Odd words flashed in my vision, amidst murky darkness.

Welcome to Novazem, transient soul. Solve Equation for Full System activation: 67-12-5+5+0x1=

“Um… Fifty five?” I automatically answered the odd text, not sure if I was actually speaking or thinking out loud.

[Sufficient cognition confirmed. Full System activated.]

[Two skill slots and two skills granted by the Omniscience.]

“Uhh… say what?”

The text blossomed into an entire chart.

Name:

_______ Alana Skyisle

Age:

7 days since fertilisation

Species & Subtype:

Human blastocyst

Level:

0

Experience:

0/50

Health:

0.1/0.1

Stamina:

0.1/0.1

Mana:

0.1/0.1

Mana regen:

0.1m/hr

Strength:

0

Agility:

0

Dexterity:

0

Vitality:

0

Charisma:

0

Magic:

1

Luck:

0

Intelligence:

0

Wisdom:

0

Soul:

1

Skills:

[Transient Soul LV 0]

[Universal Comprehension LV 0]

I tried to blink. It didn't work. There was nothing to see except for this floating text. Not sure what I expected when I was offered a continuation of my narrative by an entity in front of the Wheel of Life, but a nice break from exploding was a definite welcome, even if I had nothing but my thoughts and the strange text for company now.

So…

I was a human blastocyst that was hopefully inside of a human womb if the text was to be believed. I wouldn't even dare to call myself a full human at this point - I was a bunch of cells that were in the process of dividing. Inexplicably enough, I was able to formulate coherent, complex thoughts which should have been quite impossible for a group of cells that didn’t even become a foetus yet.

If I recalled it correctly, the human blastocyst had a diameter of about 0.1 mm and was composed of approximately 200 cells. There was no rational explanation of how a sphere of 200 cells could contain my intelligence, such a thing was utterly absurd according to everything I knew.

I formulated a hypothesis that perhaps my soul was a miniature, electromagnetic data construct that was somehow able to store a whole lifetime of information that made me exactly who I was. Was my soul also acting as my processor, allowing me to make coherent thoughts? It was a decent theory if any, confirmed by the “Soul” stat in the chart.

There wasn’t much to do at this point, except to observe the strange text and to ponder things. This was an acceptable situation for me. Some people might cry and despair if they were to lose their freedom and all of their numerous body functions, but I would be content being just a brain inside of a jar. As long as my mind remained stable, as long as I could formulate complex thoughts, I could find ways of entertaining myself. If the said brain jar had an eye - even better and if it had a robot arm to poke things with, three times so.

The pure ability to contemplate was fun for me. Some people found happiness in family, friends, relationships, sports, food, wealth and so forth. I found happiness in the beauty of thought itself. Using my imagination alone I could produce an entire universe of theoretical or pure mathematical beauty for endless hours, conceiving what sort of life could form from one chemical or another and how a variety of said imaginary life could interact with one another. If I were ever to grow bored of staring at floating text I could always entertain myself with imaginary abiogenesis.

In my current predicament I didn’t possess eyes, or an appendage or a brain for that matter, yet I somehow observed and understood information presented to me. For all I knew, I was in a complex simulation of some sort.

Observing the text pleased me even though I currently lacked the necessary dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens. How could information be happy? What was simulating happiness in the soul? How did the Soul function? So many questions.

The text in front of me was the most valuable differential from the world I had departed from and this place. I stared at each line in serene wonder of first discovery - it was an entire System that evaluated a being! How unique. Could something like this develop naturally through evolution or was this a construct of some advanced intelligence such as the Omniscience?

The entire experience of meeting a god that wore the space suit of Yuri Gagarin was very suspect - it wasn’t a thing from any religion that I knew about. Perhaps, the so-called Omniscience was some sort of alien, highly evolved life that had the ability to duplicate or transfer the electromagnetic activity from within the human brain at the moment of death, transposing it to a new host.

Why would it want to do that? I wanted to ask more pertinent questions before it pulled me into the ring of Samsara, but alas I was quite befuddled by evidence of life after death and unable to quickly formulate coherent demands. Many questions arose in my mind as I floated about. What was I to the Omniscience? A soul to be recycled? A mote in the eye of god? An experiment? It had called me one.

I recalled how its words were made from a remix of male voices. Wait a minute....

Upon reviewing my memories, I realised that the voices that the Omniscience spoke with were in fact my own. It spoke to me with a voice of me as a child, me as a teenager and me as an old man. It was wearing clothing woven from my memory of Yuri Gagarin speaking with tones, intonations and ideas that it had copied, stolen from me!

This didn’t give me much trust in the words of the Omniscience - if they were simply echoes of my own memory, perhaps it had only told me what I wanted, expected to hear. The real truth was yet to be discovered. For all I knew, the cosmonaut and the wheel of Samsara were just an illusion created by a monster akin to a planet-sized angler fish, drawing me deeper into its maw for the purposes of digestion!

Was this really a womb? It could be a lab for all I knew... or maybe the stomach of an alien monstrosity.

I pushed away this highly concerning hypothesis. I needed to make more observations and not get bogged down by irrational fears.

It asked me to do math. Perhaps it was communicating with me. Math was the language of the universe, after all. If the Omniscience was an advanced entity perhaps one of its imperceptible tendrils still held me in its grasp - connected to me, reading my thoughts.

The primary puzzle was the text floating in front of my eyes that somehow judged my statistics and assigned them numbers. These were painfully low numbers too. A lot of zeros and ones. I briefly wondered whether this chart was some sort of a divine joke at my expense.

As I stopped thinking about the weird stat chart, it faded from view. I thought about it again and it appeared once more. Stats Off. The chart vanished. Stats On. The chart appeared.

Hide System? The chart vanished. Show me the System. The chart appeared.

I see. I could turn it off and on, regardless of the command I used. It was indeed reading my thoughts.

“What are you?” I thought at the chart. No answer came. I tried to communicate with it in other ways, asking it various questions and making demands of it. It didn’t respond. All I could do was turn it off and on. It wasn't a very interactive interface nor did it explain why my numbers were so low.

As I continued to stare at the floating text I noticed that two parts of it wobbled ever so slightly.

In physics, the observer effect is the disturbance of an observed system by the act of observation. I wondered if this was the case here - whether the very act of my observation affected the chart.

The wobbling text was [Transient Soul LV: 0] and [Universal Comprehension LV: 0]. I tried to wobble the first one harder.

A new text window suddenly flashed into my mind:

[Are you sure you want to unslot [Transient Soul]? Warning: Removal of this skill will result in disconnection of the unanchored soul. Do you want to proceed?]

I stopped mentally pulling at the [Transient Soul] tab and the warning faded.

What? Okay… better not pull this one out. It seemed very important. I wouldn't want to disconnect my soul and die again. How was my soul even attached to a bunch of cells?

I pulled at the [Universal Comprehension] tab next to see what would happen.

[Are you sure you want to unslot [Universal Comprehension]? Warning: Removal of this skill will result in inability to understand the language used by the System and this world’s inhabitants.]

Hrrmm?

"What if I want to learn this so-called Universal on my own? Do you really think you can threaten me with a language barrier? We’ll see about that!" I pulled the [Universal Comprehension] tab out of the chart.

As the tab disconnected, everything in the menu immediately became unreadable gibberish. I mentally held onto the [Universal Comprehension] tab. It now looked like

I looked at the first line of the main chart.

Name:

_______ Alana Skyisle

It had turned into:

Aha! My reckless move paid off. Even though I couldn't read the quirky letters or words, I still knew what they stood for priorly. I had my Rosetta stone, my first key to understanding the System on a deeper, more personal level.

I shoved the back into place, and the System language became readable once again.

My skills were back to:

Skills:

[Transient Soul LV 0]

[Universal Comprehension LV 0]

[Achievement Unlocked - mental fortitude. You’ve dropped an essential skill and managed to slot it back in. Congratulations on interacting with the System without Universal translator assistance!]

A new notification flashed. It faded away as soon as I read it.

[50 Experience points gained!]

[50/50 Experience optimum reached! Initiate level up?]

“Jawohl!” I thought back to the text in German, as a test whether the System understood me in any language.

[Tu du! Level up to LV: 1!]

A strange feeling overwhelmed my diminutive body along with a strange noise. The Tu-du sound stretched on, sounding like it was nearby and distant at the same time. It rang like a keypad password door beep in the Virology lab and also like Orthodox church bells. The noise was memorable, refreshing, nostalgic and rewarding at the same time.

It suddenly felt like blinding bliss was emanating from within me, like stabbing all-consuming pain ignited all over. An indeterminate, entirely new sensation that I couldn't quite comprehend came over me and my consciousness folded in on itself.