The world ended with a chime.
It wasn't a scream, or an explosion, or the roar of some eldritch horror. It was a gentle, crystalline ding that echoed not in the air, but directly inside the skull of every human on Earth.
Alex Wei heard it through the fog of his own pain, lying on a stained mattress in his tiny, rented room. The cancer—a rare, aggressive type the doctors had no name for—was particularly bad today. His body was a map of agony, every nerve ending a lit fuse.
[System Integration Commencing.]
A blue, semi-transparent screen materialized before his eyes. The text was a cold, alien script he had never seen, yet he understood it perfectly.
[Scanning Planetary Biosphere...]
[Assessing Sapient Species Potential...]
[Initializing Tutorial Zone: 'New Earth'.]
Panicked shouts erupted from the street outside. Alex, too weak to even rise and look out the window, could only watch the screen.
[Welcome to the Omniverse Ascendancy System. Your world has been selected for integration. The old rules are void. Survive. Evolve. Or be culled.]
Another chime, this one personal.
[Individual Scan Complete.]
[Name: Alex Wei]
[Assessing Class Compatibility...]
A flicker of desperate, foolish hope ignited in his chest. A miracle. This had to be a miracle. Maybe this "System" could cure what modern medicine couldn't. Maybe he could get a Class like "Paladin" or "Vitalist" and be reborn in a body of light and strength.
[Diagnosis: Cellular Degeneration (Terminal-Stage).]
[Vital Energy Signature: Critically Low.]
[Conclusion: Insufficient foundation for standard Class Inheritance. Incompatible with all Combat, Magic, and Support Archetypes.]
The hope died, crushed under the weight of a cosmic confirmation of his worthlessness. Even an alien god-system saw him as garbage.
[Allocation Reverted to Base Parameters.]
[Granting: Standard Status Panel.]
The main screen vanished, replaced by a simpler, starkly minimalist window. It was... pathetic. He'd seen enough video games to know what a status screen should look like. They were supposed to be filled with numbers, skills, titles, and fancy artwork.
His was barren.
---
Name: Alex Wei
Race:Human (E)
Title:None
Class:None
Health (HP): 11/11
Mana (MP):5/5
Stats:
· Strength (STR): 1
· Agility (AGI): 1
· Vitality (VIT): 1
· Intelligence (INT): 1
· Wisdom (WIS): 1
· Luck (LCK): 0
Unallocated Stat Points: 5
---
A bitter laugh, more of a wheeze, escaped his lips. The numbers were a perfect quantification of his miserable life. A 1 in everything. Below average in all physical and mental attributes. His Health was in the single digits. And Luck... Luck was a flat zero. Of course it was.
Five points. That was his entire inheritance for the end of the world. Five points to stand against monsters and the newly empowered.
What was the point? Putting them into Strength would make him as strong as a sickly child instead of a dying one. Agility wouldn't let him outrun a stiff breeze. Vitality might buy him an extra day of pain. Intelligence and Wisdom were meaningless without a Class to give him spells.
His eyes, dull with acceptance of his fate, drifted over the stats again. Luck: 0.
The one stat that was universally mocked in every game he'd ever played. The dump stat. The stat for gamblers and fools. It didn't increase your damage. It didn't make you tougher. It was a vague, ethereal concept of fortune.
But what did he have to lose? Absolutely nothing. The world was ending, and he was already at its finish line. If he was going to die, he might as well do it on his own terms, as the biggest fool in the universe.
With a thought born of pure, nihilistic defiance, he selected the Luck stat.
Allocate 5 points to Luck?
"Yes," he whispered.
The zero shimmered and changed.
Luck (LCK): 5
The number blinked once, twice, and then his entire Status Panel flickered violently, like a corrupted file. The blue text turned a deep, molten gold for a split second before stabilizing back to blue.
[Anomaly Detected.]
[...]
[Stat Allocation Confirmed.]
Nothing happened. No surge of power. No sudden healing. The pain was still there. He was still a frail man dying on a mattress. He had wasted his one chance.
A tremendous crash shook the building. The sound of screeching metal and shattering concrete filled the air, followed by screams that were abruptly cut short. Something was out there. Something the System had brought.
Alex closed his eyes, waiting for the end. He heard heavy, clanking footsteps in the hallway outside his room. They stopped right at his door. The cheap wooden door splintered inward with a single blow, and a creature stepped through.
It was a hulking brute of rusted metal and raw, pulsating muscle, standing eight feet tall. It had four arms, each ending in a wicked, saw-toothed blade. Its single, red eye scanned the room and locked onto him. A notification popped up.
[Rust-Hulk Grunt (Level 3)]
This was it. This was how he died. The creature raised two of its blade-arms, ready to cleave him and his mattress in two.
Clang!
A violent, shuddering cough wracked Alex's body. It was a pathetic, weak sound. But as he coughed, he dislodged a tiny, dusty pebble that had been kicked up from the broken doorframe. The pebble skittered across the floor.
The Rust-Hulk took a heavy step forward to deliver the killing blow, and its massive, armored foot landed directly on the pebble.
It was a one-in-a-million chance. The angle was perfect. The pebble acted like a ball bearing under a ton of unbalanced metal. The monster's foot slid out from under it with a screech of surprise. Its massive body twisted, its center of gravity lost. One of its wildly flailing blade-arms caught on the exposed, frayed electrical wire running along the base of the wall—a wiring fault his landlord had refused to fix.
There was a brilliant flash of blue-white light and the sizzle of cooking meat. The Rust-Hulk convulsed violently, its red eye flickering out, before it crashed to the floor, smoke rising from its joints. The smell of ozone and burnt metal filled the room.
[Passive Experience Gain: 50 EXP.]
[Congratulations! You are now Level 2.]
[+5 Health, +5 Mana.]
[+5 Unallocated Stat Points.]
Alex stared, uncomprehending, at the dead monster not ten feet from him. He hadn't moved a muscle. He looked from the pebble, to the frayed wire, to the smoldering corpse.
A slow, dawning realization began to push through the pain and the fog in his mind. The cough. The pebble. The faulty wire. A series of impossibly perfect coincidences.
His eyes drifted to his Status Panel, to the golden number that had briefly flashed.
Luck (LCK): 5
It wasn't a dump stat. It wasn't vague. It was a tangible, active force. It was the universe bending over backwards to keep him alive.
A fierce, wild light ignited in his eyes for the first time in years. He wasn't just a dying man anymore. He was an anomaly. He was a variable the System hadn't accounted for.
With a thought as sharp and cold as steel, he allocated his five new points.
Allocate 5 points to Luck?
Yes.
Luck (LCK): 10
The panel flickered gold once more, brighter this time.
[Title Earned: 'The Fortuitous']
[Effect: +10% to the effectiveness of the Luck stat.]
A small, genuine smile touched Alex's lips. He wasn't fighting for survival. Not anymore. He was a scientist, and this new world was his laboratory. His stat sheet was his equation. And he had just discovered the most powerful variable of all.
His evolution, starting from a single, overlooked number, had only just begun. And he was going to push it to infinity.