When Kaniel regained consciousness, he was inside a small room, surrounded by bright whiteness on all sides. He lay on the floor for a long while. Strangely enough, he didn’t carry any physical injuries; nonetheless, mentally, he was crippled, to put it the best way. The worst was, the more he thought, the worse it got.
“How am I alive?” he asked, expecting no one to answer.
A transparent blue box formed before his eyes. The engravings followed.
Level: 0
Points: 0
Skills: N/A
Initialization was over, yet, he didn’t feel relieved in the least. Instead, he was bamboozled. Kaniel had gone to such lengths to obtain the System. He finally did, and due to the preinstalled manual, he could immediately understand what the attributes scribed on the blue hologram meant.
The problem was in the numbers, or more precisely, the lack thereof. Level 0 meant he was a weakling. Zero points meant he was broke. No skills whatsoever was a nail in the coffin. To sum it up, all the System did to him was tell him he was useless.
Records said that Emperor Constantine could stand against a massive army by himself, all with the help of the System. Something didn’t add up. Did he perhaps leave a prank instead of an inheritance?
“Motherfucker,” Kaniel whispered in English in an accent so broken that the emperor himself would roll in his grave. He pressed his fingers against his brows and calmed himself down. Not all was lost. Yet.
He rose to his feet and darted his eyes across the room. At the front stood a table upon legs not of wood but of some unknown black material, unlike any he had ever seen, bizarrely plain, without carvings or a single blemish. Devoid of nails or pegs holding it together, it still stood firm as castle walls. Beside was a chair with no velvet or silk. And atop the desk a strange machinery, a box of glass and metal.
“A… computer?” Kaniel muttered, frowning at the headache that followed. The information swarmed his mind all at once, and as such, he couldn't turn it into something comprehensive. He instinctively neared, sat on the chair, then pressed the circular emblem on the side.
The computer awakened from its slumber. Tiny blue LEDs along the edges blinked to life. Mechanical click-clacks followed while the machinery activated. The screen burst the room with pale blue lights. To his amazement, Kaniel knew what was occurring, how the CPU fetched instructions into RAM from the BIOS stored in the ROM. Lines of code ran vertically, thousands of symbols flashing a second before vanishing into the background as the system loaded.
Configuration complete.
Choose a username.
The lifeless machine asked for his name. What should he choose? He liked his name, but it seemed… dull. Why would he not choose a pseudonym if given a chance to? Maybe go for something funny. But no, what if he had to interact with others at some point? Then that would’ve been awkward.
His eyes drew downward. There, beneath the monitor, a pair of a keyboard and a mouse lay. He began to type on the keyboard at a tortoise-like speed and left-clicked on the mouse, only later realizing he could just press ‘Enter’. Meanwhile, he wondered why the little machine was called a ‘mouse’. Was it ground from the corpse of a literal mouse? It looked like mice, that’s for sure.
The user has been authenticated as ‘Leinak’
The query vanished, replaced by a small loading circle that spun lazily in the middle of the screen. Minor glyphs appeared around the circle's perimeter every few moments, only to disappear before he could make sense of them.
Loading... 23%... 45%... 77%...
Not again… Kaniel prepared himself for another bout of torture.
“For fuck’s sake…” he practiced his English.
But nothing happened. Only a ding-a-ling chime.
100%—
The desktop emerged. Three lone icons floated in the holographic light, all with a simple design. Just as Kaniel hovered the cursor over one of the three apps, a small pop-up followed by a bright flash of light in the lower-right corner of the screen appeared: a miniature ghostlike human figure with an oversized crown on his head and a golden cape twice his size dragging behind him. His tiny hands rested on his hips in a heroic stance. A tiny, shadowy red figure, like a wisp. Only its eyes were of a different color, white in its entirety. The same as the symbol of a trident on its forehead.
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It stretched its hands. “WELLLLCOMEEE!!!” it screamed in a cuteish voice, violently. The noise encapsulated the whole room. Kaniel’s ears almost bled.
“They call me many names. The Conqueror. The Great Archmage. The One And Only Emperor. Family and friends call me Constantine.” it said with pride as it strutted inside the monitor from left to right and right to left in a jestful manner. “They’re all wrong! Wrong!” The emperor stopped and glanced at him with sad eyes.
Kaniel was as cautious as he could ever get. He presumed the holograph he was witnessing was simply a will the emperor had left behind. But who knew with these godlike figures? Even after their death. If the emperor were to figure out somehow that Kaniel was a fraud, he’d undoubtedly grill his soul and toss it to the pits of the abyss.
“But…” The figure of a miniature emperor hunched, its eyes sorrowful. “I’m Richard. I was born and raised in a family of three, went to a college at Cornell, and spent my latter years as a mathematician. My home is Earth. All my life in this new world I’ve been reincarnated into, I’ve tried my best to find a way back. But alas…”
The mini-emperor pressed its hands against the screen. “I’m sure you understand me. I placed hints to this inheritance in the English alphabet all over the world in case there’d be someone from the future just like me, a poor soul from Earth tossed into this barbaric world.”
Kaniel gulped, sweating profusely. He felt as though the emperor pierced his soul with those empty white eyes of his through the holographic screen. He had spent all his childhood in an attempt to decipher the bits of this weird English language.
It smiled. Not that it had a mouth to do so, but it could be told from its eyes. “The years of my research didn’t go unrewarded. Months before my death, I made a breakthrough in dimensional magic. There is a way back!”
Ah, was that so? Kaniel wondered if any Earthlings were to be in his place, would they jump up and down in joy? He wasn’t from Earth, so he couldn’t sympathize.
“But that demands hard work and wit! You’ll have to bear through numerous arduous challenges. If you’ve gotten this far, I'm sure you have some basic qualifications to attempt it.” It slumped forward, folding its arms while its eyes dim.
“So let me explain.”
It pointed toward the first icon of a dark tower veiled in dark flames, a tottering obsidian colossus. “A place where you’ll get to up your level from zero to hero.”
Flame Tower
“This is the inheritance ground. In this tower, there are one hundred floors. You’ve probably played video games, so you can get the gist of it,” it said with a tinge of nostalgia.
Kaniel blinked blankly, confused.
“There are various monsters, traps, puzzles, and sometimes settlements on each floor, which, upon completion, you’ll get shiny and tasty rewards. The requirements to climb these floors vary, sometimes meet a certain condition, find the gate, kill a boss monster, and on and on. Mind you, this is not a simulation but a real place constructed by my genius self. You die there—you die for real. Game over. Make sure to beware of the mimics and even chickens. You never know.” Its eyes widened mockingly, arms behind its head as it floated. “In fact, you are currently on floor 0. This white room is a domain I’ve built for you, and you’ll appear here every three nights while in sleep.”
Kaniel leaned back and put the finger on his chin, trying to digest the information, yet the will gave him no chances as it continued talking, pointing toward the second icon of a mosaic gold coin.
Dimensional Store
“That is where you spend your points to buy stuff like skills, runes, items, and such. Not complicated. What is, is getting points themselves. There are two ways. A, through the tower. B, by transforming gold into points. The rates are one hundred grams to a single point.”
“Come again?” Kaniel shot back in shock. Such an amount of gold was enough to buy a house, and here, it was traded for a single point.
The will of course, didn't mind Kaniel. It couldn't. “This is wondrous, isn't it? It's too soon to get excited, my friend.”
It presented the last icon with fervor.
The Internet
“With points, you can even use the internet! It has many functions. They will slowly unlock as you level up, but for now, all you get is Wikipedia.” It raised its voice. “I’d love for our meetings to be memorable; hence, I’ll shower you with gifts. You’ve gotten this far, after all.”
You acquired a passive skill |Dreamscape |B||
You acquired a domain |White Room |D||
You acquired an active skill |Stow |D||
A talisman |Planeswalker |B|| has been added to your domain
+10 points
“Well, then, until the next time!” Swinging its cape, it disappeared.
Kaniel could understand none of the internet. He knew it was a global computer network providing various communication facilities, as seen in the user manual. But communicate with whom? His world didn’t have an internet. Also, what was Wikipedia? He clicked on the third icon.
One more blue box popped up.
You acquired a unique class |Internet Explorer |A+||