Time passed extremely slowly, as I just waited for the night to come. Eventually however we reached the moment of truth as I laid down on the bed and calmed my mind as I had done before. I entered into where I was last, in the human capital of Domus. My first priority was to check what the voice meant by school and arts. My best shot at this point was just to ask, so I did. 'How do I look at my attributes?' To my surprise, this plan worked and the voice replied back "You are required to visualise a screen with your attributes and other info related to you. Like a summary of who you are." Well, I'm glad that wasn't too hard. I tried to visualize something similar to a 'player info' sheet from RPG games. Though I still didn't completely trust that this would work, as the time I waited kept increasing but eventually a box similar to the one that I had seen in the first dream showed up in my vision, it was exactly what I was looking for.
I looked through the box, carefully reading through the details that it mentioned. It went something like this
Name : Amitav Reddy
Age : 16
Race : Human
School : Fighter
Arts :
- Clarity (level 1) - your mind remains clear.
- Weapon Summon - summon your weapon to you.
- Dance for the Gods - you can perform a dance to please the gods themselves
Attributes:
- Charm of the Truthful - you are truthful, and people are attracted to you for it
- Shiva's Disciple - the lord shiva favours your soul.
- Strength of the Destroyer (level 1) - you possess the strength to destroy those that dare to sin
- Better Half - your physical and mental features change to adopt the better half that you possess within
- Hair Longer Than Life - your hair is your matted and long, it contains the unruly part of your mind
Well that's a lot. As I read through the list, Clarity seemed too vague for me to consider for now. Weapon summon was pretty straight forward and Dance for the Gods could only be tested out. However the attributes had a different story, I could try to figure out what these were right now. The 'Better Half' attribute made me have a realization. I felt different from before, like looking at these attributes had triggered them. With a sinking feeling in my heart, I ran to the closest mirror like substance I could find. I saw a reflective statue of two fish swimming in harmony a couple hundred metres away and headed there. As I was walking there, I finally got time to take notice of the people around me. They were human, but they had.. mutations to them. Some walked with tails, others had claws growing out of their knuckles. But most surprisingly, some of them even had wings. I said to myself, 'Wow I wonder if I will get mutations like that one day'. I looked into the reflecting surface, and saw...'lets fucking go'.
I looked like royalty. My hair was luscious and matted and it flowed all over my head like a river eventually reaching my shoulders. It covered a face that, was strangely the perfect mix between a male and female. Thought I was still definitely a man, from far away it would be hard to tell so. And it looked good. Paired with the long hair I looked like I definitely took care of myself. I spent some time admiring all that had changed about my face, and also noticed that a lot of the fat that I had on my body had dissipated, leaving behind a toned body that was fit but not ripped at all. This must have been from the attribute 'Better Half'. Well wherever it was from, I was really happy that it was there. Cause who doesn't wanna look like a Greek God. I did pretending like I was the greatest looking guy in the world though and focused more on the 'Strength of the Destroyer' attribute. I wanted to get it tested somehow and also get a better scope of the rest of the humans on this planet.
I headed to the nearest person and decided to just shoot my shot, I asked them "Where can I ask for more information about this city? I've just moved in from a very remote place." Just as they were about to answer and I get my hopes up the guiding voice from before picked up again and she said "I have translated what you said for convenience, and will continue to do this until you tell me to stop." 'Huh, that's handy.' I thought before the person in front of me answered. They were a normal human, with ears that resembled the fins of a fish? Quite a strange mutation. They appeared to be a woman but I cannot be completely sure. They said in a sort of broken Eastern European accent "If you head there you will see a big sphere building that's completely made of glass with the symbol of an 'i' on the front." I thanked them for their kindness and headed in the direction they had pointed in. After a short walk through the city, which helped me get a better look at the structure of the city itself. Most of the city was residential with a few dedicated spaces being commercial areas. Honeycomb like, wooden buildings with wines growing around them were extremely common and were pretty much 1 in 5 buildings, at the edges of these buildings; shops, cafes, pharmacies creeped out of them like they were attached to them intentionally. The roads on either side has a pavement. The pavement had a region where a moving walkway that travelled both ways, and another where people could walk on their own and a final one for cyclists. The road itself in the middle was about 100 feet wide and had 6 lanes stretched across both ways of travel. The cars were extremely futuristic, most of them had a Tic-Tac shape and hovered slightly higher than the road as they accelerated at quite a drastic rate. Every now and then though, a car that resembled an f-32 fighter jet or another that resembled the Tesla Cybertruck would come along and people would stare as they went by. While I studied my surroundings, I noticed the building that the stranger had talked about from before. I had reached an area that was relatively better maintained then the rest of the city. This seemed to be a sort of posh area with most of the honeycomb buildings going away and more commercial buildings with complicated and interesting architecture appeared. I noticed the information cent At this point I had to cross the street and noticed that the pavement had a bar of soft white light along the edges. When someone steps on the light they get a prompt to be transported to the other side of the road. I used the light bar and reached the right side of the street where the information centre building was and entered inside the doors which were pretty much just complicated sliding doors which sterilized you before you walked in.
As soon as I stepped in, all the sounds of moving 'cars' and other natures sounds disappeared and all that was left was a calm bossa-nova track. Inside, I noticed an information desk with a pretty woman sitting behind it. Behind the desk was a water feature that created a sort of moat around the desk itself and on the floor. To the sides of the building were normal offices and to the back was a stairway to the next floor. I walked over beyond the moat to what I thought was the 'help desk' and asked the lady, "I needed to know where the nearest library is and whether I needed currency to enter it". With a smooth, informative voice the lady answered back "I can send the map to the nearest library to your device if you would like it, there are free libraries I could direct you too as well."
I frowned as I said "Can I just have a physical map instead, I'm afraid I do not have a device, which I was hoping for advice on as well." She seemed very taken aback, but kept her composure and answered the question with "No worries, I'll have that printed right away for you. As for the device, if you are a registered member of the civilization you can get a free device over at the Institution of Public Provisions, I will print out the map to that building as well. As for transport, you can use the free metro service provided to you at the local metro station, but you will require the appropriate ID for that." I smiled and said," Thank you so much! You're a lifesaver. See you around." I reached for the maps, and thanked her once again before leaving.
I walked out and onto the street, and looked down at the maps I had obtained. I knew I had to go to the library first to get a better understanding of where I was and what exactly I needed to do next. Knowledge is probably the first thing I needed in this world anyway. Now you may be wondering why I was moving so fast. Why I was being so competitive in a way. This was just because of a hunch I had. The hunch that told me that this was the future of humanity. That through this opportunity I could make myself into a much better person. I had missed enough opportunities before and I was not about to miss this big of one. And maybe part of this was the 'Clarity' attribute that I had obtained through the voice. I started walking towards the closest free library which, to my luck wasn't that far at all.
The library was an expansive building and was really, really tall. The shelves were almost a 100m tall and and there were hundred of these shelves. It truly felt really calming. I headed in and walked towards a table that actually looked like something from my world and sat down. As I did, a screen with all the books the library currently had in stock popped up. It would be free as long as you read the book inside the library itself, but you couldn't take it out since then you would have to rent it and I didn't have the money for that. I decided that I would spend as much time in this library as possible. So I did. When I entered the sun was just about to set, and when I left it was just rising again. During this time I tried to absorbed as much info as I could and learned quite a lot about the world I was in.
The date according to the calendar here, was 008/10/3056. the additional zero before the date was a way of communicating where they were in the garbage disposal scheme. Depending on that number, people would dispose of different types of garbage to help maintain the cleanliness. I thought the system was rather cool. The date matters because it seemed that these humans developed faster than we did. Maybe because of the mutations they had? According to the book, the calendar was started at the official inception of the joint human civilization, at which point several species of humans on one planet ended a massive war and made peace. Ever since then, the development was going really fast. They made the steam engine 800 years in, electricity 1000 years in and the Internet 1500 years in. These inventions were slightly different from the ones in our world but only in insignificant ways. The main difference being that the electricity wires were laid underground, so there was no wire clutter on the roads.
The planet domus had more than 20 billion people, with 100 million of them being in the main city where I was. It had other main cities in other parts continents, but there were no countries as such in this world. The world was divided based on .. schools. People would associate themeselves with others of their school. There would be educational institutions for a specific school and occupations for a specific school. There were stereotypes but no serious discrimination. Each person had certain attributes and skills from birth that they could use in their lives. This was quite surprising to me, since it wasn't obvious at all that the people I saw had those attributes. this knowledge came from a book called How to: Arts and Schools.
The final and perhaps most interesting book I read was one about the space exploration that the humans on this planet had conducted. This one was wild. Though for the first 1000 or so years of space exploration they followed our development pretty closely, right after they would make a major discovery. While in travel, they would receive a message from an unknown source. Once, investigated they found an alien ship that had their engine destroyed by space debris. This alien spaceship was from the argentum race. Once they saved the ship, they were given the coordinates for the planet of the argentum race. The ship was able to return safely to Domus, were the two individuals on the argentum ship were able to look at the technology that the humans used and suggest certain changes to be made. A couple months later, the largest space expedition ever was launched to returns the argentum individuals to their planet safely. This mission would go down as the one to change the civilization completely. The mission was successful, and the humans were able to return the argentum race individuals successfully. In return, the argentum race decide to help the humans in their technology. Their race was very good at technology but had no real defences as their bodies were quite weak. As the humans and their race improved relations based on their constant transactions, they eventually signed a pact that said the races will forever work together, the humans providing defence for the argentum race in exchange for technology. This deal would mark the start of the largest species alliance in the universe. As the two races worked in collaboration to move further in space exploration and together they started to discover more and more of the foreign races. With the argentum races technology and the human races expansiveness these species were added and each provided something unique for the other planets. As the alliance developed, the races realized the need for fast transportation between the planets. Each species put forward a massive amount of money to develop this solution; which, of course, the argentum race would discover to be something similar to teleportation. All one would have to do is step into a pod, which would then accelerate really fast down a path and then you would be in the planet you wanted to go to. (like the DeLorean in Back to The Future) After all these developments, the one that was most interesting to me would be made. Every year, a competition would be held where several amateur warriors would challenge each other in a tournament style format. The one this year had already happened the month before. The one next year was going to happen in the 9th month. (they had 15 months) That meant I had close to a year to get ready for this tournament. The reason I even wanted to do it in the first place, was the huge cash prize and the fact that the human race rewards the winner if they were human. Perhaps I can even get an audience with the leaders of the planet. But first I needed some ID. But before that, I needed to wake up.