the bulk of the kingdom, but everything else had a “here be dragons” vibe to it, with names like The Widows Mountains and The Valley of Tears.
Gretel saw why I had stopped and walked back. She pointed to a red dot of paint that might have been in the northeastern part of Oregon or maybe Washington—though the topography certainly didn’t match. Judging by the ring of hills, it looked like the dot was on the inner edge of a giant meteor crater, which explained the two lines of jagged hills I’d seen beyond the forest.
“That’s us.” She moved her finger a couple of hundred miles north through a forest into what would have been Washington or Canada. “That’s the elven border.” She then followed a series of mountains I couldn’t name. “The western dwarven mountain kingdoms.”
She waved me over to the next map.
This one was more detailed and mostly showed Oregon and the crater area. It also had a series of hexagons overlaying everything that kind of reminded me of Settlers of Catan, D&D, and a few older video games I’d played. She pointed to a small village surrounded by forest in the northeastern section again. A small path seemed to cut through the forest and ring of hills to the village.
“That’s us. I know it looks like we are close to those hedonistic elves on the other map, but we’re actually quite far away. Now, if you look over here, you will see a map of the village.” She led me to the next map. This one showed the village dead centre in the middle of a hexagon. There were houses, barns, every last little detail. “This is what we used to look like before the attack. For decades this map hung in the main room, being updated as Blackwood changed, but it depresses me to look at now.”
Looking at the map, I could see what the village had been like. Salem and I had apparently walked east when we’d gone outside the village. There had been over a hundred farms there. Now there was only a few dozen against the wall. The same was true for the north and south of the village. The only place that looked similar to how it was now was the western side, and a quarter of that was a small woods.
“I can tell you about the village’s history over dinner if you are interested,” Gretel offered.
Salem pulled at my trouser leg with his mouth.
I glanced down and then back at the innkeeper. “Maybe in a few days, once I’m washed and settled.”
She smiled and tapped her forehead theatrically. “Right, the washing. Follow me.”
She turned and headed for the door at the end of the hallway. It connected to the back of the inn, where there was a large open area next to the stable. She found me a new bar of harsh-smelling soap and a wash bucket, and showed me the washing line and where to get water, and then she left me to it.
Over my lacklustre gaming career, I’d stayed at my fair share of discount motels, places where the washing machines and fridges didn’t work, so cleaning my clothes with a bar of soap in a bathroom sink wasn’t exactly a new experience for me. I quickly began working the smell and stains out of the first of the two changes of clothes stored in my pack.
As I finished the first set, a prompt appeared, and a halo of light surrounded me, making me glow like a Christmas tree.
Well done, you have successfully cleaned a set of clothing to a fine standard with a wash bucket and gained a new tool proficiency. You can now boast that you can use a wash bucket as well as any Novice.
Salem scowled at me, looked around, saw nobody, and then scowled at me some more.
For a second, I almost told him that I didn’t know that the whole tool proficiency thing was going to happen simply by cleaning clothes, but then I realised that my ignorance was precisely why he wanted to talk to me alone in the first place, and I’d be supporting his argument. So I wisely said, “Sorry,” and then shut up.
“So, basically, don’t accept any prompt that will make things too easy for me. If it seems too good to be true, then it probably is,” I said quietly as I soaked away weeks’ worth of grime. The tub was surprisingly big and the small bar of soap Gretel had sold me held a pleasant aroma, compared to the one I’d used on my clothes.
Salem sighed. “If you need to dumb it down, then yes: if it seems too good to be true then it probably is. There are exceptions, of course, but it will take time for me to teach you the nuances of how everything works.”
“How much time?”
“Three days should be enough that you don’t accidentally kill yourself or others, but it will take weeks for a proper understanding of the basics.”
I nodded my head. “So, in three days, I can go out and start training to reach level 100. Do you have any pointers?”
“Don’t bother. Varla didn’t directly lie to you, but she didn’t give you the whole truth. The only farmers that ever reach 100 have old family money or are somehow useful to a nobleman or merchant. No one makes it on their own. To gather that much experience by yourself would take two lifetimes, and the cost of purchasing the experience is more than a farmer can earn in ten.”
“Wait, you can buy experience?”
“Of course that’s the only part you heard. And to answer your question, yes you can buy experience. I’ll explain why when we get to my lecture on leveling. And before you ask, you don’t have nearly enough money to purchase the experience required to get you to 100. At the bare minimum, it will cost you 2,500 gold crowns, and no one sells experience for the bare minimum.”
“What about that fact that I’m an incarnate? You said we sometimes bring information from our world that is quite valuable in yours. Maybe I can make money that way?”
“That is a possibility. What did you do for employment in your world?”
“Well, for the last six months, I’ve been studying economics and accounting, but before that, I was a semi-pro gamer for nine years.”
“What is a semi-pro gamer?”
“It means I was paid to play games.”
“And you think that will help you make money in our world?”
“Well, your laws kind of sound like what we would call ‘mechanics’ in some of the games I used to play. It was sort of my job to understand those mechanics and learn how to take advantage of them, finding weaknesses that could be used to my team’s advantage.”
“Ah, in our world, the scholar class fills this function. They study each class, finding each method for gaining experience more easily, and sell that information to the class they specialise in.”
“We have a thing called walkthroughs that people read to do the same thing. But what I’m talking about is more specialised. It was my job to find ways no one had ever thought of doing something, adding weird quirks together to create unexpected results.”
“Oh, you were an exploitationist. That can be quite profitable if you are successful.”
“How profitable?”
“Very in some cases; exploitationists receive a 25% experience bonus when anyone uses their method to gain experience. Of course, that will only apply to your class, as you cannot receive experience from another class.”
“That’s what I will do then.”
“You will fail. Scholars and exploitationists have devoted centuries to discovering new ways of gaining experience. New methods for exploitation are now all small discoveries, and rare.”
“Alright, maybe I won’t do that. So we’ll hang out in our room for a few days while you teach me the basics and then we can go buy a few weapons and start leveling.”
Salem sighed again. “Why do you need weapons?”
“To kill monsters.”
“And why are you planning to kill monsters?”
“So I can level.”
“Of course, it is so obvious. Except you are neither a hunter, a warrior, or an adventurer, so killing monsters will gain you nothing but the l
oot they drop.”
I stared at Salem over the edge of the tub. “What…are you saying I can’t level by killing monsters?”
“What part of the class farmer indicates to you that you should be slaying monsters?”
The uneasy feeling was returning. I could sense the curveball. “No, no, no…you get experience from killing monsters. It’s the rules.”
“Perhaps in your world, but here, in our world, farmers gain experience by farming. This includes the planting of crops and the raising of livestock, but not the slaying of monsters.”
I scowled at Salem. “Bullshit. You’ve got three days to teach me the basics and then we are going monster hunting.”
Chapter Three
A SHORT WALK INTO MADNESS
The Beaten Anvil was the only remaining smithy in Blackwood. It was located about as far from the main square as you could possibly go without stepping into farmland. That put it just across the road from the village warehouse.
I trudged down the side road, past a pair of empty houses following the sounds of hammering. I wasn’t in a good mood. I wasn’t depressed—I’d stared into that abyss, and this wasn’t that. But I wasn’t right. It had something to do with the fact that I wasn’t getting much sleep, but that also wasn’t everything.
I stepped around the corner to yet another disappointment. The Beaten Anvil wouldn’t have impressed anyone. There was a thatched roof over the forge to keep the rain off and two stone walls that only seemed to be there as a windbreak. The forge’s furnace sat in the middle of the structure with a tall chimney that puffed black smoke. There was an anvil on either side with two sets of bellows behind. Eight people were working.
A man and woman stood at separate anvils banging away at what looked like a hoe and a wood axe. They weren’t forging them from raw steel but merely reforming damaged blades brought in from larger, more complicated forges. The pair had to be the owners, Quinn and Ava, Gretel had told me about, which made the six mismatched youths their adopted children.
Oh Great! I was Reincarnated as a Farmer Page 4
