“Hey, Old Achilles...How are you doing, old man?” said a tall man with flames for eyes.

“Oh, I’m good, sir. My heart is still ticking and this old scrap knee hasn’t given up on me yet. Now, what can old Achilles do for you?” said the old man. Somehow still sounding gruff and no-nonsense while being obsequiously deferential.

“Ah, well...One of my brats had a bit of an accident the other day...Could you get some of the lads to help clean it up? Small things like this shouldn’t hurt a boy’s future, after all. Especially since it was just meant to be a fight between children,” said the tall man.

“Of course, sir...I send some of the tight-lipped boys out to clean it up...Or if it's a really small job we can have little Hector without the tongue to deal with it…” said Old Achilles.

“Hm, yeah...Send Hector. He knows how to keep his mouth shut,” said the tall man. Nodding. Patting the old man on the shoulder and leaving in the direction he'd come from. The whole room grew several degrees cooler once he was gone.

*************************************************************************************************************

I caught sight of Conrad Marrow, Patriarch of House Marrow, for the first time, during my first shower day. He came to talk with Old Achilles about something. I have sharp ears so I heard a little, but I tried not to linger around because knowing too much, or even looking like you know too much, can often be a capital offense.

Shower day was the day before the household staff gave the Marrow Clan’s bathhouse a thorough cleaning. It happened once a month, and during that time, our employers were magnanimous enough to allow us staff to use their facilities, because well, it was getting a thorough clean in a few hours anyway. This meant that those of us who’d been making do with buckets, rag cloths, and sponges, could now have a proper shower and soak.

Conrad Marrow...was a tall man. A big man. He wasn’t fat. He was just huge. Like a bull. Or some wild hogs I’d seen in the woods outside my hometown. His core-treasure was some kind of elemental treasure. So his hair and eyes would occasionally catch flame. His temple-fade afro turning his head into a torch as every hair on his head burst into a conflagration. Smoke would occasionally come out of his nostrils and mouth. Being a teeny, tiny, eleven-year-old runt with some very dangerous secrets. I couldn’t help shrinking into myself and hoping not to get noticed.

Thankfully, Mister Marrow was a typical wealthy clan head. So, I quickly realized that unless I somehow made myself relevant to the man, I could be standing right in front of him, and I might as well have been air. I was just the help. The help weren’t people. The help were a living part of the decor. A part of one’s property that you purchased or hired to look after the other property.

The full name, or true-name, of my core-treasure is the “[Empty-Archivist’s Idle-Clicker Inheritance System]”. Actually, that probably wasn’t the “truest” name for the system but it was as close as I could get in our world’s common-tongue. Actually, “that” wasn’t true either. The best actual approximation for the true-name of my Idle-clicker system would involve me explaining to you that somewhere beyond time and space, beyond real and fiction, lay a realm that abutted the realm of platonic ideal.

In that place of pure knowledge and the abstraction of all reality down to almost its most base form, there was a seemingly infinite library, and that library was watched over by an invisible man in a sharp charcoal suit and glasses. An invisible librarian, an “Empty Archivist”, who sat at the main desk of that library all eons and eons cataloging every new “book” that entered the archive. Perfectly knowing the contents of all those “books”.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Then one day that guy decided after witnessing the birth and deaths of countless multiverses for basically forever, he’d like to die, or maybe just go outside and do something else for a few eons because cataloging all that stuff, and knowing all that stuff had stopped being fun eons ago, and he’d had it up to here. So he just grabbed a fate that was distantly related to him by blood, switched it out for his own with string, and now there was a screaming child slowly being unspun from material existence, so that they could fill his shoes.

To make the screaming stop and keep the child from panicking, the archive was playing a little game with the child that made the whole process of becoming this powerful but basically trapped cosmic being seem a lot less terrible. Like a rich person giving a baby a smartphone, which is a thing I’ve heard people used to do in the old world before our world shattered. A thing that would be unthinkable now, because who the heck would give a baby a supercomputer. Though maybe there were a few royals and high-nobles with more regular access to old-world tech, who still did so.

Anyway, yeah...so, there’s a reason why I’ll just be sticking with calling my core-treasure the “Idle-Clicker System.” It rolls off the tongue better and has fewer undertones of impending doom. As to how I knew all this, well, my Idle-clicker system has two main functions. It allows me to improve my “stats” by actively and passively engaging with the system. It also allows me to learn, and gain near-perfect knowledge from, “Stories”. Things that were sometimes basically like classes or professions, but sometimes not.

I could gain stories by learning enough about a given thing that it became a story in my system. The first story I ever gained was the Tale of the Empty Archivist’s Heir. Which taught me all about how to use the system, a bit about its background, and a bit about my ultimate fate. A convenient thing to have, even if a bit of what it told me was potentially a bummer.

Regardless of the potentially dark consequences, I used the Idle-Clicker System constantly. I’d be a fool not to. I was a child left alone in a world of literal, and figurative, monsters. I needed all the help I could get. The Idle-Clicker system lived up to the reputation of all system-type core-treasures by granting me an almost unfair amount of growth in an almost unfair amount of time. For instance, despite having no cultivation resources, and basically starving most of the time, not only had I scarcely ever been sick or injured, thanks to my Constitution stat, I was able to get hired because my Strength stat was at the level of a fit, grown, man’s.

The nine attributes that the system could help me build up and cultivate were: Strength, Agility, Dexterity, Perception, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma, and Luck. Then I could collect and generate an infinite amount of stories by learning enough about a specific subject for the system to add it into my story tab. The stories weren’t shallow things, either. For instance, watching a bunch of soldiers at an army base for a couple of weeks earned me the [Tale of the Soldier]. A guide to military lives and military lifestyles throughout the multiverse.

To actually use the system, I needed to use the system’s two currencies. The first, and most important currency, was “Talent”. The system didn’t use numbers to keep track of its currencies, or my progress. I had to go by feel. I’d ended up contextualizing the feel of the currencies into “blocks”. Training a stat passively required investing a block of talent into that stat. Studying a “Story” and gaining the knowledge, skills, and experiences therein required investing three blocks of talent.

I could gain more talent by spending the second currency, “Potential”. Potential was basically my internalized spiritual energy. The trade-off of having the idle-clicker system was that it took away my ability to cultivate the normal way. All of my spiritual energy was turned into Potential. If I accumulated enough Potential I could either use it to purchase more talent, or I could use it to multiply the effect of my talent. Which meant that my cultivation rate would grow even faster. Besides using it to alter the effect of my talent, Potential could also be used to actively engage with the system, my one form of active cultivation, and the “clicker” part of the Idle-Clicker system.