A few minutes later, a change in the light draws me back to the world outside my book.

I look up to an idyllic storybook landscape.

Apparently the hill I’d seen earlier was more gentle than it’d looked, enough that I didn’t even notice we were climbing it. I’ve just reached the crest and it’s like the world has unfolded in front of me.

The hedgerow-bordered fields are replaced by an oddly low, dense forest, opening the view up even more. Coppicing, if I remember correctly, repeatedly cutting the tree off just above the ground so it regrows dozens of small poles instead of a single large trunk. The area near us was apparently harvested recently, within the last year or so, so the coppiced stumps sprout hundreds of tiny shoots, each only a few feet tall and barely thicker than twigs.

Between the height and lack of obstructions, I can see for miles.

Low forests of varying heights and textures surround the road until it disappears over another hill, several miles out. All of them are a bright, verdant green that speaks of healthy young growth. Thin lines of trees cut five or ten feet above ground level - pollarded, rather than coppiced - mark the boundaries, probably between forests cut on different rotations or belonging to different families. Small cottages stud the landscape, one for every four or five bordered forests.

In the distance the forests give way to agriculture. Large fields cover the ground until they disappear behind more gentle hills, some separated by visible hedgerows, others by fences or something else small enough that I can’t see it in the distance. Some are covered in what looks like tall, vaguely fuzzy grass, likely a grain like wheat or barley. One field is clearly growing corn. Others are densely carpeted in various shades of green, root vegetables or clover or some other crop. I see a couple purple fields and one that’s violently orange, which makes me entirely certain that some of those unidentifiable vegetables in the market didn’t exist on Earth.

There are fewer travelers here than there were closer to the city, but the road is still well-used. People this far out carry entire pallets of grain or towering bundles of wood, almost certainly staple crops or firewood from the coppiced trees we’ve been walking through.

What I recall of pre-industrial economics and urban planning says that higher-margin activities happen closer to the center due to the cost of transport. This layout means that magical plants haven’t changed the fact that specialized horticulture makes more money than wood and forestry products and both make more money than staple crops. Despite the broad use of Gifts that look like they compare favorably to beasts of burden, transportation hasn’t improved enough for agriculture to completely detach itself from urban areas.

Agnes interrupts my musing. “A woman of the city, I suppose?”

I realize that I’ve stopped walking. “From a post-industrial scarcity-constrained civilization, no less,” I answer as I start moving again. “If you know what that means.”

“Heard, I have, of the drab wonders of un-Gifted lands,” she says. “It must be a great change.”

“Even when you get out into the countryside the fields aren’t this small or vibrant,” I say. “There are entire states, whole regions that grow a single crop, tens of thousands of square miles of wheat or corn interrupted only by huge highways and irrigation canals. It looks like something from a painting.”

“So say many who Visit us, not only from places built tall and tight in man-made stone,” she says sadly. “Lands destroyed by great catastrophes, Visitors born and raised in great ships on oceans of water or emptiness, entire peoples beset by beasts of such ferocity that they never stopped running enough to build.”

“Oh. I’m… not sure that urban living belongs in the same bucket as post-apocalyptic wastelands,” I say helplessly. I feel an urge to defend my old home, even though I’ve seen all the research about air pollution and stress and generally how bad cities are for you. Then again, I haven’t yet asked about quality of life here yet, so even though the town looked pretty good I don’t know if I should be all high-and-mighty about living in the “developed world”. “What’s life expectancy for baseline humans like me like? How about economic inequality and social mobility?”

Heather fields that question, smoothly inserting herself into the conversation. “Almost thirty-three thousand days in the Republic,” she offers proudly. “much lower elsewhere. I don’t have simple statistics for the others.”

Thirty-three thou divided by fifty-times-seven, which is about four and a half thou divided by fifty, which is about ninety years? “Oh,” I say belatedly. So that’s one place where Gifts win handily. Or maybe they’ve just managed to make universal healthcare work? It did sound like the founder of the Republic was from Star Trek or something. “Ummm, for inequality and mobility, you probably can’t calculate the Gini Index in your head even if I could remember the definition,” I mumble, half to myself. “Fraction of the country’s income controlled by, say, the most wealthy one percent of the population?” It’s the simplest idea I have and I know what it is for a couple major countries because news sites like to use it. Very un-subtle but also not terrible. “Maybe also probability of children whose parents are in the top and bottom income quintiles ending up in the same income quintile as adults,” I offer.

“I know that it’s very good, but I don’t know the numbers,” Heather says. “Liv, any chance you have them?”

“Yeah, give me a sec to calculate,” Liv calls back from ahead of us. It doesn’t take her too long, which I guess tells me something about what kinds of information processing her Perception score helps with. “Eight-ish percent of the total income,” she says, “fifty percent stay in the bottom quartile, twenty-seven percent stay in the top quartile.”

“Except for mobility out of the bottom quintile that’s noticeably better than most places back home,” I say, “and probably wildly better than any historical economy that ran fields that looked like this.” Developed countries back home are in the 10% to 20% range for income equality, and children stay in their starting quintiles, rather than quartiles, between 25% and 40% of the time. “Gifts at work again?”

“That’s the accepted thought,” Heather confirms. “You can succeed in most professions with only a suitable Gift. We do what we can to assist with that process.”

“By which you mean you’re also working on mobility out of the bottom quartile,” I infer. “Making it safer to take different Gifts than your parents did. These farms are probably all family affairs?”

“Most likely,” Heather agrees. “Solutions at this scale take time.”

“I can imagine,” I say. “Out of curiosity, what fraction of the Republic’s population is dedicated to agriculture?”

“Twenty percent or so,” Heather says. “We’re not doing as well as Wynforte, he’s down around five or ten percent, but we’re doing okay. We estimate that the Warlord Kingdoms vary between fifty and upwards of ninety percent,” she finishes grimly.

“Ouch,” I wince. Not even failed states get that bad back home. Ninety-plus percent is full-blown collapse of civilization territory.

That pretty well kills the conversation.

I do make a note to ask who Wynforte is, though, and why they deserve a single-person pronoun in a discussion about international socioeconomics.

Listen, I’m not discarding any hypothesis these days.

Also, note to self: Get a notebook so I can start writing down all these notes to self!

We reach a border between two of the coppiced forests about a minute later, before I can even pull my attention away from the landscape and back to the book. The delineation is incredibly clear now that I’m right next to it; not only is there the line of coppiced trees standing fifteen feet above the brush-like stumps, the two forests are clearly being harvested on different schedules. The trees behind us are in the process of sending up thin shoots, maybe four feet tall. They’re only barely distinguishable from the low brush around them. The forest ahead is more like an incredibly dense normal forest, clusters of two-inch-wide trees sprouting from a common base like giant living brooms.

It seems weird that I’m marveling at the landscape almost as much as I am at the literal spellbook I’m studying. I guess that’s just life as an isekai protagonist.

Now surrounded by greenery, I return to practicing Find Spellcraft.