Mercury Cosmetics (1)
“My, that is quite the severe headache.”
“Is it dangerous, Doctor?”
“Not to worry. If we drill a modest hole through your skull to give the pressure some room to breathe, you will be back on your feet in no time.”
Inside a modest residence in Adrian, a physician delivered this grave diagnosis to a patient clutching a throbbing brow. While trepanning was hardly an everyday routine, neither was it considered outlandish in these parts; every so often, local healers genuinely resorted to cracking skulls to relieve mortal afflictions. The trouble was that such primitive medieval quackery no longer passed muster.
“You want to drill into my skull to do what?”
“Wait, what are you doing with that fire iron?!”
“I ought to crack open your thick skull first to see what kind of lunatic comes up with an idea like that! A single Tylenol from the marketplace fixes this instantly, and you want to bore a hole in my head?!”
With general medical literacy steadily climbing throughout the population, brazen nonsense was losing its foothold. Even if ordinary folks had no inkling of modern pharmacology, a single pill ordered from the Head Mod’s Marketplace cleared up almost any mundane malady. Yet the Head Mod’s Marketplace did not exclusively shower medieval society with unalloyed blessings.
I have zero strength left in my limbs (┬┬﹏┬┬)
It was a heartwarming photo that warmed the cockles of one's heart, and the Gallery flocked to the post in droves, showering it with adoring comments. In contrast to the forum's desperate early days, popular fascination with personal beauty and cosmetics had surged exponentially. While much of this was thanks to the marketplace elevating living conditions past mere day-to-day survival, the comments quickly revealed a specific obsession.
Virtually everyone fixated on her porcelain skin. The bathing culture I had spread had left an enormous imprint on public consciousness. In the wake of the Black Plague scare, sanitary hygiene had become an all-consuming interest, which in turn dramatically altered aesthetic tastes. Unlike the medieval past, where nobles assumed they could simply mask body odor with heavy dabs of perfume beneath layers of velvet dresses, modern beauty was now measured by how clean one appeared. Cleanliness equated to whiteness, and whiteness equated to absolute beauty—the cultural formula had cemented itself into law.
Before the arrival of indoor plumbing and systematic bathing, meticulous skincare had been a luxury restricted to the upper and middle classes. Consequently, pristine cleanliness functioned as a blatant display of wealth. The real catastrophe began when the original poster dropped her personal beauty secret in the reply thread.
In this world, next to pure gold, silver stood on the highest pedestal. It exorcised evil spirits, purified filth, resisted rust, and carried a sheen of divine holiness. And quicksilver happened to look like liquid silver—ethereal, gleaming, and mysteriously fluid.
Wait, what? Quicksilver-yeehaw?!
Raw cinnabar and mercury deposits, which had previously sat neglected in mineral veins, instantaneously soared in market value until they matched—or surpassed—solid bullion.
And just like that, unchecked vanity ignited a runaway mercury fad across the entire forum.
At first, you might feel a little hesitation or odd heaviness in your stomach.
But once you drink it all up, ta-da!
(Before-and-after skin comparison photos)
You can see that every single stubborn wrinkle has completely smoothed out!
Drink quicksilver and find true happiness ^^
The quicksilver craze swept through the population like dry tinder. While I was bogged down recruiting workers to neutralize chemical weapons and securing hazardous rift sectors, the trend had burned out of control. The moment I caught my breath from disposing of those weapon caches, an urgent private ping landed in the staff chat that laid bare the entire madness.
Full-Health Elf: Head Mod, Head Mod! Come look, come look, it is!
Juddak*: Yeah? What is it?
Full-Health Elf: (A photo of an ornate glass vial brimming with heavy silver fluid)
Full-Health Elf: Ta-da! I finally managed to purchase some authentic quicksilver, it is!
Full-Health Elf: It was insanely difficult to procure, but if you want some, I can spare a little for you, it is!
Juddak*: .
Juddak*: What kind of crazy shit is this now.
My Sub-Moderator was actively preparing to poison herself right in front of my eyes. For a second, I wondered if screening endless shock memes and tactical nukes had finally melted her brain. Only after scrambling to binge-read the backlog of forum posts I had neglected over the past few days did I grasp the horrific scale of the situation. Driven by sudden vanity, folks were smearing mercury onto their skin, chugging it down by the glassful, and causing an utter nightmare.
“And the dwarves are using this to mint a fortune.”
Naturally, the technologically advanced dwarves had stepped up to refine the substance on an industrial scale. Extracting liquid mercury in bulk, they carted it straight to Adrian, raked in astronomical profits, and immediately funneled every last copper into buying out all the liquor on my marketplace.
The 'Alcohol' category on the Marketplace has been temporarily suspended.
I wiped the alcohol category from the listings that very second. I ran the marketplace so users wouldn't starve and would keep the community active—not to act like a subterranean cartel boss laundering dirty money off lethal poison that slowly rotted human organs.
Stop it.
I took it a step further and decided to issue immediate, unconditional bans on any threads peddling mercury reviews, alleged medicinal benefits, or supposed cosmetic recipes.
“Though relying purely on bans won't fix a thing.”
Human nature was notoriously obstinate: the louder you told people not to touch something, the more desperately they craved it. I wracked my brain for an effective countermeasure, but a simple bureaucratic edict wouldn't cut through the vanity fever.
“A way to hammer home the sheer danger while making quicksilver utterly taboo... Ah.”
I clicked over to the Gallery Management tab. Down in the medical division, the Gallery Doctors were still diligently drawing their monthly salaries under my administration—essentially serving as the civil servants of the platform.
Juddak*: Got a quick commission that comes with overtime pay. Looking for one volunteer.
I posted the brief call for help, and the response was instantaneous.
Recruiting an eager volunteer proved delightfully effortless.
Greetings, everyone.
The weather today is exceptionally clear, and the birds outside are singing sweetly.
Yet my heart is heavy with profound grief.
Why in heaven's name is everyone swallowing quicksilver?
Oh, this is profound, monumental stupidity.
(A clear video recording of laboratory mice exposed directly to heated mercury vapor)
(A GIF of the rodent seizing violently, stiffening into paralysis, and perishing in visible torment)
Look upon this. This substance possesses terrifying, catastrophic danger.
Drinking quicksilver = Death.
Taking a bullet to the chest = Death.
Swallowing liquid quicksilver versus shooting yourself with a firearm—pray tell, what difference is there between the two?
Desist immediately, you foolish, misguided children.
Across the realm, the public placed vastly higher trust in the Gallery Doctors than in any medieval quack. When Kellierton's famous celebrity healer, the raven-masked Plague Doctor himself, personally stepped onto the stage and presented cold, irrefutable visual evidence, the psychological fallout was immense. A single empirical experiment was worth a thousand well-intentioned warnings.
The rampant enthusiasm that had fueled the mercury craze vanished in an instant, replaced by cold dread and bitter hesitation. And how could it not? A rat had convulsed and died before their very eyes under strict medical supervision. Continuing to smear that fluid over their skin now was practically signing a declaration of natural selection.
Yet, as with any revelation, contrarians immediately clawed their way out of the woodwork—the medieval equivalents of flat-earthers and Apollo moon landing deniers who opposed established facts purely for the sake of opposing them. Dwarven mining consortiums who had struck gold on mercury, alongside corrupt clerics skimming hefty cuts as distribution brokers, raised a shrill outcry. They couldn't dare bully an official Gallery Doctor with brute force, but they fought back with vicious rhetorical defiance.
Of course, the Gallery Doctor couldn't formulate a comprehensive modern biochemical explanation. He possessed the empirical diagnostic results, but lacked modern toxicological vocabulary to explain heavy metal poisoning and cellular necrosis.
“Fortunately, I happen to be a twenty-first-century netizen.”
More specifically, a professional home-security specialist—a shut-in who had spent entire decades surfing the endless waves of internet data. I stepped directly into the fray with a rebuttal.
The fact is, your skin isn't becoming healthier at all.
You’re just watching skin normalization via destruction.
Your skin looks snowy pale because the outer layers are undergoing literal necrosis and cell death.
And your wrinkles aren't magically flattening out; your capillaries are collapsing from severe heavy metal toxicity, causing localized swelling that stretches the dead tissue tight.
The dwarven clans conceded and yielded almost immediately. I had half-expected them to stubbornly dig in their heels over losing such an absurdly lucrative cash cow, so their prompt capitulation came as a pleasant surprise.
We, the dwarven smiths and miners, shall strictly refuse to extract or sell quicksilver for any cosmetic or medicinal intent.
Furthermore, to prevent under-the-table bootlegging and black-market dealings, we shall halt all general mercury distribution entirely for the remainder of this calendar year.
They even took bold, sweeping measures to clean up the mess left in their wake.
“Ha! As expected, the Dwarf GOATs never lose their integrity.”
Even when blind drunk, a dwarf possessed too much pride to burden the public with shameless villainy. The true predicament, however, befell the poor forum users who had swallowed the red pill.
With the lethal reality of mercury laid bare, every established cosmetic ritual evaporated overnight. The forum users wandered through the threads looking utterly despondent, resembling lost zombies whose sole purpose had been snuffed out. Some hopelessly desperate users were even trying to rationalize that taking tiny micro-doses might be harmless despite the warnings.
“Hmm. Are they really this desperate for skincare?”
The collective longing for decent personal grooming ran far deeper than I had anticipated. Turning away from the holographic system interface, I looked toward the bedside stand beside my bunker mattress, where a familiar plastic pump bottle rested.
A basic, entry-level daily necessity of modern civilization: skin lotion.
“Should I start by stocking that?”
New merchandise has been stocked in the Marketplace!
Opening the system catalog, I registered an authentic, harmless replacement for mercury on the marketplace shelves.