What the hell?
All my enthusiasm, my energy and my excitement were gone. In fact, I felt drained and exhausted.
There was no Class Name or Description or anything. Instead, it was a baiting title worthy of the worst scams and advertisements.
[This Secret Technique Will SHOCK You! Click Here to Unlock Your Full Potential]
Yeah, I am shocked, alright...
What is this cheap title meant to say? Am I supposed to get excited and feel hyped up?
Anyone who spent more than a couple of minutes on the internet knows not to fall for these scams.
What's worse, it says that I have to click on it to "unlock" my full potential?
First, how am I supposed to click on my system's menu.
And second... Should I even do that?
This is how all these scams start. First they bait you in with an exciting phrase and the promise of reward if you just follow their lead. And next thing you know, your computer was full of malware.
Of course, this was no mere "computer". This was my magical System...
As I gazed at my entry for Class, more and more questions started to pile on, and with them my anxiety.
The "Feat of Will", or whatever it was that the system mentioned, was it the amount of ads I watched?
If it was the amount of ads I watched, does that mean that my system will be built around ads?
In all the stories I read, having a System also meant that you were going to battle monsters or rule a kingdom or something. Was I supposed to battle monsters with ads?
I took a long sigh and tried to calm myself.
I still do have a System.
My "powers", whatever they were, might be unconventional, but there will surely be something fun I could do with them. All I had to do was to fully explore my System and discover any hidden mechanics it might hold.
With that thought in mind, I focused on closing the Menu and hiding it away. Dealing with my System will have to wait, for something stranger still caught my attention.
While I was busy with my reasoning, eyes closed and mind focused, I realized that I was lying down.
In fact, I was lying down on something very comfortable and warm.
That realization also brought with it another.
At some point, I was dead. And then I was brought back to life.
It felt like my body was extremely tired and my eyelids extremely heavy. As I strained to open my eyes again, the that flooded my vision felt overwhelming and painful.
Resurrection is a zero out of ten experience. Would not recommend.
I tried to laugh at my own joke, but my voice felt hoarse and rough. And as I opened my eyes, I discovered that I was in an unknown room.
I was lying in what looked like a hospital bed, which wasn't too surprising considering my close encounter with a truck.
What was truly surprising, to the point that I it made me yell, was my body.
It was light.
I was light.
I was MADE of light.
"What the-"
Whatever I was about to yell shocked me even more as I realized why my voice felt wrong. It sounded like it came out of a low quality speaker lodged deep within my throat.
I sat there for a moment, silent and in shock. I kept moving my arms and fingers. Poking my body and feeling it around.
My "body" had consistency and resistance. I could feel that there was something there when I touched it. And yet, there was nothing but emanating light of white color. I wasn't even wearing a hospital gown, or anything.
I was just pure light.
Looking around the room, I quickly spotted a small door and, inside, found what I was looking for. A small bathroom with a mirror hanging on the wall.
The reflection that greeted me was the stuff from which horror movies, or children drawings, were made.
My "face" was just a circle of light, with two small circles of blackness for eyes, and a larger black circle for a mouth.
I stood there confused. Not knowing what to do, or say, or even think.
Watching my reflection in silence, I stood there for what felt like minutes or hours. I lost track of time as I simply gazed into the abyss that was my "eyes".
"... Just what kind of hellish System is this?"
It didn't make sense for me to lose my physical form just because of the amount of ads I watched. There must be another secret to it.
As I closed my eyes and fervently focused on summoning the menu, I was hellbent on figuring out whatever made my system tick.
And again, in the darkness of my eyelids, the light of the System shone bright. Immediately drawing lines and letters, and my menu was up again.
[Name: Become a member now to find out!]
[Age: Become a member now to find out!]
[Location: Become a member now to find out!]
[Inventory: Become a member now to find out!]
...
There were other entries, as well. My Status, my Missions, my Experience... Plenty of information about everything concerning my System seemed to be hidden there, waiting for me to become a member.
In fact, the only different entry was my Class one, asking me click on it to unlock my full potential.
It dawned on me that this could be the reason why my body was made of light. Like every other information about me, my body was locked behind my membership status.
So, it seemed that the obvious course of action was to activate whatever membership my class demanded, and I would receive all the benefits of my System...
But was it really this simple?
This also seemed awfully familiar. This is how all those pyramid schemes, scam programs and fake products worked.
They would promise you the world in exchange of your email. And as soon as they had it, they would bombard you with spam messages.
Of course, it looked like my only other option was to live the rest of my life as a breathing body of light.
It only took me a second to make my decision.
I have received a life changing gift and I wasn't going to throw it away for fear of the unknown.
In for a penny, in for a pound!
With that last thought, I focused my mind on the Class entry, on the words [Click Here], and braced myself.
In hindsight, that act was like making a mistake, then doubling down and making the same mistake with twice the intensity...
Immediately, a new window of my System popped up. I did not have the time to read what it said as it instantly disappeared.
Followed by another, then another.
One window would appear with the word "You Won!", but would disappear after the loading bar below it filled up in less than a second.
Another, titled "Congratulations!" did the same thing.
In fact, the more I looked at what was unfolding, the more uneasy I felt.
As my eyes darted across my System's messages, following the appearing and disappearing windows, memories of my first computer started to resurface.
I was still only a child, merely six or seven years old, when I started using my dad's computer. Looking at the screen and the flashing colors was such a captivating experience, that my parents feared for my mental health and my attention span.
Eventually, years later, they would succumb to my constant harassment and give me my own computer, which was just my dad's old one. And it was on that laptop that I would learn all the vital computer lesson any child should know.
Never downloading a strange file, never opening a random link, never allowing a suspicious program to install...
I learned all these lessons by watching weird messages and fake files pop up on my screen every time I did the wrong thing.
And as it were, that was exactly what I was watching happen on my System, right now.
I wanted to abort or cancel or uninstall or do anything to interfere with the process I inadvertently started. But no matter where I focused my mind, nothing changed.
In fact, as I tried to focus my mind to close my System, I found that impossible too.
The menu stubbornly kept flashing its messages and windows in front of me, each of them sounding like a bigger lie than the one before.
But just as my panic was beginning to swell, everything stopped. The menu settled on a single, big, flashing window:
[Congratulations! You Won!]
That was... awfully suspicious.
And even worse, though the chaos of the popping messages stopped, nothing actually changed.
Looking behind the big message, I saw that my reflection on the mirror was the exact same round face with ghostly round eyes.
"Am I stuck in this form forever, now?" The worry I felt was audible, despite the crackling "low quality" nature of my voice.
But just as I finished that thought, the congratulatory message closed, and a new window popped up.
And this ultimate window was the final nail to my coffin.
For it confirmed every worry and every bad thought I had.
Whatever hope I had left in me evaporated in that instant.
For this new window was...
To put it simply...
An ad.