Lucas spent several more hours with Heisenburgle, who was positively insufferable until Lucas pointed out that he was about to add dried treant blood to the potion he was working on instead of the pulverized rust caps as he’d intended. He calmed down a little after that.

Lucas’s mind didn’t, though. Instead, he spent the rest of the evening leafing through the damn recipe book, and once Heisenburgle decided to call it a night, he took several other books back to his room with him to read in the morning.

“I knew you’d come around to my superior worldview eventually,” Heisenburgle gloated. “Elements, if properly applied, can explain everything around us. They can even…”

Lucas turned the gnome after that, but only so he didn’t kick him down the stairs. The truth was that on some level, he was grateful to the egotistical runt; he’d learned more about alchemy today than he ever suspected existed before now, and now he wanted to dig deeper.

Now, every time he did a quick read of a page, he was getting another pop-up. Well, most of the time. Some of the recipes didn’t trigger it, making Lucas wonder if they were faulty or otherwise non-optimized, but for now, that didn’t matter. What mattered was that according to the system in his head, there was a right way and a wrong way to do things, and Lucas was absolutely shocked that it had taken him years in this world to find that shit out.

You have learned the recipe for Potion of Greater Breath-Holding.

You have learned the recipe for Potion of Lesser Mana Regeneration.

You have learned the recipe for Potion of Greater Mana Regeneration.

You have learned the recipe for the Elixir of Clear Thoughts.

You have learned the recipe for Salve of Healing.

You have learned the recipe for Potion of Greater Health Restoration.

You have learned the recipe for Potion of Nighttime Stealth.

You have learned the recipe for Potion of Elemental Endurance - Fire.

For page after page, there were recipes, and most of them triggered a screen as if this was the proper way to make the potion. Up until now, Lucas would have said there was no such thing and that one should do whatever worked, but then he would have said that elemental balance was a myth too, and he’d very clearly seen that was wrong too.

Telling him, he’d learned the recipe didn’t seem to impart him any special knowledge or memory about it. Truthfully, he didn’t feel like he’d learned anything, but if he concentrated on a specific recipe, he could bring up a screen that detailed how to make it. That was cool, but the fact that he couldn’t do the same for the random recipes he’d perfected over the last few years. If he tried concentrating on his healing salve, nothing about bear grease or any of the other ingredients appeared before his eyes; instead, the recipe from this book that he’d never once tried appeared. It used twice rendered pig fat, crushed freshwater seashells, and ground mustard seed. It was so stupid and arbitrary, but he didn’t have time to get worked up about that. Instead, he got completely distracted when he looked up one more recipe before bed. This one was followed by a second screen that he hadn’t anticipated either.

You have learned the recipe for Elixir of Swift Striding.

You have discovered 10 recipes! You have gained additional insight into the art of Alchemy. +10% will be added to the effect of all alchemical mixtures brewed by you.

“What?” Lucas shouted, almost throwing the book in annoyance. “That doesn’t even make any sense!”

“A fucking potion is going to do whatever its ingredients do,” he grumbled to himself. “That’s how science works!”

But it isn’t science, is it, he reminded himself. You might have been using it to cook up crack, but this shit is more than that.

Lucas went to bed more than a little frustrated that night, vowing that he was going to get to the bottom of this first thing in the morning. However, unlike most nights, everything that happened stirred up all sorts of dreams of times he’d rather forget.

. . .

The days immediately after he fell into this world were hazy to him, just like always, and this wasn’t the first time he’d dreamed about them. Tonight, though they were more vivid and urgent, even if they didn’t always make sense, much like a fever dream as he was assaulted with out-of-order images.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Why was it so bad tonight? Was it from the overstimulation the magic behind those annoying blue pop-ups had caused? He had no idea. He was just along for the ride.

He could only dimly remember the priest who had tried to exorcise him twice. The man had nearly drowned him in the holy font before Lucas had finally had enough of it and given the holy man a black eye for his trouble.

Events weren’t much clearer in the dream version, either. However, the mixed and swirling events that happened after that all confirmed one thing, falling into the body of a recently dead man was not a good way to make friends.

Lucas’s life was a mystery in those first weeks in a new world, but they were a joy, too. After all, he’d managed to stay himself and told those angels to fuck off. Still, he probably would have died in the gutter or taken up banditry to keep body and soul together if not for his apprenticeship to crazy old Mister Markesh.

Unlike Lucas, his family had survived the spring fevers, but they disowned him immediately. That was fair enough because the last thing that Lucas wanted was to pretend to be someone else’s dead son. That would be creepy as hell.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t exactly get a job slinging cheeseburgers and asking if someone would like fries with that, and none of the more reputable places wanted anything more to do with a recently dead man than his parents had. Fortunately, Mister Markesh was the local apothecary for the little town of Evenspring that Lucas found himself living in, and once Lucas had shown that he knew a thing or two about potions and reagents, thanks to his convenient little pop-ups, the man had let Lucas stay on as an Apprentice.

That temporary arrangement was supposed to last through the summer because the old drunk hated going into the woods to find herbs and didn’t mind too much if one of his apprentices just never came home.

In the dreams, those trips blended into one long, horrid affair. He’d never run into more than a single goblin at a time out there, and other than the time he was almost run down by the wild boar, Lucas’s life had never really been in danger. He’d just waited up a tree until the thing had lost interest; in the dream, he fought them all, though, in a never-ending congo line of danger.

He didn’t even have to go digging through the bushes to find what he needed. He just killed the baddies that were attacking him, and they popped like herb piñatas. Need a night root? Attack a goblin. How about some olden seeds? Bears are full of them. It was a ridiculous halt, and Lucas was carrying hundreds of pounds worth of bags by the time he got back to Mister Markesh’s shop.

That still wasn’t enough to save the old bastard, though. In reality, he’d come back one day with an armful of mushrooms and boots covered in mud to find the old man dead, and the dream version wasn’t much different. As Lucas set down the bags from his impossible haul, the only difference he noticed was that his skin wasn’t the light blue of a fresh corpse. It was the dark blue of someone who’d been mainlining potions.

Mister Markesh had died doing what he loved, at least, and overdosed on the dregs of the formula that would one day become blue. Lucas hadn’t done anything to him, but he still fled just the same with a book full of bootleg recipes and as many expensive reagents as he could carry to make his own fortune. He was smart enough to know that no one in Evenspring had an ounce of goodwill toward the ‘dead boy,’ as they often called him.

In the dream, he didn’t flee, though. He just kept looking through the book, trying to find a true recipe and not all these fakes. He wanted something that would make the little ding sound so he could level up, but that didn’t happen, and by the time he reached the end of the book, he was angry enough to toss it aside and strangle the corpse.

“Tell me where the real recipes are, asshat!” Lucas roared as he shook the man like a rag doll, but that still wasn’t enough to elicit a confession. The most it did was make the dead man smile.

That’s what Lucas woke up to. He woke up way before noon because of that dead man’s fucking smile, and it fucking killed him. It is too fucking early for this bullshit, he thought to himself.

Not even that gripe could detract him from his annoyance, though. Mister Markesh’s face haunted him; it was like the stingy old bastard was on team Heisenburgle, and they were making fun of him. “All this time, I’ve been grinding, and the whole fucking world has been keeping secrets, huh?” Lucas grumbled to himself, still trying to get the image of the old man’s corpse out of his head.

Mister Markesh had lots of ways to get high or drunk, but using the dregs of poison he’d leached off the recipes of the potions he’d made for paying customers had been his go-to trick, and it was one that had served Lucas well until now.

Still, suddenly, he’d been dropped into the deep end of the pool, and he didn’t like that at all. Stubbornly, Lucas tried to go back to sleep and tossed and turned until almost noon. That was when he finally gave up. He pulled the bell cord to send a servant his way and then got dressed. He was going to drink tea until he was so caffeinated he couldn’t stand it, and he was going to get to the bottom of them.

He cracked the first book, and then enthusiasm drained from him almost immediately. This time, instead of trying to dig through the recipe book, he’d cracked open Porentheo’s Guide to Elemental Alignment, which turned out to be among the densest things he’d ever had the misfortune to read.

“Seriously, I’ve read dictionary entries that are more lively than this shit,” he mumbled to himself.

Lucas didn’t stop, though, and he didn’t skip ahead to look for some pictures. Instead, he poured himself another cup with extra sugar and knuckled down. He wasn’t going to let that gnome get one over on him anymore, and the experiment with the flying potions had shown Lucas all he needed to know. There was something of value in here, and he wouldn’t be surprised to find out that it had something to do with the little blue screens he’d seen so much of in the last 24 hours.