The Sigil interface sat in the corner of his vision.
[ Sigil Option 1 — David's Belt (Bronze) ] [ Effect: +1 Constitution. Digestion speed increased. Eating after being full slowly recovers HP. ]
[ Sigil Option 2 — Run Faster (Bronze) ] [ Effect: +1 Agility. Running speed increases by 5%. ]
[ Sigil Option 3 — Inventory Expansion (Bronze) ] [ Effect: Permanently adds 5 inventory slots. ]
In the upper right corner of his vision, a reminder pulsed quietly.
[ Please select your Sigil within 10 minutes. ]
Out of the three options, inventory expansion was something that could be useful later, so he skipped option three. David's Belt increased Constitution, which meant better survivability and a lower chance of dying. It also added HP recovery whenever he ate. That was definitely a useful skill for staying alive.
Still, his experience warned him that, when facing the unknown, increased Agility usually offered better survivability.
Kael was ready to choose when he suddenly stopped himself.
Something — not instinct exactly — made him pause.
In any tense situation, whether in games or real life, the worst decisions were usually made in the first ten minutes. When everything felt loud and urgent, when your heart was pounding harder than it should, people tended to grab the first option that looked vaguely reasonable without truly thinking about what they were choosing.
He decided to learn more about the system before making his selection.
That left only the other available panel. The chat interface was accessible through a tab in the lower corner of his vision, and he pulled it open.
The number hit him first.
[ H City, District 107 — Regional Chat ]
[ Active Users: 134,441 ]
One-fifth of Hong Kong's population lives in this district channel alone.
The chat was moving too fast to read linearly. Messages cascaded at hundreds per second, a waterfall of text blurring at scroll speed into coloured noise.
He didn't try to follow it. Instead, he let his eyes go soft, skimming for signal inside the static — the way he used to skim case studies in his finance tutorials, not looking for any specific thing, letting the patterns surface on their own.
HelpMe: CAN ANYONE HELP ME? THERE ARE MONSTERS EVERYWHERE OUTSIDE
=====
Dexter340: This is kinda cool ngl
Huge AF: Are we being abducted by aliens??
Lyhmpho: I think I'm still drunk... I partied too hard
Zhao Ming: What sigil did everyone get?
Catdriver: No way, this is definitely the government
Base Bull: Bronze. Pretty mediocre.
=====
Kael wishes to test the chat when a prompt blinks in the corner.
[ Please create a username. ]
He typed without thinking about it.
SlothKing.
His nickname for the last decade — forums, ranked ladders, everything. The name had started as a joke at seventeen, built on the specific irony of grinding twenty-two-hour sessions on two hours of sleep. He'd always found it privately funny.
Right now, in a locked dorm room, he entered the chat.
The chat bragged about the same things, panicked about the same things, and asked the same questions in slightly different words. He extracted what mattered and discarded the rest.
On Sigil types, a rough taxonomy emerged quickly. The system offered multiple categories.
Attribute Sigils gave raw stat points — Strength, Constitution, Agility, Spirit.
XP Sigils modify experience gain or level requirements.
Gear Sigils awarded equipment directly, usually a random draw within a rarity band.
Functional Sigils provided utility — inventory space, stealth effects, and crafting bonuses.
Special: Sigils with conditional mechanics, triggers, and situational effects.
On rarity, the numbers were already visible in his panel header, but the chat confirmed them through volume. Bronze was everywhere. Silver was common enough to be unremarkable. Gold was rare enough that the two people who posted gold-tier screenshots immediately became the centre of temporary attention.
The first gold screenshot: Stimulant.
[ Stimulant (Gold) ] After being injured, all attributes temporarily +3 for 5 minutes. Side effects resolve 20–30 minutes later.
The second: Bodybuilder.
[ Bodybuilder (Gold) ] Instantly gain +1 Strength and +1 Constitution. Gain one random Strength or Constitution point each day for the next 6 days.
Kael read both twice.
Stimulant was volatile — powerful but conditional, triggered only by damage, rewarding aggression, and punishing caution.
Bodybuilder was slower, more reliable, compounding daily rather than spiking in a single window. Gold tier, by the chat's rough consensus, was worth approximately four silver, eight bronze. He did the arithmetic automatically.
Reading all these, Kael can't help but frown on his three bronze options
He took a deep breath and was ready to settle on Run Faster when he noticed the button.
It was small.
Sitting directly beneath the three Sigil cards, centred, easy to overlook — a faint rectangular prompt with no border weight, no animation, no visual emphasis whatsoever. Like the system had placed it there without being entirely sure it should be visible.
[ REFRESH ]
He almost moved past it.
The countdown was at 05:39 and dropping. The screaming outside had acquired a new layer — something breaking, glass or furniture, several floors below — and the door was holding but he didn't know for how long, and he had a perfectly adequate bronze Sigil already identified, and there was really no reason to—
He tapped it.
The third card — Inventory Expansion — dissolved. A new card materialised in its place.
[ Trash Collector (Bronze) ] For the next 3 days, you cannot gain EXP or rewards from monsters. On the fourth day, automatically receive 20 gold coins.
He stared at it.
Worse than the original. Actively punishing. He'd have been better off keeping Inventory Expansion.
He looked back at the Refresh button.
It was still lit.
His mental hand moved again. Almost reflexively.
The card shifted.
He tapped it again.
Shifted again.
Again.
No notification. No deduction. No timer appears beside the button to tell him he'd have to wait thirty seconds, a minute, or until next week. The button sat there, steady and unremarkable, the way a door sat open.
He stopped tapping.
He sat very still.
The chat was still flooding. The screaming was still audible. The countdown in his upper right vision read 04:54, and the numbers kept dropping with the patient indifference of a system that did not care what he was doing while it ran.
No one mentioned this.
Over a hundred thousand users in the district chat. Hundreds of messages per second. Attribute comparisons, gear screenshots, tier debates, panicked questions about the monsters, and advice about barricading doors. People showing off gold draws. People were complaining about bronze draws. Not one — not a single message in the four minutes he'd been reading — had mentioned a Refresh function.
Which meant one of two things.
Either no one else had noticed it. Possible — the button was easy to miss, the countdown was running, people were panicking, and the human instinct under pressure was to grab the first viable option and hold on.
Or it was unique to him. Could he really have something different from the others?
A resource he didn't see in his panel yet. Coins, maybe, or a currency the system hadn't surfaced because he hadn't needed it. Something that made the button expensive enough to tap once or twice, but not freely.
Not infinitely.
He picked up the thread slowly, following it to where it led.
If the Refresh was free — if he could cycle through Sigil options as many times as he wanted before the clock hit zero — then what everyone else was experiencing was a gacha pull.
A random draw.
You got your three cards, you picked the best of what the system gave you, and you hoped the variance was in your favour.
What he was looking at was a buffet.
The countdown read 04:20.
Something surfaced in his chest that wasn't quite excitement — he didn't do excitement, not as a rule — but was adjacent to it. Colder. More precise. The specific sensation of a problem that had looked impossible, revealing a clean, hidden solution.
Four minutes.
He exhaled once.
Then his finger became a blur.
Bronze. Bronze. Bronze.
Silver — attribute, Constitution plus two, better than bronze but not worth stopping for.
Bronze. Bronze. Bronze.
Silver again — XP type, minor modifier, functional but unremarkable. Bronze. Bronze—
He'd stopped reading the card text after the first thirty seconds. Text was slow. The border colour was all that mattered — his eyes had adjusted to the rhythm, scanning the frame of each new card in the half-second before the next refresh, waiting for the colour that would mean something had changed.
The countdown dropped below three minutes.
He'd lost count somewhere in the hundreds.
02:37.
A gold border flickered through. He paused for exactly one second — read it, categorised it, made the assessment. Good. Not exceptional. The kind of pick that would feel like a win if he hadn't seen the probability breakdown. He kept going.
02:00.
Bronze. Bronze. Silver. Bronze. Bronze—
01:30.
Bronze. Bronze.
Gold — a different one, conditional combat trigger, interesting but situational. Keep going.
01:00.
[ If no Sigil is selected before the countdown expires, a random selection will be made from your current options. ]
00:45.
Bronze. Bronze. Bronze—
00:20.
His finger didn't slow down. He'd committed to this.
00:10.
Bronze. Silver. Bronze—
00:07.
Bronze—
00:04.
COME ON!!!
00:03.
Bronze—
00:02.
The screen detonated.
There was no other word for it.
Seven colours light filled his entire field of vision for a fraction of a second before it resolved — and there it was, in the position of the third card.
Unmistakable. The rarest pull the system contained.
He selected it before he could read it.
The countdown hit zero.
The chat tab closed. The countdown vanished.
[ Sigil Selection Successful. ]
[ Rarity: Prismatic ]
[Lucky Dice]