Tom threw himself back into his spear forms. He had a future to create. With the weapon spinning around him, he focused on footwork and on rotating the shaft to block imaginary monsters striking at him from his blind spot.

The shaft slipped from his small, sweaty hands. It crashed into his shins before spinning out of control, rolling and thumping into the wall.

“Damn it,” he cursed, while jumping up and down on one foot. Sweat was running down his face, and he tested his leg. It protested, but there was no structural damage, so he retrieved his weapon and kept going. He only allowed himself to stop once his breath started labouring so much that every attempt to suck in the life-saving air hurt.

His shins and forearms were covered with bruises. He used a light weapon, but had spun it more than fast enough for slip-ups to have consequences. Without Skills to aid his spear work and with the added disadvantage of the unfamiliar body there had been lots of mistakes.

While sucking in deep breaths, he forced himself to pick up the folder that contained current events. He flipped through to the next chapter he wanted to target, which was ‘Demographics.’

“Fuck, that’s bad,” he cursed in annoyance the moment he reached the page in question. Talking almost caused a coughing fit, but he managed to stabilise his air flow and forced deep breaths in and out.

His eyes devoured the information. The numbers were terrible, and, unfortunately, they provided context to humanity’s poor result on the ladder. Stagnation was the word that fitted the situation best. Collectively, something had gone badly wrong with humanity’s progress.

In his last life, in a little over six months, he had almost reached rank fifty. Yes, he had a lot of fortunate encounters, significant luck, and the first mover’s advantages that had elevated him above his peers. If you stripped away all those bonuses, he might have expected others to take five years at the most to match what he had done. That would be more than ten times slower, and the trials and titles had not sped him up that much.

For so many to have failed after fifty-five years to reach even that modest threshold was damning.

There were an estimated a hundred and twenty thousand humans left in the competition, with the vast majority of them being from earth. Of that population, about ninety thousand were loosely associated with the human empire, which was the three towns and billions and possibly trillions of acres of wilderness that spread out on all sides of them. Two-thirds of that population were classed as adventurers and spent their time on exploring - and then exploiting - the unclaimed lands nearby. While it was presented as a single kingdom, it wasn’t. Each of the towns were effectively isolated entities that were far enough apart that on earth they would be on different continents, and they all had established native kingdoms between them, so you couldn’t even pretend they were linked. However, thanks to the auction house, the towns communicated freely with each other, so in a very real sense they worked together, sharing progress.

The problem was not the existence of these safe havens - it was the general lack of advancement.

Only five people had been confirmed to have reached the PowerHouse stage, which was a rank greater than a hundred. Four of which, he noted, were reincarnated.

Tom mentally did the mathematics. During the trial, the worst of them were getting a hundred thousand experience per day, but to reach the PowerHouse rank you only needed to average twenty. It was a lot, Tom could acknowledge that, but was it reasonable that so few people had hit that threshold?

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

Tom considered the daily grind that would be required for such an achievement. He had fought in the tutorial for forty-five years, and, until Pinkwing had died and he had started taking unreasonable chances, he had progressed faster than that and his rate of gathering experience hadn’t trailed off.

The tutorial was, of course, different from Existentia, as it had forced him to transition to progressively stronger zones as he grew. There had been no slow periods or slacking off allowed by the setup. To not grow in the tutorial was to be overwhelmed and die. That wouldn’t happen here, as the impossibly large world they found themselves in was a natural system. Sometimes the enemies you faced would get stronger as you continued on, and other times you would cross the power peak and they would start to get weaker. Basically, once you got to high levels, it would become a struggle to find monsters capable of challenging you.

There was also the issue of diminishing returns you got when you kept killing the same type of monster. It was logical that eventually the majority of creatures you fought would be ones you had defeated before, and so the experience you got per kill would be reduced. If you killed a lot of rank ten wolves, then when you fought the rank hundred versions, you would start hitting diminishing returns almost immediately.

Even when one took those factors into account, it was disappointing that the most powerful human was only rank a hundred and thirteen. He had been expecting better.

He skimmed down to the next fact, and that fact almost made him want to scream.

Over fifty percent of people were below rank fifty.

That was unacceptable.

Tom shook his head in disgust as he read those numbers.

It was extremely disappointing.

It was no less than a collective failure, especially by those who hadn’t passed rank forty. Tom wasn’t even willing to give a pass to crafters. Everyone had a responsibility to improve and do better, and, in his mind, being below eighty after fifty years, let alone having only achieved half that rank, was negligence.

He went back to physical training and monitored the ritual corner. It flashed twice to indicate that it was available again, and, thankful for the relief, he stopped the kata. All of his leg muscles were spasming, and he used the ritual terminal to check the skill he knew he still had. The moment he finished, the screen updated.

Skill: Social Silence – Tier 7

This is considered by some to be a powerful social skill, and by others to be the most insidious of curses. A spirit gifted with precognition keeps watch over you, and if you are about to say something that is likely to have a moderate negative social impact or worse, you will be stricken with two seconds of silence.

The same attempt to convey an idea may only be blocked three times, unless the recipient mentally acknowledges the block as being in his favour in which case it will continue to occur.

This skill has been applied as a curse and cannot be removed.

This skill has zero levels and cannot be turned off.

It was there, completely unchanged from his previous life.

Tom appreciated still having it, despite its occasional downsides. While it could be annoying, it had proven its value when negotiating with the other competition species and trial natives. The way it functioned had allowed him to navigate social pitfalls that he would otherwise have never been able to see. For his current circumstances, it was also almost perfect. It would stop him from saying anything that would risk revealing that he had been reincarnated, because saying something that could get you killed was the ultimate negative social impact.

Tom wanted to find out what happened with the trolls and confirm that the apparent racial trait upgrade had been caused by his plan and, after he had died, by his old team’s continual efforts. Unfortunately, there was nothing in the ‘Current Events’ book about racial traits or bloodlines. Also, he hadn’t noticed any titles that indicated data sets that contained the answers he was looking for while examining the bookshelf.

It would be there. Given all the other materials supplied in the isolation rooms, the knowledge would be here somewhere. But it had clearly not been deemed important enough for a typical reincarnated one to be placed in an obvious spot. It was probably buried as a footnote in one of the larger random books but hunting that down was not a priority. Plus, it was not necessary knowledge for right here and now. It would be nice to have, and would satisfy his curiosity, but he wasn’t going to waste hours searching for these details. Not when there were both the more readily available and possibly the more useful facts out there, ones that could actually change his approach in the obvious places.

He focused his effort on understanding the society that the survivors had built.