Shen didn't materialize anywhere. Instead, he found himself in absolute darkness, with only a system message in front of him.

Tutorial - 7th Stage

You have reached the 7th stage; therefore, you deserve to be told some extra things.

The Alliance's Guardians aren't only required to rank up within certain time frames. They have other obligations, and they come with privileges. It's time to inform you of some of them.

The most crucial things Guardians are required to do are:

1. Accept many changes to their body, including:

- The removal of the need for sleep;

- Perfect night vision;

- Changed time perception;

- Fertility enhancement.

2. Complete at least one Bounty every two Earth months

3. Fight on the front lines at least once every two and a half Earth years

4. Promptly answer urgent calls to duty

5. Attend a sanctioned training ground at least once every ten earth years

Guardians also have privileges, the best being:

1. Exclusive access to:

- Guardian system

- Sanctioned training grounds

- System-controlled rifts

- Free teleportation to the front lines

2. Payment according to their rank

3. Access to parts of the Alliance beyond regular citizen access

The system then proceeded to explain what each item meant.

Guardian Sleep

The Multiverse Alliance considers sleeping a waste of valuable time. Our technology completely removes the need for it.

In this tutorial, you were only allowed to do so once. Your body now requires special items or techniques to sleep.

Sleeping is not illegal, but remember:

While you sleep, our enemies work.

Shen could see the value of sleeping less, but he would bow to his father's wisdom instead. He would find a way to take naps now and then to deal with stress and refresh the mind.

Perfect Night Vision

Many times, Guardians must work in dark places. The Alliance considers it wasteful to force you to spend energy or resources to see in such sites.

More importantly, the fight against the Void often leads to all light being absorbed from a battlefield at first notice.

As such, you no longer need any light source.

You will always see with perfect clarity.

The only exception to this is when magic is at work to obscure something. That, however, cannot be solved by the common light that you no longer need to carry.

You lose nothing with this change and gain a lot.

You can deactivate this enhancement once you reach the C- rank. Deactivating it before the C- rank is illegal.

Shen liked that change in himself. Indeed, worrying about ways to see in the dark was annoying at best. He had noticed the lack of illumination before, especially back in the fight against the werewolves, but he hadn't realized he was the changed one.

It felt awkward not to have noticed his body had changed. Cultivators should be well aware of their physique. Then again, when he started to cultivate his qi in a way that let him know his body well, he had already been changed by the Alliance. He had just cleared his meridians before joining the tutorial.

The following window was the one he had gotten explaining time perception dilation, so he just glossed over it.

Then came the explanation about the thing that had really bothered him.

Guardian Fertility

Statistics reveal that the stronger the parents are, the more likely their child is to reach the same strength. Compared to the general population, the increase is up to twenty percent.

Therefore, every time a Guardian copulates, it will lead to pregnancy, theirs or the other party, unless they use adequate contraceptives.

Abortion is forbidden in the Multiverse Alliance. The war against the Void is perpetual, and we need every last one of every race to protect ourselves. If both parents don't want a child, the system can bring the child to an orphanage with a single command. It can also speed pregnancy for a cost.

Special cases can be discussed at the court of law.

In the opposite direction, if you want to adopt a child, the process is easy for Guardians with a good record.

Races that don't require copulation for procreation follow adapted rules.

Deactivating this enhancement is illegal, but one-time use contraceptives are not.

Shen was astonished. That was absurd. The Alliance wanted Guardians to become mere breeding animals spreading their genes around.

He wouldn't risk it. He decided right then and there that until he found a wife or a concubine, he wouldn't partake in the pleasures of the flesh.

Bounty Subsystem

Bounties are missions generated by the Guardian System at its convenience or by citizens' or Guardians' requests. Those of you used to modern games will likely see the similarity with "quests" or "tasks."

Bounties can be of many different types and are optional most of the time.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

The Bounty Subsystem will be unlocked when you leave the tutorial.

Nothing new there.

Front Lines

The front lines are where the Multiverse Alliance fights its wars.

The most likely and common enemy is the Void. It surrounds us and is constantly trying to consume us. However, we also have more standard enemies, races and nations not part of the Alliance, or even separatists.

Those are mercilessly crushed.

If you have any moral issues with mundane war, make sure to pick a front line against the Void at every opportunity to guarantee you'll fulfill your two-and-a-half-year quota against the desired enemy. Most Guardians prefer to fight the Void, and sometimes those front lines have no slots to spare.

Yes, slots. The front lines are not a place of chaos. Organized warfare happens there, and the generals request only a manageable number of Guardians to fight.

Only in unexpected outbreaks are numbers poured as an unorganized mass to stop the bleeding before it can rot. It leads to a higher Guardian death count, but the alternative is worse.

That was interesting to learn about. Cultivators usually preferred to fight either alone or with their clans or sects, but there were times when the Eternal Emperor demanded they fight under his rule. Everyone was doubtlessly more effective that way.

Still, powerful people were resistant to obedience. Shen couldn't even imagine how hard it should be to make some B-ranks or even A-ranks obey the chain of command.

Being A-rank meant one was mighty, but it didn't mean they automatically became tactical geniuses. Strategy should be kept to those who knew what they were doing, and that might mean beings with weaker power in command.

How did the A-ranks, the strongest beings in the Alliance as far as Shen knew, feel about that?

Guardian Emergencies

Sometimes, emergencies appear in the Multiverse Alliance.

Sudden invasions, magic disease outbreaks, and terrorist attacks are constant possibilities.

When a local administrator or the Guardian System determines that Guardians must contain the emergency, an urgent call to duty is sent to nearby Guardians.

All Guardians who receive it are required to answer at once.

That sounded simple and humane enough. Shen had no issues with any of it.

The talk about magic diseases didn't surprise him. The first message the system had given them only spoke about eradicating human disease. Dealing with magic ones required more than just changing human physiology.

Sanctioned Training Grounds

There are places in the Multiverse Alliance where Guardians can train in whatever they want.

Fighting, investigation, cooking, most things you want are available.

Sanctioned training grounds are sanctioned by the Multiverse Alliance and free for every Guardian.

Keep learning, keep improving. The war against the Void is endless. There is no such thing as being too good.

Of everything he had learned, that sounded the best. Training under adequate guidance could help push anyone to greater heights.

The only thing that remained to be seen was how useful those training grounds were.

Rifts

Throughout the Multiverse, many mystical places contain great peril and reward at equivalent rates. Some form naturally, others are crafted, and others are forced upon nefarious races.

Those places are called rifts, and whichever rift the Guardian System discovers before anyone else becomes a system-controlled rift.

Earth's gamers will notice rifts share many similarities with what you call dungeons.

Many factors are used to determine whether your planet will get a rift portal, which is used to send you to the rift. Primary among them are closeness to Earth and difficulty level relative to how long you've been part of the Alliance.

Portals always appear randomly on any planet, except they are always reachable to at least one sapient species without requiring highly advanced external aid.

Earth has only one sapient species, humans. Therefore, no portals will appear on the sea or in the air. They can, however, appear on the water close to coasts, lakes, and top of tall mountains.

Rifts and fighting on the front lines are Guardians' primary ways to earn AP.

However, for all their advantages, rift portals carry some dangers too. Enemies can leave through the portals, so guard them well.

The idea of rifts was interesting, but Shen had to admit he didn't like the line about "nefarious races" being forced into rifts. Who determined what was nefarious in the Alliance, and who decided whether to send them to rifts or not?

There was only one explanation message remaining.

Payment

The Multiverse Alliance uses Standard Coins, SC. SC are entirely digital and backed by the Alliance itself.

Unlike Alliance Points, SC can be freely exchanged with any other Alliance member.

Your Standard Wallet is a separate part of the Guardian System that is not tied to being a Guardian. Every Alliance citizen has a Standard Wallet.

Guardians have a wage based on their ranks and achievements. Human Guardians will be paid every Earth's month.

Wages are prone to change without forewarning.

Rank - Wage (SC)

F - 2,700

E - 6,300

D - 28,500

C - 118,000

B - 834,450

A - 12,850,000

Shen lacked any frame of reference to know if that was a fair wage or not, so he mostly ignored it.

After the explanations, the system finally started the seventh stage proper.

Tutorial - 7th Stage

The Multiverse Alliance aims to save as many as possible in the fight against the Void.

Sometimes, that means focusing on the people at the bottom. They allow the Alliance to function on a day-to-day basis. It's for them that the strong fight for.

At other times, that means focusing on those at the top, the ones who protect everything with their overwhelming power.

One of the unfortunate truths the Multiverse Alliance acknowledged over time was that the mountain's peak is only broad enough for a few.

You have proven your adaptability, resilience, Concept, and willpower. It's time to show you are the very best at a stat.

Pick a stat. You'll have to prove yourself using it until the very end of this tutorial.

Only one person of each stat for each age group in the entire world will complete the Pioneer Tutorial.

For now, you'll compete only against those in your country.

You eliminated the fifteen-year-olds of your country, but that didn't happen in the entire world. Some of that age group won the previous stage in other countries. The same happened to all 20 age groups: they triumphed in some countries and were defeated in others.

You have just eliminated others from this tutorial.

Can you eliminate your former allies?

Shen was surprised. Four people per age group? Only eighty people would complete the Pioneer Tutorial? That felt like way too few.

Anyway, he hoped for a free-for-all slaughtering stage with infinite energy and willpower recovery, but he guessed that wouldn't happen if people were divided into stats.

"Qi," he tried at once.

Unfortunately, nothing happened. Qi wasn't a stat, but it hadn't hurt to try.

So he went with the second-best choice, "Agility."

Two of his Skills, his footwork and spear art, used agility. Only the spear art used strength, and he had nothing going for his resistance. The choice was obvious.

Tutorial - 7th Stage

Agility affects mainly your speed, reaction time, and motor coordination. Those will be the themes of this stage and the next two.

We start with speed.

He was teleported back to the first stage's scenario. His equipment and weapon were gone, and he found himself wearing just a G cultivator robe and G leather boots.

This time, his floating island resembled a thin board. It was only a few feet wide both to his front and back, and endless to the sides.

People of all ages filled the place in a line. After seeing only sixteen-year-olds for so long, Shen found it strange to see an old lady—white hair and everything—wearing leather armor to his right and a middle-aged man wearing a dark robe to the left.

The system had previously said they would only meet people from other countries when they reached the tenth stage. Therefore, those around should all be from the USA.

In front of him, many floating islands of all sizes formed a path without end. They were close enough to each other that a jump would let one reach them but were still far enough that a misstep would cause one to fall.

He could guess what was coming if the theme was speed.

Tutorial - 7th Stage

This stage is a race.

You'll have endless stamina. You won't be able to use any other energy. All stats other than agility will be set to F-.

If you fall, you'll have to start over.

Only the first 10% of each age group will continue. They will also receive 10,000 AP.

Win the race by any means necessary.

There was no mention of a countdown, and indeed, Shen saw many people jump ahead as soon as they finished reading.

He didn't follow.

Getting to the next stage would net him 10,000 AP. He had 108,924 AP. With the reward, it would be enough for him to buy a stat upgrade and have some spare to buy the rank-up if he mastered a Concept.

But even if that hadn't been the case, the rest of the tutorial would be based on agility. It only made sense to purchase as much agility as possible.

"Buy agility upgrade," he said, and from what he heard, he wasn't the only one. The old lady beside him was one of those who improved herself.

The decision wasn't easy to make, as it gave others a head start, but the system gave them infinite stamina. That suggested that this wouldn't be a short run at all. Spending a little extra time here for a better overall run felt worth it.

| Purchased: Agility Up (E) | -16,000 AP

| Remaining AP: 92,924 AP

He felt his muscles contracting and expanding. It was painful and made him sporadically lose control of his body. He fell to the ground, barely managing to not fall over the edge. Some weren't as lucky as him, though they were teleported back to the island within a few seconds.

While his body improved, he checked the stat store, but the E+ agility upgrade wasn't available.

Almost a full minute later, the upgrade finally ended. He stood up and confirmed that his body was fully functional.

He was about to jump when the old lady kicked him.