Chapter 1: Hester Bunny

"System, why was I brought to this world?" Jack asked.

[Time Remaining 5:00 minutes.]

[Host, please use the last few minutes to meet the system's requirements or make your final system purchases.]

"You're still pretending not to be sentient? I have had you for a year, and I still couldn't access your secrets."

Jack looked at his system message and felt incredibly disheartened. He had initially been filled with hope when he first came into this world. With two years having passed by in a flash, his system is going to leave him.

Let's start at the beginning, Jack was a young man from the earth who had recently come out of a pandemic that shut the world for several years. Due to that sudden shutdown, billions of people were forced inside their homes with nothing to do but drown their sorrow in entertainment.

Video games and anime became mainstream, and live streams became extremely commonplace. A sector that was previously slowly growing was forced to expand by more than 100X in the time frame of a few years. This was considered to be the golden era of the gaming industry.

However, just like every other thing, the golden era for video games disappeared with time, and the world began to open more and more. That was the history of the earth that Jack was born in and experienced.

On Jack's 25th birthday, he woke up to find that he had returned to the past when he had turned 19 and graduated high school.

That was what he initially thought, but it didn't take long before Jack realized that he was in an alternative universe.

The young man's body his soul had taken over was Hester Bunny. He was an aspiring game developer who had grand dreams.

But lacked the desire to pursue higher education or a job. Dreaming to become his own boss.

Becoming a famous indie game developer was Hester's dream.

Hester wanted to teach himself how to be a self-reliant game developer. He wanted to design the code, the visual design, the audio, everything, and anything that he needed to create a game he wanted to have his hands on.

Hester was an ambitious lad and, frankly, in Jack's opinion incredibly dumb. Not only did he waste his high school years attempting this, but he did it in the worst way possible!

Hester would switch what he learned to create a game every week, so in the end, he learned a little bit about everything. But at the same time, even an amateur from any field would be better than him.

After Hester died for unknown reasons, Jack found himself in Hester's body. With the unfortunate fact of having to clean up the mess Hester left behind.

Jack didn't even want to be a game developer. In his previous life, he was a researcher in ancient civilizations.

but it wasn't like he had much of a choice.

He either had to continue trying to make it as a game developer with the help of the system that came along with him. Or find himself enlisted into the City's mandatory military service.

Jack shivered at the thought of all the eldritch horrors that existed outside the city walls.

Similar to his previous life, this world had also entered a pandemic around the same time as back on earth; however, it was so much worse.

In this world, they had a virus that turned everything that caught it into the living undead.

Zombies…

Real-life zombies were much more terrifying compared to the slow-moving zombies seen in games or movies. They were fast, strong, had all five of their senses intact, and even could cooperate with each to some extent.

This zombie virus had caused the world to completely freeze, and each city became an isolated island. The worst part of it was that numerous other viruses and diseases popped out of nowhere and transformed animals, plants, and humans into monsters.

Even with these monsters, humanity had been able to stay alive and even fight back, but it was still dangerous to leave the cities. As such, it was mandatory for anyone at the age of 19 to enter 6 months of military service.

Jack had just transmigrated into Hester's body on his 19th birthday. The same day, he received the call to come to serve the city.

Luckily, at that time, he received the system that pushed back the time he needed to do military service. As long as he met the system's missions, he would never have to worry about leaving the city.

"Damn! Why did you have to set such a high target?" Jack languished.

Still, it didn't stop his fingers from rapidly tapping on his attributes.

[User has spent points to increase strength. 1000 total points have been spent.]

[User has spent points to increase dexterity. 1000 total points have been spent.]

[User has spent points to increase intelligence. 1000 total points have been spent.]

[User has spent points to increase defense. 1000 total points have been spent.]

[User has spent 1000 points to unlock the Better Sleep Skill.]

[User has spent 1000 points to unlock the Basic Survival Skill.]

[System has detected that a large quantity of points is being put into non-game developing skills without the user completing the mission. The system recommends saving some points to make better games.]

"I'm about to fail the mission anyway. What's the point of saving points!" Jack gritted his teeth as a wave of pain flooded his body he felt thousands of burning needles poke his body.

But he endured the pain because he knew that it would save his life in the future. It wasn't his fault that the Game Making System that came with him to help him out gave him an impossible mission.

He had to reach 1,000,000 players in one of the games he developed. And he wasn't allowed to cheat and copy any game that existed in his old world either.

All his games had to be original and also follow the system's strict requirements of being recreational games.

In the end, after two years, Jack's most popular game was an RPG MMO called Ranked Survival. At its height, Ranked Survival reached a total of 60,000 players and got decent reviews, but at the end of the day, he was still far off of the mission target.

He had gotten tens of thousands of points from all his games and spent nearly everything to improve his game-making skills. At the moment, he had only a couple of thousand points to spend on improving his survival skills.

Now that he had a minute left before he failed the mission, Jack wanted to extract the last bit of usefulness out of his points so he clicked to use the rest of his points to buy a random skill.

[User has spent 1233 points to randomly select a skill….. Congratulations, the user has acquired the Novice Sniper.]

[Profile: Jack Hoffman]

[Age: 21]

[Stats: Strength D+, Dexterity C+, Intelligence B, Defense D+]

[Skills: Software Development (Rank C+), Game Development (Rank C+), Debugging (Rank B), Storytelling (Rank C+), Multi-Platform Coding (Rank B) Better Sleep (Rank F), Basic Survival (Rank F), Novice Sniper (Rank F)]

[Game Dev Points: 0]

[Note: Make sure to stock up on delicious points to keep making better games!]

Jack felt his mind overloaded as a combination of multiple skills, abilities, and physical improvements proved too much for him, causing him to collapse, falling unconscious.

Just as Jack was about to faint, he heard a faint scoff coming from his behind.

A few hours later, Jack's eyes fluttered as he woke up.

"Ring Ring Ring…"

Waking up to the sound of his phone ringing, Jack felt as if his mind was filled with random thoughts and information about survival, and common knowledge on sniper rifles and basic information on how to shoot them, colliding with each other.

Taking a minute to reorientate himself, Jack picked up his phone and looked at the caller ID.

Timber Wood Selective Services.