Bang, bang, bang! A burst of rough knocking jolted Jess awake.

"Jess! Jess Seso!"

"Coming."

Jess threw on his shirt and opened the door. Outside, people were gathering in groups and heading toward the city gates, where some kind of grand assembly seemed to be underway. The noise was tremendous.

A burly man who barely came up to Jess's chest stood outside and promptly seized him by the collar.

"What are you doing, huh? Sleeping in on a day this important? You're about to miss it!"

Calling him burly was no joke. The fellow was a dwarf, with a thick black beard, a broad, fleshy face, and a linen eyepatch over his right eye—and he was unusually tall by the standards of his people.

"So, Gred, what happened?" Jess asked impatiently.

"Don't you want to see Alleria Windrunner?" Gred said excitedly. "She's a ranger commander of Quel'Thalas and General Turalyon's sweetheart... If you don't see her now, when will you ever get another chance to lay eyes on an elven beauty like that?"

At the name Alleria Windrunner, Jess's heart slammed twice against his ribs.

Not because he had any particular feelings for the elven general. The familiar name had simply stirred memories of his previous life that had long lain buried.

Yes, he was a transmigrator. He had been in this world for seventeen years.

From the moment he was pulled from his mother's womb, he had known something was wrong. His memories of his former world remained as clear as carvings in stone; not even the rapid development of his brain between the ages of three and five had erased them.

One moment, he had been sitting at his computer, focused on progression raiding in World of Warcraft. Then drowsiness swept over him, and the world before his eyes changed completely.

He had been born in Lordaeron's Capital City. His father was a guard on the city walls, and his mother was the daughter of a farmer from Brill.

His childhood had gone smoothly enough. Then, when he was ten, the Dark Portal opened and the war against the orcs began. Fortunately, Lordaeron's capital had not suffered greatly in the war.

Refugees fleeing the Kingdom of Stormwind told stories of chaos and disaster in the distant south. Their accounts convinced Jess that everything here was exactly as the game had described it.

If he wanted to live out his life in peace, he had to leave Lordaeron and settle in Stormwind.

According to the game's story, little more than a decade from now, glorious Lordaeron would be utterly destroyed by the Scourge, and plague would ravage the entire kingdom.

The victims would not even find peace in death. Necromancy would drag them from their graves and force them to fight for undead masters bent on conquering the world, until their bodies were torn apart and could rise no more.

Stormwind, meanwhile, might lie in ruins now, but the next few decades would be relatively smooth for it, with no disasters on the same annihilating scale.

Jess naturally refused to sit around and wait for death. His parents, however, had lived in Lordaeron all their lives and would never agree to move. Nor could he convince them to believe a warning from another world about events that would not happen for more than a decade.

Fortunately, they did not object to young Jess leaving home in search of adventure.

Stormwind had been destroyed in the war. To help House Wrynn rebuild its homeland, King Terenas II of Lordaeron had spent a fortune hiring craftsmen and young laborers from all the human kingdoms and even from the dwarves.

Jess, fifteen at the time, had ridden that tide south alongside Stormwind's returning refugees. He came to the city that had been a beacon of hope in the game and would later become the capital of the Alliance.

Now Gred used his sturdy body like an icebreaker, forcing a path through the crowd with Jess in tow, laughing all the while.

He made no attempt to hide his excitement. The legendary warrior Alleria Windrunner was exactly the kind of woman he adored—a fighter who possessed both beauty and strength. Unlike those flamboyant elves who loved to boast, she was a genuine hero capable of taking on a hundred foes.

Jess was excited too. This was the first famous figure from Warcraft he would ever see with his own eyes.

For the first seventeen years of his life, those familiar names had reached him only through his parents, other country folk, townspeople, or reports brought back from battle.

He had never personally known any of them. He had never even seen one.

Jess followed Gred through the inner gate and into the Valley of Heroes—though, of course, it did not yet bear that name.

Without its statues, the valley was a battered ruin. Years of war had scarred every inch of it. The flames of demon-worshiping warlocks and red dragons had burned the once-lush shade trees along the river into a blackened mess.

Veterans of the war against the orcs marched in formation across the newly rebuilt bridge at the city gates. Their armor still bore scorch marks and dents from blades, while their weapons and shields displayed the emblems of many different kingdoms.

Their destination lay more than five hundred kilometers to the southeast: the Dark Portal, the passage through which the orcs had entered this world from another realm.

High General Turalyon was gathering an army at Nethergarde Keep. They intended to cross the Dark Portal built by the orcs, strike directly at their homeland of Draenor, and end the Horde's threat to the world of Azeroth once and for all.

Yet among the crowd watching the army depart, Jess alone knew how it would end.

A few years from now, the orc leader Ner'zhul would unleash the magic that destroyed Draenor, tearing the entire world apart. To keep the catastrophe from spreading to Azeroth, the expedition would destroy the Dark Portal from the Draenor side.

Every member of the expedition would be stranded in that dying world.

To honor their sacrifice, the king of Stormwind would order statues erected on this bridge to the expedition's heroes—the Sons of Lothar—and name this place the Valley of Heroes.

"Where's Alleria? I want to see Alleria Windrunner!" Gred roared, utterly indifferent to the solemn mood around him.

Almost everyone present, whether citizen of Stormwind or member of the expedition, understood the danger of the mission. They had gathered to send the soldiers off.

But to a dwarf like Gred, fighting to the death against an enemy capable of destroying the world was life's highest romance.

He stared at the dwarven warriors who had come from Aerie Peak to join the column, his gaze full of envy rather than concern.

"If one of those troll bats hadn't blinded me in one eye and ruined my hammer aim, I'd follow Kurdran Wildhammer straight through the Dark Portal myself," he said in Common thick with a dwarven accent. "Then I'd be General Alleria's closest comrade-in-arms. Who knows whether your High General Turalyon or I would win the beauty in the end?"

At those words, the irritation in the surrounding citizens' eyes quietly faded.

Before the war against the orcs, humans, dwarves, and elves had been divided by deep mistrust and conflict. They had even clashed several times.

But every resident of Stormwind now knew that if the dwarves and elves had not stood beside humanity in its darkest hour and fought the otherworldly invaders without regard for their own lives, the people of Stormwind might never have returned home.

"Alleria has two younger sisters every bit as beautiful," Jess said. "You still have a chance, Gred."

"Hah!" Gred gave an awkward laugh. "I've no interest in immature little girls. I like mature women."

"Lady Sylvanas, the middle of the three Windrunner sisters, is supposedly more than six hundred years old."

"More than six hundred? Then her older sister must be—"

"Shh..."

Jess saw the blue-feathered golden phoenix banner of the high elves approaching in the distance.

"They're here, they're here! Help me onto the railing... I can't see!"

Gred grumbled. Jess had to use every ounce of strength merely to lift the nearly two-hundred-and-twenty-pound barrel of iron a little higher.

From the corner of his eye, he watched a formation of high elves advance. They wore silver-white armor and carried engraved spears and silver bows. Sea-blue cloaks snapped in the wind blowing through the valley. Men and women alike moved with an elegance and composure that set them sharply apart from the dwarves and humans.

The female elf at their head, mounted on a white horse, was likely Alleria Windrunner, Ranger-Captain of Silvermoon.

She wore an emerald-green cloak, and pale golden hair fell over her chest. Her eyes, glowing blue with arcane power, were clearly visible even in the sunlight as she stared resolutely ahead.

Alleria's cheeks were astonishingly gaunt. Combined with her narrow, pointed nose and long ears that swept upward, she looked rather strange by human standards.

Jess still remembered the first time he had seen an elf from Quel'Thalas back in Lordaeron. He had felt as though he had encountered an alien.

Their overall appearance was the same as in the game, only far more detailed and real. Yet Jess no longer saw them through the eyes of the player he had once been.

After more than a decade in another world, he sometimes wondered whether he was drifting farther and farther from the office worker he used to be and becoming more like a native of Lordaeron.

Without the certainty of the Scourge invasion in another decade, he could never have made the decision to cross the sea and leave his homeland for Stormwind.

Perhaps that was because he had no special advantage.

Even now, there was no ancient master living in a ring, no suddenly awakened primordial bloodline, no arcane gem brimming with magic, and no god or demon king whispering guidance in his ear.

He was just a laborer from the north. Aside from speaking Common with a Brill accent, he was no different from any other local.

Other people got one kind of transmigration. Then there was his.

If Jess had begun with some system for allocating stats like the protagonists of other transmigration novels, perhaps he would already possess the power to stop all this and save the world in their place.

As things stood, he could only scrape together a living with his own hands. At best, his knowledge of future events might help him choose somewhere safe and stable to keep his head down.

But at the very least, he had to earn enough money to bring his aging parents from Lordaeron to Stormwind. If he could not save the world, he could at least protect the people who mattered most to him.

Gred watched the expedition recede into the distance and sighed. "Got any plans today?"

"I'll check the notice board for work," Jess replied. "Next month's rent is almost due."

The two chatted as they followed the crowd back toward the inner gate.

"Mine too," Gred said. "A few Bronzebeards say Baron Lescovar is raising the rent next month, from five silver to six."

"Why don't you move somewhere else?"

"Where? Rents are going up all over Stormwind, and every cheap place is full. What, should I move to Goldshire and get my head cut off by an orc on the way?"

"Hasn't the road to Goldshire resumed regular patrols?"

"It has. Just last month they found a patrolman's sword and guts by Crystal Lake."

"A sword and... guts?"

"Human guts, not orc guts."

"Could have been wolves."

"Does it make a difference, Jess? Wolves, orcs, murlocs—Elwynn Forest is worse than the damned Hinterlands, I'm telling you. At least the Amani trolls understand a little Dwarven. If you shout, 'Spare me!' they won't mistake it for, 'Put my head on a spear!'"

"They'll put your head on a spear either way," Jess said with a laugh.

"True enough. But then it feels like you fought an enemy to the death instead of getting eaten for no reason by a brainless beast. You know what I mean?"

Still trading jokes, they reached the notice board at the crossroads in the Trade District. A few months ago, nearly every posting had concerned repairs in one district or another. Now many were wanted notices for bandits and wandering orc leaders in Elwynn Forest, along with recruitment notices for jobs in the Redridge Mountains.

Stormwind's reconstruction was nearing completion, and most of the finer, more specialized work had already been taken over by the city's professional craftsmen's organization, the Stonemasons' Guild. That meant outside laborers like Jess and Gred had to find some other way to survive.

Jess rented a room on a back street behind the Stormwind counting house, in one of the first buildings raised in the new district. Most refugees lived in the Old Town; those willing to live in the new district were outsiders and laborers like them.

But as the new district grew more prosperous, Jess's rent had risen to four silver a month, and it would probably rise again soon. Dwarves always had reliable information.

To someone who had once played World of Warcraft, four silver sounded like a joke. In the game, he had carried hundreds of thousands of gold without thinking himself particularly rich, and a casual trip to the auction house could involve thousands changing hands.

Here, however, many people in Stormwind could work for an entire month without earning even a few silver.

Jess remembered a man outside his building the previous year who cleaned armor and weapons for veterans, charging only two or three copper each time. Back then, the silver mines in Westfall had not yet been reclaimed from the Blackrock orcs, and one silver coin was worth nearly two hundred copper.

The man was a Stormwind native and had once had some connection to a noble family, yet he now lived in extreme poverty. Jess had heard that ogres had occupied his house during the orc occupation, and rebuilding it had left him buried in debt.

Jess was worse off than that man. At least the fellow had a trade. Jess had nothing but physical labor, and the pay promised by Terenas II was nearly gone.

They had originally been promised one gold coin each. By the time the money reached their hands, it had become forty silver.

The noble responsible for paying them claimed that the kobolds had been driven from the gold mines around Goldshire. Gold had become cheaper, he said, so forty silver was now worth one gold coin.

Yet since arriving in the Kingdom of Stormwind, none of the workers had seen a single gold coin—or a single kobold. Only Jess knew that twenty years from now the kobolds still would not have been cleared from those mines, and their boss would even have gold teeth.

More importantly, if the gold mines had resumed production, why had they not been paid in gold coins—or at least in chunks of gold of roughly equal weight?

Work was becoming harder to find by the day. The previous week, Jess had taken a job escorting lumber from Eastvale Logging Camp to Stormwind. A pack of gray wolves had stalked the hired workers for two or three hours, and each of them received only thirty-five copper when they returned. It was a joke.

Even so, crowds of outsiders just like him had fought madly for the work.

As he fretted over his prospects, a rather unusual posting caught his eye.

"Assistant wanted. Applicants must possess some knowledge of history and archaeology and preferably some familiarity with herbs. Patience and other commendable qualities required. Workplace in the Mage Quarter.—Eden Malin."

Eden Malin?

Jess remembered that the Mage Quarter of Stormwind had an Archmage Malin, and that his daughter was also an accomplished mage. More than a decade from now, she would join the Alliance and Horde's united northern campaign.

If this Eden Malin was that Archmage Malin, applying to be his assistant might be the perfect opportunity to become a mage.

History, archaeology, and herbs... Jess had never formally studied history or archaeology, but with his knowledge of this world's setting, he believed he could easily surpass the vast majority of ordinary people in all three areas.

Since the mage had posted the notice on a board used by migrant laborers and common citizens, his expectations could not be too high.

Once Jess became a mage, surely he would never lack money again.