I woke up in the darkness, floating in complete darkness, not knowing which one is up or down. I couldn’t see anything for several seconds… But before I got plunged into panic again, a glowing figure appeared in front of me.

I quickly recognized the figure… the messy blonde hair and beard, the strange goggle-like glasses, the hooked big nose… It was Fremde… Windell Fremde, the genius creator of this SC-Capsule.

“Hello, Stranger!” the figure greeted in a lazy tone. “Don’t need to answer that. I am just the memory record anyway, the memory record of Windell Fremde, the one who set this Gate of Rebirth.”

Gate of Rebirth? What the hell! Wasn’t this device called Second Chance Capsule, or Reincarnation Capsule? Why the hell did you need to use so many names for this?

“This gate will let you reborn in a different world, a world of magic and monsters, of swords and sorcery,” the figure continued talking. “And if you think that it would simply be a visual reality game… well, whatever, you can think so. You wouldn’t believe if I told you that this is real anyway.”

Different world? What was I getting into? Should I believe him? Should I… A barrage of questions assaulted my mind. This… the best I could do was probably assuming that this was real, that being reborn in another world could really happen. But…

While I was hesitating, the figure of Windell Fremde waved his hand and a holographic sphere of light, in a size of a soccer ball, appeared. “This will help you adjust with your new life. It basically let you set some preferences which might affect your life-style in the new world. Just touch it… and please use the points wisely. Farewell, Stanger!” With those parting words, he gradually disappeared, while the glowing sphere slowly floated to my direction.

Use the points wisely… I felt chill creeping all over my body when I heard those words. Fremde was a well known scientist and inventor. But, not many people knew that he was also the main game maker of three “worst” games of the century, which became cult hits only for certain hardcore gamer society. Those games were: the insanely hard real time strategy game “Chess World Pawns”, the crazy virtual reality fighting game “Fists of Wisdom”, and the frustrating virtual reality MMORPG “Forbidden Knowledge”.

One of the common features of those three games, which made the game insanely hard, was the use of points at the start to configure the character of the player. One small “unwise” choice of the configuration could make the game a hell to play. The words “use your points wisely” were the well-known sayings related to those games. Then, if I could assume that I would be sent to a reality based on such games…

I groaned. I had played those games that Fremde created when I was younger, but not very much. I had to restart over and over because of what seemed harmless choice in the configuration at the start of the game. I gave up rather quickly in all three of them. Restarting was possible for those games. But this time, would it be possible? I definitely would never die on purpose just to check whether resurrecting was possible.

Those missing gamers… Twelve hundred of them… Twenty years had passed and none of them returned. I should not forget that. I needed to assume that this would be real… that this would be my second chance to live, and that there wouldn’t be a third chance.

I focused my mind and directed my right hand to the sphere of light. Right when my fingers touched it, the sphere suddenly turned into a medium sized holographic screen. I could read CHARACTER CONFIGURATION at the top of the screen.

Let’s see... There were several choices: Legendary Skills, Great Artifacts, General Appearance, Basic Stats, and Miscellaneous Setting. At the bottom of the screen, there were… 1000 points and the button-like rectangle with a word “FINALIZE” in it. It probably meant that I had 1000 unused points to configure my character and that I needed to press the finalize button when I finished configuring.

I started browsing. The first tab, legendary skills, was probably useless… Phoenix’s Immortality (-1000 pts)... Dragon’s Breath (-980 pts)… As I’d thought, they were extremely expensive. The cheapest skill was Imp’s Dance (-480 pts). What the hell was Imp’s Dance anyway?

I had no hope for legendary skills from the start. Although I hadn’t played that much in Fremde’s games, I played enough to know that in all those games, taking legendary skills during the starting configuration phase was never the same as gaining cheat power. In the contrary, if you took it, you were digging your own grave. The logic was: why would you waste points to take a skill in the early game that you could never use until your level was high enough, which was most likely happened at the end of the game?

I had no expectation either with the Great Artifacts… but I still browsed them a little. From Dragonsoul Blade (-990 pts), Hell Angel Armor (-960 pts), to… Recovery Ring (-320 pts). There were many interesting items. But this, I was sure, was another trap. If I chose any of them, I would probably get robbed and would lose the item before I got strong enough to protect it. I wouldn’t pick any of these artifacts.

Next would be… appearance, huh? I browsed the choices under the General Appearance tab thoroughly. Race… what the heck? Choosing a specific race was so expensive. There were many races, but… Human (-600 pts), Orc (-560 pts), Dragon (-900 pts)… It was such a waste of points. I had only a thousand points, dammit!

After what probably hours of contemplating, I finally chose Race: Random Humanoid (-50 points). I sincerely wished it wouldn’t turn me into a Goblin, a Dwarf, or any version of Undead. I didn’t mind playing a game as any character of those races, but to live a real life as one of them… heck, no!

Still in General Appearance tab, I configured some other choices. The default for any choice here was random. If I ignored this, it would be possible that I would turn into a kind of short fat pink haired female orc. That would be terrible. Like I’d be willing to spend my second life as that kind of monstrosity…

I spent some time configuring this part. My configuration was approximately, let’s see… Gender: Male (-10 pts); Hair-color: Random (0 pts); Skin Tone: Random (0 pts); Optimal Body-built: Muscular (-5 pts); Optimal Height: Tall (-5 pts)…

I definitely wanted to be a male. Gender-bender was really not my taste. About hair color or skin tone, I didn’t really care. I wouldn’t spend any point for those two. I spent some points in body-shape and height though. I had some small expectation that this could make me avoid being turned into goblin or dwarf or living skeleton… well, hopefully. I didn’t want to be any of those races. I could actually choose hulk-like, gigantic, very tall, or extremely tall here, but it cost more, and it might slow me down significantly, so...

Anyway, for all other choices in this tab I chose medium (0 pts), which was actually not very different from random (0 pts) in term of costs, but much… much safer.

I had spent 70 points for appearance. There were 930 points left. I planned to spend most of them for this next tab, Basic Stats. But, as I was about to open the Basic Stats tab, I got a strange feeling that I had to check the Miscellaneous Setting tab first. Was this… instinct? Whatever! It might not be a bad idea to check this misc. tab first. Save the best for the last, or something like that.

Under the Miscellaneous tab, there were several choices: Sanctuary, Pet, Production Skill Knowledge, Initial Wealth, Blessing, and Language. It was pretty much similar to the starting configuration in “Forbidden Knowledge” VRMMORPG. I knew that I needed to spend some points here.

Sanctuary [Self] (-70 pts) was a must… I guessed. If I was not mistaken, it basically gave immortality protection for beginners up to twelve days in the game. It would probably be the same here. Damn… I wished there was a help function here. I could see that there was Sanctuary [Household] (-300 pts). This one might be better in term of safety, but I wanted to save as many points as possible here… Well, whatever. Self Sanctuary was good enough I hoped.

The next one… Pet? Well, it might be interesting, but it was not really vital for me. So, I guessed I would have to skip that.

Then… Production Skill Knowledge. Hmm… blacksmithing, alchemy, and the likes. It was knowledge, not skills. So, it was most likely just the theory. I could probably acquire it by being an apprentice to some masters. It was not really important for now. Skip.

Wealth and Blessing were nice, but they were really expensive. Damn, even normal initial wealth needed 200 points and the cheapest blessing, Dream God’s Blessing, cost 700 points. I guessed I would have to leave initial wealth at random (0 pts) and skip the blessing.

The next one… Language, huh? Well it would be problematic if I could not use the new world’s language. I checked the language choice. Damn. There were so many languages. And they were quite pricey.

I sighed and chose two languages that sounded most useful, while setting them in the most basic aptitude: Language: Common [Basic] (-20 pts), and Language: Elven [Basic] (-20 pts). Common seemed like the universal language of the realm, while Elven would probably be useful for learning magic. Basic aptitude probably meant that I could understand only high frequency words and the simplest grammar, but it should be enough for the beginning. Alright, with this I was done with the miscellaneous part.

I had 820 points left. I hoped they were enough for this last yet most important section, Basic Stats. I took a deep breath and carefully accessed the tab. A single mistake here would be very… troublesome.

Underneath the Basic Stats tab, there were three categories: Spirit, Mind, and Body. I accessed the first category, Spirit.

There were several other choices: Charisma, Ki, Growth Rate, and Lifespan.

I quickly accessed the most important one… Lifespan, which predictably had the default set to random. There were several choices there, from Extremely Short (+600 pts) to Immortal (-900 pts). I guess it meant that I would get 600 points if I chose extremely short lifespan. But, who wanted to choose it? Really?!

I knew I couldn’t afford Immortal (-900 pts), but I really wanted Extremely Long Lifespan (-700 pts), or at least Very Long Lifespan (-450 pts). Yet, I knew that, considering many other basic stats choices I needed to configure, choosing either of the two would probably be unwise.

Should I choose Random Lifespan? It didn’t need any point, and if I were lucky, I might get immortality. But, if I were unlucky, I might get extremely short lifespan… without getting the bonus points.

Dammit! I couldn’t afford to gamble here. After some time agonizing over the choices, I sighed and picked the Long Lifespan (-200 pts).

I set Charisma at Average (0 pts). I didn’t want to become an idol or a politician anyway. But, I didn’t want to be a dull follower either. So, average was pretty good choice here.

Then, under Ki, there were Ki-Capacity, Ki-Type: Enhancement, Ki-Type: Projection, and Ki-Type: Manipulation. I set them all at Average (0 pts) too. I wanted to set them higher, but the price was too much.

For the next choice, Growth Rate, I set Physical Growth Rate, Magical Growth Rate, and Spiritual Growth Rate at Above Average (-50 pts) each. A little faster growth would definitely be useful. I spent 350 points in total only for Spirit tab. I might run out of points if this tendency continued.

Feeling a little bit depressed, I moved to the next tab, Mind. There were two categories here: Mental Faculty and Magic. I accessed mental faculty first. It seemed that this one was related to normal, non-magical, mind power.

Memory, Mental Acuity, Emotional Control, and Sanity… Those four were listed under mental faculty category.

The last part… Sanity… I really had a bad feeling about it, so I quickly accessed it. I was right. It was set at random (0 pts). With only two other choices: sane and insane, this gave me 50 percent chances to be reborn as an insane character. Like hell I would want that. Who wanted to be insane if choosing sane only cost 10 points? I quickly set this one into Sanity: Sane (-10 pts).

I checked the next one, memory. Shouldn’t this be a part of mental acuity? Let’s see… The choices here were: reborn with fresh memory (0 pts), and reborn with past-life memory intact (-40 pts). The default was easily predicted, the first choice.

I sighed, no longer spirited enough to swear and curse, even when it was just in my mind. This was worse than the sanity one. How would I even know that this device worked if I didn’t change the setting? I warily set it to Memory: Reborn with Past-Life Memory Intact (-40 pts).

Next was mental acuity… I guessed it was a generalized version of cognition, concentration, memory, and intelligence. I wanted to set it as high as possible since it would definitely help in learning things. However, I still needed to configure other things. I had limited number of points after all. So, I reluctantly set it to Mental Acuity: High (-100 pts).

Similarly, after that, I set Emotional Control to Emotional Control: High (-100 pts). My reason to dump some points here was because I was pretty sure that this section would determine a lot of things, especially in troublesome things like combat or debate or research. Frozen from fear during combat, getting furious during debate, or succumbing into impatience during research could obviously make me end in harmful situation.

With mental faculty section done, I moved to the next category, magic. There were many things to configure here… starting manna capacity, elemental affinity… Gosh! There were a lot of elements. They were more than thirty. There were some normal cliché ones like fire, wind, water… to some weird ones like: mud, rubber, blood…

Hell, I mindlessly set everything at normal (0 pts). Increasing each of them cost respectively 50 or 100 points for above average or high quality. It was too expensive. I could set some low and some high to even the points, but it meant that I gave myself some weaknesses in exchange for some strengths. I would be in a lot of trouble if I set, for example, water affinity low and this reincarnation machine sent me to places where water-element monsters lived. I might be paranoid here, but…

Anyway, the only points I spent in magic category was Magic: Capable (-10 pts). In a world where magic existed, it would be very pathetic if I couldn’t use it.

I made a quick calculation and realized that I only spent 260 points for mind configuration. It meant that I still had 210 points left. Would it be enough for configuring the last section?

Physical Strength, Psychomotor Ability, Sensory Ability, Stamina, and Health… Those were the choices under Body section.

The first thing I accessed here was obviously the most important thing, health. After experiencing the lifespan, sanity, and memory things previously, I had become familiar enough with the ridiculous trap set in this starting configuration. I was not surprised at all seeing health set to random, even though healthy cost only 10 points. The choices better than healthy were really expensive though… very healthy (-300 pts) and extremely healthy (-600 pts). I picked Health: Healthy (-10 pts) because I didn’t want random choice landed me to either… unhealthy, sickly, or dying.

After that, I set physical strength and stamina to normal (0 pts). In any game I had ever played, I never played as a “brute” character which depended on strength and stamina. I’d rather choose agility or magic type, so I planned to dump some points in psychomotor ability. I was pretty sure that psychomotor skill was related to the ability to control body movement. It was probably the combination of dexterity, agility, and speed, so I set it to Psychomotor Ability: High (-100 points).

The last 100 points… I used them to set sensory ability to Sensory Ability: High (-100 points). I guessed this was related to how sensitive my senses would be, so it was quite a necessary investment to survive.

I was a bit surprised to see that I could empty the configuration points without leaving any extra. It was a good thing, wasn’t it?

I checked all my choices once more. Well, that was good enough I guessed… I was quite satisfied with my choices. It would not make me very great or anything, but at least it would be… safe.

I was not really worried with some stats that I left at normal or medium. I was pretty sure that almost all of the choices in the basic stats could be trained and upgraded. The preferred categories that I set to be higher than normal were those that either were the harder-to-increase ones or the ones that helped better to improve my overall ability. Yeah… I was quite satisfied.

I touched the “FINALIZE” button at the bottom of the holographic screen, and… my consciousness faded away… again.