His priority was to find a source of water. If the sewer system had exploded, he didn't think pipe water was still a thing. The cans had probably exploded too; even if they hadn't been considered soft tech by the system, depending on their size, they might have been considered shelters. But even if they hadn't, the water tanks where the water came from surely had.

After finding a source of water, his priority would be to build a shelter in a place with easy access to it while also being defensible. He vaguely remembered something about food, water, shelter, and fire from his single day in the boy scouts, before deciding he didn't like the group, but he didn't know what the correct order was. So, he would go with what his body and own logic told him. Not only was he already ridiculously thirsty due to all the dust — which had thankfully settled down — he also would have to exert himself to build a shelter from the blocks of concrete lying around. Without water, he might faint midway through.

For once, he was glad about not being home. His hometown had no rivers nearby, but Juiz de Fora, as the medium-sized Brazilian city was named, did. Not a very wide one, but definitely enough to sate the thirst of a single man.

He had heard about natural sources of mineral water nearby and he guessed he wouldn't have to worry about monstrous fish in those. But he had visited none and didn't know where they were. To the river it was.

His desperate climb felt like a waste of time and energy, a stupid way to hurt himself for no reason at all. Even the few of his muscles who hadn't gotten hurt by the explosions were now sore from the exertion, while his hands, knees, and elbows were full of extra scratches. His right arm hurt the most; he had put his weight on it when he threw himself on the ground to roll underneath the truck, followed by his back, which had taken the brunt of the shelter-destroying shockwave. If it wasn't for his well-built back muscles, his spine might have simply snapped from that. He needed a fresh shirt but he had no hope of finding one.

It felt so counterproductive of the system to destroy all his amenities to force his growth. He would grow better by going from a relatively safe place to a more dangerous one over time. His mental health would be better that way, too. This "make it or break it" approach was simply stupid. He even thought that going more slowly could have cost the system fewer resources than destroying everything and evolving stuff three times instead of one!

Thankfully, his body was warming up again and his speed was increasing ever so slightly, while the pain was receding. Still, climbing down was taking a while, and he focused on organizing what he knew about the system.

To begin with, it worshiped the Omniheaven, whatever it was. From the little he knew about Eastern culture, which was abysmally little and came from his childhood watching a couple of animes, the heavens were an impersonal higher power to which all mortals were subjected. For lack of better information, he would take that as a temporary truth for now.

The heavens also had a ruler, the Jade Emperor in some stories, gods in others, spirits in yet other ones. The identity of the ruler or rulers didn't matter, what mattered was that the figure existed. It was doubtful that an impersonal thing like "the heavens" had created a computer-like system out of nowhere, as that required sapience to accomplish — the same sapience the system seemed to value.

Maybe the Omniheaven was a sapient being under a moniker — who knew how alien naming conventions worked? — but even if currently there was no ruler to the system, someone, somewhere, at some time, had created the system. That being had likely bound it to the heavens, but it was also possible that the heavens had stolen the system somehow. Some stories called the heavens jealous and cruel, after all.

By the way, aliens. They were real. He had seen none yet, but if he survived long enough, he bet he would. He wondered if there was an alien association governing the system, or if other species had also been victims of it. It had conquered the entire universe, after all. Were humans alone in their universe or not?

Speaking of the universe, the first messages about assimilation and evaluations hinted at a system that expanded to assimilate new universes to its Omniverse, and tested all sapient creatures found in those universes to check if they were worthy of having resources used on them.

What did the system need worthy creatures for? Why was it investing resources in them? It had spoken about servitude, what did it entail?

What were the resources it used to begin with? How was the resource usage calculated? How was evolving a third of the non-sapients in the world less wasteful than allowing humanity to run wild?

In another front of questioning, how did the system explode everything? He had felt an icy wave go through his body before all tech was gone. Was it a kind of weird electromagnetic wave? Where had it originated from? How was the system reading his mind? Through the interface, maybe? Someone smarter than Ricardo once said that sufficiently advanced science would look like magic to the ignorant, and he was feeling it on his skin. He couldn't even begin to fathom the technology required to make his past minutes reality, and it felt a lot like magic to him.

Too many doubts, not even a single answer.

Due to all the vehicles exploding, he found out that foraging whatever resisted the explosions and was useful to him had gotten a lot easier, like a big ass pipe wrench the size of his leg he found lying around. He already had the distorted metal piece, but the wrench was heavier, which would help with momentum when swinging it, and the handle fit his hand better. He kept both but relegated the metal piece to a secondary weapon just in case the wrench broke or was lost.

He also saw exploded canned food in a few cars as he moved towards the river. None of them had survived the cars' explosions, and he just had lunch, so he wasn't desperate enough to eat from the ground yet. Who knows, some bacteria might also have evolved and become able to kill him on touch. The canned food made him wonder though.

A pack of canned food might have resisted the explosions. Not the cans on the outer layer, of course, but maybe the ones in the middle. He should look for such things in the near future. Maybe look for a firetruck too, to get himself some sweet fire ax. Did Brazilian fire trucks even have fire axes? He hoped so.

He felt weird walking through the remains of the city. Where tall buildings had hidden the horizon before, now only huge piles of concrete remained to tell the tale of humanity's past glory. Some of them were still tall enough that he couldn't see the horizon properly, but the city felt much spacious and cleaner now, as strange as it sounded, considering all the debris and dust around.

Some of the cars' explosions had been strong enough to split cars apart completely. They didn't even leave even enough traces to find out which kind of vehicles the pieces belonged to unless you had specialized knowledge, which he didn't.

It took him half an hour to reach the river, which was a hundred and fifty feet wide at the tall margins but the lack of rain put the water at only eighty feet wide and fifteen feet below the top, creating a small slope on the grassy banks. The water was maroon and dark; the Paraibuna River was the city's sewer dump. He knew it, but he had no other choice but to drink from those waters when the time came. He just hoped that the sewer system's collapse when the shelters had been taken out was enough to stop the all shit dumping in the river.

He would wait as long as possible before drinking from it, but he already knew he would contract some disease from it. His hope was finding the remains of a drugstore that had been one floor high, as was relatively common in the city, to get some medicine from it.

There was also a chance to find water in such places, as well as from one-floor supermarkets. In fact, there had been a supermarket on the other side of the river. He hadn't planned for it, but it was a pleasant coincidence. Not that it mattered as much, since he knew of a similar place not too far on this side of the river too. The city center didn't lack places selling food.

Unfortunately, the markets he knew of were in open, vulnerable areas. It would be nice to build a shelter close to them, but if the monsters' evolution hadn't made them forgo the need to eat to survive, they would be attracted to the rubble as much as he was.

He didn't want to put himself in such a disadvantageous position, which was the reason he had come for the river. He wanted to find shelter there somewhere, close to a source of water that was enough for both him and the monsters.

That said, now that he saw and smelled the river, even his terrible thirst didn't make him run for it. It would do as an acceptable plan C, but he would look for a healthier source of water as plan A, and if he couldn't find any, plan B was finding some way to make fire and use it to sterilize the river water.

On the shelter front, he had three hours to build it, so he planned to spend most of it searching for some place, any place slightly defensible, he might use. On that, he lucked out. In front of him, he saw all the glory of a broken bridge.

Its extremities had been destroyed by the system as someone could've gotten below them to use them as shelters, but it was the kind of bridge that had pillars going through the water, so its middle still stood. His best guess was that since humans weren't an aquatic species, having cover above a river wasn't considered a shelter.

The gap between the road and the bridge was only about fifteen feet. It wasn't short enough to jump, as he was no athlete, but short enough that he might bridge it with the correct materials.

Looking around, he found pieces of metal that had once been cars everywhere. He had to search for five minutes to find a truck that had been destroyed enough that it could provide him with a long enough metal plank. He happily took ten minutes to drag it back; that shit was heavy.

His walkway built, he brought pieces of concrete and metal plates with him to the bridge. He would use them to build something later, but for now, it was better to stockpile building materials while it was safe.

One hour into it, he decided he had enough debris to build a makeshift shelter to protect himself from the elements and monsters at night. His thirst was too strong though, and he needed to find water ASAP.

It wasn't easy to guess the time without a clock, but he estimated he had about one and a half hours to do something. The river still smelled bad, and this might be his best chance to get some water from the market. Maybe some food too.

After picking up his wrench, he used the big metal plank to cross to the other side of the bridge from where he had arrived. Long curved avenues followed the river on both sides.

A few minutes later, he arrived at the fallen rooftop of the former supermarket.

He smiled as soon as he arrived. One car by the market had exploded, throwing a pack of bottled water on the street. Only one of them was intact, but it was enough to sate his immediate thirst to a point. He drank every drop in desperation and it ended too soon.

Ricardo smiled wider when he saw the remains of the market though. Not only was the rooftop a cheap metal one, like those usually seen in shitty hangars, the system had also shredded it to make sure it couldn't be used as a shelter somehow. This meant there were lots of food and drink packages here and there in between metal pieces. Most of the packages had been shredded by the explosions too, but there was still plenty for him.

Ricardo soon had an additional issue: backpacks, or rather the lack of them. He found a few plastic bags alright, but if he ever planned to run while carrying stuff around, like the treasures the system had talked about, he couldn't keep them in the fragile plastic bags. Especially if he might need to run away from some monsters.

He made multiple trips to his bridge. First, he stocked water, the disgusting canned food found in Brazil, and non-perishable food. Then he also grabbed some barbecue coal, alcohol bottles, a few lighters, a couple of pans, a couple of metallic cups, a lot of instant noodles, and some pieces of the rooftop for his own shelter. For whatever reason, the cutlery section wasn't close to the pans and cups, so he couldn't find any forks or the more useful knives.

After that, he wasted fifteen minutes in a fruitless search for a backpack. He more or less calculated he had less than half an hour to go back when he decided not to test his luck against giant insects.

Back on the bridge, the first thing he did was pulling the metal plank in so no monster could cross. Then, he piled pieces of concrete on the edges of the bridge as barricades, in case some monsters were good jumpers. The bridge wasn't very wide, only enough for two cars and pedestrians to go side by side, but still wide enough that he had to limit his barricades to three feet tall, else he wouldn't have enough to build a shelter. He would need to get more concrete later to make it taller.

For the shelter proper, he considered building something in the middle of the bridge but decided against it. It would be easy to overwhelm him from all sides and hard to escape unless he made more than a single opening to it, but doing so would mean two weak spots instead of one. No, it was better to use one of the bridge's walls as one of the shelter's walls too, and make a shelter there, so if he was overwhelmed, he could still jump on the river to escape. The jump was low enough that he shouldn't die unless he hit a hidden stone face-first.

He also opted to make the shelter only large enough to hide his water and food and to swing his wrench comfortably in case he needed to. It only needed to be tall enough for him to fight crouched and sleep in a sitting position. Ricardo dreaded the moment he would need to sleep and didn't even think about doing so while laying down. He wanted to be sitting so at least he could react a little faster in case a monster came while he was unconscious.

That decided, it was time to get to work.

The moment he put the first piece of concrete down was the moment the system appeared again.

Personal Directive: Bring Honor to Humanity!

Rejoice, the 1st boon is over!

You can now explore the world in search of riches!

Happy hunting!

He had barely finished reading it when the box disappeared and he heard a loud shriek coming from the distance, swiftly followed by a roar. They were followed by two, ten, and finally, hundreds of others.

The monsters were awakening.