[You are invited to join Worlds Collide Series!]
[1. You truly are among the top one percent of your race, and the first of them to enter the competition. For that, you are granted seven days of death protection. Try not to squander it. If you somehow get pinned between a pack of beasts and die over and over, that is not a flaw in our design. That is simply you being you. When the seven days end, so do your excuses.]
[2. Free shelter? How adorable. No, there is no shelter. You are fortunate we even allowed you to keep your clothes.]
[3. We will assign miraculous powers through classes. Yes, there are differences between them, and yes, all of them can raise a being toward transcendence. There is no strongest class. There are only stronger users.]
[4. Your race has been drafted into World's Collide Series, Season 59,625,517. You are not the first desperate little species forced to crawl across it. Countless predecessors came before you and left things behind. Some out of kindness. Some out of malice. Some because they hoped to hunt you after you achieved transcendence. We do not care. Use what they left behind, or do not. The choice is yours.]
[5. You will receive a status window containing your attributes, class skills, and a small inventory of up to fifty slots. Yes, all of these can be expanded over time. No, we will not explain how. You are sentient organisms with functional consciousness. Use those neglected little noggins.]
[6. We are not evil. Do try to appreciate the distinction. We will allow you to communicate with your own kind through a replicated form of whatever common technology your species knows best. Group communications for multiracial interaction may also be established, should you feel compelled to mingle.]
[7. You will face hardships of every scale. One day it may be something as pitiful as jock itch. The next, a cataclysm of biblical proportions, the sort your imaginary religions taught you to fear like fools. We say this not to frighten you, but to remind you. The average survivability rate per species across all Cosmic Games is below 0.0000107%, so do not expect everyone who looks like you to reach the end.]
[8. The benefits. Win first place in the current Series, and your home planet will receive immense advancement. Permanent lifespan extension across your species. A global telekinetic awakening. Immunity to viral and microbial disease. And many more. Remarkable rewards for remarkable winners. We will also allow you to earn some spare change on the side and use the shops run by the galactic overlord civilizations. By our standards, they are still ants. As for you, you are still nothing, not even cosmic dust, so do work hard.]
[9. As stated, we are not evil. But we are not running a charity either. Losers should prepare their neuropeptides and neurotransmitters accordingly, along with whatever primitive emotional responses you still clutch so dearly. We will be plain. If you place last, your entire race returns to primordial soup.]
[10. One final rule. We are the ones in charge, the first and strongest civilization in this cosmos. If we feel inclined, we may erase these rules, rewrite them, and change the entire game at will. You can do nothing about it except endure. We are your makers. We are your gods.]
[All the best, Cosmic Chronographic System]
"I'm seeing things, aren't I?" the man said with a faint chuckle, as though disbelief alone might strip the nonsense from his sight.
Only hours earlier, Hermes Laurent had finalized the acquisition of Raw-AI, the world's largest and most influential artificial intelligence company.
He was a man whose influence stretched through automotive, technology, oil, medicine, and finance, with a fortune valued at a little over a trillion dollars.
Hermes closed his eyes for a moment, hoping the comical laws written behind them would vanish with the gesture.
Less than half a minute passed before the darkness around him deepened into something like starless midnight, unnatural enough to force his eyes open.
Hermes turned to the window, and his eyes widened. The sky was changing.
Not with the wild churn of a storm, nor with the slow roll of evening.
The clouds formed perfect squares that blotted out the sun. They were the darkest clouds Hermes had ever seen, blacker even than diesel smoke.
At the heart of every square, a deeper darkness turned, each vortex spinning in perfect rhythm with the rest, so deliberate and so precise that it felt less like a natural disaster and more like a message from something too powerful, or too contemptuous, to hide its hand.
Still, Hermes remained calm.
His first certainty was that it was not human. Extraterrestrial activity came to mind at once, and with it the quick, cold machinery of his thoughts began to turn.
He did not think only of survival. Men like him never did. His mind leapt ahead to exchanges, to leverage, to research facilities, to technologies he might trade if whatever had come from the sky proved willing to bargain.
Even now, faced with the impossible, part of him was already measuring how to become the greatest winner when the dust settled.
The unknown did not shatter his worldview. It merely forced him to revise his plans. Then again, not every plan could survive what came next.
Hermes saw shafts of light descend from the vortexes above. He narrowed his eyes, trying to make sense of the impossible.
Then he saw what the beams were doing. Men and women were rising into the air inside them, their clothes stripped away as they were taken.
"Hey, I'm here, hey." Hermes joked, but after a few minutes passed and no light appeared above him, he let out a breath. "I suppose I'm not going to heaven."
The light answered his envy at once. Everything around him came apart.
The leather seat beneath him disintegrated first. Then the reinforced frame of the limousine, broke apart as though it were nothing.
Hermes's clothes vanished with it, yet he kept his eyes fixed on the light.
His mind had already run to the darkest possibilities. He pictured himself cut open and bound to some machine while alien hands stripped every memory from his skull. He imagined the opposite too, some grand invitation to immortality, the sort of fate that came wrapped in adventure and romance alike.
Then the beam pulled Hermes faster. He shot upward with terrifying speed. The earth dropped away beneath him. His body burst through the atmosphere, yet he felt no wind, no cold, no pressure trying to tear him apart.
Space opened around him in a vast black silence. For the briefest instant, he saw the satellites he had once ordered into orbit, tiny works of human ambition hanging like obedient metal stars.
Then even that vanished. The beam took him, along with a hundred million others, and folded him elsewhere.
In the next blink, Hermes stood atop a rocky mountain.
He felt lighter at once, though he could not say why. Clothes began to rematerialize over his body, thread and fabric rebuilding themselves as though the beam had only borrowed them for a moment.
Yet that was not what made him still. It was his skin.
Hermes looked down and saw youth where age had been. He touched his face with careful fingers and found it smooth. The wrinkles were gone.
Still, the ruthless system did not give Hermes any time to appreciate the newfound youth as it appeared once again against his retina.
[System Message: You have been returned to the most vigorous stage of your species at 21 Earth years of age.]
[System Message: You will be given choices for your class. Choose carefully. As stated in the earlier rules, if you fail to read properly and miss something important, that failure belongs entirely to you.]
[System Message: The system will grant you one chance to ask a question about classes. Gather whatever wisdom your kind can manage and ask something that is actually worth asking.]
[Choose your class:]
[1. SSS-Rank Beast Tamer]
[2. EX-Rank Sword God]
[3. F-Rank Trash Peddler]
[4. A-Rank Daoist Cultivator]
[5. SS-Rank Necromancer Mage]
Hermes started breathing hard. He had read enough novels, from proper books to those cursed machine translated wrecks that only the stubborn or the brilliant could endure, to recognize what lay before him.
The names alone were enough to stir old fantasies. Beast Tamer. Sword God. Cultivator. Necromancer.
The very classes protagonists claimed in fiction now waited within reach of his hand.
His finger nearly fell on Sword God at once. Nearly.
Hermes stopped himself and drew back.
The temptation was obvious, and that alone made him wary.
A system like this would not reward the first greedy fool who lunged for the grandest title.
So he forced himself to think. Hermes sat with the problem for half an hour, turning it over from every angle, cutting away every question that sounded too broad, too needy, or too stupid.
At last, Hermes lifted his head. Then he spoke.
"System, give me a full breakdown of how each class develops, plus the recorded experiences of every species that's taken those very classes before me. Put it in my native language, make it simple enough for a five-year-old to follow, and format it in a way that doesn't burn so much time that everyone else in this World's Collide Series pulls ahead," Hermes said in a single breath.
[System Admin to Hermes Laurent: Your question falls within a hair of perfection by our standards.]
[Exclusive Admin Reward: Classes Introduction Learning Pill]
The reward appeared in his palm at once, a pill wrapped in paper like something from Earth, with only a few simple words written across it.
"Swallow."
Hermes obeyed. The moment the pill slid down his throat, his pupils widened. A movie theater like one from Earth unfolded behind his eyes, with only a single seat at its center. He found himself sitting there alone before an enormous screen. With the slightest motion of his hand, the choices shifted across it like short videos flicked past on social media.
A beast tamer wandering the wilds in search of a first companion.
A Sword God drilling with nothing but a twig.
A peddler hunched behind his first wooden handcart, calling out his wares along a dusty road.
A lone cultivator practicing their martial arts one movement at a time.
A necromancer carved runes into the ground as he laid down the first lines of an undead summoning.
Each vision revealed how a class earned its skills, how long its training took, and what kind of discipline its path demanded.
By the time he finished surveying them all, he had lived through what felt like ten thousand man hours.
Outside his mind, barely any time had passed. Yet his head was crammed with hard won knowledge, enough to make him feel like a novel regressor.
Then came the disappointing reality.
The stronger the class, the harsher the threshold. Hermes had dabbled in swords in his old life, enough to spar even with Olympic elites, but what he saw in those memories stripped the fantasy clean away.
There were alien races from worlds where blade combat had taken the place of technology, races for whom a cheetah's speed would have been mocked as laughably slow. Worse, that was only the physique they began with, the natural standard of their bodies before the World's Collide Series had even begun.
For Hermes, the EX-Rank Sword God was nothing but a trap draped in glory.
The right choice was not the most dazzling one. It was the one that began where he was already strongest.
"I choose F-Rank Trash Peddler."