I come to, standing in the middle of a village. A typical medieval-style starting village you find in most games. Nothing out of the ordinary there. There are no houses in view in the middle of the wide space sits a fountain of water so I’ will assume this is the central square. I see a couple of shops, the town hall, an armorer, an inn, a blacksmith, and other places I don’t recognize.

There was some information about this in the book, but each planet gets its starting zone customized by the system. The whole endeavor is a big courtesy of the council. Ohhhhh, how benevolent and wise they are indeed.

I would have to figure out the rules that governed this instance and how to exploit them for the betterment of both me and mankind. Lofty aspirations.

I feel something strange in my eye before remembering the seed. I look for it with my Aether. I’m both amazed and terrified at what I find. The seed itself is gone, in its place is a nodule slightly smaller than the seed was, with a couple of tendrils starting to revolve around my eye. I blink a couple of times and the growth settles in a position that doesn’t bother me too much.

There is something wrong in the air, trying to make sense of it, I draw my Aether and move it around. Instantly I determine something limiting my control of it. Probably the system. This would be a massive impediment for anyone trying to get a handle on Aether.

Just like putting weight on your feet. For an adult, a 5-pound weight on one of their legs might make for an uncomfortable walk. For a toddler, it means they take will longer to learn if they even manage it.

I see someone standing in front of the town hall. He stands at the wide landing atop the seven steps staircase. Something like a town hall platform. His head moves around tilted upward. Clothed in silk against our simple villages clothes, the contrast is even more apparent. I instantly dislike him, but he probably has something important to talk about, so I start to move in his direction.

All around me people start popping in. One moment they aren’t there, the next they are. I would guess a thousand people coming in over the next minute and then it stops. I was the first to come in by about 30 seconds when everyone else came in an almost continuous stream. The people coming, seem to be from all around the world, I see Chinese, Japanese, Russians, Brasilian, and a few other nationalities. But almost half of everyone is North-American.

Not a single person is wearing their customary clothes. We are all wearing starting clothes.

The man’s voice booms taking me out of my musings. It is not overly loud in the way someone yelling and trying to be heard across a room hurts your ears. He just speaks at a good volume and I know the people further back will have no problem hearing him. I’m almost certain he is using some kind of magic or skill to accomplish the effect.

“Good morning, seeing as everyone is here I will start. I’m the mayor of this settlement. My name is Mayor Glenwood. Now please don’t interrupt me or I’m never gonna end. I will be providing some information, if you haven’t had your doubts sated by the end, come back tomorrow. I’m not here to answer your questions. I will provide information as the system deems it appropriate.

“There are a thousand people here in this village. There are a thousand villages we can reach by walking. The closest ones are at around 100 miles.

“Everyone from the human race is in one of these starting villages. Everyone will come back to earth at a time to be determined by your actions.

“What you are being introduced to is the system that governs the multiverse. Earth has recently accumulated enough Aether that the system was able to make its debut there. Our generous overlords that help guide the system in minor ways have hastened your entry by a couple of years. They provided a tithe of their stores of this very precious resource. But fear not, while the system has its dangers and downfalls, the booms, as all of you will come to realize, are so much more.

“This region of the system has several planets which will be your neighbors. There is no reason to be afraid, the system protects its citizens or users; whichever you prefer. After the protections of the System start to wane if you’re law-abiding citizens the Council would happily protect you from anyone that might try to cause harm to you.

“We are here to provide a safe and sound education to all the new system users. Everyone here, over the coming weeks or months, will start to come to terms with the new reality. I hope I provided a good and concise account and answered all your questions. Now if you wish for more information, come back tomorrow.”

He turns around and ignores all attempts to get him to answer any more questions. He closes the door with a finality that shuts everybody. I start thinking; the council makes it seem as if they are the rulers of the people with only a very minor influence on what the system does. They also paint the whole scheme as a good thing, that may ever work with most races.

I know they come later and start to take all the best resources and most of the common ones in trade for protection from the very people they send. That is just evil, but I’m forced to admit it probably works most of the time. As generations go by, most people in the council-controlled worlds probably realize they got swindled.

The Mayor also provided a bunch of information that would only be useful much, much later. Not that I won’t benefit from it, but from most people’s point of view, more than half is just useless stuff. Who the hell needs to know exactly how many villages or how many people are on each one on the first day.

We would discover most of that on our own soon enough. A couple of weeks at the most if we start sending out scouts as they run across these other villages. The system probably determined that we need information given the measures the council put in place to prevent most information from getting to us.

I see a couple of people around leaving so I go to the same place that the mayor was and try to get everyone’s attention. They are probably gamers trying to get a head start on killing the goblins or rabbits around the starting zone.

“Hey everybody. I got very important information. First, choose the second option if you haven’t chosen yet. It is the option to keep your current stats. The other option is a trap.”

“How do you know that?” Someone inquires over dozens of other people.

“People, people, please be quiet for a moment.” I wait until everyone shuts up. I wait a few seconds, seeing as nobody else seems to know anything they shut up and let me continue. “I got a book as a reward from the system.”

“From a quest already?” A boy on the edge of the crowd asks. He is one of the ones that returned. I would guess 15 years old.

“No, and again please don’t interrupt, we are never going to get this done if everybody keeps interrupting. All flowery talk aside, this is our lives we are discussing.” They see my look and almost everyone straightens their backs and I see in their faces they will try not to interrupt me. I express this from the bottom of my heart with my expression and tone, for I too know this is important.

“Thank you. I will be making copies of this book as soon as I can. We should also distribute copies to other villages. There are only a few pages filled out for now and the information in the book is only common knowledge. Like the stuff, you might read in a newspaper or learn in school.

“We know almost nothing. My guess, in our circumstances, this book will be very helpful. I’m not sure how trusty worthy everything is, but there shouldn’t be anything too egregious there. Just something to keep on the back of your minds.”

“Now, one of the things I learned is that those two options are not only irreversible but very significant. The first one guarantees your base stats are always at 10. The second option allows you to slowly train your body and mind to achieve around 20 in everything. It’s also possible to reach even higher in the mental stats. Though mental stats are much slower to raise.

“We also only get a single point on each level.” At this point a couple of the younger people, I would guess gamers, start to get closer and pay close attention to each of my words.

“The system seems to be different for each person but most of what I cover shouldn’t be too different. I can guess what some of you are thinking about. ‘But I spend all my time on the couch my stats are all probably at one or two points. It’s gonna take years to get in shape.’

“To that, I say two things, most people in a couple of weeks are close to all 20’s in their stats. You probably only need a few days to a week to get to 10 if you work hard. In this place you learn faster, train faster and level faster. Now if you think you can’t do that or you wouldn’t bother to do at least a little exercise, you might prefer the locked stats.

“Just keep in mind that the mental stats also follow this rule, so even if you want to pursue a magical path. We are talking 100 stat points you will not have the chance of getting back in the future. It makes a huge difference in early development. For people thinking the fact you can’t choose where to allocate is a downside, there is a couple of things to consider.

“Unbalanced stats will get you killed. If you don’t know what you are doing, it’s a huge problem. Eventually, you would have to put points into the other stats. Also, stats bleed into each other. Even discounting the pools, a person with higher endurance will have a more resilient body, even though that is primarily the purview of your Constitution.

“I could talk all day but I will be ending here. We need to organize ourselves. I don’t have an interest in administering anything. But I do have information, so I probably gonna keep in contact with the people that will end up in charge. I suggest we have a couple of gamers and readers of system stories thrown into the mix, especially if they have experience managing guilds. It may not be the same, but some of the skills still apply.”

I go down the stairs and I see the boy come to me.

“Hey, mister. How did you get the book?”

I answer as I go in the direction of the library.

“Reward from a title I gained.”

“Cool. Is it a first quest or repeatable one?”

“Probably repeatable, but I’m not even sure how I got it. The only way I know to get it would take hundreds, maybe thousands of years.”

“Damn, I was hoping I could get something. I saw online someone putting a couple of pages of a book with information. And that same message about stats. I didn’t read it, the internet went down, but it got me wondering. It must be a relatively common reward.”

“I put it up,” I respond in a nonchalant way

“Holy shit, you manage Pando’s pages? That is so awesome. My parents didn’t want to take me there, said it was too expensive. They also didn’t want their vacation to be with a bunch of weirdoes talking about the magical forest and stuff like that. I only went once, when I was 6. I barely remember it. You ever went there?”

“I have a house near the ranger’s station.”

“Damn, I wish I could live beside the grove.”

“Me too, that’s why I got the house. Before that, I had to ride 100 miles on my bicycle to get there.”

“I would take three days just to get there. And my ass would be all sore and my legs would be falling off and…” With a gesture from my hand, I gently cut him off.

“Surely you jest, you are a fit young man. I started at 15 and in only a few months I could do a hundred miles. Double than that in less than 2 years. I used to ride it every weekend. It felt like the whole day, just to spend a few moments standing in the forest, but it was worth it. So I came back every time I had a chance.”

“You are a true brother. I wonder how Pando is faring?”

“He is fine, Pando is a smart boy.”

“I hope so.”

We split ways and the boy goes back to the group. Probably gonna try and get himself as one of the leaders, or at least someone with some insight into the system. I stop at the front of the building and see stacks filled with books inside. I don’t know if it’s a store or a library but I move to go in.

-----------------------------------------

Thousands of light-years away. Earth – Pando’s territory.

Thousands of insects enter my domain, after climbing they start to eat at my saplings. Unlike the usual insects, these weren’t looking for sustenance, and it was happening all over the grove.

These insects only sought to destroy, they cut leaves or thin branches at their roots and let them fall to the ground. For now, it was insignificant, but even the mightiest of trees could die by a few thermites if they didn’t learn and had the resources to fight. My friend’s teachings seem to be especially useful now. That is the only reason I so quickly identified the intention of these annoying pests. My friend taught me much as I taught him about the ways of the Earth.

Focusing on one of the moving creatures I think of poison or spikes but both of those options would take too long. I then filled one of them with vigor, a hundred times more than was normal for such a small being in only a few instants and it drops dead. So I keep going repeating the same with all of them.

As the last of them fall, all the reason for trying to imitate my friend is gone, and I return to my comfortable and useful way of thinking.

Growth. Movement. Defense.

Growth. Movement. Defense.

Growth. Movement. Defense.