After saying goodbye to Dong Xu, Ning Qi slowly walked to his house, which is a single-bedroom penthouse with a hall, kitchen, and bathroom.
This is around 2 km from his work location and is actually in a pretty pleasant area, as such, the cost of the rent is 3,500 yuan a month.
Ning Qi is sharing this house with his best friend from university. Unlike him, who barely passed his graduation, his friend Li Ping, aka Lao Li, passed it in first class.
Lao Li also got a reasonably good job, and he is earning even more than Ning Qi. such that both of them can afford this place pretty easily.
"It appears that old Li is once again dozing off somewhere. Good for me! I don't have to worry about his snores today!"
As he climbed the stairs to his penthouse, Ning Qi noticed that the house was still locked.
Ning Qi explored his pockets for a moment before fishing out a shabby-looking key. He then opened the door and saw that the room was tidy. He breathed a sigh of relief before wobbling his way into the bed.
"Good night "
Ning Qi said to himself before collapsing on his bed. But! He didn't see the dumbbell that Li Ping uses (once in a full moon) laying under his bed sheet.
"Ahhhh! F****, I'm going to kill you, Old Li."
Ning Qi slowly collapsed on the bed, and his head hit the dumbbell, making Ning Qi cry out in pain.
He cursed Lao Li, as he already recognized the cause. One good thing is he didn't jump on it, as he usually does.
He only received a minor bruise with the bump, but this caused him to feel dizzy, and the combination of alcohol that he had caused him to lose consciousness.
"Ouch!"
The next morning, as the sun's rays crept into his room, Ning Qi awoke from his bed with a bump on his forehead.
He slowly rubbed his eyes, and in that process, his hand touched that bump, making him cry out in pain.
[Ding! The ordinary sect system is bound successfully to the host! Please confirm the permanent bond with the host.]
['Yes' (the system will bond to the host's soul permanently.)]
['No' (the system will erase host memory and find another host.)]
Ning Qi was busy massaging the area around his bump, trying to soothe the pain a little. He was startled when he heard a mechanical voice appear out of nowhere.
"Ghost!!!? Oh, mother, who the hell is it? Early in the morning, you're attempting to frighten me to death! Come out for this daddie, hmm... Old Li? Old Li?"
Ning Qi initially thought of it as a ghost, but soon denied it, as he is a pure atheist who doesn't believe in any god or ghost.
His first thought was that it was his buddy, who came back from 'who knows where he was last night '.
"Old Li?... Old Li? "
Ning Qi called out for his buddy again...but there was no response. He dashed out of his room hurriedly and checked outside.
To his surprise, no one else was there either, except that some people in the street started doing their early morning work or exercises.
After confirming that no one was outside, he went back inside with a puzzled expression. If it was his buddy, he would have already shown up by now.
[Waiting for the host's confirmation, please select Yes or No?]
A similar mechanical voice sounded out again, making Ning Qi, who was about to sit down on the couch, stand up again.
But this time, he didn't shout or look around anymore. He believes he heard that sound right inside his ears, or, more precisely, right inside his head and soul.
He didn't comprehend how he was able to figure that out, but he firmly believed it came from his soul.
He also knows about systems, which are very famous at the moment. It's just that they are famous only in the novels that he reads frequently and not in the real world.
Though he also read those novels, he was much more rational about them. He read them so that he could enjoy that fictional feeling and know they wouldn't happen in the real world.
But now the same situation that he thinks is impossibly 'impossible' is happening right inside him.
He sat on the couch slowly and stupidly, staring at the door for five minutes. His mind went through a multitude of thoughts in those 5 minutes.
Ranging from excitement (at the prospect of obtaining the system, which is usually thought to be fictional) to fear (because he suspected that his brain had been damaged by the hit on his head the night before... but quickly denied this as his thought process is still rational).
Many more emotions and thoughts flashed across his face in that brief span.
Soon he readjusted himself and believed this impossible thing was happening to him.
He slapped himself twice and pinched his thigh twice, and it wasn't until he endured the agony that he realized this s*** is more real than real.
His face lit up with delight as he remembered all the MCs who had received the system.
He thought of many things that looked impossible to achieve before, but now? In the past, he cowered in front of things. He wanted to do something... but he always finds himself helpless against them.
"Finally ahhhhh!!... Every dog has his or her day is a lovely quote. Now, all those things that I can only look up to don't look that hard to achieve, huh? Hahaha"
Ning Qi laughed loudly as he thought of the things against which he was helpless and which had made him depressed over the years.
"System! Confirm 'Yes' for this dog!?!!... Oh no! For this 'daddy' please."
Ning Qi soon calmed himself down a bit and slowly called out to System.
[Ding! The system is binding to the soul of the host... Binding starts.]
[1%, 2%... 78%... ]
Ning Qi waited patiently until the binding process was complete. It took around half an hour for the process to complete.
[Ding! 100% successful! The system is permanently bound to the host! Congratulations Host... The system is issuing a Celebration Gift Package to celebrate this auspicious event.]
[(Note: Free Gift Package Issues are extremely rare) for the successful binding with the Ordinary Sect System.]
The mechanical voice sounded again, even though it was congratulating...That voice doesn't contain any emotion.
"Ooh! A gift package? I didn't expect that at all. What a brilliant start, man! for the 'hopefully better life' ahead of me."
Ning Qi cheered himself on for the new journey that he was about to embark on. As soon as he stopped, his brain flooded with a bit of information. It's the information manual on how to operate the system.
Ning Qi marveled at this process of transferring knowledge, which he had merely read about in novels. He sorted that information pretty quickly, as it likely didn't even need five MB of his memory.
"System! Show me the Panel."
Ning Qi called out to the system accordingly from the memory manual he received.
[Personal stats:
Name: Ning Qi
Race: Human
Cultivation: Level 1 (0/100) *XP required for leveling up [every 9 levels has a qualitative change to the host]
Life Span: 27/90
Health: 99/100
Body stats:
Strength: 1
Agility: 1
Intelligence: 1.2
(The average human has stats around 1).
Special Stats:
Time affinity (Earthly): level 0 (0/10)
Darkness affinity (Earthly): level 0 (0/10)
Skills: None]
Ning Qi saw his stats page and thought it was completely reasonable that his stats were pretty ordinary. But he clicked his tongue, as his intelligence is a bit higher than the average person's.
"I wonder what the intelligence stats of Albert Einstein and other genius scientists on earth are, huh?"
Ning Qi wondered a bit about that, but soon got rid of that thought process. That is not his business at all. He saw the two special stats but didn't get what they meant.
"It's probably because I can control the laws of time and darkness, right? System.."
Ning Qi ran his thoughts wildly through all the novels he had read. He thought how marvelous it would be to control time and darkness laws and couldn't help but seek out the system to explain them.
[It is exactly as the host anticipated, but in order to fully control them, the host must upgrade the laws. It will be very difficult to upgrade laws, and the system can only provide so much assistance.]
The system responded, bursting the absurd thoughts of Ning Qi and forcing him back to the ground from on high.
Other than the personal stats section, there are some other sections on the system, but all are grayed out, so he couldn't access them, as it seems.
"System, what about those grayed-out sections? Why does it seem that I can't access them?"
Ning Qi asked. as he tried to access one of the sections without any result.
[The host can't access them with the current authority! Some of them can be accessed after the host completes a Grand Level Up (every nine levels), and the remaining ones will be opened when certain requirements are met.] System responded.
"Oh, ok!... Open the gift package and let me see what I am going to get, hehe!"
Ning Qi laughed wildly, not bothering about the grayed-out sections anymore.
He doesn't want to think of those sections, which look very far from opening, and he demanded the system open the gift package with expectations written all over his face.