"OH MY GOD! STOP!" Elijah screamed.
The System never listens.
Elijah crashed into the planet but to his surprise, it felt like he dived into clouds.
It was a gas planet.
Then Elijah sped up again to one billion times the speed of light. He was moving through countless galaxies at a speed so fast that he was seeing streaks — spears of white light going past him. It looked like a black sky raining down meters-long tube lights. It was beautiful.
It sped Elijah up to 1 trillion of the speed of light.
He was moving across distances so vast that the stars streaking past him weren't from his universe but parallel universes. He was cutting through the infinite multiverse.
Yet, he was still going faster. He reached speeds that were just straight absurd, out of the realm of even the most advanced civilizations. 1 trillion to the power of 1 trillion C's. In layman's terms, every single integer in a trillion was equivalent to another trillion.
When he reached that speed, the world around him was now plunged into a multi-colored cloud as if he had dived into a pool of water, where bubbles and the underwater sceneries greeted him.
He had easily broken past the barriers separating the laws of the elements, the time barrier, the dimensional barriers, the quantum realms, the mirror realms, and others.
There were now strange shapes and lights moving past him. Green, purple, blue, yellow, red, orange, and all kinds of colors of twisting light energy strings flying around him. There were different colors of clouds and glass-like fragments.
Elijah was flying past the multi-verse and the layers of dimensions in a straight line. Then he stopped before a black hole.
It was terrifying because it was almost invisible. It didn't have a color because it did not emit any light. You'd not know that it was there except for the stars and other particles it was sucking up. It was also extremely enormous, bigger than anything he'd ever seen, so it was terrifying.
Then, he felt himself getting pulled into it.
The black hole sucked him with powerful force. The suction became stronger as he got closer. Soon he couldn't see anything in front of him anymore because the black hole was too massive.
Then when he got closer to the stars, they didn't look like shining glitter anymore. They grew into suns.
Yet he didn't burn because there was a powerful System-level force field protecting him.
A sun engulfed him, but he wasn't burned at all. It simply passed through him. The suns were pulled in faster because they had a much larger mass, therefore a stronger gravitational field.
The sun's gravitational field added to the black hole's field, relatively the net attractive force towards the center of the black hole was much larger than the attractive force acting on Elijah.
When he passed through the black hole, he entered a cylindrical vortex of energy. It was like a light show, flashing through multiple worlds different colored lights reflected off his face.
His body turned thin. He was the same height and length, but his width was decreasing. He looked at his hands in horror as they turned thin as paper.
The super-condensed gravity force made his body regress into two dimensions (2D). If the System hadn't protected him, he would already be like a piece of large meat squeezed into a kitchen sinkhole and shredded by the garbage disposal unit.
Elijah screamed as he flew in the vortex and flopped wildly like a piece of paper. Then further down the tunnel, bright light washed over him.
He saw something. Something important.
He just couldn't remember what it was.
***
The white light faded, and the familiar concrete road slowly came into reality.
Just like a dream, he couldn't remember a single detail, a single word about what had happened in the tunnel. He knew who he was and why he was here, he just couldn't remember what happened after that flash of light.
As the moment went by, he was unsure now had anything happened at all. A flash of light blinded him, and he appeared here. That makes sense.
No. Something felt wrong.
[You have a new skill!]
[You have a new skill!]
Two text boxes popped up in the center of his vision. This must be the System.
'How do I…'
Just as he thought about how to open up the status screen, it appeared in front of him.
'Oh cool, so I could just think of it, and it'll happen…'
Elijah nervously parsed the status screen.
On the top center read: "Hero System"
[Hero System]
[Status]
LV. 0
Name: Elijah Whitlock
Class: None
Title: None
______________________________________________________________________________
HP: 100
MP: 0
Fatigue: 0
______________________________________________________________________________
Strength: 0
Agility: 0
Sense: 0
Vitality: 0
Intelligence: 0
AP: 0
______________________________________________________________________________
Elijah fainted and fell to his knees.
Some middle school teenagers turned their heads to see what was going on.
Elijah held onto a low rock fence to keep his face from embracing the hard ground.
'How can this be!'
Why was he level zero and not level one? Why were all of his stats zero? Could he do any damage to his enemies?
His vitality was zero. Was he not alive but actually a ghost?
No. His health was 100, but it didn't give him any sense of relief.
"System! Why did you make me level 0? Are you trying to get me killed!" He yelled for an answer.
People gave him odd stares. The younger people thought he was doing some kind of TikTok video or prank. They looked around to find a hidden camera recording their reactions.
Some were embarrassed for the guy doing the prank, so they ignored him and carried on with their conversations.
Elijah noticed the stares he was getting, so he got up and walked normally.
"I'm sorry I shouted before. Can you please help me out? I'm really confused."
He thought that maybe the System would help if he was polite.
He waited for a while, but it didn't answer.
"Can you hear me?"
"…"
There were two kinds of Systems that Elijah had seen in anime and read in light novels.
One type of System is helpful and answers questions. The other type is an extremely silent System that doesn't answer your questions unless triggered by an event. Elijah had hoped that he would get the former, but it was clear what he had.
'You'd think the Hero System would be more useful. Sigh.'
[Level 0 is your base stats.]
Elijah: "!"