“So… does anyone use those flowers for, say, medical purposes?”

  “You mean like, a tea or somethin’?” John asked. “I don’t think so.”

  Jessica grinned. With some sulfuric acid, sodium carbonate, ammonium chloride, and beakers to precipitate in, she could invent morphine. And then, with a bit of luck, she might find employment as the king’s personal pharmacist. It was hard to imagine the only person who could isolate opium alkaloids staying a serf for long.

  “Weren’t you gonna help ma’ make the soap?” John asked.

  “Huh? Oh! Yeah. Let’s go do that.”

  Back at the house, Jessica put last night’s wood ash in the kettle to sit. The Serf family was a little off-put by not being able to cook since it took 12 hours to make a caustic slurry. Fortunately, Charles’ second cousin’s family, the Stevenson-Serfs, had enough to spare.

  As they sat around the dinner table with three children running around playing dragon and princess, Steven Jr. Stevenson-Serf was asking about why their cookpot was unusable.

  “Micro-demons? Never heard of ‘em!” Steven said, licking porridge off his dirty fingers.

  Jessica cleared her throat. “Er… I know it’s a strange idea, Steven—”

  He wiped the fingers on his equally-dirty trousers. “Call me Junior!”

  “Right. Well, Junior, the um… you can’t see the demons, you see, but the pollution of the Demon King was subtle, and persisted after his death. The micro-demons are everywhere, but they congregate in certain places. Like raw meat.”

  He stroked his chin. “How come you can see ‘em then?”

  “I have The Sight,” Jessica said, forming a V with her fingers over her right eye.

  Steven Jr., his wife Alice, and the entire Serf family collectively gasped at the revelation of The Sight. The three children looked over in wonder and immediately dropped the game to start doing Jessica’s V-pose.

  “Earth must be incredible to give birth to The Sight,” Junior said. “Ours is so mundane by comparison.”

  “You’ve got elves and magic and quests though,” Jessica said.

  “Who needs ‘em!? Magic doesn’t put food on the table!”

  It could, Jessica thought. At least it ought to. It seemed ridiculous that a world which defied the laws of thermodynamics could still have so much scarcity that agricultural bondage was an important institution. Explaining all that to her hosts seemed like a hassle though, especially when she wasn’t in a position to help them.

  “So when are we gettin’ this soap?” Alice asked.

  Jessica steepled her hands. “I was thinking about making a surplus and charging—”

  “We’ll get ya some of the first batch,” Rosemary said with a smile.

  “Lovely! I’ll scrub my little munchkins ‘til their faces are red as their bums were when I popped ‘em out!” Alice said.

  Jessica glanced at the couple’s eldest son, Steve III. The scrawny five year-old had a face covered in black dirt liquefied by streams of snot. Unfortunately, she didn’t have any knowledge of industrial engineering or she could’ve invented a pressure washer to help Alice apply the soap.

  “I suppose samples aren’t bad for marketing purposes,” Jessica said.

  Jessica finished her dinner and went outside for some air while the two families chatted away. The wooden walls of the hovel seemed sturdy enough to lean against so she did. It made her wish she had a cigarette. Just the one. And a bottle of soju.

  John emerged from the hovel attempting to look nonchalant. He was about as awkward and unsubtle as one might expect from a peasant who lived his entire life in a small hamlet. Jessica wondered briefly if he’d picked up a tiny crush. If she really did look like a morkal, she couldn’t blame him. In a messed up sort of way the morkal had been kind of hot.

  God, grad school really had fried her brain.

  “Hey…” John said, leaning against the wall with his hands behind his back. “The stuff you said about, uh, marketing, I think? What’s that?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Marketing? It’s like… convincing people to buy your product.”

  “Product?”

  “Something you’re trying to sell,” she said. “Like a bar of soap.”

  “Oh! Like hawking your wares! I didn’t know you were gonna sell it. I can tell ma and I’m sure she’ll be willing to—”

  Jessica shook her head. “I get the impression that isn’t something you all do.”

  “It uh… it does feel a bit greedy to make other people pay for it. It’s not like it costs much to make. It’s just lard and ash, right? Heck, we oughta teach everyone to make it since it’s so easy. If there’s micro-demons everywhere I don’t wanna hoard the stuff people need to vanquish them,” John said and then blushed. “I-I mean, that’s just how I see it, a-anyway. You probably know more cuz a’ The Sight and all.”

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  “No, no, you’re right,” Jessica said with a sigh. “If no one gets sick from the micro-demons, we’ll have a better harvest, right?”

  John smiled and nodded. “I’ve heard folks say a rising tide floats all boats but I ain’t ever seen a boat and the water I know just kinda sits there or it goes rushing down a stream. It doesn’t really fill up unless there’s rain. But if people say it, it’s gotta be true.”

  Jessica wasn’t so sure about his logic but his spirit was in the right place.

  After the adults finished their chat the Serf family returned to their own hovel to sleep. By this point Rosemary had made Jessica her own straw pallet which was as comfortable after a day of harvesting as any bed she’d ever laid on.

  The next morning Jessica stirred the slurry with a broom handle and with the help of the Serf family and some linen, separated the potash solution from the water, boiled the potassium salts out, and mixed them with lard to form pasty globs which she hardened with table salt.

  “Where’s the salt come from? I imagine it can’t be cheap,” Jessica said as Charles tried out the new soap on his hairy armpits.

  “Glassbed,” Rosemary said, giving the soap a sniff. “That’s how it got its name, cuz a’ the salt flats. They look like mirrors. Merchants sell it all the way up the King’s Road but we get it dirt cheap cuz we go straight to the suppliers. Trade it for barley bread, mostly.”

  That was a stroke of luck, Jessica thought. She wondered if she could get another.

  “Are there plants near the salt flats?” she asked.

  “Saltwort. Plus some scrub, mostly.”

  Jessica grinned. Saltwort meant halophytic plants and that meant sodium carbonate. That was one ingredient down for extracting opium alkaloids. Now she just needed some sulfuric acid and ammonium chloride and a vessel that wouldn’t react with sulfuric acid. The iron pot the Serfs used for dinner wasn’t gonna cut it. She needed glasses.

  Over the next week soapmaking spread to the other families. For Jessica this was both good and bad.

  The good was that the peasant families required far less convincing than she imagined. Micro-demons, it turned out, were serious business. The bad was that Jessica had to run around like a chicken with her head cut off making sure people didn’t burn themselves. Despite her best efforts, there were a number of arms, legs, and chests covered in chemical burns from the lye and some clothes that had to be chucked.

  She considered it a partial success that no one tried to drink it. After the first few burns, most treated the alkaline solution with the respect it demanded. And by the time Jessica remembered to tell them they could also dilute it to about 3-4% lye to cure food in, no one was willing to test her proposal.

  Annoyances aside, Jessica spent the week quite pleased with herself. Between spreading hygiene standards and harvesting grain, that week felt more productive than the entirety of her grad school career. It helped she could see the results of her labor immediately. Everyone’s faces looked cleaner and healthier and the Stevenson-Serfs’ kids were no longer perpetual snot factories.

  Better yet, Sir Hayek was nowhere to be seen. In all likelihood he’d forgotten about her. Nonetheless, she didn’t feel tempted to leave. The first round of barley stalks would be done drying next week and then it was time for threshing and milling. On the second day of threshing, however, something happened which disturbed the rhythm of her new life.

  Jessica saw the group of four coming down the King’s Road from the north shortly after lunchtime while she was whacking some barley with a flail.

  It was obvious this was a party of adventurers since one of them was a bland-looking teenage boy in a black-and-grey trenchcoat and his three companions were a dark elf with a ponytail and a v-cut to her navel, a girl with fox ears wearing a metal collar, and a suspiciously small girl who Jessica really, really hoped was a halfling.

  “Oh Christ…” she said aloud.

  “Huh? What’s that?” John asked, pausing his threshing.

  She pointed at the brightly-colored group in skimpy clothing. “Adventurers.”

  “We get adventurers passin’ through from time to time. Especially goin’ to the Sultanate. They won’t cause any harm I don’t figure.”

  In contrast to John’s reassurance, the morkal’s words about adventurers and their power echoed in Jessica’s head. She didn’t like the look of them, especially knowing the edgy dork in the trenchcoat had come from Earth and spent his time collecting a harem, one of whom was literally wearing a collar. The institution of serfdom had clearly not been a problem for him.

  She kept an eye on the group as they came up the road past the field. To her chagrin, the teenage boy noticed her and came toward her.

  By this point Jessica had traded her rubber rain boots, lab coat, and sweatpants for a brown wool gown and leather sandals. With her eye bags cleared up and her hair tied back in a single braid, she should have looked indistinguishable from the other serfs. She wasn’t sure why she caught his attention.

  “You’re not from here, are you? You got reincarnated, same as me. The hell are you doing farming?” he asked, squinting at her. “Is there a farming skill?”

  She put her hands on her hips. “Well it takes skill, that’s for sure. As for why…”

  There was something cold and calculating behind the kid’s eyes she didn’t like. Admitting she had her system taken away by a morkal felt like tipping him off too much.

  “I like to farm. Not everyone goes on crazy adventures with a harem when they reincarnate in another world,” she said, completely ignorant of the existence of a sub-genre devoted to precisely what she was describing.

  The teenaged boy laughed. “Oh you’re one of those types. Got it. No aura moments for you, just cozy life slices. Whatever you say. Couldn’t be me though.”

  Jessica saw John taking in everything with wide eyes. Please don’t take this boy as a role model, she silently pleaded. He’s an obnoxious, edgy dork who was a loser in real life.

  “How’d you know I was reincarnated?” she asked.

  He gestured at his eyes. Well, that should have been obvious. Barleyfield and its inhabitants were solidly medieval European-looking. Her half-Korean ancestry was not. The boy himself also looked like he came from East Asia, but it felt like an awkward thing for her to come right out and ask. Fortunately, he offered this information up himself.

  “I’m from Japan,” he said. “My name’s Akuhara Jun. You’re Korean, I take it?”

  “Uh… I’m from Ohio.”

  “Oh. You look Korean. You’re probably from a Korean family? I can tell.”

  “Where’s Ohio?” the fox girl asked in a high-pitched and rather dopey voice.

  “Don’t worry about it, Vix-chan.”

  “Oh okay.”

  Jessica sighed. “Yeah, man, my dad’s Korean. What are you getting at?”

  “Nothing. I actually like kimchi a lot. Even the spicy stuff,” he said.

  She burst out laughing at that. “Okay dude. I’ve got some grain to thresh, so don’t let me hold up your questing.”

  “Actually,” Akuhara said, “I was hoping you could help me with that. We’re hunting a morkal.”