The worst day of my life was fated to be a special day, unlike any other.
I was riding the bus heading home after a long day in highschool when it happened.
Mind you, don't think that my day was long because I was focusing on my studies or listening to my teachers... It was long because I had to watch hundreds of ads on my phone.
You see, I had gotten addicted to this online game that, by all accounts, was the worst game ever inflicted upon a mobile phone.
It was so bad that it made me question my sanity every time I launched it.
The graphics were terrible. The gameplay was boring. The characters were ugly. The menus were confusing. Half the features didn't even work...
So why was I addicted to the game? Why was I constantly running the ads and inflicting this man-made horror upon myself daily?
Well it's due to a simple choice this cursed developer team made when designing their crappy game.
There was no limit to how much premium currency you could earn by watching ads.
Actually, considering how damn terrible their abomination of a game was, that was probably a mistake too. They probably never meant for players to earn every single broken item and every single bugged character without paying them a single coin.
And yet, there I was, at 99.9% collection rate for all the collectibles they added, without ever swiping a card.
At least I believed that I was at 99.9%... The interface was bugged and it stopped counting long ago. All I knew was that I was missing a single item and I would finally run out of things to buy from the broken in-game store.
Of course, any sane person would ask me why I was doing this. Why was I so determined to completely finish this crappy game that I hated from the bottom of my heart?
I honestly wouldn't know how to answer this without sounding like a lunatic...
When I first played it, or tried to anyway, it crashed right from the installation menu.
After some fiddling, I managed to get it to successfully install by downloading unpacked files from a shady website.
At the time, what drove me was mostly curiosity. I was starving for a new game to play after trying so many.
I was constantly installing games, playing them for less than five minutes at times, then removing them to try new ones.
Hell, sometimes I would install one and, right from the loading screen, I would decide that it wasn't for me and would immediately start looking for another.
I suspected that I had a mental illness or something awful going on, for me to be going through such a routine constantly. Yet, I didn't really care.
As long as I was having fun, forever looking forward to the next hidden gem, I was happy. Who cares if I enjoyed installing new games more than actually playing them?
That was, until I came upon this aberration of a game...
Ever since, I spent days trying to install it, and even more days trying to actually launch this torture device disguised as an app. When I finally managed to catch a glimpse of the main menu after a week of trials... it stopped being a hobby and it became an obsession.
I was hellbent on seeing just what kind of game it was.
What kind of game came out of the eldritch, cursed and incomprehensible computer code the mentally defective troglodytes in the development team managed to write?
My curiosity consumed me like a fire. It had to be something miraculously bad.
And when I finally managed to *play* the thing, my expectations weren't met... They were shattered.
I expected the game to be bad. I expected it to have bugs and crashes. I could envision the graphical glitches and the terrible gameplay long before I laid my eyes upon them.
And yet, the game was just... bad.
Beyond the constant freezing and crashing, the error popups and the misaligned buttons... The game was just bad.
Yes. It wasn't fun, the art was ugly, the mechanics stupid, and the game seemed to stubbornly fight the player and refuse to work at times...
But also, it looked like the developers genuinely tried to make a fun game and had good intentions... They were simply awful at everything they touched.
But I expected more.
After all the effort it took, I wanted the game to be so bad that it would drive me to madness.
Deep inside I hoped that it would make my phone explode or give me seizures or something. Anything incredibly and incomprehensibly bad that it would leave me scarred.
I wanted it to justify the time I wasted trying to get it to work by finding an impossibly horrible game... But it wasn't.
And so, the game was so disappointingly average that I didn't feel cheated or disappointed. I felt spiteful.
Something deep inside me cracked and I felt pure hatred towards the developers for wasting my time.
I felt so much hatred, in fact, that I wanted vengeance. Uninstalling the game wouldn't do.
No.
I had to actively participate in their ruin. I had to somehow cause them damage.
Of course, I thought of suing them for the mental harm they inflicted upon me. But I was just a highschooler and not even my parents would take my pleas seriously.
That and I didn't want them to discover just how much time I actually spent on my phone playing games. Or in this case, trying to play a game.
I also considered finding their real addresses and harassing them. I briefly thought of sending them death threats, but that would put me on the wrong side of the law.
And, of course, I would then have to explain to my parents why I was sending bomb threats to a team of developers after they made me spend too much time on a game that didn't even work. So that plan also went out the window.
No, the only option left for me was to cause them financial damage by taking potential money from them. Especially after discovering that I could abuse their ad-reward system.
I wanted them to gaze in horror as they watched someone finish every little bit of content, own every expensive item, explore every hidden corner of their garbage game without even paying them once.
I wanted them to taste the bitterness I did, and feel the disappointment I felt.
The horror. The pain. The depression...
I wanted vengeance.
And there I was, on the ride back home, doing what I have been doing constantly for months, now. I was tapping the same button to watch the same handful of ads play over and over and over again.
Whether I was in class, taking a shower, doing chores or having dinner... I was chaining one ad after the other and watching my premium points counter grow.
I even managed to do the impossible and regulate my sleeping schedule, not for a better life and a healthier body, but to minimize my downtime and maximize my ad-watching time.
My vengeance became my purpose and every second spent earning the accursed points brought me closer to my final goal.
It took me months to own all the items and characters. To earn some of them I had to suffer the excruciatingly dull gameplay, but for most, the good old ads were the only way.
And it was fine by me, honestly. Ads stopped being an annoyance long ago. They were now my only form of entertainment.
Musical ads with catchy songs for consumer products, soothing ads for mental health guides, and the near-infinite variety of obvious scams and shady products. I knew them all by heart at this point.
In fact, I became a bit of an expert in the matter.
As soon as a new product was out, I would find myself unconsciously analyzing it.
Observing the directing, criticizing the wording choice or thinking up ways to improve it became the only creative work my mistreated brain experienced. Small oases of life sprinkled among the vast swathes of brain-death I suffered continuously for my revenge.
And I knew that it would all be worth it in the end, for I was slowly approaching my goal.
There was one last item that I was missing, and I was so close to buying it that I could nearly taste its digital bytes.
Like nearly everything else in that blasphemy of a game, there was a bug involving that item. Not with it's name or it's function, but with it's pricing.
It had one extra zero.
And because it was the most expensive item, made as a reward for the most loyal spenders, it's price was inherently unattainable. Far more than what a mere highschool student could spend.
Hell, it was probably far more than what the richest of spenders could buy.
I remember staring in disbelief at the amount of points it would take to buy it, trying to calculate how much time it would take me to earn it through ads, before simply giving up.
Not giving up on my vengeance, but giving up on doing the math.
I was hellbent on finishing my self-imposed purgatory. No amount of extra zeroes would stand in my way of absolute domination over this piece of crap.
And by everything holy and unholy, everything cursed and pure on this equally heavenly and hellish Earth... I was there!
Finally!
On that fateful day, on that fateful ride of that most familiar bus, I was about to earn the last points.
The culmination of months and months of brain-rotting routine. After over a year of the most mind-numbingly boring kind of torture conceived by a man, and self-inflicted upon himself, I was about to have enough points.
I didn't feel glee or joy, but something wicked.
Something sweet and venomous was stirring in my heart, summoning the vilest form of joy and the most innocent form of evil in the depths of my being.
I was ready to make that uneventful day a cornerstone of my history, and all I was missing for my masterpiece of financial ruination brought upon those criminal developers was a couple more ads.
And so, I sat there and watched my phone. Blissfully ignorant of the world around me. I was eyeing the dark spot on the screen where the "Watch an ad" button was.
I have tapped that same spot so many times that the phone couldn't render that area anymore. I knew the button's exact position by heart and my fingers could do the tapping mechanically on their own, anyway.
One tap.
A window popped up and an ad started playing.
How nostalgic. This one started showing up about three weeks ago, but I have seen it less and less, lately. Such is the life cycle of all ads, I am afraid.
The very instant the ad was over, my fingers immediately closed the window, moved across the screen towards the dark spot, and tapped again.
As the next ad started playing, I found myself gazing at the outside world, through the bus window.
I would need to stop clicking ads out of instinct and navigate my way towards the shop soon. I haven't done that since... forever?
I did not need to look at my phone to know that the ad was over. I knew their duration by heart. Immediately my finger slipped across the screen and, two taps later, another ad was rolling.
It would take two more ads...
What an exhilarating feeling it will be. I can already sense the satisfaction. I am probably smirking like an idiot right now, actually...
I took a slow look around the bus. As usual it was crowded, full of students and salary men and women heading home.
I chuckled internally at how unaware they all were. I was sitting there, on the left side of the bus, right in the middle, and among all these people having an uneventful day, like any other. And yet, they were the companions and blind witnesses to the end of my tribulations.
Oops! I didn't realize that I had already tapped my phone, as always, and another ad was rolling. The penultimate ad!
Just one more and I will be there!
I looked back at the street and watched silently. How peaceful the world was... How perfect! As the bus rolled slowly on the road, past the cars, the buildings, the people... I couldn't help but witness the clock-work perfection of it's design. Not a single speck of dust was misplaced.
And there it was.
The final ad.
As always, my fingers started it on their own.
This time I raised my phone and brought it in front of me.
No, this final ad, I will have to watch. It doesn't deserve to run its course while I wasn't looking... I had to witness it in all its glory.
And, of course. It was one of the ads for a scam.
How poetic.
I felt scammed by those cursed developers. And the final ad I will have to bear because of them will be for a scam.
The world truly works in mysterious ways...
Aha!
There it is!
It ended!
I consciously order my finger not to sprint the usual course and not to start another run. Instead, I order it to take a different path.
One tap, the shop was open.
A long slide scrolled my view through the menu, past every item I had already bought.
And there, at the bottom of list was the final-
A sudden tire screech interrupted my solemn moment. The loud noise came from my left, outside the bus.
Instinctively, I raise my eyes to come face to face with a barreling truck.
It was speeding straight towards the bus.
Not the front of the bus. Not it's back. It was coming straight for the middle, from it's left.
I did not have the time to scream or brace myself. I could only watch, frozen, as the deathly mechanical beast's might came crashing upon my seat.
There was no sound, no pain, no light.
Only darkness.
And in that darkness, a soft female voice echoed.
[Detected a Fated death]
"Wait... what? What's going on?"
I suddenly realized that something felt wrong. I couldn't sense my body. I had no feeling in my arms or legs. In fact, it didnt feel like I had any at all.
[Examining your deeds in this life]
"My deeds? Wait what the-"
I suddenly interrupted my thoughts as I noticed something else... Somehow I was speaking, yet I didn't have a mouth. And in fact, I was hearing the female's voice, yet it didn't feel like I had ears. All these sounds seemed to come from within me... Whatever I was.
[A Feat of Will was detected]
"A Feat of what? What is thi-"
And immediately, I knew.
All my memories came back in an instant, and in that same instant, I understood everything. I had seen this unfold countless times in all the novels, comics and stories I read before discovering that cursed game.
I was hit by a truck!
And now I was going to receive a System, or a power, or get transported to another world or something!
"YEESSS!!!! Oh god YES! Thank you, Mister Truck!"
My voice echoed through the blackness, overpowering any sound the other voice was making. If I had a physical heart it would have burst inside my chest, right then. I was so incredibly happy, so immeasurably excited, so damn joyful, that nothing in the world, or any other world for that matter, could contain me.
[A suitable System has been selected for you]
"Please give me something good! Oh yes!"
I couldn't even wait for whatever was happening to end. I was already trying to focus my mind to make a menu, or a screen, or a display, or anything to appear.
"Come on, come on! I saw this done a million times!"
[You will be revived on your home world again, good luck!]
Screw that! Whether it was a magical new world or just my old one was irrelevant. I now had a system of my own and will probably be able to use all kinds of powers. All I had to do was figure out how to summon my menu.
As I was trying to move my focus everywhere across the darkness, a slow shift was beginning to happen.
I was beginning to feel my arms and legs again. In fact, I felt like I was getting heavier, as if gravity disappeared earlier but was slowly being brought back to the room.
I understood that I was being brought back to life, but I was still trying my hardest to get my menu to appear.
"There must be a way! Come on, show up!"
I suddenly realized that those words came out of my mouth, and that I was conscious of my eyes and how tightly shut they were.
Slowly regaining control of body, I tried to contain my excitement and relax. With the newfound calm and the ability to focus on a "center" of vision again, all it took was a single moment of concentrated willpower for a miracle to appear.
Right in front of me, in the darkness of my closed eyes, a golden menu appeared.
As expected, I felt my heart throb within my chest again, for there it was! Just like in all the stories I read, a status menu drawn in pure light manifested itself in front of me.
I saw an entry for my name, which I completely ignored as I jumped straight to the most exciting entry I glimpsed. "Class".
And in that moment, all my excitement disappeared. My heart, which was beating to the point of explosion within my chest, suddenly sank like a rock.
I felt like a cold bucket of water was dumped on me for, right in front of the entry "Class", where Warrior or Mage or Necromancer or any other word was supposed to be, the only words I read were...
[This Secret Technique Will SHOCK You! Click Here To Unlock Your Full Potential]