"Right, the video. I need to write down everything I can still remember, and fast."
The thought hit Lucien like a jolt, and he was on his feet before he had finished thinking it through. He dug around the room from memory until he came up with paper and a pen.
He had transmigrated the instant the video ended, and that was not the kind of coincidence a person could afford to shrug off. Those videos might have been a revelation aimed squarely at him, and if he did not get the contents down while they were still fresh, the details would rot away the way dreams did.
The Assassin Potion is the safer bet if you want to stay alive. If you have savings you want to invest, go find the famous mine owner Lanevus. If you can't find Lanevus, don't panic. He's only gone off to look for new investors, and in the meantime you can try his pregnant wife. If you're looking for a way to pass the time, an astronomical telescope for stargazing isn't a bad choice. The official personnel of this world are extremely dangerous. They will treat a transmigrator as a heretic and wipe you out. If you run into them, you must pick up the pistol at your side and defend yourself. If you choose the "Apprentice" pathway, you can drink the potion under a full moon rich in spirituality. There is a chance this earns you the blessing of some great existence. When you believe advancement is hopeless, try reciting the honored name of ■■. This will deliver you straight to Angel. If you hit a predicament you cannot solve, shout ■■■■ toward the sky, and every problem will vanish like smoke.
Lucien's hand stopped mid-stroke.
He stared at items seven and eight, because the crucial names, the ones that mattered more than every other word on the page, were simply gone. He remembered all the surrounding detail with perfect clarity, down to the wording of the sentences, yet the most important parts had been wiped clean as though they had never been there at all.
It was as if fate itself refused to let him remember.
He sat with the blank space for a moment, then decided to set the question aside. Better to get the remaining two items down before those slipped away as well.
If you are not confident in your appearance, choose the 'Secret Supplicant' pathway. Trust me, it will do wonders for your looks.
The original body's face was not bad to begin with, so Lucien let that one pass without much thought and kept writing.
This world has many faiths. You do not need to limit yourself to the Orthodox Churches. Try believing in other existences, and it may bring unexpected gains.
Faith. The original body had followed the God of Steam and Machinery, as far as he could recall.
Steam and Machinery. The name had no weight to it at all. It sounded like someone who had lucked into a divine seat and been handed a title on the way out, and it did not even have the ring of "God of All Machines."
If nothing else, calling him the Omnissiah would have been an improvement.
Having grumbled internally about the original body's choice of deity, Lucien set down his pen. Apart from the two names he could not retrieve, everything he remembered was now on paper.
He did not dwell on the missing names. They were Western-style names, the kind that slid out of memory easily. That was all.
"I'll call it a Transmigration Guide. Follow these ten rules, and the future probably won't throw any curve ball that I can't handle…Probably."
He ran through the list once more, confirmed that nothing besides those two names had been missed, and stood up to stretch.
The mechanical clock on the wall read 6:03 in the morning. He tidied the mess on the desk a little, then decided to wash up before heading out to see what this world actually looked like in daylight.
Lucien lived at 69 Rose Long Street, in a two-story loft. His room was upstairs, and the second-floor washroom sat directly across from it.
After his father died Lucien, still a student, had lost his income overnight. The family house had been sold off long ago by his dear father, so he had been forced to rent this place with the little money that remained. The location was not great, but the environment was tolerable enough.
It was a single room, and because this was the capital, the rent was not cheap: one pound a month. The original body, for the sake of keeping up appearances, had gritted his teeth and signed the lease despite having no income in sight, which told Lucien rather a lot about the original Lucien.
He splashed cold water on his face and caught the metallic tang of it as it ran over his skin. Then he looked up at the mirror above the sink.
Dark brown, slightly curly hair. Brown eyes. Delicate features that did give him something of a rich young master's look, except that his face was deathly pale and worn thin with exhaustion.
He steadied himself. Breakfast first. He was already starting to feel the edge of low blood sugar.
The stairs creaked with age under his feet, so he kept his steps light, one at a time, pausing between each. The last thing he wanted was to wake his landlady, Mrs. Griffin, since soundproofing in this era was a joke.
Mrs. Griffin lived on the ground floor. She was around sixty, a widow with a son working in another city, and she had lived alone here ever since her husband died in an accident ten years ago.
From what Lucien remembered of her, Mrs. Griffin was hardcore in a way that was almost difficult to process. She had once boasted to him about her past: in her youth she had served in the colonial army, and not as a medic or a clerk either. She had been a frontline combatant.
How she had managed that, Lucien had no idea, but it was not hard to imagine what kind of woman it took to serve as a female soldier in this era.
She had also boasted that she had spotted her husband back then and hardcore-proposed to him on the spot. According to her, he had tried to resist at first, but in the end he could not beat her in a fight, so he had no choice but to go along with it.
Exactly how hardcore that proposal had been, Lucien had never learned. He had doubted her stories before, more than once, but then he had seen the decorative flintlocks in her room and the swords and blades that covered an entire wall, and he had decided that keeping his mouth shut was the wiser course.
Lucien opened the front door and stepped out into a street of Victorian buildings that filled his entire field of view.