Hidden away at a tiny section of Verinza Plaza, Capres Town, I shivered, waiting. Nine hours had passed. The sky had shifted from its signature blue to a deep black by now, and yet I was still waiting for a distant promise.

  “The Guide To Ascending” by the self-named “Master of Cultivation” was almost certainly a scam, like the hundreds of books I had bought prior to this that had promised the same thing.

  Ascending.

  The promise of exiting this garbage hole that the System called “Tier 12” to somewhere else. Somewhere… higher. Better. More… magical.

  For fifteen long years I had been stuck in a place with nothing to do. Sure, I could run around the plaza like the other kids. But what was the point? Running around the exact same waterfall playing the exact same game got boring, quick. Sure, I could exit the town.

  But it was not like there was anything there, anything exciting. The system called Tier 12 the Peaceful Realm for a reason.

  Literally any and all resources were all only available via gathering them by chopping down trees and mining. Mining. That was to be my job when I grew up, there was no doubt about that. I had to mine.

  Capres Town was a mining town. Or, as the mayor says it, “a Mining town.” You could practically hear the capital letter.

  The system classified Mining as a skill, which could be leveled through use. What the system didn’t mention, however, was that ores were worth different amounts of XP and had different XP caps.

  The known ores went Coal, Copper, Iron, Silver, and Gold. Capres Town was a coal mining town. Like every other town in Tier 12.

  Needless to say, everybody’s mining skill was at level 10 by the time they graduated from Mining school. The maximum for Coal.

  It was rumored that somebody found a Hellcoal deposit, and they got Level 11. However, that’s the highest leveled person in our town.

  From the textbooks I had read, I knew quite a bit more information. For one, skill levels give 1 level of general XP every time a skill was leveled. So, skills were quite a good source of XP.

  On the other hand, Ascending requires Level 1000.

  The highest leveled person in the town is level 11.

  Needless to say, the tales of soaring dragons and people with levels of hundreds of trillions seemed farther than ever.

  Not all was terrible though. Even though the best I could become was a coal miner, I could at least become a competent coal miner. Mine enough coal, and I could retire from the coal mines that gave you the debuff. I was not sure the “50% weaken against airway-based diseases” was “perfectly harmless” like the teachers kept telling us.

  In fact, I’ve heard rumors of diamonds being made of coal. I was not sure that was plausible, but if it was, I was going to mine some and hopefully get Mining to a higher level.

  A voice jolted me from my state of thought.

  A merchant stood in the middle of the square. He was a tall, bearded man, who was hauling a huge cart behind him, packed full of various odds and ends that I was sure was not legal.

  “Wha-“

  “Sorry I was late,” the man puffed gruffly, then muttered something about the dratted swamp. “You Everlon? Everlon Quiaz- Quiax-“

  “Quiazine.”

  “Everlon Quizaine, you mailed me a letter eight and a half days ago saying you wanted this book, the Guide to Ascending,” the man suddenly straightened and spoke regally, “for nine silver and fifty coppers.”

  “Here you go, sir.”

  The man bent down again to check the wheels. “That’s only eight silver and fifty coppers,” he said. “Don’t try to trick me, now.”

  “Sir, that’s-“

  With a bellow of “Dash”, the large man plowed into me. I fell down on the hard stone slabs of the Plaza.

  “Oh, there’s the silver! My apologies little one, I miscounted. Here. Take this as compensation.”

  The man tossed me something. A small pamphlet with instructions on it. I turned it over. The pamphlet said, “A Beginners Guide To Analyzing”.

  I thanked the man, and hurried back to my tiny room in my tiny apartment.

  Before I tried to read the book I had been waiting for, I studied the pamphlet. It had two sides. The first simply read “Inspect”, and the second read “Analyze”.

  I glanced at the section marked as “Inspect”. Suddenly, a system notification popped up:

  I stared at the window, puzzled. I clicked yes. A ding popped up.

  I sighed. It seemed I had a long way ahead of me.

  I learned Analyze, then started reading the Guide to Ascending. Suddenly, a message popped up:

  I clicked Yes. I already knew what Quests were, from the various games the other children would play in the square.

  Back in the days of legend, when Capres Town had Adventurers and Dread Knights and Umbral Riders and such, Quests were a common thing. Quests, or Tasks as they referred to it back then, were handed out willy-nilly to everybody. Now, however, they were long ago buried things like the Legendary VI Rarity Zomet’s Edge and the set of Unique armor worn by Verna, the Dread Knight.

  I was already overwhelmed with all the notifications, but there was just one more to go.

  I suddenly felt like I was falling. This was all too much in an hour to process. I suddenly felt nauseous and threw up all over my bed, which was… not there. Instead, the vomit landed on a flat gray floor that stretched seemingly infinitely.

  “Hello, User. Input your name here.”

  Feeling foolish, I said: “Everlon.”

  “Loading Personality… Personality #302913 loaded.”

  Suddenly, a young woman’s voice sounded in my mind.

  “Hello, Everlon.”

  “Hello,” I said, then I asked, “What’s your name?”

  “Name? I don’t know. And you can talk to me in your mind as well. Just try!”

  “Okay, then I’ll call you Sarah. Is that fine?”

  “Hmm… what does that mean?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied honestly.

  “But why would you name me something that you don’t know the meaning of?”

  “Because it sounds good.”

  “Sarah. Saaaaarrraah. That’s a good name.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to teach me something?”

  “Oh, right. Your System Introduction. First, we have to look at what you have. Think “Status”.

  Feeling foolish, I did so. A screen popped up:

  “Wow. A Chaos White item. That’s the-“ Sarah started choking in my mind.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. I probably shouldn’t talk about it anymore.”

  “With those aptitudes, you should go for Rogue as your first class.”

  “What’s a Class?”

  “Well-“ She started choking again.

  “Okay. How do I gain one?”

  “Just gain the necessary skills and attributes in order to get one. Think ‘Class’, and you can view all the classes you could hypothetically get without getting another one. There are secret classes, though.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, some classes, like a Dusk Archer, can only be obtained after you gain the Dark Archer class. It’s not important right now, though. Just think ‘Class’.”

  “Class.”

  “Okay. Now, think ‘Display Class’.”

  “Display Class.”

  Sarah went silent for a length of time.

  A very, very long length of time.

  Worried, I asked, “Is it okay?”

  “Okay? OKAY? You have a Mythical class! That’s rarer than Legendary! Most people only have a handful of choices, all Common, and maybe an Uncommon one. Rares are wanted everywhere, and most people never see a single Epic in their lives. You have two Rare classes, one Epic class, and a Mythical class, TWO TIERS higher than Epic!” She was yelling by this point.

  “Whoa, whoa, calm down. Should I take the Mythical class or not? It seems awfully high in requirements.”

  “The higher the requirements, the better the class.”

  “How am I supposed to get all this? Three Skills at Level 20? Five Skills at Level 10? Five Tier-1 Spells? A Tier-2 Spell? And those Attributes - they’ll take me hundreds of Levels to get!”

  “Don’t worry. Your amazing Talents will make it so that you’ll get a lot of levels really quickly.”

  “What do you mean? What do Talents do, exactly?”

  “Talents come in eight tiers, but only six you know. I can’t say the other two, otherwise I’ll choke again. If you have an Average talent, one Attribute point will equal one point in that Attribute. If you have an Above Average talent, one Attribute point will equal two points in that Attribute, and so on. It goes Average, Above Average, Excellent, then one more tier I can’t tell you about. It goes in the reverse direction as well. Average, then Below Average, then Poor, then Horrific, then one more.”

  “What about the Skills?”

  “Oh, they’re all decently common. The rarest would probably be Dual Wielding, at Uncommon V, but I can’t imagine it being that difficult to find. Anything else?”

  Honestly, I was pretty full up on crazy world-changing information tonight, and I just asked Sarah if I could go back to my apartment.

  “Sure. Just think ‘Exit’.”

  When I landed on my bed, sleep came faster than ever before.