I was completely overwhelmed by the onslaught of messages, but they just kept coming.

Congratulations! You have gained the achievement [System Explorer] for being the first to find a secret attribute. You have gained a 10% increase to all hidden attributes.

I suddenly felt my being grow even more powerful

Congratulations! You have gained the achievement [Soul Pioneer] for being the first whose Soul Strength has reached three digits. You have gained a 15% increase to Soul Strength. Congratulations! Soul Strength has reached 7000. The decay of your soul has slowed down incredibly.

Then a second, even bigger boost in power came, and I felt the tingling discomfort that I had been experiencing devolve into a dull nagging in the back of my mind, if I even had one anymore.

Congratulations! You have gained the achievement [Soul Spearhead] for being the first whose Soul Strength has reached four digits. You have gained a 25% increase to Soul Strength. Soul Strength has reached 8000. The decay of your soul has almost come to a halt. Soul Strength has reached 9000. Your soul has stopped decaying completely.

I felt, once again, how my being was elevated. Suddenly, I became even more, and any discomfort I may had felt was gone without a trace.

Congratulations! You have gained the achievement [It's over 9000!] for being the first whose sum of stats exceeds that value. You have gained a +10% to all stats. Soul Strength has reached the maximum value of 9999, and will be restrained to that value. Congratulations! You have gained the achievement [Soul Master] for being the first whose Soul Strength has reached the maximum value. Bonus: +5 Assignable Stat Points per level.

With a last sudden burst of power, my soul reached its limits. It was like my soul was perfect, complete. It would not, could not improve anymore. I didn't pay any attention to the tens of small screens as I basked in the feeling. I was finally going to check them out when I found a new, much bigger screen in front of them.

Welcome to the tutorial screen! The world has been remodeled on a fundamental level. This screen will tell you all the fundamentals that will be necessary to survive. Good luck!

1. Monsters: They will appear all throughout the world. You can inspect them with the [Inspection] skill that had been gifted to everyone, if their strength is not too high. The weakest ones will be 9th rank, but some are born in higher ranks, and all of them can evolve if they reach certain levels. Their levels revert to 0 every time they evolve, but their power does not decrease, quite the opposite.

Approximate threat level equivalence from monster Ranks to human levels (This can vary greatly depending on countless factors): 9th Rank (5 levels) level 0-5 8th Rank (15 levels) level 5-20 7th Rank (30 levels) level 20-50 6th Rank (50 levels) level 50-100 5th Rank (75 levels) level 100-175 4th Rank (105 levels) level 175-280 3rd Rank (140 levels) level 280-420 2nd Rank (180 levels) level 420-600 1st Rank (225 levels) level 600-825 ??? (??? levels) level 825-999

2. The System:

-You will have to increase your level and learn skills in order to contend against these beasts. Each level will give you 10 attribute points to distribute among your six basic stats!

These stats are: Strength:

Increases muscle power, meaning the force and raw speed you can exert.

It also increases the necessary food intake and necessary time for muscles to rest.

Agility:

Increases reflexes, flexibility and proprioception, allowing for more nimble and optimised movements, along with finer control and accuracy.

Endurance:

Improves the toughness of your body and makes it harder to damage, and it gives resistance to sicknesses and other ailments.

It also increased body weight and thus slows down healing, both natural and assisted.

Vigor: Hastens natural regeneration and reduces the need for rest and sleep. Slightly increases lifespan. Intelligence: Improves mana regeneration and control, along with calculation power. Capacity: Improves memory and maximum mana capacity.

-You can discover hidden stats by various means too.

-By doing notable actions, you will receive achievements that will give you permanent or temporary boosts to make you stronger than those at a similar level! These are very hard to achieve (heh) so don't be discouraged if you do not manage to get any during your lifetime.

-You will gain a class at level 10. Several options will become available depending on many factors. The higher the rarity of the class, the harder the unlock requirements are and the better the benefits. For example, higher rarity classes provide more stats per level, although the 10 free Stat Points will remain constant except for unique cases.

-You will be given the option to evolve your class at certain milestones. Be mindful, the higher the class rarity, the harder it will be to unlock future evolutions.

-Killing beasts will always give experience based on their threat level, but depending on one's job there might be other methods to get experience. They are mostly common sense, so the tutorial screen will not provide a more detailed explanation

3. Think or say 'Status' to open your Status Screen. If you ever forget some information given here, think 'Tutorial' and this screen will open!

'Hey, hey, let me just read these screens in order.'

After I finally went through all the messages, I understood the situation a bit more. Still, I couldn't just sit on my nonexistent ass pondering over it, so I resumed my journey to the crust of the Earth while I tried to open up my Status. It was pretty easy in the end, since a screen immediately appeared at a mere thought.

Damuel Adams (32)

Level 0

Achievements: System Explorer, Soul Pioneer, Soul Spearhead, It’s over 9000!, Soul Master

Strength

-

Agility

-

Endurance

-

Vitality

-

Intelligence

3

Capacity

4

Soul Strength

9999 (6293 x 1.6)

Stat points:

0

Skills:

[Inspection] (Level 1)

‘So I’m 32...I still can’t really remember anything about my life’

I was not surprised to see that I didn’t have any physical stats. In fact, I was amazed about actually having mana capacity. ‘Where do I even store the mana?’

I decided to let that go for now and focus on getting out. Since I couldn't feel heat or pressure, I was incapable of estimating the depth I was at, and with the Earth doubling in surface area, it’s thickness was obviously also increased, making the math even more impossible.

'I was never good at math anyway, so I'll just plow through the problems, like I've always done.'

'Wait...where did that knowledge come from? Seems like my memories are finally starting to come back.'

For what seemed like hours I hauled my zero weight self up through countless layers of different stones and minerals, sometimes stopping to marvel at some unknown crystal or metal that must've been created in the clusterfuck that had just taken place.

The first one was some sort of rainbow-coloured crystal that was present inside several caves and ravines. It seemed to give off a strong glow that would probably blind me if I had eyes, but that with my current, strange set of senses could only be felt by the radiation waves that it emitted.

Thinking about it, it was strange how I couldn’t really see but I just... felt everything in a small radius around me. It also substituted the sense of touch, as I could easily determine textures if I focused on a surface, even at a respectable distance and straight through rock.

In any case, as I kept going up those crystals quickly disappeared, replaced with other new materials, mostly a strange purplish metal ore that appeared in extremely large veins that were really hard to come by, and a blueish ore that always appeared in small quantities, but fairly frequently. There were several other, less impressive-looking ones too.

I also found monsters, such as some scarily huge, 20-meter-long and 3-meter-thick serpents with black, jagged scales that seemed to be made out of polished basalt, but also looked a lot stronger than the igneous rock, and with glowing red, lava-like skin underneath that could be seen in between them and was probably blazing hot, as they lived in lava pools.

Further up there were huge tunnel systems inhabited with colonies of large, 3-meter-tall rat-moles, with button-like eyes and huge claws that seemed to be made of an extremely hard material. When I used my only skill, [Inspection] on them, these screens appeared.

Deep Lava Serpent - 5th Rank - level 0

Hard-Clawed Excavator - 8th Rank - level 0

Thankfully they didn’t seem to notice me, so I just flew past them, but according to the tutorial, those lava serpents were the equivalent of someone over level 100.

'Scary stuff.'

The long trip upwards gave me time to collect my thoughts, but I was barely able to force myself to keep it toghether. With all these things happening at once I was on the verge of a mental breakdown, so the long trip with nothing happening helped me calm down.

'Okay, so based on what we know, I most likely died at the age of 32. I was sent to some sort of underworld that resembled Greek mythology, and... something turned the world around just as I was getting judged, and I managed to escape actual death by dumb luck... I mean, pure skill.'

Then a realization hit me like a truck.

'But the world has changed, and it probably will never go back to being as we know it. Wait, I mostly remember the common sense of the world, but nothing about my personal life?'

I kept pondering for a while longer

'I remember... some things. A lot of fire. Ah, it hurts to remember. Did I die in a fire? No...I remember many, many fires, I think I was a firefighter. That's kinda cool. Wait...aghhh...I think both are true. How ridiculous, for a firefighter to be killed in a fire. I think my own apartment burned down... I remember waking up to the stench of burnt sheets.'

I stopped for a while to let this pounding headache-like pain settle down, then tried other approaches of recovering my memory.

'Where was I from...? I think...I speak English, although I could understand the judges just fine, and they were clearly speaking some other... dialect. Most likely USA, but that's just by using the information on hand. This isn't getting me anywhere.'

I gave up and kept note of the things around me in order to keep myself busy and not let existential dread take over me, and eventually the stone layers started changing, and turning to dirt. I made a last push, and finally, finally exited the ground. Immediately, a single thought came to me.

‘Ahh, I can’t see the sky’

I hadn’t realised it until now because I was surrounded in stone, but not being able to see sucked. This was not the time to think of these things, though. Metaphorically slapping myself, I forced myself to leave the grieving for when I had figured out what the hell had happened to the world. I tried to expand the range of my awareness as big as possible to test the limits of my new form, and it actually reached quite far. I couldn’t process all the information coming in all at once though, so I immediately retracted it back.

‘Aah...now I feel sick. Still, I was able to expand my range more than 100 meters... that’s a lot.’

It hadn’t been a good idea to do that, but it had given me a good idea of my surroundings. I seemed to be in some sort of mutated redwood or sequoia forest, since the trees were extremely wide and tall. There were no people nearby, and of course there wasn’t a conveniently placed corpse for me to possess.

‘Well, I don’t know if that would actually work though...’

I kept messing around for a while with my range of ‘awareness’ and found that a distance of about 5 meters in every direction, meaning a sphere of 10 meter in diameter, felt the most comfortable. I didn’t have to expend mental energy to forcibly compress it or expand it that way, and usually the amount of information coming in was manageable. It seemed like unless I focused on something in specific, I only processed the ‘rough outlines’ of things, so maybe that was why. In fact, if I concentrated really hard on a tree, I could even glimpse at the almost perfectly hexagonal cells and the wide channels for nutrients to pass through the trunk. I couldn’t feel things like the DNA inside the nucleus though.

Also, I couldn't easily know if it was day or night, since I couldn’t detect light, and I also couldn’t hear sound. I judged it to be the latter, since somehow I could feel radiation waves, and not many of them were coming from above. Without a reference point it was pretty hard to tell, though.

'Well then, I guess I'll have to look for a body...?'