Merely assimilating the new knowledge associated with creating one’s avatar was sufficient to reflect for an entire day alone like a philosopher from Rune’s opinion.

Nevertheless, he immediately understood something, a new era was dawning, and this moment was the critical opening, the astonishing start that would be recorded in the e-textbooks used to teach school.

Now wasn’t the moment to be impulsive or hot-blooded, and after reading through the guidance given by the Compensation Law, he instantly calmed down.

Rune thought of himself as the careful and attentive sort, and though his parents saw him as being a little slow on the uptake, he consoled himself by thinking he just thought very carefully about every decision he had to make.

Thinking about the best course of action to take, he instinctively thought the best plan to take was to wait for the “front-liners” to make more intel circulate. Like his friends said, creating an avatar impulsively would be a disaster.

And while he waited for this intel to come, he could familiarize himself with the other functions of the global system and discuss with other people to forge an opinion on everything he learned and be as subjective as possible.

‘Ok, let’s do that, open everything and wait for the stupid… Brave people to come back, no I’ll just call them stupid, nobody can read my mind anyway.’

Rune decided to continue exploring the global system.

Dimensions

Information Board

Ether Wiki

Event

Willing this menu to appear was still as easy as before, describing it as making a mental effort would be a straight-up lie.

The Dimensions, Information Board, and the disappeared Compensation, Rune had already checked, so only the Event and the Ether Wiki options remained to open and see.

Opening Event, he was welcomed with…

Event

A barren screen, fan-tas-tic.

‘Half of my work plan just disappeared, amazing,’ was his instinctual reaction, before becoming speechless.

After staring dumbly at the empty screen for a few seconds, he pulled himself together and followed up with the next logical action, opening the Ether Wiki.

Ether Wiki

Knowledge vault, for knowledge seeker, every information will be verified by the Ether Law itself before being made available to everyone, contribute as much as you can. Ether Wiki isn’t dependent on delimited universe sectors. Power is limited by ether density.

Search?

Contribute?

Considering the celebrated citation ‘knowledge is strength’, having something that could distinguish truths from lies was a game-changer.

‘Delimited universe sectors? Ok, if you want, why not.’

He wasn’t above understanding something seemingly as simple as that.

Rune didn’t know if he could base himself on the 100% truth intuited by the description, but just having the possibility to search for pieces of information based on this assumption, even if they seemed unreliable, was more than enough for him to complete his short term goal of understanding the situation.

The way to search for information was the same as the wiki of anything, the interrogation about how did the Ether Law translate everything to have a system so understandable was lost on him, system-thing.

As for the working of the wiki, he just had to think about keywords and results will appear depending on it.

The associations with gaming wikis were obvious, even more so when terms like ‘stats’, ‘ether resources’ and ‘energy’ gave an overwhelming number of results, modified in real-time, probably by the Ether Law confirming the information contributed by others.

However, Rune had a little problem.

‘What am I even searching for? Ether resources gathering? Ether resources Absorption? Avatar? Stats? Delimited universe sectors? The Ether Law? The Compensation Law? The global system?’ His thought summarized the problem.

His rough plan was already complete, he opened everything the system introduced, but now he entered an even more critical period, information gathering.

‘Huuuu… Let’s start with… Huuu… Well, everything, I guess? Am I missing something before starting…’

Pondering on the seemingly infinite available information that increased by the second on the global system Ether wiki, he found that he was missing something to really put himself into it.

A little bit of music.

Chill music, perfect background music.

Turning on his speaker, he chose the right playlist, one he used long before today.

Soft music immediately started playing in the background as he started to slowly and carefully read the information that may change his life, maybe.

‘That’s better.’

He felt relaxed and ready.

…

As Rune was reading through the wiki, the world was having a strange lull in its normalcy.

The IGS was an optimized society, but the problem was self-evident, it was due to people that already created their avatars and acquired power based on the stats they decided to take.

No news reported someone suddenly becoming a world-killer weapon, but for those who did an all-in on strength and got just below 10 points of strength after it was transmitted from their avatar to their original body, they were as good as true super-being for everyone, crushing reinforced material like it was dough.

The IGS government and the major research companies called for emergency meetings as complicated situations appeared in every part of the known universe with sapient beings involved. Opportunities had to be found and decisions had to be made.

Old people returning to their prime after creating their avatar, terminally diseased patients considered a lost cause because some diseases just couldn’t be healed even at the current age, waking up like nothing was wrong with their body.

Induced comatose patients and cryogenized people woke up, telling tales of a spiritual journey where from complete nothingness, a pure white light appeared, their souls became real.

Their awareness woke up after hearing the announcement and creating their avatar allowed them to break free from invisible chains.

Be it, school students, murderers in prison, or universally known celebrities, everyone now had access to a strength that surpassed common sense.

And the key to this strength resided in something everyone had access to, the Ether Points, the EP.

On the Information Board, some public forums already gained traction for the sharing of information that everyone wanted.

Those who already created their avatar described their situation and what the different stats did not only with their avatar but also with their original body, while at the same time, pieces of information were fed to the wiki according to what was shared, expanding the knowledge base of everyone.

The IGS just happened to not be separated in multiple universe sectors by the Ether Law, and some forums and users were already communicating the fact that they had no idea what the IGS was because they came from a still grounded and completely different civilization.

They told the tales of living on their own single planet at different technological ages and their whole civilization being shaken by what was happening.

Some of those civilizations were still in what could be compared to the middle age, some were in the industrial revolution age, and others were in a more advanced and developed society, but no one reported being able to travel between star systems.

First-contact protocols established by the IGS were totally annihilated by the current events as the curiosity of everyone allowed intel to be shared without any form of restraint.

Such a delicate subject was better left in the hands of professionals but communication without language barrier with regular citizens evidently affected the regular way those new civilizations would be integrated.

Culture assimilation had always been what the IGS did, it was never forced and it always worked. The regular citizens of course knew it, so they shared stories of how every previous civilization was integrated peacefully and could even decide to isolate themselves if they desired.

With time, the front liners that were, in fact, not all stupid people, began to increase. Those who created their avatar after such a short time already had their own plan and weren’t indecisive like Rune was.

Maybe the majority were unaware of the possible dangers involved with such a reckless advance, but with a population of trillions of trillions, the more time passed, the more smart people with concrete plans would act.

They would then perpetuate a virtuous cycle of information sharing as more information sources were born.

Together with the wiki confirming dubious intel, there was nothing that could stop the explosions in terms of knowledge quantity and quality.

Those like Rune, only reading and not contributing accounted for the majority but such a majority was only comparing trillions of contributors to hundreds of trillions of readers.

“So freaking unreal,” Rune finally said after more than 3 hours of browsing through the wiki.

One hour in, he had hoped to have something to write on, and the global system answered by opening a little window where he could write his thoughts, the system could really read his thoughts, even the nearly subconscious ones.

The following 2 hours were used to compile information he judged primordials for having a good start, or, in academic terms, copy-paste the introductory paragraph of what he found.

The strength of the Ether wiki resided in the possibility to make assumptions and verifying them without experiment, any doubt could be cleared instantly or within minutes.

As the Ether Law had to sort every contribution, and its power was that of the minimum ether density needed for it to wake up, it couldn’t possibly have the time to organize the wiki itself.

The reality was that the wiki was just sentences after sentences of confirmed fact without a link, it was a shopping list of facts.

Linking everything was by itself a guessing game that tired the mind more than searching for what you wanted.

‘Strength doesn’t affect longevity but allows non-ether life forms to function at maximum metabolic strength without consequences independent of entity age… Clearly, someone was contributing for himself… He probably already created his avatar right?’

Analyzing everything at this point in time didn't make sense as too much was possibly not taken into account, or maybe too much was?

Refining his search for what was actually useful, he searched for what would soon happen, no answer apart from a list of already happened events.

He searched for even more info about the avatar creation and what was needed to progress further, he realized how amazing it really was.

Little by little, Rune made up his mind to reach for the maximum potential from the start.

He realized he didn’t want to be average, it was an opportunity like nothing else, who knew what would happen in the future? Maybe the Ether Law awakening presaged something even more amazing?

Possibly more fantastic than even the most extreme of imagination could come up with?

Already, he could see himself as someone traveling the universe with his body alone, an adventurer that would be at the forefront… The second forefront of exploring dimensions for new sightings.

‘If I want to become like that, I need to really make up my mind, not just with words, but also with actions, if I want a plan, then I’ll go big, sleep begone, what’re my problems? My advantages?’ Reflecting on oneself has never been easy.

Who liked being told by others that you were stupid? It could be as much taken as a joke as accepted due to the situation, but self-derision had a limit when a serious situation came up.

A serious situation like now.

‘What’s my strength in this situation?’ Rune reflected on what his advantages could be.

At the start he only came up with common talents, useless ones at that, he didn’t have inborn eidetic memory like the rululus.

He wasn’t a genius in anything and, in the end, his only strength was that he didn’t start his professional life yet.

It means that if he decided to dedicate himself completely to his plan, he’d have all the time of a day except sleep time that he could use to take advantage, and with what he saw of the stats…

With lively eyes, Rune turned his eyes to his research, more precisely, the starting situation of going to the Void dimension.

‘Appearing in the middle of a vast nothingness, only your perception stat can help you see the resources, your sight is useless, to move you have to use your momentum, it’s like space…’ It was a sentence he found after searching for Void dimensions resource gathering on the board.

As it was confirmed by lots of people, he decided to accept it as the reality.

The situation was the same for everyone, but from what Rune gathered, not every stat had the same use at the moment.

With a simple deduction, momentum and perception were the kings because gathering more resources was the goal.

Gathering ether resources meant gaining EP, and gaining EP meant more stats, with a simple “invest everything you get” plan, it meant that gaining EP through gathering ether resources was a snowball sort of plan.

‘But it’s not min-maxing, people that have gone all-in with perception and momentum have an increased chance of dying.’

He clearly remembered reading on the information board about people dying for a very precise reason.

Even by rearranging your stats so that you had the minimum allowed for the creation of your avatar or 1 point per stat, you’d have 90 free points to invest which, for Rune, represented near-complete freedom in reaching for what he wanted.

The basic, however, was of course the perception stat, its direct use was to form a sphere of perception around you with its radius being the stat number itself.

With this information, everyone who knew basic math would know that one more point in this stat exponentially increased the scanned volume, and subsequently, the ether resource finding efficiency.

So if he planned to go the ether resources gathering path, increasing his perception sphere was even more important than the second king stat.

Momentum was a much more linear stat, and simple math once again helped to determine something very useful.

Major gains at the start were easier, 20 meters per minute was double that of 10 meters per minute, but every time you decided to double it, the price increased explosively.

It was pretty easy to decide that with 90 free stat points to invest, allocating 20 to momentum, reducing his available point to 71, was the apparent best move.

And then investing everything in the perception, of course, that would be the supreme resource gathering stat build.

‘The problem with this is that sustaining damage from anything equals being dead, I’ll only be keeping 1 health after all.’

Deflating a little, Rune scrapped the idea of full perception and momentum mix.

“Maybe I should go eat something, still haven’t eaten anything…” After hours of an intensive wiki and board search as well as planning, he decided to take a break, a well-deserved break.

The dawning of a new era changed only the fact that his computer was turned on but was only used to play background music compared to being used to entertain.

After eating a snack, Rune willed the Information Board to appear and then got to his friends' forum.

After a cursory glance, he asked his official informants to slash friends about their latest findings.

[Rune: Re, anything’s happening?]

[Rune: Guys?]

When even after 5 minutes of waiting, no one responded, his brain started to give strange possibilities from over imagination.

‘Did they already create their avatar and they’re focusing on it? Maybe they’re just not here and gathering info, it’s only been, what? 5 to 6 hours since the opening? Oh…’

And then he realized something.

‘Well, never mind, it’s obvious now that I think about it, they should just have gone to sleep after the all-nighter they pulled off…’

Returning to his information-gathering activity on the wiki and board, he stopped after only 30 minutes, the reason being that he didn’t know what to search for anymore. Be it the stats, the Void, or even Ether itself, he had searched for everything he wanted answers to.

This relaxation made him inadvertently have completely random thoughts.

‘Conspiracy theory will have a hard time against something that doesn’t exist hehehe.’

The “awakening” of the Ether Law, or even the forming of the Ether Entity, as it was called in the announcement, was just the ether density in the universe achieving a necessary threshold, that was it.

The term “Ether Entity” was just what was used to describe all the ether in a dimension.

It was similar to mana in fantasy, mana sometimes moves and does things without life being involved, it was the same for the ether, entity formation thing was just the ether now going under the Ether Law and obeying it.

The quantity of content on this subject was one of the current behemoths of the wiki, and summarized, the Ether Law wasn’t sentient.

The opening of the Void dimension wasn’t controlled, the compensation law wasn’t different from the Ether Law itself.

If anyone searched for them, hundreds of such statements were present on the wiki.

The speed at which knowledge was gathered was higher than the speed at which it was digested, Rune even tried to contribute a little after he finished everything.

Nothing actually made it to the wiki however, he even tried to be sophisticated, only to understand that he wasn’t the only one able to make a stupid statement.

‘The Ether Wiki only contains true information but omissions aren't managed, meaning that a piece of info can be true but not complete.’

Rune was pretty sure it was already here before he contributed a sentence similar to it…

‘Not like I’ll ever forget that…’ Putting it to practice was simple, believe nothing you read, try yourself.

And so, while billions, possibly trillions of people, already entered the Void dimension with their avatar, Rune completed his day by just hanging around on the board and the wiki.

“What a satisfying day, I really look forward to tomorrow, hehehe,” creepily laughing like he pulled out a successful prank, Rune decided to go to sleep, he was pretty much exhausted from intense brain use.