The sun wasn't up yet. It was never up yet when I started. I scraped the ash from last night's embers, stacked fresh kindling, and got the Ember Hard Wood burning. The wood caught slow, the way it always did — a reluctant flame that licked at the edges before finally committing.
I watched it for a minute, letting the warmth hit my face, listening to the crack and hiss of the bark splitting. The oven needed to hit four hundred fifty degrees by the time the first customer walked in. That gave me about two hours, give or take. Nobody could tell time properly in this world, but the oven didn't care.
It just sat there, hungry and patient, soaking up heat like a blacksmith's forge. I fed it another log and let the door clang shut. I'd gotten used to the rhythm by now. Flour on the board, water from the morning bucket, a pinch of Aether Yeast dissolved in warm liquid.
The dough came together under my palms, elastic and alive. Same movement every day. Fold, press, turn. Fold, press, turn.
My knuckles ached in the cold morning air, but it was a good ache. The kind that meant I'd done something. The flour was cool and fine grained, dusting my fingers white up to the second knuckle. It smelled faintly of grain and earth — not the sterile bleached smell of supermarket flour back home, but something older.
Something that had been grown in soil that still had minerals in it, that hadn't been strip mined by industrial agriculture. I kneaded harder, putting my weight into it, feeling the gluten tighten and resist. The system interface flickered at the edge of my vision. It was always there now.
A translucent overlay, shimmering like heat haze, showing me ingredient stats and oven temperature and a little timer that counted up instead of down because the system didn't believe in deadlines. I'd stopped trying to dismiss it. It stayed whether I wanted it or not, a quiet ghost in my peripheral sight.
"Morning, Sir." Al descended the stairs, already dressed, his hair slightly less immaculate than usual. He'd been sleeping better lately.
I didn't ask why. "Morning," I said. "Coffee's on the counter."
"The what?"
"Herbal infusion. Brown leaves. Tastes like dirt. You'll love it."
He made a face and poured himself a cup anyway. We worked in comfortable silence after that. He prepped the serving plates. I shaped the first batch of dough into rounds and laid them on the wooden peel.
The breakfast crowd trickled in around what I guessed was seven. A few merchants, a courier, an old man who always ordered the same thing and always complained it was too hot. I fired pizzas, slid them onto plates, watched people eat. Around mid service, a woman I recognized as one of the weavers from the textile district caught my eye.
She was mid chew, staring at her half finished Margherita with an expression I couldn't quite place. "Everything all right?" I asked.
She blinked, swallowed. "Yes. Sorry."
"I was just... thinking."
"About?"
She shook her head, almost embarrassed. "I've been sleeping terribly lately. Bad dreams, you know."
"But last night, after I ate here yesterday evening..." She trailed off, picking at her crust. "I slept through the whole night. First time in weeks."
I kept my face neutral. "That's good."
"Yeah." She smiled, a little uncertain. "Maybe it was the herbs."
"Maybe."
She finished her pizza and left with a small wave. I watched her go, my hands still wet from wiping down the counter. The system interface pulsed gently in my peripheral vision. I pulled up the Margherita's active properties.
There it was, plain as day:
*Minor Calming Effect — duration 4-6 hours.*
I wiped my hands on my apron and got back to work.
Another customer came in around mid morning. A trader I didn't recognize, heavy set, with a leather satchel slung across his chest. He ordered a mushroom pizza and ate it in three minutes flat, barely chewing. Then he ordered another one and ate that too. He left without saying a word, just dropped the coins on the counter and walked out.
I watched him go, wondering if he'd feel anything different today. If the system's magic would settle into his bones the way it had for the weaver. I'd never know. That was the weird part — I'd never know.
The rest of the morning passed without incident. I made pizzas, Al served them, the customers ate and paid and left. Normal. Routine. The kind of day I'd dreamed about back when I was debugging SQL queries at two in the morning. But the system stayed at the edge of my vision, pulsing softly, waiting.
By midday, the crowd thinned. Al swept the floor. I scraped the oven floor clean and fed the embers for the afternoon service. The pizzeria smelled like bread and cheese and woodsmoke. It smelled like home.
I stood at the counter, wiping it down with a damp rag, and looked at my hands. Flour dusted, calloused, dotted with a few new burns. A pizzaiolo's hands. Not an IT manager's hands. Not Edgard's soft noble fingers. Mine. I'd made this.
All of it. The dough, the oven, the life. Some asshole System Architect from another dimension had dropped me into a fantasy world and given me a pizza gimmick, but I was the one who woke up every morning and did the work. I scraped the last bits of dried cheese off the counter, threw the rag in the bucket, and stretched my back until it cracked.
The oven glowed. The dough was proofing. The sun was finally up. One day down. A thousand more to go.