The water was lukewarm and sulfury, but it was clean. Jessica drank deeply from the ladle the woman held to her mouth. For the first time in five years, she was hydrating with something other than coffee and energy drinks. After four ladlefuls, Jessica thanked the woman and lay back on her straw mat.

  The hovel was about 15 feet in diameter with a hearth and spit in the center from which hung a pot of boiled water. There were three straw mats on a wooden platform and against the opposite wall was a table, chairs, and a chest. It was not quite as bad as student housing, but not much better.

  “How come ya like your water boiled?” the teenage boy asked.

  The woman slapped him upside the head. “Mind your manners, Johnny! We ain’t even introduced ourselves. I’m Rosemary. A pleasure.”

  Rosemary engulfed Jessica’s hand with her larger ones and shook. She was in many ways the exact opposite of Jessica. Squat, with big ruddy cheeks tanned in the sun. They shared a fashion sense in egregiously stained clothes, however.

  Sitting cross-legged on the other mats and staring at Jessica in wonderment were Rosemary’s husband and son.

  “I’m Charles,” her husband said, thrusting forward a hand thick with dirt and muscle.

  Jessica was still debating whether to undo her attempts at sanitation and shake his hand when Rosemary swatted it down.

  “She don’t wanna shake your dirty mitts, Charlie! Give her a bow like a gentleman!”

  Charles stood up and gave an exaggerated bow which had his family cracking up. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Miss Jessica”

  “Er… the pleasure is mine?” Jessica said.

  This response refreshed their cackling fit. When he was finally able to speak without laughing, the son introduced himself with a bow.

  “My name’s John. How’d’ya do?”

  Jessica swallowed. “I’m uh… Jessica. Jessica Moon.”

  “Nice to meetcha, Jessica! We’re the Serfs. It’s one of them occupational surnames,” John Serf said. “How come you’re named after the moon? That sounds like an adventurer name!”

  “It’s Korean, actually. I’m half-Korean. On my dad’s side.”

  Jessica prepared to answer follow-up questions about what a ‘Korean’ was.

  “Oh wow, Korea, huh? Do you know Min-woo and Seo-yeong?” John asked.

  Jessica blinked. “You… know what Korea is?”

  “Well yeah! Plenty of famous adventurers came here from Korea! Mal-chin and Seo-yeong both work for Emperor Oftampa and Min-woo’s one of the Original Eight!”

  Aside from a few ill-fated attempts at writing ‘derivative literary works,’ linguistics fell well outside Jessica’s area of expertise. Nonetheless, armed with the knowledge that they knew what Korea was, a few neurons banged together and pointed out to her that ‘Oftampa’ sounded like, ‘Of Tampa.’

  “The uh… the Emperor. The guy that killed the Demon King. Has he said where he’s from?” Jessica asked.

  “Supposedly he comes from some mystical land beyond the stars,” said Charles. “A place called Florida.”

  Jessica put her head in her hands. “Oh my God.”

  She was slowly putting together a picture of what this place was. She was not, as she had hoped, in a stress-induced fever dream, but had instead been reincarnated into a fantasy isekai world (not that she knew what those words meant). It also apparently had game elements to it she had hitherto been locked out of.

  But the absolute worst revelation so far was that she had shown up late to the party. Other people had been reborn before her and already accomplished everything. And she was stuck here.

  “I have to get out…” she said, face frozen in numb fear. “I have to get out of here. I have to go back… back to my lab… I can’t…”

  “Huh? What’s wrong with Florida?” John asked.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Jessica would not have even known where to begin. She found it easier to huddle in a fetal position.

  Rosemary put her hands on her hips. “It’s not Florida, ya numbskull, she’s just hungry! She’s probably just come from some famine-ridden pisshole!”

  “No really, I’m not—”

  Before Jessica could protest, Rosemary thrust a bowl at her. It was, in the kindest words, slop. Pale gloop with lumps of root vegetables floating in it and a chunk of grey meat. Admittedly, it looked a little like dakjuk. But as unappetizing as it looked, Jessica’s mother had drilled into her that she absolutely had to eat whatever was given to her, no exceptions.

  “Mmh… Thanks,” she said, swallowing a scoop.

  “Family pottage. Made with the finest ingredients you’ll find in a one hectare radius!” Rosemary said with fists on her hips.

  Truthfully, it was a bit bland. But the pottage was the kind of bland and warm meal she needed right now. Comfortably bland. The kind of stuff her mother made on the extremely rare occasions Jessica went home

  “Feel better, dearie?” Rosemary asked, brushing strands of sweaty, greasy black-brown hair out of Jessica’s eyes.

  “Much,” Jessica replied.

  With the most urgent of her body’s warning lights turned off, she felt better. Melina was right, she thought. As always.

  Although she felt better, this just brought her physical exhaustion to the forefront of things to deal with. Guessing what was on her mind, Rosemary shooed Charles and John off to let Jessica sleep. It wasn’t until the following morning seeing Rosemary’s husband snoring in a chair that she realized it was his bed she’d commandeered.

  While waiting for her host family to wake up, Jessica planned what to do next.

  Her main goal was to escape this world. Maybe it was possible, maybe it wasn’t. But if other people from Earth had been sent here, someone had to have tried. Her next step was clear: Find out who the hell knew anything about the world. Her best bet was in a big city. The bigger, the better.

  On the whims of that stupid knight, however, she was now a serf stuck in the back end of nowhere. Being a serf was barely a step above being a slave, which, if she knew anything about isekais (and she didn’t) was also a realistic fate.

  Running away was possible. With a head start and some time to plan, Jessica was certain she could outwit and outrun any feudal idiot. However, Sir Hayek promising to execute her hosts if she escaped was not a bluff she wanted to call.

  Her best plan, then, was probably her original one: Impress the king with chemistry.

  She had no idea what the agricultural situation was, but given they hadn’t figured out how to boil water yet, she could probably blow their minds just by rotating fields. Artificial fertilizers, though fun, would take way too long and required already being in the king’s good graces.

  Would crop rotation be enough to get her an audience with a king? Perhaps she had to climb the networking tree from the bottom and wow a gauntlet of aristocrats with science fair projects to fund her other ventures.

  “It’s grant proposals all the way down…” she mumbled in numb horror.

  “Wassat now?” John said, yawning and rolling over in his cot.

  “Oh! Sorry, John. I didn’t mean to wake you up,” Jessica whispered.

  “Nah,” John replied at full volume. “It’s time to get up anyhow. Ma! I’m fetchin’ water!”

  Candles were lit and the Serf family soon got to work preparing for the day. Rosemary drilled Jessica on what she knew about farm labor (very little) and about how much she knew about chores (also very little), and finally about what she did know.

  “Carbon allotrope synthesis and nanoscale materials chemistry,” Jessica said on instinct. It was her default answer when people asked what she did because it wowed them into not asking her more questions.

  Rosemary raised an eyebrow. “Alchemy stuff?”

  “N… Sort of, yes.”

  “How’s about you go help John with the water.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The two stepped out onto a dewy lawn overlooking a dark field of some cereal or another planted as far as the eye could see. That was good, Jessica thought. Fixing a farm based on a cereal mono-crop would be easy. She was already imagining her presentation on legumes as she and John followed a dirt path to a well at the top of the hill the hovel was on.

  Jessica got a better look at John than she had the evening before. The boy was shorter than her by several inches and scrubby, with jagged blonde hair almost certainly cut with shears. Not that she had room to criticize. The last haircut she’d gotten was in undergrad. From scalp to hip she was a tangle of split ends.

  Messiness aside, there was something charming about the teenage boy. He wore a brown tunic and linen shorts and his feet were bare which gave him a sort of Tom Sawyerish look. The crooked-tooth grin he sported while he whistled was one that had never known sin.

  “Hey, big sis!”

  “I’m your sister now?” she asked.

  “Naw, I just call girls older than me big sis. Unless they’re an auntie. But you ain’t old enough to be an auntie yet.”

  “You’re a smart boy, you know that?” Jessica said.

  “Really? Ma’ calls me dumb.”

  “I’d call you perceptive. What did you wanna ask?”

  “Oh yeah!” John said, swinging his empty pail. “How come you like your water boiled?”

  “In most water sources, including your well, there are bacteria and other microorganisms which can cause illness and disease. You may have the gut biome for it, but if I drink it, I could get sick and die,” she explained.

  He squinted at her. “What the heck is a micro-organa-whatnow? Like those big pipes they got in cathedrals?”

  “Imagine very tiny demons in the water.”

  Horror burst onto John’s face. “There’re demons in the water!? I gotta tell ma’!”

  As they crested the top of the hill, Jessica gazed out to the grey horizon over miles and miles of dark farmland and sighed. Pulling this world out of the dark ages was going to take a while.

  ? ? ?

  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.

  ? ? ?

  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

  ? ? ?