The final book was by far the heftiest of the bunch. An ancient looking thing, it felt almost wrong to be touching it without a pair of gloves. Despite that sensation, Alexander was pleasantly surprised to find that the fragile-looking book felt remarkably durable under his fingers. The paper was old, but not stiff or brittle, its ink bold and clear. Too clear, in fact. The colors were vibrant and precise, like something that had come out of a high-quality modern printer rather than the handwritten remarks from the others.

Even with the glossy, detailed pages, it was hard for Alex to make heads or tails of what he was looking at. Nearly the entire back half was composed of single-page summaries of various items, tools, and crops that could be found on the property. At least, that is what he suspected. The majority of the descriptions were written in the same jumbled text as his uncle's journal, with only a few basic entries such as the ax, the watering can and so forth written in plain English.

Each summary was accompanied by a pixel image of the crop or item at the top left corner of the page, an art style he found as much strangely reassuring as it was totally out of place. It reminded him of the old Brady strategy guides his mom used to buy whenever she came home with a new SNES game, a 16-bit representation of a parsnip here, an apple there and so forth.

Flipping through the book at random hadn't answered any questions, so Alex returned to the start. He turned over the first few blank pages in search of a table of contents that wasn't there. What he found instead was far more troubling.

The top half of the page was an image of forty-eight boxes on a dark grey background, arranged in four rows of twelve, with the bottom three rows a darker grey than the first. By contrast, the top row was alive with color, each of its twelve boxes filled with a pixel image similar to the ones he'd found in the rear of the book. The image of a rock with the number twenty-nine next to in. A picture of a stick with a four. A belt and an alarm clock.

On the bottom half, split from the top by a thick silver line, was a two-dimensional sprite of a man with short dark hair, wearing a brown jacket, black shirt, and blue jeans.

Alex dropped the book as a wave of fear washed over him, stumbling half a step away from it without ever letting his eyes leave the open book. There was no way, absolutely no way, that anyone had somehow snuck in and put down all of that in the time since he'd gotten dressed. No, not since then, the list didn't include the hoe that he'd pulled out of the bag, so they'd had to have updated it while he was in the other room. Maybe it was some sort of fancy e-paper, and he just wasn't seeing it?

He shook his head, laughing weakly in spite of his own sudden discomfort. Not ten minutes ago he'd watched a satchel absorb a farm implement into what he guessed was a pocket dimension. Was it really that farfetched that one of the books his uncle left behind contained a status screen?

After a moment to steel his nerves, Alex approached the book once again and plucked it from the floor before taking a seat at the table.

To the right of the pixel image of himself was a host of information only some of which made sense:

Alexander Adamson

Level 1

HP 200/200

Energy 200/200

Birch Branch Farm

Current Funds:1000Ƶ

Debts Owed: TBD

“Level?” He asked himself incredulously. “HP? You've got to be kidding me!”

A game. In a way, it made a twisted sort of sense. A young man wakes up in an unfamiliar place with temporary amnesia, given a bunch of beginner tools and just enough advice to start out. Even the bag made sense once he realized it was just a stand-in for a video game inventory. Hell, there was even a triangle of six open spaces next to his basic inventory that he could only guess was a way for him to see what items he had equipped at a glance.

Of course, it didn't actually make sense. Magic wasn't real, and even if VR headsets were all the rage these days, there was a very literal world of difference between what he was seeing and a couple of gloves with an oLED screen. He'd had been transported to a place, perhaps even a world, where the laws of physics were less important than game mechanics.

Somehow, Alex didn't think he actually came in on a train.

"Would have been nice of you to leave me some brandy," Alex grumbled at the nearby journal of his uncle. He didn't really know how to feel about any of this. Scared, sure, obviously. But there was excitement behind it as well. Whatever else this place might be, it was like nothing else Alex, or perhaps anyone had ever seen. A reality entirely different from the one he'd grown up in, but similar to so many he'd controlled over the years.

Come to think of it, wasn't he the protagonist then? Alex laughed at the idea at first, but the more angles he approached it from, the more he realized that it was probably correct. The newcomer to an established village, A-level tracker? He sure as heck wasn't an NPC. Questions for later.

In the meantime, he flipped to the next page, a half-smile creeping across his features as he instantly recognized what he was looking at.

Farming 0/100

Mining 0/100

Crafting 0/100

Gathering 0/100

Fishing 0/100

Combat 0/100

Each of the skills had a visual representation of it next to its name, a sword, a watering can and so on. They also had a series of one hundred unfilled notches to the right side of the page. Every twenty-fifth notch was larger than the others, though whether that made them special, or just made the whole thing easier to read at a glance was beyond Alex.

In addition to the six legible skills, the bottom quarter of the page was taken up by two blocks of now familiar, but still entirely indecipherable text. Each was accompanied by a blurred icon and a similar series of unticked boxes. A pair of unlockable skills, apparently.

Not like he didn't have enough to keep him busy with the six he already had.

The skills he had seemed self-explanatory. All of them save combat that is. His mind had begun to work itself into a tizzy the moment he saw the letters HP on the first page, but he'd been able to excuse it as maybe having to do with farm time accidents. But the crossed sword and bow next to the word Combat put an end to any delusions in that regards and brought reality rushing back in a heartbeat.

If this wasn't a dream, if he was here for a month, just how on earth was he going to deal with combat? Alex hadn't been in a fight since grade school, and he'd lost that one! Somehow he didn't think it was going to be turn-based.

Eager to put the thoughts aside, at least for the moment, Alex turned his attention to the opposite page

It was nearly blank, with only two words in English and a handful from the unknown language filling the top of it. The underlined title at the top of the page read Traits while the only entry beneath it was the word Greenthumb, followed by a long string of foreign text.

Alex couldn't be sure, but he was sensing a theme. If he didn't know something, or perhaps wasn't ready to know something, it was written in that language. Considering the sheer volume for it, he'd have to come up with a name for it sooner or later.

"Cryptic," Alex muttered to himself. He liked the way the word rolled off his tongue.

Next time he spoke to Marie, he'd have to ask if anyone in the village spoke the language, but he wasn't counting on it. If this really was a game, then this information was being hidden from him for a reason, and it'd be pretty poor design to give him a way to circumvent that. The more he looked at it, the more he wondered if he'd even be able to decipher it at all.

Not that he necessarily needed to know to be able to infer. Greenthumb, for example, was listed under his 'traits.' If he had to take an educated guess, based on the two terms, he'd guess that it was some sort of bonus to his ability to grow crops.

Again he flipped the page, and this time he was greeted with a stylish pixelized rendering of Marie Mayer. There was no mistaking the top hat, but he suspected that the older woman might take offense to the amount of silver the rendering put in her hair.

The picture sat at the top left corner of the page, with her name next to it. It included some things he knew or at least things that he suspected he knew, such as her estimated age, weight and so on. Beneath that it listed an occupation, showed a similarly animated picture of what he assumed to be her home and place of work.

The bottom half of the page was taken up primarily by a series of four columns arranged in a square labeled: Favorites, Likes, Dislikes, Hates.

Each column had up to seven different items listed beneath it, though only the word politeness was written in English, with the rest of the entries, predictably, written in cryptic.

Strangest of all was a series of twenty heart-shaped bubbles in two rows of ten at the top of the page, just offset from Marie's name. Nineteen of them were empty, with a single ruby red heart filled in at the top left corner. A reputation system maybe? That was sort of creepy.

The opposite page was done in the same format, though almost everything on, save for category headings, was filled out in Cryptic. The pixel image was nothing more than a shadow in the shape of its subject, as were the pictures of house and workplace. The next page was the same, and the one after that, and the next. In total, he counted thirty-nine pages, including Marie's.

“Looks like someone isn't keeping such good track after all.” Alex chuckled at the discrepancy. He wondered how three people could go unnoticed, or at least unremembered in such a small community, but decided it didn't matter. At least, not right now.

The final two pages before the book devolved back into its listing of crops and farm paraphernalia, were a comprehensive map of the entire region. It was even complete with a tiny little pixel version of Alex himself to serve as a 'you are here' marker, one that shifted along with his movement as he paced from one end of the house to another.

Twenty minutes ago that would have made him panic. Funny how quickly you become inured to weirdness when everything was weird.

Alex sighed, leaning his chair onto its back two legs as he sat back down and spoke to the empty room. “So, what now?”

The books had given him a wealth of new information, but little in the way of answers to the most important of his questions. The how and the why of all of this were arguably more ephemeral now than they had been before he started, now that a simple bout of drinking or a bit of head trauma were out of the question.

Assuming that Marie wasn't lying to him, he was going to be stuck in Blue Hills for the better part of a month, whether he wanted to, or not. With that in mind, he really only had two choices while he waited. Hunker down or engage with the village and try to get to the bottom of what on earth was going on.

Not exactly a hard choice. Even if it did involve farming.