Chapter 3

I woke up with a start and full of energy. It wasn't like a normal wake up where you come awake and it takes time to get going and be fully aware of your surroundings, this was more like you blinked one second and when your eyes opened from the blink you knew that time had passed.

The first thing that I noticed was that the power was still on which was a good thing since that most likely meant that this wasn't a System apocalypse scenario where our science driven technologies suddenly stopped working or at least some of them still worked. I looked around my small villa slash home slash workshop slash compound making sure that nothing had drastically changed inside my little safe area for the moment. 

Once I finished making my rounds, and saw that there were no pulsating portals of doom or new ominous stairways leading down into a dark dungeon I holster my weapon and made my way back towards my office and quickly start looking for news channels and new posts on WeTube and other social media platforms to find out what others are seeing.

The first five minutes or so were fairly quiet and while I found news stations they were all running static standby screens with elevator music as if they were out of service. I was using my cell phone to send messages checking on my employees and friends while also offering shelter to anyone who wanted and could make the trip to either my main workshop in town, to my home compound just outside of town, or to one of the company owned vacation buildings we had scattered around the country. 

I would never have called myself a doomsday prepper but our world had been fairly volatile since I was a good so I made sure that anywhere I, or my company, bought property that it was well stocked for emergency situations like hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, or pretty much any other natural disaster. I care about and do my best to look out for my people so I wanted emergency help to always be within travel distance for any of my employees. My company wasn't rated in the top five best companies to work for last year for nothing.

While I was opening up encoded files on my desktop and sending out addresses of our various locations, security codes and key locations to access them, and generally trying to get my people somewhere they could group up with people they know and can trust, the news stations slowly started to come back online. Posts started popping up on the social media sites as well, mostly just people talking about the message we had all heard and seen as well as freaking out about what comes next. 

The first post that popped up that seemed interesting was on WeTube where a guy was talking about accessing the System and the class choices he had been given. He seemed to mostly be ranting about only being offered common classes and how he was supposed to be the protagonist in this "story" and how dare the system force him into a role that was destined to be the slave or lapdog of others. You know, the usual woe is me. I refuse to take responsibility for my own life, the kind of whining that is so common. 

I know now that he had a legitimate concern seeing as common classes pretty much are the low rungs of society except in very extreme cases. I feel bad thinking about how harshly I had thought about the guy as even those who refuse to let their class choices define them very rarely get a chance to upgrade their classes to a higher rarity. Common classes rarely get the chance to do much of anything that would greatly improve their chances of survival or improving their lives and station. 

Commons rarely earn the right to upgrade or change classes, rarely earn the right to have sub classes or a second full class, they rarely have the strength to go beyond level 50 in their entire lives, and even if the common classer or commoners as most call them are born geniuses who in other circumstances could change the universe as we know it… because they lack the options higher rarity classes do they are held down and smothered.

The one thing the guy did share that was useful, and that I had neglected to really investigate since I was trying to make sure my employees and friends had the information they needed to the supplies and safe houses nearest them, was how to access the System itself! 

"System!" I called out hesitantly, almost afraid that this was really just an elaborate special brownies dream like I had once experienced at a party in high school. I was therefore pretty damn stoked when a System screen appeared in front of my eyes. 

It was fairly interesting as the screen floated like a semi-transparent hologram but also when it opened I seemed to gain some instantaneous understanding of what it was and how I could use it. For example, I knew that I could create a heads up display tailored to my preferences just by thinking about what information I wanted to show, how I wanted it to be displayed, and where I wanted the information to display in my vision. It was pretty neat and after playing with it for a few minutes I found a HUD that I could use easily, for the moment, and if I found I needed it to change in the future I could make changes at that time.

I also knew that I could access all functions of the system with a simple thought as it was now connected directly to my "soul" for lack of a better word. Each living being had their own system connected to them directly that was created and bound to them only to help them directly. 

Systems couldn't be hacked, hijacked, or overridden by any outside forces. Each person's individual system also connected directly to the System, with a capital S, which was the multiversal system that seemed to maintain the stability of all realities. It provided, mostly, the overarching rules that all sentients needed to abide by while allowing them to organize, govern, and live however they wanted as long as they didn't break the rules provided. 

Basically the System was like a sandbox survival game, across the universe, encompassing technology, magic, cultivation, psionics, and other more esoteric energy systems, and while you couldn't hack the game or break the hard coded rules, you absolutely could find and use glitches, min-max yourself into a true monster, or live any way you wanted so long as you had the strength and/or backing to do so.

Mentally looking over the system tabs I currently had available I knew that during the Tutorial period we would have less options as we would be limited to technology, magic, and cultivation options as well as system features that did not need to be connected to the multiverse to work correctly (like the auction house, system store, etc).

Currently I have a status tab, an inventory tab, a skills tab, and a perks tab. There wasn't a lot to choose from really but from the information dumped into my head from thin air I knew that there were potentially hundreds of additional tabs that can be acquired from class options, quest rewards, as purchases from the store or auction house, gifts from others, or from joining various groups when the multiverse is fully connected to our world.

Mentally switching through the tabs I found the information to be fairly basic. I had nothing in my inventory, although I appeared to have 10 slots currently, but knew that anything I placed inside would be stored in a temporal node tied to my soul and that while stored would have no weight, no time would pass, and could not be anything that had a soul attached to it. 

The skills tab was empty as well, likely since I hadn't chosen a class yet, but I did see that there were active skills as well as passive skills and could think of a few different anime or comics that had been able to really abuse passive skills that I was planning on keeping in mind for the future.

The perks tab was also empty although I did find that the information that filled my head mentioned we got one after choosing our class and an additional one every ten levels after that.

My status tab was the most interesting at this point.

Name: Emil Mercator

Age: 23 Earth Years

Race: Human of Creation Descendant

Class: Please select class!

Str - 1.2

Per - 1.5

End - 1.1

Cha - 1.4

Int - 2.7

Agi - 1.0

Lck - 57.0

Pre-Integration Skills

Basic Skills - Driving, swimming, climbing, running, jumping, breath holding, pet training

Novice Skills - accounting, law, contract creation

Standard Skills - cooking, cleaning, exercising, hand to hand combat, melee combat

Expert Skills - Computer usage, tactical planning, leadership

Master Skills - Sales,Schematic Creation

Godly Skills - Item Creation

Looking over my status I was extremely surprised to see my luck and intelligence stats. The information dump from the system had let me know the human average was 1 for each of the stats so seeing that I was "smarter" than most people came as quite a shock. I mean I have always been good at math and sciences, as well as anything that really caught my interest, but I never really felt super smart or anything. 

Maybe it was the kinds of people I tended to spend my time with and surround myself with as employees and friends. I have always been a part of the geek, freak, and nerd crowds who always tend to be kind of out there, I guess, compared to the world at large so maybe I just never really felt any different.

My luck skill being so high just felt… broken. I never won the lottery, got lucky in Vegas, or seemed to get out of life and death situations by the skin of my teeth but maybe Luck wasn't really a "thing" until the System came along. I would have to check and see what other people had for luck and see if it affected me any more now.

One thing I missed back then though was my race, I saw "human" but seemed to skip over the rest and it didn't become a concern for quite a long time… but we will get to that part of my history later on.

Having looked over my starting options, while multitasking and sending out the last of the text messages to my people about safe zones and supply caches, I decided it was time to check out my class options. Most of the people who were posting on social media seemed to be getting common choices (gray), very few were getting uncommon classes (green), and I only saw one person talking about taking a rare class (blue). 

Mentally selecting the class option the system opened a screen that filled my vision with a range of colors and a solid wall of text detailing what looked like over a hundred options. I saw mostly gray and green options, a smaller block of a dozen blue options, a solid 7-8 purple, 3 orange, and a single oversize rainbow colored option. The rainbow colored option took up a third of the screen displayed options, almost as if the system was trying to imply that if I didn't take it I was a dummy who deserved not to make it to the multiverse.

Of course, thinking about the colors and what they meant, the system happily dumped more information into my brain but what it basically boils down to is commons are gray, uncommons are green, rares are blue, epics are purple, legendaries are orange, and Unique classes are a shimmering rainbow color. The more rare the class, the more powerful it is from the start and the more options and upgrades you can get as it grows with you through leveling up and completing quests. 

It also gave me a breakdown on how common the different rarities were in the multiverse.

Non-God System Users Breakdown by Rarity

Common - 81.9%

Uncommon - 11%

Rare - 5%

Epic - 2%

Legendary - .1%

Unique - 5 known (some could be hidden from view by Gods, perks, or special items)

I did notice that most of my class options are based around crafting, building and leading groups, or merchant style classes but none of them were quite as eye-catching as the rainbow glowing Merchant Manufacturing class. I guess even in the multiverse money talks eh?