Congratulations, your planet has been integrated into the System. Mana has flooded the atmosphere, changing your planet’s landscape and mutating the wildlife into dangerous monsters. For the first week, monsters will be less active during the day, allowing humanity a chance to reestablish itself.

To stand up to these new challenges, accumulate Experience by killing monsters to raise your level. You can check your progress at any time on your [Status Screen]. Good luck!

After reading the barebones message, Clover was left wondering if he was stuck in some weird nightmare. Holographic blue boxes aren't supposed to float through the air after all.

Actually, he remembered watching a T.V. series about this exact topic not too long ago. Apparently, it was surprisingly common for people to think that they had woken up while still stuck in a dream.

The show mentioned a few ways to check if what you were seeing was real. He started with the simplest method.

Clover poked the announcement with his finger; it felt solid, though, with enough force, he could force his hand through it.

Next, he pinched his cheek till it turned bright red. Nothing changed - nothing pointed towards this not being real. He ran through a couple other small tests, each not yielding the result he wanted.

Finally, with growing panic, he reread the System announcement, hoping to catch some small inconsistency or change in its wording. The human brain was terrible at keeping small details the same while dreaming.

However, after he read the message for the fourth time without it changing, he was forced to accept that this was real.

Which meant that the blood pooling underneath his door was also real. His heart rate quickened, racing out of control.

I need to get out of here!

Clover coughed, his lungs twisting inside his chest. He wiped some salvia off his mouth and tried to calm down. Panicking would do him no good. At his rate, he’d die of a heart attack before any supposed monster got to him.

He took a deep breath; his lungs strained to meet his demands.

Outside his room, a tree rustled - its many leaves moving with the wind. A wave of calm passed over him.

He didn’t remember there being any trees by his room, but he dismissed the thought as unimportant. Remembering the exact botanical layout of the hospital was a waste of time.

Suddenly, it was clear to him that as long as he stayed in this room, he would be safe. Animals turned monsters, hopefully, didn’t have opposable thumbs, so they shouldn’t be able to open doors.

Plus, they hadn’t attacked him while he was sleeping, which meant that his position was relatively hidden. Clover continued to reason with himself, like a child pulling a blanket over their head, hiding from reality.

Deep down, he knew the door could open with the slightest bit of force. It was a hospital; it had to be that way – the door didn’t even have a lock. Even still, the flimsy barrier made him feel better.

If he was honest, he didn’t want to go outside. Who knew what could be lurking behind that door?

The tree’s leaves rustled again, its branches creaking unnaturally. A force pressed down on his mind, smothering his thoughts of leaving the room with a heavy blanket.

He yawned as a wave of lethargy passed over him as his adrenaline rush ended. It must still be nighttime.

He checked the clock - its glass casing had cracked down the center, and its hands were stuck, pointing at midnight. Strange, the mana the System flooded the atmosphere must have broken it. An unfortunate occurrence, but he still had another way of checking the time.

Still in from before, he took his earbuds out and checked his phone for the time – it was dead, and now everything was much louder. He could hear a popping noise outside, presumably, gunfire, though he wasn’t sure. He had never heard a gunshot in real life.

The fighting sounded far away, not a threat to him. His floor of the hospital was downright peaceful in comparison. If I don’t hear anyone fighting on my floor of the hospital, doesn’t that mean it should be safe for me to go out and explore a bit?

A gust of wind violently buffeted the tree, causing its leaves to shake madly.

He changed his mind and resolved to leave in the morning - once it was safer and things calmed down. There was no point in taking unnecessary risks.

In the meantime, he decided to investigate the System a bit more.

He opened his [Status Screen]. The process was akin to flipping a switch in his mind. If he focused on the words, the System took care of the rest.

He made the screen disappear and reappear a couple times just for the hell of it. It was surprisingly fun. He refocused his attention and read the new blue box.

Status Screen:

Name: Clover Hills

Class: Blank Lvl 0 0/100 Exp

Shard:

HP: 100/100

SP: 100/100

MP: 100/100

Strength: 0

Endurance: 0

Recovery: 0

Vitality: 0

Regeneration: 0

Dexterity: 0

Agility: 0

Perception: 0

Intelligence: 0

Mana: 0

Magic: 0

Myth: 0

Stat Points: 0

Skill Points: 0

General Skills (0/8):

Class Skills (0/8):

The screen reminded him of something he’d find in an old video game. This gave him some sort of grounding to understand what he was looking at. Things like Strength and Endurance were rather self-explanatory, but other parts of his [Status Screen] might have well been in a foreign language. Just what the hell was a Shard supposed to be?

Really, there wasn’t much information he could glean from the screen. With all his Stats at zero, there wasn’t much to go off of. Though, the fact that he was able to function normally with nonexistent Stats gave him a hint as to how the System worked.

He theorized that the [Status Screen] didn’t display or measure his base capabilities; it instead showed how much the System had externally enhanced him. At least that made sense to him.

A small spark of hope lit in his chest, but he quickly stifled it. There’s no way he could kill a monster in the first place.

His eyelids grew heavy as the outside wall of his room began to crack. Slowly at first, then accelerating in speed, lightning bolt shaped cracks spread.

Once again, to the sound of shifting leaves, a warm blanket of force pressed down on his mind, threatening to suffocate him. Maybe, I’ll just take a nap. Yeah, that sounds good. I’ll be ready for the morning that way.

As his head hit the pillow, a painful cough ripped him out of his daze. Wait, what am I doing? His heart thundered in his chest as a large tendril of wood punched through the drywall. Smaller branches covered in thorns wormed through the opening and then slowly slithered across the floor towards him.

“Oh, hell no,” Clover whispered to himself. He hurriedly ripped off the medical equipment attached to him. It hurt, but it was much preferable to getting eaten by a giant tree.

He rolled to the edge of his bed, then grabbed his wheelchair with both hands and lifted himself onto it. Twisting in place, he situated himself in the chair. The process was dreadfully slow, not nearly fast enough for how urgent the situation was, but it was the best he could do.

Slightly out of breath, Clover pushed the control joystick forward and accelerated towards the door. However, as he passed the puddle of blood that had pooled under the door, he hesitated for a fraction of a second.

He looked back. The slithering branches had reached the foot of his bed and were budding small leaves, hiding their deadly thorns. The leaves shook, blasting another wave of mental force towards his mind. He wasn’t sure what had changed, but this time he was able to shake it off.

With a creak, he opened the door and left the room before he was devoured by the rapidly growing tree. Now sitting in an empty hallway, he slammed the door shut and scanned his surroundings, searching for monsters.

It looked like a small-scale war had been waged out here. Part of the ceiling had collapsed, and numerous bullet holes littered the hallway. And despite multiple pools of blood staining the ground and the copious amounts of destruction surrounding them, there were no bodies in sight - neither human nor monster.

Clover briefly wondered how he had managed to sleep through this happening right outside the door. In the end, he blamed the stupid mind control tree and decided to move on.

Clover traveled west, down the hallway – towards where he remembered the elevator was before the tree decided to have another random growth spurt.

While wheeling down the empty hallway, his shoulders were tense and scrunched up - his breathing heavy and labored. All the rooms he passed were empty, void of their inhabitants, beds, and most of their medical equipment. Still, he couldn’t help but expect the worst.

After a minute, he reached an oddity. Part of a house had been teleported into the hallway, replacing the space a hospital room would normally take up. The door was open, but he didn’t go inside; he wanted to get out of here as quickly as possible.

He continued forward.

Abruptly, the hallway ended. As if a giant scalpel had descended, the building had been cut in half, cleanly sliced from top to bottom, giving him a bird’s eye view of the city below him.

Where the other half of the hospital building went, he wasn’t sure. But, it wasn’t particularly important to him. Though it did mean he’d have to find another way down from the third floor – the elevator was in the other half of the building that had mysteriously disappeared.

Outside, hordes of monsters aimlessly roamed the cracked streets of the broken city. The System’s “changing of the landscape” had been imprecise. Just like the hospital, the downtown cityscape had been seemingly randomly rearranged.

Some larger business buildings had toppled over, and a collection of residential buildings had been haphazardly plopped down on the roof of a shopping mall. With a smattering of fires burning wildly under the full moon, it looked exactly as he had imagined the end of the world would.

He saw other humans for the first time that night. In the distance, someone drove a tractor down the street, chased by almost a hundred monsters. Across the way, a man with a shotgun waged Rambo-style warfare against the beasts. It was quite surreal to watch.

He couldn’t spot many people on the streets, though that made sense – it took an especially brave or unhinged type of person to willingly fight a monster.

He guessed most people were holed up in their homes, waiting for the military or the police to solve the situation. He wasn’t sure how realistic that dream was, but he couldn’t blame them. Even from hundreds of feet away, the monsters terrified him.

Speaking of monsters, he glanced behind him, checking if any were sneaking up on him. Nothing was, but he couldn’t shake the pit in his stomach. It was only a matter of time.

Monsters were here in the buildings; there was no question about that – his walk through the hallway had been evidence enough of that. So, that left him with only one question: where did all the monsters go?

Having delayed for long enough, he wheeled back down the hallway, retracing his path. As he passed the house haphazardly smashed in the hallway, he heard a loud crash.

He hid inside the partially destroyed house.

It may have been nothing more than a wall collapsing or something equally mundane, but he didn’t want to take any chances.

In the dim flickering light, Clover found himself in what looked like a kitchen. It was mostly intact, a cabinet had fallen off the wall, but other than that, it was in perfect condition. On the counter, a half-eaten bagel and a cold cup of coffee lay next to a small knife.

He hurriedly picked up the weapon and tested it against his skin. It wasn’t very sharp, but with enough force, he had no doubt that the knife could pierce through flesh.

A high-pitch scream rang out, startling Clover. The next moment, he heard feet pounding against the ground, heading right towards him. He spun his chair around and waited with bated breath.

At that moment, he realized he had picked a terrible place to hide. The wall connecting the kitchen to the hallway had two large windows in it, giving him a great view of the empty hallway, but also giving anything outside a clear view of him.

A mousey brown-haired woman sprinted past, looking like she had just seen the boogeyman. Which, considering the situation, was actually possible.

She had outpaced whatever she was escaping from, but Clover knew she was running towards a dead end.

A couple seconds later, a rat the size of a large dog turned a corner and lumbered into his view on two legs, stumbling forward like a drunk human. Thick bone protrusions extended out of its spine, forming a descending row of spikes. A set of claws made of sharpened bone lined its fingers.

Despite its intimidating appearance, someone, presumably the woman who had just run past, had managed to injure it. Half of a wooden broomstick handle stuck out of its ribs at an odd angle, leaking massive amounts of blood down its black fur.

Additionally, a blue box hovered over its head.

Bone Rat - Lvl 2

The monster stopped in front of the window Clover was hiding behind. A bead of sweat dripped down his forehead as he held still, not daring to move a single muscle. He had watched a nature documentary once where they had said that rats had bad eyesight.

Hopefully, that held true for mutated monster rats.

The rat’s pure black eyes flitted across the room and then locked onto Clover’s position. He waited in suspense for the longest couple of seconds of his life, then the oversized rat shook its head and continued down the hallway.

Clover let out a quiet sigh of relief as the Bone Rat left his sight. However, his body refused to relax. The small spark of hope in his chest that he had tried to squash had returned, this time burning with an angry intensity he could not ignore. It was now clear to him after seeing what the world had become, that what was once impossible was now possible through the System.

His reflection in the window stared back at him. Shaggy brown hair, skinny arms, and dead brown eyes – he didn’t like what he saw. He wanted to change. He didn’t just want to be some sickly 18-year-old kid who died early.

His body acted on its own, bringing him out into the hallway. He could escape now without any difficulty, but a question bounced around his head, haunting him: Then what? The answer was obvious. Without access to modern medicine, he’d die a miserable death in under two weeks.

There was only one option available to him if he wanted to live. It was a stupid long shot, and he knew it. Clover stared at the monster’s back as it slowly approached the cornered woman, gathering his courage. The Bone Rat was heavily injured, and it was completely distracted – this was the best shot he’d get at ever killing a monster.

He slowly wheeled forward, doing his best to stay unnoticed. All the while, his mind assailed him with countless doubts. What if the knife wasn’t sharp enough? What if the monster noticed him?

He was hit with a wave of nausea and vertigo. In the face of these questions, he continued forward. He could ignore all these fears because of one simple fact: he wasn’t ready to die yet – there was too much he hadn’t seen yet.

Tears rained down his eyes as he raised his small steak knife with shaking hands. I want to live!

Nauseous, dizzy, and barely able to breathe, he charged toward the monster like a valiant knight on a horse; or perhaps, more realistically, like a delusional idiot in a wheelchair. Have I lost my mind?

The wheelchair hit its top speed of 10 miles per hour, and he knew there was no turning back. He stuck out the knife like a spear and screamed his head off in a terrified war cry.

Alerted by his scream, the Bone Rat noticed his approach and clumsily turned to face Clover. However, it was too late. Clover stabbed the knife into the monster’s soft throat a moment before the wheelchair itself crashed into the beast.

He was thrown out of the chair in a tangle of limbs. They both rolled on the floor, and through sheer luck, he ended up on top of the oversized rat. The monster’s sharp claws cut into his shoulder, trying to push him off, but he barely felt it. In a blur of action that he was barely aware of, he stabbed the Bone Rat until it stopped moving.

Congratulations! You have defeated a Bone Rat - Lvl 2. +150 Exp.

Class: [Blank] has reached Lvl 1. +5 Stat Points.

Sprawled out on the floor with the dead monster, Clover put all five Stat Points into Vitality. A rush of warmth flowed into him, and just for a moment, all his problems disappeared. He could breathe without pain, and Clover felt as light as a feather.

The warmth faded, and his pain returned, but now they were lessened. It was just a bit easier to breathe, and he didn’t feel quite so nauseous anymore.

He laughed, feeling more alive than ever. It wouldn’t be easy, but now the path forward was clear.

He’d raise his level so damn high that no illness or disease would ever be able to affect him again.