Leslie was slowly coming back to his senses.

Wherever he was, it felt warm and he could hear the fireplace crackling. The air smelt of iron and paper. Having blinked a couple times, he tried to get up but a strong hand gently put him back to horizontal position.

- Now, now. You most likely had a head concussion, it is better for you to stay like this.

Leslie looked a bit to the side, where he saw the old owner of the forge.

- Yes, it's me, - the man smiled, - the same guy whose shop youre eyeing every day. Now would you please tell me what was it between you and that fat brat and his gang?

***

After Leslie has finished explaining, the old man, whose expression has been changing from curiosity to frowning, then resentment, then disgust, finally sighed and said:

- Alright, I see you. Indeed, this really would be very unfair if you had to fight multiple people with your bare hands... A shame there was no one to stand up for you, but, more importantly, for justice. They did you bad. But that's mostly just how the world is. You better tell me what... why won't you put them hammering skills of yours to some better use then just bonking annoying guys on the head?

Leslie frowned for a second, then the realisation hit him. His face lit up with a smile and he started nodding frantically. Something inside was telling him that smithing was absolutely worth learning in this world. The rest was history.

Leslie spent a couple more weeks resting and recovering, it took him THAT much to recover from all the beating. After he was done, the old blacksmith, grandpa Lou, as he called himself, brought him to one of the clothing shops where they got him a somewhat decent outfit and paid a couple gold coins for it.

No one has dared to cause trouble for him ever since. Except for one time when the old Johnson tried to shame him into coming back, because he already got used to that extra coin. Fortunately, Leslie wasn't dumb enough to go back to somewhere he was treated badly, even though he was the one his parents initially sent him to. Seeing there was no reaction from Leslie, his former boss tried to pull him out of the shop by his clothes, but, fortunately, the gramps, who was quietly observing their entire interaction, showed up and told him to frick off. After that, the old Johnson has never disturbed Leslie ever since and for all the things regarding business, he communicated with gramps directly.

The old blacksmith taught Leslie everything he knew himself, and over time, Leslie has turned into a decent assistant for him. He also paid him way more than the pittance Johnson did. Leslie was happy to be able to help his parents more, and the half of his first salary he sent to his parents himself. Quite swiftly he received an answer with words of gratitude, congratulations on earning his bread and asking what took him so long. That's how he learned that the old fart of a shoemaker never sent his parents any money. First, he wanted to immediately go and make him pay, but gramps, although, with great effort, dissuaded him. His parents were still alive and well, after all, so there was no reason to be really mad. Also, it seemed that their situation was slowly getting better, at least they could eat twice a day now, even though the drought was looking like it was going nowhere in the nearest time.

"Damn.", thought Leslie. "Back in my world, living like that would count as something beyond the line of poverty. I gotta lock in so that they can have a good life."

Speaking of good life, as soon as Leslie has properly recovered, gramps took him to buy some better clothes instead of the rubbish he was wearing. Now, as he was paid in gold, he was able to afford different things he couldn't earlier. His former pay was barely able to afford him food, but now not only he was able to eat different tasty stuff at the tavern, but also buy something more substantial, like clothes. Or books! Speaking of which, Leslie was quite hungry for knowledge about this world, even though the books were expensive. Still, it took him some time to learn to read in the language of this world first.

After roughly half a year, he was finally able to comprehend text and was finally able to gorge himself on information. That's when it hit him. Almost outright with the first encyclopedias on the general knowledge about world and nature, he realised it.

He really was in Terraria.

The world was huge, with continents so massive, spunning thousands of kilometers, they could fit multiple Earth continents, none of the book he read was even sure on what other continents are like, beyond the closest ones.

The continent Leslie ended on was called Eastern Edge, it was called that because the continent itself was shaped as a peninsula, protruding to the east of another, much larger continent that was called Central. It also was known that there was a plenty of other continents around the Central one, but there was little to no information about them.

The Eastern Edge consisted of a bunch of states tightly tucked in between the two unconquerable natural territories: an Eastern Jungle that could fit almost all of these countries on its territory in the east, and equally gigantic Western Desert in the west. In the south, the continent was washed by the ocean called Eastern.

Not only the countries were tightly tucked in between the two uninhabitable areas, but there was also another one right in the middle of them, which was, by the way, how Leslie discovered that he really was in Terraria. All because the third area was the Crimson.

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With the little overall knowledge about it, the descriptions and sketches brought back by various adventurers and expeditions were describing the very same Crimson Leslie knew from Terraria. The meaty landscape, the crimeras, the facemonsters, the mouth caverns, it all fit what Leslie remembered from the game.

Almost every country on the continent was sharing a border with the Crimson, except for one, including Leslie's. That was unsettling. Good grief that Leslie's town was in the western part of the country, and the Crimson was in the east.

Countries were conducting the containment measures together, sending adventurers on missions inside those territories, which held the Crimson from growing further onto human territories, because yes, that thing was always growing and without anyone holding it back, it would've engulfed the entire place. It was unsure how exactly people held it back, but seemingly, it worked. Unfortunately, there was no way to take back the already contaminated territories, so the best people could do was preventing it from spreading to somewhere new.

Also, there was another uninhabitable territory in the west, called the Lunar Forest, which separated the human lands from the Great Desert, and, honestly, people were thankful for its existence. If not for that, human kingdoms would have to constantly deal with invasions of gigantic insects from the desert, which were firmly held off by the forest. It was unclear what it was that held them back, but there was a word that the forest was inhabited by ghosts and spirits, and thus, people tended to avoid going there.

As for the countries themselves, there were five human states in total, as well as a goblin enclave in another, smaller desert to the south.

Starting with the country Leslie was born in, it was a kingdom under the name of Gloria. It was a pretty safe place to live in, even despite being sandwiched between the Lunar forest and the Crimson. All because just like in any other setting, the main danger to humans was always other humans, and luckily, Gloria was bordering only one another country, which never gave it any problems and the relations between them were pretty chill. It had full range of various natural areas, and was known for its rich forests with various rare tree breeds, as well as the agriculture.

The country next to it in the south was called Melissa and its most distinctive feature was bordering the ocean on the other side. It was famous for its export of sea products, its beautiful beaches and coastline cities, as well as its good and healthy climate. Melissa and Gloria were called sister kingdoms and were actually great allies, holding off political advances of other countries together.

The next one on the list was the Junkyard located to the north of Gloria, which was not really a country, but an assembly of various small bandit- and not so much clans, constantly fighting among themselves for territories, power and influence. They often asked the neighboring countries for assistance in the past, but every time someone did it, other clans requested help from other countries, which inevitably made Junkyard an arena for proxy wars. There were no constant cities, nor even towns, the entire territory was very militarised and very chaotic. Another factor adding to the instability was that all the criminals wanted in the neighboring countries sought refuge in the Junkyard, seeing as there were no laws or treaties to catch and punish them.

"Wow, well isn't that a definition of a shithole?", thought Leslie reading this.

The country on the other side of Junkyard was a merchant republic ruled by a clan under the name of Geo. It was essentially somewhat of a corporation-state belonging to one family and it had everything one could expect from such a country. Even though it proclaimed freedom of trade and being a safe haven for all kinds of businessmen, in fact it was extremely monopolised, and everything was put to serve the profits of the ruling family. But one thing was true, it was really rich and could afford a very professional army and adventurers, sometimes even from other continents, thus, considered one of the safest places to live for the regular people.

It had somewhat tense relations with Gloria, because often they were the ones accidentally waging proxy wars on each other in the Junkyard. After a series of incidents, it was decided by both countries that they will refuse to involve themselves with Junkyard in the future, and thus, the unstable area was left to itself.

Next to the Geo republic was an area called Azure Enclave. It was an academia country, a research facility country. According to the historical records, it was founded by an increibly powerful mage who came to these places from some other continent hundreds of years ago and founded a school of magic, which later, with the help of his pupils, grew to the university the size of country. It was filled with various magical wonders, but, unfortunately, tourism there was quite expensive and restricted. The country claimed to be pacifist, which, however, didn't prevent it from selling weapons to its neighbor, the Nyx Empire.

The Nyx Empire was the largest country on the continent, the oldest one, and with the strongest military. However, most of its effort were directed towards the containment of Crimson, with which, it also had the largest border span. Another thing to watch out for was the Goblin Desert in its south, so even though it was kinda an open secret that the Empire wished to unite the continent under its rule, it had more than enough issues to take care about first.

The Goblin desert was the only non-human country in the Eastern Edge, which was known for the periodical raids on the neighboring countries. Goblins would be squashed long ago if not for how hard it was to find a travelling goblin clan in the desert, especially if the latter didn't want to be found. That, however, only added to the extreme prejudice and hate towards goblins that the human races had. Good thing for goblins was that it didn't influence trade a bit. Some of the trinkets that they found in the depths of the desert, made on their own, or bought\took from island inhabitants were one hundred percent worthy of dealing with them, so, begrudgingly, the trade flourished.

Another thing was that the goblin mages, although being born way more rarely than the human ones, always had an exceptional battle prowess, which is why they were often hired by the neighboring pirate enclaves (and even the adventurers, sometimes), and were a deterring factor by themselves. All of this was a pretty good explanation as to how the goblins managed to survive alongside humans for hundreds of years with THAT kind of history.

Also there were a pretty big number of small and middle-sized islands along the shore of the continent, which were filled by multitudes of miniature island kingdoms, some of them being savage tribes, some being respectable clans from the continent, pirate enclaves of various sizes, and all of this was contantly trading, raiding, exchanging, making peace, then robbing each other again... in other words, the political situation of the islands was so confusing that it wasn't even worth mentioning.