When Tom woke up, he didn't immediately jump out of the bed and start rushing around and trying to get back into the Secverse as fast as possible. No, instead he just laid there, staring at the ceiling, enjoying a slow morning for the first time in a long time.

While he laid, he awarded himself the luxury of momentarily closing his eyes again. He was treating this morning completely differently from his normal routine.

Sure, he had slept decent amounts in the last weeks, as his body had forced him to, but the moment he had woken up, he had always shot straight out of the bed, hurrying back into the Secverse.

He had finally gotten his core, mind, and body to the awakened realm. And he was going to enjoy it! Even if, it wasn't like he didn't have anything to do, but he felt like he deserved this small reward. He had just taken his first full step onto the path that he didn't even fully comprehend.

However, soon enough, his thought drifted from sweet nothings to thinking about all the ways he could use the electricity mana, and more specifically the cave. It felt like a gold mine to him, a place full of mana, just drifting around in the air, waiting for someone to use it.

As he thought about it, his excitement grew, and he had to force his body to enjoy the small break before it grew too high for him to contain.

After five minutes of enjoying the sweet embrace of his bed, he finally allowed himself to get back up, his head already full of plans and ideas.

As Tom got up, he noticed a box on his table with a note placed on top of it.

His first reaction was a terror at the concept that his home had been infiltrated, but he soon remembered all the other times it had happened. He shortly wondered just removing his door altogether and replacing it with a metal slab, but as soon as the thought surfaced, it vanished, the mere thought of getting free stuff exiting him. And who knows, maybe he would get something specially chosen from him now that he wasn't in life-threatening need of mana, and they could actually give him something rather than save his life.

He walked straight to the box and started reading the note. "Reward for joining the small group of people who have fully reached the awakened realm!"

Tom was shocked by the note. Sure he hadn't actively thought of himself as being furthest along the path of cultivation. But at the same time, he hadn't thought that there would be someone or multiple someones already ahead of him.

After he had met Mike, he knew that he wasn't necessarily unique existence with his early start to cultivation, but he had kept on a grueling pace, and he was quite sure that he had been ahead of Mike in cultivation when they had met.

Then again, he was located only in one of many cities, and there had to be countless humans in the Secverse, all thanks to the opportunities it offered.

But then again, it was only a good thing for humanity, they would have more people to help it to win this war.

He opened the box, and inside of it, one bottle of a tier 0 nutrient fluid awaited him, and another note, on it just read to save it for the next time he advance his mind. And right under it told him to check his Empire net account, so he did just that.

The first thing he saw was that in his profile there had opened a new page called the library. He immediately clicked on it, and there a "Cultivation basics page five" waited for him.

At this point, he no longer had any doubts about if someone was trying to tell him to get this guide. They might as well have told him that this book contained all the information of the great library of Alexandria.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

He immediately dove right in, his curiosity peeked as he finally could see what this book actually contained.

On the single page, he could see most of the space was filled with a diagram of a bipedal creature, not quite human, but not that far away from it. However, he couldn't tell that much about the creature it depicted, as the photo was focused on its insides, or to be precise, on the same kind of veins he had seen running through the bigger golem.

They all moved out from its core in the center of its torso, and created vein-like paths to every tip of each appendage and back in circular paths.

Under the picture was typed, " meridians, the channels that allow one to channel mana through their bodies efficiently.

To create meridians, one has to burn channels through their bodies and force the mana partly crystalize on its edges by using partly the same progress as creating the core, see page two."

Tom looked at the book incredulously. Had they really just given him an incompleted teaser to force him to buy this book, making all the information he could get out of it completely useless to the current him? Was this just some sick trick to make him lose his mind?

After a while, he calmed down enough that he could read the rest of the page. There were some notes around some body parts. Like next to the head, it informed one to be extremely careful and recommending not to do it at all while in the awakened realm, at least in the real world. And one could do it in Secverse, but it warned about an over-days death timer, as Secverse AI liked the principle, play stupid games win stupid prices.

Tom read through all of the different notes and memorized all the information they contained. Admitting to himself that maybe this guide would truly be useful as if only one of its pages contained this much information, then what about the whole thing?

Then Tom ran through his normal morning routine. Adding in, for the first time in a while, training his body, having neglected it during the last couple of days. As he rested between reps, he looked at the news.

At the very top was a piece on how Secverse's popularity had exploded after the Empire announced the war and the fact that they were giving loans to buy the helmets, as who wouldn't like to get possibly free stuff? Especially as humanity, in general, acknowledged that they were truly good at war and that just happened to be the requirement to get them for free. Hell, they had been at war for over ninety percent of their recorded history.

The news reported that at this point, over a billion people had purchased Secverse helmets, roughly ten percent of the whole population, and it was growing each day. The only thing limiting the faster growth was the fact that all of the available starting areas had started getting crowded, and most people didn't even wish to log in, as what could they do? Just sit around in the town? As all of the accessible resource areas had already been claimed by factions.

So independent players could only head toward the deadly wilderness, and the survival statistics from there were abysmal.

To his surprise, all of the factions weren't just already established household names, like countries and companies. There were also a couple of completely unknown factions, created by individuals that were ahead of others in cultivation.

The main drawing factor for each faction was their strongest person. Because if they had someone who was truly strong, they didn't have to compete for the already claimed areas, as they could go and explore into the wilderness trusting that their leader could handle whatever the planet threw at them.

One of these groups seemed interesting to Tom. A group made completely from cultivators. It didn't even accept people who hadn't reached the awakened state in at least one field, into their ranks. There were apparently a lot of rumors surrounding the group and how they had at least two fully awakened individuals.

Tom found it fascinating how the whole of humanity's focus had changed from reporting about who was together with who to speculating how high-rank someone had achieved.

He scrolled through countless other articles about different groups, as some self-acclaimed "experts" analyzed their strengths and if you should join them or not. And to no one's surprise, the bigger factions got praised to high heavens, the very faction that had the whole country's bankrolls behind them.

Just as he was about to end this brief dive into the going-ons, he spotted something interesting. It was about a group of people who had managed to claim an area in the wilderness in the city just next to the Main city one's lake area, and they were making a fortune by selling camouflage planks.

He nearly had a heart attack, some people were using the fruits of his barely surviving labor, monopolizing an area he should have claimed for himself. But he soon stopped wallowing in self-pity, as the wolves driving him off the edge had caused him to reach his current gold mine of a location.

One could not have absolutely everything.

Then having had enough of the news, Tom went back to his bed and logged back in, ready to try and reach new heights.