1 Those damn kids!

Lei Li woke up one morning to find himself... in his usual arduous routine: Ignore his alarm for an hour or two, find out that he's almost late for a job he got lucky in getting and preparing everything in less than five minutes in a rush make it in time to his office.

It was the same every morning.

Lei thought nothing of this particular day, thinking it'd be the same. That was until he found himself laying in a pool of his own blood after running across the road in his usual morning panic.

"Damn it..." He growled as he glared at the driver of the car that hit him. They were a group of teenagers and looked as if they had just been to the club or whatever they called it... he was a NEET, school and work was as far as his social skills have been through. Anyway, it looked like they went out and had some shots.

The group seem to wake from their stupor when they found Lei in front of their car. They shouted at each other, not knowing what to do. Though in the end they decided to abandon him and drove of in a hurry, getting as far as possible from the site.

And there was nothing to stop them as this part of the street was usually and is empty. It was a shortcut he was grateful for everyday due to his morning tardiness, he just didn't think it'd be the cause of his death.

Lei seethed in anger before laughing to himself. "Haa... it was partially my fault. No need to get angry over those kids, hopefully they learn their lesson though..."

Lei laughed at himself. His words were laced with both sarcasm and self-pity as he found it funny that his death may possibly teach the teenagers to be more disciplined. He eventually found his vision darkening as the loss of blood started affecting his senses. 'At least the pains' become numb'

He cracked his final joke as death eventually embraced his body.

What Lei did not see was a golden leaf that seemingly came out of no where. The space around it rippled as it floated down back and fourth, eventually landing on his forehead. It gave a much larger ripple not long after, as if it was a heart in a struggle to re-start a pulse.

...

Lei woke up groggy and dreary. He looked at his surroundings stupidly. Before confusion started painting his expression.

"Huh...?"

He looked up, down left and right but found the same thing: White

It was a vast expense of white that surrounded his... being? He looked down on his body and found the same white color of the environment.

"Wha...?" His lips wriggled as he found himself uncomfortable that he could 'feel' his body and felt his perspective move according to his input despite lacking a physical body. He eventually got used to the situation and looked at his surroundings once more in curiosity.

As he was experimenting with the boundaries of this world of white, Lei heard a pleasant 'ding' despite his lack of ears... or body, for that matter.

Lei stared at an exclamation mark at the top right of his vision. "This can't be, right...?"

His 'body' shook in excitement. His knowledge from years of accumulating absolutely useless information couldn't help but assume what it could be.

Lei's imaginary hand inched forward nervously and tapped on the icon.

[Booting... please wait]

A happy grin formed on his face despite lacking one as he stared deeply into a panel. It had a lively green theme with tree-like brown outlining the panel. "I'm sure of it this time... a System"

It didn't take long before a new panel replaced the first one.

[Welcome to the 'World Tree System'] Was what the title read out.

Lei continued reading and found that it was your typical system scenario. He was given the choice out of a long branch of what he assumed to be universes.

He identified most of them as he had read or watched it on earth as entertainment. But before that, Lei stared at another panel next to the second one. It seemed to involve things concerning about his body, stats and abilities.

"Hmm..." Lei had already grasped on what situation he was on right now. Although still a bit skeptical, he took what this system stated very thoroughly.

Lei read through the third panel quietly. There was your typical two bars: HP and Energy. Besides that, the panel had three tabs, the first being stats.

[Stats - STR: 0 / AGI: 0 / INT: 0 / END: 0]

Lei went over what the stats meant despite being sure of what it was. STR was his overall level of fitness and determined how much force he could exert. AGI not only included how fast he could move but how quick his body could react and the translation of what he wanted to do to what it does. INT measured his level of intellect, logic and process-speed which also affected his energy bar, at high levels he could control his perception of time. And finally END determined his resistance to debuffs and how much damage his body could take before hitting an HP of 0.

That was the gist of what his status meant. Luckily it wasn't much different from what he had expected so the information was easy to swallow. Now it gave him the choice to allocate a number of points to his stats. He only had ten points to spend right now so he thought seriously.

He started by putting one point in each stat. He didn't wanna know how it felt like to have zero in any of these stats. In the end he distributed the points to what he liked.

[Stats - STR: 2 / AGI: 3 / INT: 3 / END: 2]

Lei finalized at that as he found the balance perfect for whatever he would face later on. He moved on to his ability tab. He had three choices to choose between a long list of abilities. It looked very delicious...

Lei scrolled through the list, he found multiple good choices but resisted the temptation of choosing his ability right then and compiled a list of options to select from. He would most likely fight against many people from what he could see from the list of universes and even if he didn't want to fight, he refused to die to a random canon-fodder.

At the end, Lei had six choices:

[Elemental Affinity: +500% affinity to elemental manipulation. +50% to elemental damage and resistance]

[Telekinesis: User can manipulate matter with the mind]

[Universal Energy: Can integrate all energy; Chakra, Ki, Reiatsu, etc into one system]

[Absolute Accuracy: Accuracy of any action becomes absolute in five minutes. 1H cool down]

[Shape-shifting: Ability to shape one's form according to user's imagination. Stats remain the same]

[Weapon Master: +500 affinity to all weapons. Basic handling of any weapon in user's hand is integrated into mind and body.]

Lei contemplated as he gazed at the six abilities. Elemental Affinity was honestly a good choice, as many universes had at least a small form of elemental practices but the other five abilities wasn't something to easily dismiss. Telekinesis for example, is an ability that has potential as you could literally shape matter to your choice at high levels. For Universal Energy, Lei was already sure at his choice. It's a must have, if he were to travel to another universe where the type of energy he was used to was replaced by another, a proportion of his skills could be lost or have to be relearned. Universal Energy just saves the trouble of the Universe hopping he might go through later on. Absolute Accuracy was also very appeasing to him, imagining having 100% hit rate at whatever he did or wielded sounded too cool and useful to pass up. Although some attacks could probably be dodged, blocked or deflected, there were many possibilities to it. There was nothing much to note from Shape shifting, he just chose it for the survival significance it had. Lastly, there was the Overpowered Weapon Master. It was easily the top choice for him due to the flexibility it offered and the fact that it was comparable or even better in dealing damage than Elemental Affinity.

Lei thought about it over and over again and eventually chose his three; Universal Energy, Weapon Mastery and Absolute Accuracy. His choice for the first two was obvious but he had a different reason to why he chose Absolute Accuracy.

"... It sound cool!" Lei shouted, eyes gleaming as he chuckled to himself.

Obviously it wasn't just that reason. This ability not only gave him the chance to deal higher damage within five minutes due to the increase in accuracy but also because of its potential. This ability allowed him to increase the time limit and decreased cool down every fifty stat by one minute. It was capped at 1H time limit and thirty minutes cool down but it was still a top choice.

With that, Lei gave himself a nod in confirmation of his choices before moving on to the last tab, appearance.

Lei was very exited for this one. He could model his appearance to whatever he wanted! He could literally spend hours customizing characters in an RPG game and now that he could do that to his real body and possibly with one only chance, he was going to go an extra mile in his ways of character perfectionism.

With starry eyes, Lei started. He first thought of the type of character he was going in as.

"What am I gonna do in these worlds...?" With his hand of his chin, Lei thought about it for a second before coming to an ultimate answer:

"To have fun! To laugh, to interact and to mess around!" Lei shouted as a wide smile painted his non-existent face, the surrounding having to put up with his childish and carefree laugh.

There was only one type of character that perfectly fit this description; A little boy

With the perfect layout in mind, Lei began to fully immerse himself in adjusting the sliders of the character creation and the many options of aesthetics.

The appearance of his character came out after a few hours of extreme focus and immersion. The proportion of his body resembled that of an eight year-old boy with his skin taking on a pure and smooth milky tone. His hair was a bit lengthy but it fit as it framed his baby cheeks with its midnight dark color. What was most eye-catching were his eyes that was large and curved, accentuating the innocence of a child. Adding on to that were his amber eyes which lit with a illuminating vibe as a diamond shaped cornea took its place in the center with its contrasting black color. And to top it all, his eye lashes were perfectly long with a slight blush placed under his eyes, further emphasizing his eyes, alluring those to stare and get lost in the color. Finally, he ticked an option stating whether to keep appearance the same as he aged. It won't make him immortal but it was useful.

With that, Lei was ready to move on and choose his first universe.

He was starting off with mediocre stats and abilities that won't be of help before he trained them so it was best to start where there were plenty of opportunities to train and have fun. There was only one show that came to mind. Probably the most generic world most people would choose but was reasonably so; Naruto. Besides wanting to be a shinobi, the reason he chose Naruto was due to it's compatibility to his ability, Weapon Mastery. A shinobi is trained to kill and many had various ways of doing so, he planned on learning most of it. It would be within his capabilities with the help of Weapon Mastery, so it was fine.

Lei nodded to himself, excited in meeting the characters and exploring the wonders of a supernatural world. Watching and reading about it felt completely different now and he hasn't even started yet!

Lei finalized his choices with an eager smile and pressed start "Good luck to me"

[Loading world: Naruto...]