Sunlight passed through the bedroom window and shined on Louis' face.
With a light, reluctant groan, he slowly woke up. Scenes of past events flooded his mind, and after grasping the truth of his newfound mystical power, he grinned foolishly.
"This is awesome," he mumbled, finding the entire situation as ridiculous as it was miraculous.
"Did you like the trial run?" A voice echoed in Louis' ear, and he turned his head.
He found a dreamy fairy with translucent wings, thumb-sized body, and a dress woven from shimmering stardust prone on the pillow while swinging her legs behind her back.
Last night, this fairy approached him with a deal—she would give him the power of a system, but she would use him to regain her strength.
In a sense, it was a win-win deal where both sides get what they wanted. He didn't know where she came from, what world she belonged to, or how this whole fantasy system thing came about.
It was late at night and he thought he was hallucinating, when she offered to give him a taste of the power.
The condition to using this power was to select a target with a deep impression of himself, it didn't matter if the impression was good or bad.
It just happened that the class president felt disgusted to the core by him, especially since she caught him beating his meat in the P.E. public showers while peeking on other girls.
She didn't tell anyone about that incident, but it could be said that he definitely left a deep impression on her back then.
Louis chuckled, sat up against the headboard, and offered his palm to the little fairy.
She graciously stepped on his palm, stretched, and laid back lazily.
Louis coughed. "Okay, so… how does this thing work?"
The fairy rolled her eyes. "I've spent the last of my energy to give you that trial run. Now, you have to manually go through the catalogs while I go sleep…"
Then, as she yawned, her figure turned translucent and illusory, quickly fading away into motes of light.
The motes of light gathered and formed a blue screen. Following which, words appeared on the holographic screen.
Lucid Dreams System!
"So, this is the menu?" Louis straighten up and checked the menu.
He wasn't oblivious to how systems in fantasy novels worked, and apparently the fairy used that knowledge as a framework to establish this system.
He found the currency, dream points.
He found the currently available features, private dreamscape and available dreamscapes.
There was an exclamation (!) mark next to each feature, providing a brief explanation for each feature.
[Dream Points]: The passive income of dream points harvested from appointed dreamscapes. The quantity of harvested points is proportional to the host's dominant presence in the target's subconscious thought.
[Dreamscape]: Dreams are a reflection of reality as the subconscious thoughts attempt to mirror the conscious thoughts of intelligent beings. As the dreamscape is ever-changing, it generates dream energy, which will be collected by the system in the form of currency.
…
Soon, Louis discovered that he had a total of ten dream seeds, and these seeds can be planted into targets of his choice.
Of course, these seeds will be planted into their respective dreamscapes, allowing him to passively harvest dream points from them.
However, the target's impression of Louis needed to meet a certain threshold before he could use that mystical connection to plant the seed.
At the moment, his only target was the class president, Julie, and her dreamscape status was currently offline.
Next to her dreamscape status was the numerical value of +1, meaning that he earned a dream point from her lucid dream.
Louis' thoughts were interrupted by the sound of his front door's alarm buzzing.
Tossing the considerations of the system to the back of his head, he climbed down the bed and forced his way through the laundry, manga, and CDs on the floor to leave the bedroom.
"I need to start cleaning up my room sooner than next week," Louis grumbled as he smoothed out the edges of his pajamas while pacing down the hallway. "I might be getting some pussy soon, I can't have my room be a massive turn off…"
As Louis began to build castles in the sky on how to take advantage of the system for productive goals, he walked past the living room and the kitchen, entered the welcoming corridor, and reached the electronic dashboard by the front door.
It was a Sunday morning, so he wondered who could it be as he opened the live feed camera.
"Eh?" Louis was slightly surprised, but he still opened the door and greeted the guest. "Mrs. Greenwood, do you need someone?"
Louis didn't know why the housewife next door would pop up, and she seemed dressed and armed for a crusade?
Well, a cleaning crusade?
Plastic apron, yellow gloves, a cleaning tools kit, disinfectant, sanitizer, and a paper mask hanging loosely over her smooth neck as it dipped down her tantalizingly sweaty cleavage.
Louis gulped.
"Just Auntie is fine," she flashed him a motherly smile and invited herself in, taking in a deep breath before shaking her head vigorously. "As expected, you haven't been taking care of your house's hygiene after that incident… sigh."
"Erm…" Louis was at a loss for words.
Did she think he was depressed about his parents so he wasn't taking care of himself?
That's awfully considerate of her and… erm, stupid?
Other than maintaining his body and preformance on the field to latch onto the scholarship, Louis never really cared about anything else.
Even when his parents used to be around, perhaps tossing the garbage on his way out to school was the most he contributed to the house.
However, he wouldn't say something that stupid now, would he?
Louis' expression dimmed a little and he lowered his head, falling silent.
Mrs. Greenwood realized that she might have said something wrong and hurriedly apologized, rubbing his short brown hair.
"Me and my stupid mouth," she smiled apologetically and continued, "If you have anything else planned out for your Sunday, you can leave cleaning the house to me. My husband and our children can handle our house and they'd be happy to swing over to help me here."
"How can I do that?" Louis immediately raised his head—after furiously rubbing his eyes with his sleeves.
He might have seemed like he was wiping away his tears, but he was in fact tormenting his eyes to make them redder.
Once the sting on his eyes was sufficient, he raised his head, eyes burning red as he spoke with gravity, "It's about time I get on with my life anyway. I'm already eighteen, and graduation is in a few months—if I mop around like this, I'll fail both my exams and the graduation… I…"
Mrs. Greenwood paused, and then she sighed and said, "Alright. If it's the two of us working together, it might help you keep your head straight. It seems that hardships can make a man mature faster."
She smiled, seeing a trace of maturity on Louis' young face.
Louis also smiled, but for something else.
Above Mrs. Greenwood's head, Louis saw a translucent blue notification window titled "Impression."
Her current impression of him was at level 1, and the bar indicating the level had increased by 10 points.
With a thought, the interface changed into something more user friendly.
Lvl 1: 10/100.