Nathan - POV

  My relationship with my family had shifted in ways I hadn’t expected. Where once there had been silence, hesitation, and the unspoken weight of secrets, there was now conversation. I found myself asking more questions; about classes, about the world, about the things I didn’t understand but desperately wanted to. And to my surprise, my parents answered. My siblings listened too, wide-eyed, absorbing every word. It was the right choice to bring them into the fold. Knowledge, after all, was power, and power shared among family was strength multiplied.

  I learned quickly that the world of classes was far more complex than I had imagined. There were the obvious ones—warriors, mages, archers, rogues—the kinds of roles sung about in tavern songs and etched into the minds of children who dreamed of glory. But there were also the mundane, the overlooked: farmer, merchant, scribe, cook. The system, it seemed, did not discriminate between the grand and the ordinary. It simply reflected what a person was, or perhaps what they were meant to be.

  Take my mother, for example. She was a healer, though she had once worked as a cook. Her class did not erase her past, nor did it dictate her future. It was a framework, not a prison. That realization unsettled me. If classes were not destiny, then what were they? Tools? Labels? Or perhaps shackles disguised as gifts?

  One revelation struck me harder than the rest: when a person reached the threshold of level fifty, the system itself offered advancement. A new path. A chance to evolve. My mother, still only level twenty-five, had not yet reached that point, but she had seen it happen to others. Her mentor, for instance, had begun as a healer. At level fifty, she was given a choice: priest, white mage, or holy paladin. She chose priest, and her life had changed forever.

  But the choices were not uniform. Another healer she knew had been offered the path of a monk instead. Why? No one knew. The system’s logic was inscrutable; its decisions beyond mortal comprehension. People called it the “mystery of the system,” as if giving it a name made it less terrifying.

  And then there was the next threshold: level one hundred. That was where things grew stranger, rarer, more dangerous. My father told me of an emperor of the Shaxaian Empire, a man who had begun as a simple water mage. At level fifty, he became an Elemental Mage Master. At level one hundred, he was offered something darker: Bloodmage. He accepted. By the time of his death, he was level one hundred thirty-nine, a figure both feared and revered.

  But what lay beyond that? Level one hundred fifty? Two hundred? No one knew. Some whispered that the elves, with their long lives and ancient wisdom, had pierced that veil. But if they had, they weren’t sharing. To humans, such beings were legends, the stuff of poems and half-remembered tales.

  The Shaxaian Empire itself might have held answers once. Its libraries were said to be vast, its records meticulous. But all of that knowledge was lost in the fires of civil war. The empire, the oldest in the known world, had lasted three thousand years before tearing itself apart over succession disputes. Princes and princesses squabbled, and in their arrogance, they destroyed what their ancestors had built. Still, three millennia was no small feat.

  If the Shaxaians were the keepers of human history, then the elves of the Gharish Empire were the true archivists of the world. Their empire had stood for four thousand years, unbroken, unyielding. Yet they shared nothing. Some said it was arrogance, others said it was weariness, an exhaustion with the endless wars of humans. Whatever the reason, the elves had closed their borders. No one entered, no one left. The last recorded interaction between elves and humans had been two thousand years ago, when an elven prince married a Shaxaian princess. Since then, silence.

  It was in this silence that the world of Hovdenia festered. Yes, I finally learned the name of this world. Hovdenia. Took me long enough.

  And what a world it was. Elves, humans, dwarves, dragons, goblins, kobolds, orcs, minotaurs; the whole fantasy menagerie. A grand stage for endless conflict. And of course, no one got along. Humans couldn’t even get along with themselves, so expecting peace between races was laughable. Wars flared constantly, one kingdom against another, one race against another. The only exception was the elves. No one dared provoke them.

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  And with war came the usual horrors: massacres, looting, rape. The same atrocities, repeated across time and place. Different banners, same blood.

  So where did that leave me? What was my role in this grand, chaotic theater? Was I meant to be a hero? A villain? Or just another nameless figure, a mob character swept aside by history?

  No. I refused to be a bystander. Whatever this world thought of me, I would carve my own place in it, no matter how many toes I stepped on along the way.

  When I returned to my status page, I began to understand more of its mechanics. When a child reaches ten, the system is accessed by said child for the first time. The starting stats will all be in one. Then the miracle happens, when a class is rewarded, that’s when the bonus stat is also given. A mage receives +5 Intelligence, a warrior receives + 5 Strength so on and so forth.

  However, during advancement ceremony, the church conducts the ceremony and claim credit for the blessing of the system and the classes. The Church of Slalenese conducts it, invoking their gods to bestow classes upon the children. For a price, of course. Five gold per participant. And if a family couldn’t pay? Indentured servitude. Slavery.

  The church claimed that without their ceremony, a child would not receive a “good” class. Convenient, isn’t it? A monopoly on destiny. But Serena and I had already proven that claim false. We didn’t need them. The system worked regardless of their rituals. Their power was built on lies.

  After the ceremony, the bonuses shifted. A mage gained +5 Intelligence per level, a warrior +5 Strength, and so on. And also, the rest of the stats receive a plus one. The foundation was set, but growth depended on the individual. Kill monsters, train, study, fight; there were many paths to leveling. But the most efficient, the most brutal, was killing another living being. Human, demi-human, monster; it didn’t matter. The system rewarded death.

  Herein lies the problem; the experience bar cannot be seen. No one knows why.

  One would expect that a society built on rewarding death would eat itself. Surprisingly, the system also has that covered.

  What kept society from collapsing into chaos were the social tags. Commit a crime, and the system marked you. Murderer. Rapist. Arsonist. The system always knew. That was the unsettling part...it always knew. A knight who killed a farmer might or might not be tagged, depending on whether the system judged the act justified. Imagine living under that kind of scrutiny, where even your sins were catalogued by an unseen hand.

  Authorities used magical devices to check these tags. A simple scan revealed a person’s name, level, class, and any tags they carried. Those with negative tags were hunted, bounties placed on their heads.

  But not all societies cared. Among certain demi-human clans, such tags were badges of honor. One warlord, infamous for carrying the tags “Serial Killer” and “Rapist,” still ruled his people with iron authority. That was one reason humans and demi-humans clashed so often. Not all demi-humans tolerated such behavior, of course. Elves, dwarves, even dark elves placed bounties on criminals. But the divide was there, deep and bloody.

  And then there was me. Why didn’t I have a tag? I had ordered Krizek to kill. I had profited from it...gold, experience, everything. Shouldn’t the system have marked me? Was it because Krizek had done the killing directly? Or was there something else at play? The question gnawed at me. I couldn’t ask my parents, not yet. But I suspected my mother had already connected the dots between Krizek and the deaths of Bret and his men. That was a problem for future me.

  Two questions haunted me most. First: could a mage train his body to rival the physical classes? My father said yes. My mother said… maybe. That was enough for me. I would try. I would become more than a mage. A swordsman. A spellblade. Something new.

  Second: what path should I take moving forward? My mother’s plan was simple; return to her homeland, live quietly, avoid scrutiny. But her homeland was in turmoil, chaos tearing it apart. And as one infamous character from one of my favorite shows once said: Chaos is a ladder.

  That was the plan. To climb. To seize whatever structure lay before me; economic, military, political; and ascend it. To carve out a piece of this world for myself and my family. To protect them, no matter the cost. No matter what.