Familiarity

Lucan's POV

A ray of light hits my eyes and I opened them weakly. I look at the bed beside me and Miriam is sleeping heavily after coming back late in the night from her work. I get up and get dressed and go to the forest nearby to freshen up, I get to the river and splash my face with water and look at my reflection in the water. I was grinning in the reflection...even after two whole years I couldn't get used to my face.

I was now seven years old, my hair still a bit longer and covering my eyes when it droops down. My face has gotten a bit more mature than two years ago and I was still surprised by the well-structured face even though I was still a kid. The most striking change though would be my physique, when I first came into this world I looked just like I did in my previous life. I was weak, skinny, and had almost no muscle or fat on me but it was not the case anymore. I was still lean but my body had become much more defined and muscular.

Ever since that day I first used magic, I had been pushing myself to a new limit both mentally and physically every day, only then would I ever get where I hoped to be. I would train till I couldn't anymore, run till I couldn't feel my legs, and jump into the ice-cold river to steel my resolve. My physical strength was complimentary to my magic strength as both a supporting skill and a direct influence on my special form of magic.

After finishing my training for today, I went back to my tiny home in the slums. Miriam had woken up and was preparing the usual oatmeal for breakfast.

"Welcome back! My little boy is becoming stronger every day" she said while smiling.

I blush a little as she pinches my cheek and I smile back.

"Good morning mom" I say cheerfully.

After having a basic but filling breakfast, Miriam left for her work late in the afternoon. The advantages of being a kid in slums are pretty few, almost nonexistent but one of them is that nobody other than people you know care about you. It's essentially a free, non-constricted existence as long as you don't get in trouble. From now until Miriam comes back I had all the time in the world to do whatever I wanted. I was already working my way towards using my magic to its full potential but there was also another problem....money.

I needed to get out of the slums as soon as possible and for that, I needed money, just enough for me and Miriam to move to the actual town. Miriam had of course been saving for years but that wasn't going to cut it. Luckily for me, people don't care about your age if you are willing to work or bring value. A year and a half ago after I turned six, I started working some odd jobs inside the slums. Mostly labor work which paid pennies but six months into the job I had struck gold....at least relative to the living conditions in the slums.

I had learned that sugar was worth its weight in gold in the slums, almost currency. Unlike Sugarcane in my previous world, the sugarcane in this world was extremely sensitive to the climate and rarely grew with minimum yield. Using sugar carelessly was the privilege of the wealthy...which meant that it was almost non-existent in the slums.

This is where my seemingly random knowledge of the modern world came in. While sugarcane was almost impossible to grow here, there was another way to get sugar....beets. Beets were readily available in the wild in this world and they were indigenous to this place, though, fortunately for me, they are considered weeds as they are too starchy to eat and the process of their refinement in this world was unknown due to very low scientific knowledge.

Over the last year of hard work, I had made a tiny sugar beet nursery near the river in the forest, and because the knowledge about its properties was non-existent to anyone else other than me, I had set out to make sugar on my own in the seclusion of the forest. I had to do all the work myself and it took a year just to set everything up, then I also had to find a way to extract the sugar from the starchy and fibrous roots.

After Miriam left I quickly made my way into the forest where my nursery was, it was extremely crude and makeshift but all that mattered was that it was working. Today was finally the day that I would be able to refine the sugar after months of harvesting and experimenting.

I picked up the basket of beets that I had harvested yesterday and kept and cut them into very thin slices from the knife I had taken from home, I then laid them out and covered them with a muslin cloth and placed rocks on it to weigh it down. The juice from the crushed and thinly sliced beets flowed out and was collected in a bowl, I then heated the bowl to make it a thick syrup and let it crystallize.

I went back home and had dinner with Miriam after she came back before leaving for her night work again. It was late in the night when I sneaked back out and by the time the sugar had all crystallized. All that hard work had finally borne fruit, but the game had just begun and the hardest part was yet to start, I still had to sell it.

I arrived at the only place in the slums where I could sell my sugar, where I would either be killed or be able to sell it without question. Every place, no matter how modern or backward had an underbelly, a darker world...full of crime and illegal dealings, and the slums were a prime candidate for it. I had come to a place where death, murder, and thievery meant nothing, in fact, they were the norm...I had made the gamble of my life here, I would either never make it out or pass through without question. This place dealt in extremes, compromise and resolution was non-existent...I had come to the black market.

As I entered the dark alleyway I heard a rough voice.

"This is no place for kids...why are you here?" the voice said in a threatening tone.

I didn't reply and just held a tiny packet of sugar in my arms.

I then saw a behemoth of a man enter from the shadows.

"Well, well, well...what do we have here. Is that what I think it is" the man smiled greedily. "Follow me" he said immediately.

I nodded and followed him into the twisted and cramped corridors, on the way there I had seen things I wish I hadn't seen. Everything was a commodity in this place and there was nothing that couldn't be sold here. Theives selling their goods, shady merchants selling medicines and drugs made of stuff I wouldn't even dare to describe, traders selling exotic animals and even people. Their was a price tag on anything and everything here, it was just a question of how much was one willing to pay.

We finally arrived at an ominous hut, almost makeshift but that was only on the outside.