In life, at least my last life, progress towards a goal can take years, I suppose it still does in this life, but there was rarely a cut and dry measurement for progress. There was no help outside somebody else telling you what to do. You could spend years of your life in the gym, hundreds of hours working on cardio, endurance, weight loss, or strength and outside of professional athletes, you were the only one tracking your progress. The only clear measurements you got were when you timed a run, or lifted your max weight, or did one more repetition than you did before. Could you jump higher? The only way to know was to measure how high you could jump. Train, rest correctly, eat correctly, feel the burn, feel the pain of progress towards your goal. Earn every muscle. But here? Here all somebody has to do is spend time doing anything and they get rewarded.
The system was a tool created to help, to assist, to quantify, and to reward a person for their accomplishments and effort. Formed from primordial magics, woven into the fabric of this world, powered by its own use, it aided the races of this world in their struggle to survive. It was impartial, totally so, it would reward the winner in any fight, help people with any task. Run a mill,? Get experience points. Become a bandit and kill travelers? Get experience points. Growing up in this world it was normal, but from the perspective of my last world it was truly horrifying.
From what my dad had shared, our family secretes to leveling and gaining xp, it had to track every particle on the planet. How else would he get experience for his flour being used to make bread? He even wrote out a stat for how many people had used flour milled by him, how many pounds he had personally milled, and ect. He had prepared me and my brothers for system integration our entire lives, so much so that he was leveling less frequently as we started to train on the mill and farm. His father had done the same thing for him, going back generations. Our family held secrets to getting rare miller classes and skills, passed from father to children down the ages. We could enrich flour, remove blight, and even mill magically charged rare grains that would improve a person's health or make sure a child grew strong. This, of course, required a special farmer to provide and special baker to take advantage of, but it was a huge boon for the whole county.
I was lost in thought as I walked, it was system day and found myself on the village green, a square area of trimmed grass used for celebrations, holidays, and ceremonies like today. A dozen young adults from the village and surrounding farms stood together on one side of the green, our families and friends gathered around us at a respectful distance. The mayor stood on the opposite side, the sheer brawn of the man made most in the village look slender next to him. The full beard, barrel chest and bulging muscles might make someone think he was more meat than brain, but they would be wrong. He held the book of records at his side, ready to note our class and stats in the annals of the village. My father had prepared me for this day my whole life, or at least since I could fetch and carry. He taught me everything he knew, every advantage he learned, every secret his father gave him. Aside from the mayor’s family, we were the most talented, we had the most traits unlocked, knew how to earn more titles for our classes than most, and every male member of our family had at least a rare class going back to my great, great, great, grandfather Sean the Miller. Sean had retired from a life of adventure and built the village’s first and only water powered mill. Since then, our family had guarded its secrets and not only used it to grind wheat into flour, but to grind experience. My father caught my eye and nodded toward where the mayor was standing. Normally I would have felt pure excitement, but now I had a different perspective and was nervous. This event would be on par with enrolling in college and graduating on the same day.
Next to the mayor stood a man of average height hunched over with age, with close cropped grey hair, wearing fine clothes in the color of our kingdom. A green set of trousers, white shirt, and a forest green cloak over his shoulders, all with silver trim to show his station, he seemed to be leaning on a staff for support. He was one we all knew on sight, our county’s magistrate and administrator. Without preamble he raised an obsidian medallion above his head and said in a surprisingly strong voice “let the class selection and system integration commence! [STANDARD INTIGRATION]!”
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The last two words boomed, not so much volume but as a physical impact, and I immediately knew something was wrong.
[SCANNING MEMORIES AND ATTRIBUTES]
Should not have popped up in front of me, it should have gone directly to the class list. The system had observed me my whole life, there should be nothing to scan.
[COMMENCING INTEGRATION]
[…]
[FEATS RECOGNIZED AND GRANTED]
[CATEGORIZING ACHIEVEMENTS]
[…]
[…]
[FEATS, BONUSES, AND ACHIEVEMENTS WILL BE DISPLAYED AFTER CLASS SELECTION]
My class choices should have been few and fitting with my life. The list should have been short, I already knew the best choice to be the rarest version of [Miller] or [Millerson]. I should have 3 or 4 choices. Those were there, but there were pages and pages more. The other people in the green, adults now by right, had all started to make their selections, some already glowing with an inner light, but I stared at my list, frozen in shock.
Please Select a Class
* Miller (Legendary)
* Advanced Miller (Rare)
* Basic Farmer (Advanced Techniques)
* Villager (Epic)
* …
It should have ended there, the modifiers made no sense. Epic villager? Villager was one of the most basic classes, you got it as an option for living in a village, how could that be epic?! Those modifiers should only come after a lifetime of effort, but it went on.
* Warrior (Advanced)
* Veteran Solder III (Advanced, [More Than 3 Modifiers])
* Veteran Officer III (Very Rare)
* Fighter (Advanced Unarmed)
* Thug (Basic)
* Thief (Hardened)
* Administrator (Generalist)
* Warlock (Epic, Name Of The Old Ones)
* Paladin (Epic, Old Gods)
* Priest (Of The One God)
* Pastor (Non-denominational)
* Cook (International)
* Mechanic (Automotive Diesel Technician)
* Outlander (Epic)
* Driver (Expert)
* Mathematician (Ancient)
* Custom Class (Advanced)
* Theorist (Legendary+)
* Physical Only (Unique)
* Philosopher (Epic)
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The list continued for pages, and my hand froze. I searched my memories from both lives and knew one thing for certain. All I wanted was to live in this village, to be with the only family I knew before yesterday, to hold tight to them because of the loss of my other family. Maybe before yesterday the strange classes would have called to me, I would have been tempted by them. Oddly enough, my new memories were the likely cause of the strange classes, and what told me to choose [Miller] and never tell anyone it was more than rare.