The Reincarnated Copy Boy

level up!

The red stone he held up to the light again. The pulse of it was almost mesmerising. He had no idea what it was, what it did, or whether it was safe to carry, and the System, when he asked it, offered him nothing useful.

Unidentified item, Small Red Stone. Properties unknown.

"Brilliant," Ben said, and put it carefully in his breast pocket. Away from anything important.

He retrieved his original dagger from the undergrowth, wiped both blades on a fern, and sheathed them. He was bleeding from the claw marks on his forearm in a way that probably needed addressing. He tore a strip from the inside hem of his shirt, it was long enough that losing the bottom inch wouldn't inconvenience him, and bound the wound with more efficiency than elegance. It would do for now.

He stood up, adjusted the pack on his shoulders, and turned away from the goblin with the deliberate purposefulness of a man who has decided not to look back at something.

"System," he said, keeping his voice low this time. The shouting, he had concluded, was off the agenda for the foreseeable future.

“Standing by.”

"You mentioned bonus attribute points. Three of them. Can you tell me how the status system works? How do I access it?"

“Status Window can be accessed at any time by request. Speak 'Status' to open.”

Ben cleared his throat. "Status."

The forest did not disappear. He did not step into another dimension. What happened was rather more elegant and rather more disconcerting, a panel of information simply appeared in front of his eyes, hanging in the air at approximately the distance of a comfortable read, perfectly clear and perfectly transparent, so that he could see the forest through it while also reading every line.

It was, in every meaningful sense, exactly like looking at a character screen in a video game.

BENJAMIN HARLOW

Class, Unassigned Level 2

VITALS

HP: 210 / 210

MP: 20 / 20

ATTRIBUTES

Strength: 7

Intelligence: 8

Agility: 6

Bonus Points Available: 3

SKILLS

Perfect Copy Level 1. 1 use per rest cycle

Online Shop Level 1 Locked, Available at Level 10

STATUS, No active effects.

Ben stood in the forest with a floating display hovering in front of his eyes and stared at it for a long moment. He had played enough role playing games to understand the architecture of it immediately, and that understanding was doing something very strange to his brain, the same part of his brain that had always accepted the logic of game systems with complete naturalness was now receiving direct real world input in the same format, and the two were meeting in an area that felt faintly like vertigo.

"Huh," he said.

He studied the numbers. His intelligence was his highest attribute, which tracked. His agility was the lowest, which also tracked, given that he had just been ambushed by a four foot goblin and dropped his primary weapon inside the first thirty seconds. He needed to be faster. He also needed to hit harder when he did connect, because the bruises along his forearm from the pommel impact were telling him that he was currently working at the absolute outer limit of his physical capacity.

He thought about it carefully.

"I want to put two points into Agility," he said. "And one into Strength."

Confirm plus 2 Agility, plus 1 Strength?

"Yes."

Confirmed. Agility is now 8. Strength is now 8.

The status window updated immediately. He watched the numbers change and felt, nothing, physically. No surge of energy, no sudden sense of capability. He moved his arm experimentally. It still hurt where the goblin had clawed him.

"I don't feel any different," he said.

Attribute increases apply at a foundational level and improve performance over time. Immediate subjective difference is minimal.

"So it's more like, actual improvement, rather than a sudden power up."

“Correct.” The system said.

"Right." He dismissed the status window, he found that thinking close in a deliberate way made it disappear and looked at the forest around him. Shadows were deepening between the trees. The afternoon light, already golden, was taking on the amber quality of approaching evening.

He needed to move.

He set off in the direction of the water, walking more carefully this time, with rather less whooping and rather more awareness of the undergrowth on either side of the path he was picking through the trees. The extra point in Agility might not have given him a sudden burst of superhuman reflexes, but the attention it prompted him to pay to his own movement wasn't nothing.

The river appeared between two large roots about ten minutes later, not a dramatic discovery but a quiet one, the trees thinning at the bank and the water running clear and fast over a bed of smooth dark stones. It was wider than he'd expected, perhaps fifteen feet across and deep enough in the centre that the bottom was invisible. He knelt at the bank and checked the water skin. Half full.

He refilled it, capped it, and stood to look along the bank in both directions.

Downstream. Follow the water downstream. That was how it worked in every story he had ever read, and he had always been a thorough reader when the subject interested him. Rivers ran to settlements. Settlements had food, information, and probably, with any luck, some kind of inn.

He followed the bank downstream.

The river led him steadily out of the densest part of the forest and through a transition zone where the trees grew shorter and further apart and the undergrowth began to thin into something approaching open ground. The light was changing the amber of late afternoon deepening through orange towards the purple of a sunset that was rather more spectacular than any he had seen at home, the sky above the tree line lit with colours that looked professionally arranged.

He climbed the bank as the ground rose, pulling himself up through a belt of long grass to a low ridge, and turned to look out over the landscape below.

It spread out before him with the unhurried grandeur of somewhere that has never been required to justify itself. The forest stretched behind him and to either side, vast and dark and ancient, and before him the land opened rolling country, hills in the middle distance, fields of some crop he didn't recognise arranged in neat patchwork rectangles that told him immediately, with a relief that was almost physical, that people were out there. Working the land. Growing things. Building.

And there, at the far edge of the rolling country, collected against the foot of a low hill in the amber distance, a town. Too far to see clearly, just the angular suggestion of rooftops and walls and the faint, thread thin smudge of smoke rising into the cooling air, but unmistakably a town. A real one.

He judged the distance. Estimated the terrain between him and it, the way the land fell and the river curved through it. He had no skill at this kind of calculation, but he had a reasonable sense of his own walking pace from three years of the twenty five minute commute.

Four days, he thought. Maybe four and a half, if the terrain was harder than it looked.

He was still working through the implications of that when something in the sky above the distant hills caught his eye and held it.

The first moon had already risen without him noticing, pale and large in the east, the same size as the moon he had grown up with but positioned slightly wrong against the darkening sky, as if it had come up from a different angle. He had noticed it distantly and filed it without conscious thought under everything is different here, keep moving.

The second moon stopped him completely.

It rose from the south east, smaller than the first, and a colour that the moon at home had never been a soft, distinct amber, like a coal at the outer edge of its heat. It moved with the same slow, majestic patience as its companion, the two of them hanging above the distant hills like a pair of mismatched lanterns left out by a very tall householder.

Ben stood on the ridge in the cooling air and looked at the two moons.

He had known, intellectually, since the deity had told him this was a different world, that it would be different. He had expected different. He had been managing the different in manageable doses, the forest, the System, the goblin, the status window. Bite-sized pieces of strangeness.

The two moons did not come in a bite sized piece. They came as a fact the size of the sky, undeniable and complete, and what they told him with absolute certainty was that he was very far from Mercer Street.

"Okay," he said quietly. "This world has Two moons. Alright."

He looked at them for another long moment. Then he turned away from the view and unslung his pack.

He needed to take stock before the light failed. He opened the bag and laid out the contents on a flat rock near the ridge the water skin, the cloth wrapped bread, the piece of dried meat from the goblin's pouch, and an assessment.

The bread was perhaps enough for one day's eating, possibly two if he was careful. The goblin's dried meat, he unwrapped it and looked at it with cautious pragmatism was identifiable as meat in the broadest sense. He rewrapped it. The water skin, refilled at the river, would last perhaps a day if he was sensible about it.

He had a four-day walk ahead of him.

He was resupplied for one.

He sat with the contents of his pack laid out before him and the two moons rising above the far hills and the town a distant smudge of smoke and rooftops on the edge of the world, and he felt the first cold fingers of a practical problem closing around the warmth of his earlier relief.

He had survived a goblin. He had a skill that could copy one item per sleep cycle. He had eight points of agility and a strip of shirt linen bound around a claw wound on his forearm. He had food and water for a day, and somewhere out there was a town that was four days away.

The forest behind him was the same forest that had already demonstrated it contained goblins. The open country ahead of him was unknown. The System, when he queried it, offered no guidance on local foraging and no reassurances about the safety of the terrain between here and those distant rooftops.

He packed everything back carefully and settled the bag on his shoulders.

"System," he said.

Standing by.

"Is there anything in my skills or attributes that can help me find food in the wild?"

A pause that was slightly longer than usual.

No relevant skills detected. Perfect Copy can replicate existing food items. Online Shop is not yet available. No foraging or survival skills are currently registered to your profile.

Ben looked at the single cloth wrapped package of bread in his pack. He thought about the four days ahead of him. He thought about the one copy he could make per rest cycle, and the one portion of bread he had to copy with it.

"Right," he said. For the third time today, and with rather more weight behind it than the previous two.

He started walking.

Behind him, the two moons climbed slowly into the darkening sky. Ahead of him, the river curved through the open country towards the distant town, and the shadows of the coming night reached out across the grass, and somewhere in the forest at his back something called out with a sound that was not quite like anything he had heard before.

He walked faster.

One day's food. Four days of walking. A world he knew nothing about.

He was beginning to think that the god's apology, while sincere, had perhaps undersold the situation.