"Eh… Never in the heavens, I expected you to clean up the cell so well. You caught me by a surprise, I will give you that."
After a few moments of simply staring at me and at the part of the room that the small torch of the guard illuminated, the man finally took a breath and spoke to me. His words, to my surprise for change, didn't contain any form of grudge or anger, filling me with the hope that whatever I did that resulted in this cell becoming my temporary home, wasn't as bad as I initially expected.
"Thank you, sir. I should say that I'm glad for receiving this punishment, as it allowed me to realise how poor my behaviour was. To be perfectly honest, I changed so much that I cannot even recall what kind of atrocity I committed that resulted in my punishment!"
With over thirty years behind my belt, I didn't care about my face at all. Every single word that I directed to the guard on the other said of the bars was oozing with respect and sympathy, while my mind was actually plagued with the other problem. Thanks to all my experiences back when I only joined the organisation, this kind of words could flow out of my mouth without me controlling them, allowing me to actually think about the options that I received.
Even though I never really spent a lot of time playing games when compared to the generation that succeeded mine in terms of being the most hated age group across the society, it didn't mean that the obvious meaning of the last system message that I received escaped my attention.
Three points to spend, three different skills that I could invest those points in. With a simple calculation, I had exactly ten different ways to use the rewarded points. Three ways to focus on a single skill, one way to add a bit to all of the aspects of my skills, and exactly six different ways to level up one of the aspects while investing a single point into another one.
But it wasn't the way of investing those few points that puzzled me, but how the system message claimed that it would decide the initial constitution that I would receive as a reward that made this decision way harder than it should be!
"Oh, stop playing innocent. You should save those acting skills of yours for some worse crime than just devastating a garden of a minor sect! Although, I have to admit. If not for the academy selection going on right now, the patriarch might opt for greater punishment for you. After all, the flowers that you guys destroyed in your drunken stupor, were the flowers he grew for his daughter!"
Reaching towards the lock of the prison gate, the guard laughed off my attempts to keep licking his bottom. Thankfully, the rest of his words was enough to derive just what the heck did I do to deserve a sentence in a prison cell!
With a muted clang, the lock of the gate was undone. Instead of rushing towards the opening, I patiently waited for the guard to move aside and gesture at me to get moving. Even though he saw through my attempts to appear like a good kid, it didn't mean that I could suddenly stop playing and assume the character I would use back on earth, where I actually meant something within the organisation!
"Sir, with all due respect, but you mentioned the academy selection. Would you be as kind as to elaborate on this topic?"
It would take an idiot to fail to understand what those two words meant. But in my situation, it was better to double-check on even the most obvious things. After all, there was no way for those strange messages to appear if I were still on earth, was there? And since this most basic aspect of my common sense was the first thing that was broken after I regained my consciousness, only a true idiot or some novel protagonist written by a clearly unskilled and inexperienced author would assume that everything else would follow the same rules that decided the shape of life on earth!
"Wait, are you actually okay?"
The guard's hand that was about to shut the gate of the prison cell after I left it, suddenly froze. It seemed as if my questioning made him wary of something that I had yet to learn about.
"My head doesn't hurt, nor do the rest of my body if that's what you are asking, sir."
Despite the poor illumination of the prison corridor, I could tell how the guard's expression changed. While I could take his sudden expression of worry for a good sign, in my situation it was ultimately better to stay away from other's attention!
"It's all right then… Hmm… Now I'm really curious about your evaluation during the selections…"
Not saying a word more, the guard left me with questioning marks potentially hanging over my head. After all, if I could see those strange messages, then there was a chance that being puzzled would result in this kind of… physically-magical reaction! Or rather, I had no grounds to say that it was impossible, meaning that there was at least a small chance that something like this could happen!
With no more words coming out of the guard's mouth as he started to move through the corridor, I had no other choice but to follow the man. Thanks to the short moment of silence, I could finally return with my thoughts to the problem that puzzled me from a moment ago.
Should I focus on a single aspect of the cleaning and pump all my points into it? Given how little I knew about the potential of each aspect, doing so was the option with both greatest risks but also with the potential greatest rewards. On the other hand, deciding on two different abilities between which I would spend my points meant that I could only hope that the one I would omit wouldn't be useful at all in the long run!
"Let's go with all three of them, one point in each aspect."
Whispering under my nose, I finally made my decision. While it was obvious that investing in all three aspects of my abilities would bear the most moderate results of all the possible ones, given how little I knew about the world around me, I didn't dare to take any risks. After all, the status window that was included in the very first message that I saw flashing in the corner of my visions, only consisted of those three aspects of my cleaning ability and my overall level! Since there was no openly described statistic of luck that I could rely on, taking any risks in my current, unsure situation was something that only someone full of fake self-confidence would do!
*Congratulations!"
*Host has invested one skill point in each of the aspects!*
*Your current aspects: O L1(1/2) S L1(1/2) C L1(1/2)*
*To avoid cluttering of host's visions, each respective aspects will be mentioned with the first letter of its name alone!*
*Congratulation!*
*Host development results in gaining unique constitution!*
*Grants: Universal Cleaner level 1!*
Those two messages was the last things that I saw within the darkness of the prison's corridor, before the guard that guided me through it finally reached the main doors of the place. Once what could only be a sturdy gate opened, an intense array of lights instantly overwhelmed my eyes, blinding me in a result.
'Come on…'
As soon as my eyes finally accustomed themselves to the new intensity of the illumination, I finally understood that this place… No, this world… Couldn't be any further from the earth!