Sarmak quietly celebrated his 207th birthday. He had hit the threshold - his CON was now 225 and he would no longer physically age. Having no Class or other qualifications, nearly all of it was from his annual Free Point allocation. He couldn't tell anyone, of course. The racial CON maximum for Humans was 200, which was next to impossible to achieve, since diminishing returns started at half of personal maximum. Fortunately, the System strongly protected Stat privacy, even though many Skills could read a person's current resource pool numbers.
Sarmak was classified as an Endurance Laborer under the city's Peasant Classification Registry, one step up from enslavement - i.e. he was "free" unless unemployed for more than 10 day, after which he could be "claimed" by anyone willing to pay the 10 Gold fee. Fortunately for him, unemployment had been rare, and he wasn't worth the fee of enslavement in any noticeable way. Endurance Laborers were expected to work 12 hour days and need minimal support, with a minimum CON stat of 50 assumed. For Sarmak, this was a life of luxury, since his CON now allowed him to get by on 2 hours sleep and quarter rations, and made getting tired for more than a minute almost impossible.
Everyone assumed, of course, that Sarmak had Laborer as a Class, and not simply an occupation, since only Class Perks could explain his Health and Energy Pools, and even then people though him a fool to invest in those Pools when there were much better Perks available. But Sarmak had lived his life according to a Plan, and that Plan was only now coming to fruition, due to the Immortal Perk he had just gotten:
At last, Sarmak could make progress! His problem had always been his System Base scores given to him at birth (0, 0, 100), meaning NO starting bonus, NO growth rate, but infinite potential - with no obvious way to achieve that potential. "Immortal" was the ONLY Perk known to give a flat bonus to growth rate, rather than a percentage bonus that would do him no good. For Sarmak, the difference between zero and one was night and day - he could progress and gain Xp, even if only a 1% of maximum rate.
The next part of the Plan was to pick a Class and get on an Adventuring Team. With his CON, Brick would be the obvious Class, but it would be too much of a giveaway, and besides, he didn't really need a Class that would just keep boosting CON. In the end, he went with Transporter, even knowing how hard it would be to get a Party to accept him in that role. But he needed the STR and AGL they gained. Age had provided him some WIS, and his natural INT was ok, but SPR and MAG were low and Luck was still only 1, so only physical-based roles made sense for now.
The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
Sarmak - Level 1 Transporter
STR - 28 AGL - 14 CON - 226 WIS - 31 INT - 22 MAG - 4 SPR - 2 LCK - 1
Health - 2260 Energy - 536 Mana - 62
Regen: Health 2.26/sec Energy 5.36/sec Mana 0.062/sec
Stat Bonus: +10% damage, +12800% healing speed vs all physical effects, +10% general detection
1st Class perk - +10%/level movement
Sarmak sighed in resignation - still fairly pathetic for an Adventurer, but it should be enough to get by on a low-level team. They would know by his obvious age that he was slow to advance, of course, and would probably just assume he was desperate for more CON to mitigate the onset of senility and decrepitude. Hopefully they would take him on in a "nothing to lose" bid, since he would be asking a very low fee for serving as their pack mule. Of course, he'd have to be careful to avoid his old workplaces now, as it would be obvious soon that he had never been a Laborer Class, and people might wonder how he had pulled off working as one.
Digging his belongings from the haystacks, Sarmak left the stables behind him, with 9 days free to join an official Party before he needed to worry about enslavement or conscription. There was no hope of real weaponry for him, of course, but he had a functional staff and a small dagger. He had some skill in them, but no Skill, of course. The next part of his Plan was to gain some - and it would hurt. Just 1 point in each would be enough, but no Party would take someone with zero weapon Skills.
3 hours later, Sarmak emerged from the sewers, still wearing only his kilt (now blood-soaked), with his last torch in one hand and his dagger (now Skill 1) in the other. Even his Class Xp was now at 8%, instead of the forever zero he had always known. With his CON, all the bites, poisons, and diseases of the sewers were meaningless, of course, so long as he wasn't totally swarmed. His Luck was still 1, though, so it was no surprise that he hadn't found anything of value on his sewer quest.
After a rinse off and short nap, he repeated the performance with the staff by beachcombing - bashing around at all the shore life he came across, wading in and out of the surf. Again, he managed to get staff Skill level 1, but only 3% more Class skill (he imagined it was because cracking shells and killing the helpless life forms in them didn't really count as "combat"). Yet again, he had found nothing of value beyond immediate snacking.
Task complete, he went to the Adventurer's Guild and filled out an application, with blood certification that his claims of his abilities were true and that he intended to be a loyal party member to any who took him on. All that was left was to wait and hope.