Stan looked at the pill and the vial one final time before closing his hands around them.
The weight remained. Small, unmistakable and real.
Ever since receiving the system, such thoughts had crossed his mind more than once.
Yet now, more than ever, he couldn’t help but wonder whether the world was far stranger than he had ever imagined, and whether he had only just begun to glimpse its true nature.
Sighing, He walked into the living room, set them carefully on the kitchen counter, and pulled out his phone.
The system interface was already presenting him with the second new feature.
[Shop unlocked.]
[Available items: 1.]
He opened it.
A single product floated in his interface field.
[[Introduction to Earth.]
[Cost: 1 System Point]
Stan’s brow furrowed.
The title was generic. The book, if it was a book, was offered at the cost of a single system point. He had no system points currently on the balance. He was sitting at zero.
And yet,
He looked at the title again.
There was a quiet, instinctive pull toward it that he could not entirely explain. Introduction to Earth. The phrasing was deliberate. It was the kind of title you gave a book if you assumed the reader was approaching the planet from outside it. It was the kind of title a publisher would use if they expected their audience to be people who didn’t already know the basic facts.
It felt, in a way he couldn’t fully articulate, like exactly the document he was supposed to read in this exact moment of his life.
If there were superhumans on Earth, and the items on his counter strongly suggested there were, this book was likely to be where the answer to the question began.
He needed the point.
[Conversion rate available: Fiat currency (USD), 1 billion dollars : 1 system point.]
The notification arrived on cue.
Stan let out a slow, pained breath.
"Are you serious."
One billion dollars for a single system point.
It was, by any honest accounting, extortionate. The system had spent the past two weeks rewarding him with multi-billion-dollar windfalls and shareholdings, and now the moment he wanted to convert ordinary cash into something the system itself measured in, the exchange rate was set at a wall.
He turned the math over in his head.
He currently had, after the various transfers, the Wanhai purchases, the property gifts, and the Amelia treatment, roughly 1.6 billion dollars in liquid cash sitting in his primary account. A billion-dollar conversion would take a substantial chunk of that out in a single transfer.
But the question wasn’t really about cost.
The question was whether he wanted to know.
The pill and the bottle on his kitchen counter, in his honest reading of them, were a confirmation. The world he had grown up in was not the world he thought it was. There were systems of power he hadn’t been aware of. There were levels of existence he had been ignorant of. He had been walking around in a layer of reality that had quietly, deeply, never been the only layer.
He could continue not knowing. He could pocket the pill, drink the elixir, and let the rest of it remain mysterious.
Or he could buy the book.
The choice was, in the end, not really a choice.
He pulled up his phone’s banking interface, accessed his primary account, and mentally focused on the system at the same time. The instinct was clear, will the transaction, and the system would handle the rest.
He willed it.
One billion dollars vacated his account.
The deduction processed with the brisk efficiency of a wire transfer. His account balance shifted in real time. The number that appeared on his banking app was several hundred million dollars lower than it had been thirty seconds earlier.
A faint, distinctly uncomfortable pang moved through his chest as he watched the balance settle.
Losing a billion dollars in a single, instantaneous, intangible transaction was, even for him, even at this stage of his life felt uncomfortable.
But the system notification arrived a moment later.
[+1 System Point. Current balance: 1.]
He exhaled. Slowly. Through his teeth.
He tapped the Introduction to Earth in his shop interface.
[Purchase confirmed. Deducting 1 system point.]
[Item delivered.]
A weight materialized in his right hand.
He looked down. He was holding a book.
For a moment, that was all it appeared to be. No golden light..No mystical aura. No dramatic manifestation of cosmic power.
Just a book. A medium-sized hardback bound in dark navy cloth.
The cover was smooth beneath his fingers, the material matte and slightly textured. Centered on the front, pressed into the cover in clean silver lettering, were three words:
’Introduction to Earth.. huh’ Stan sighed and turned it over. The back cover was blank. No summary. No publisher. No barcode. No author photograph..Nothing.
The book carried none of the information normally attached to something intended for sale.
It existed solely as itself..He opened it..The first page contained only the title.
’Introduction to Earth.’
The second page contained a single additional line.
’A primer for those who have begun to see beyond the veil.’
Stan’s eyes lingered on the sentence. The apartment was silent. The words themselves were simple. Yet they carried a strange weight. Not because they were mysterious.
Because they were confirming something. The system was not treating him as someone who had discovered a secret.
It was treating him as someone who had finally become capable of noticing what had always been there.
Beyond the veil. Not a new world. The same world. Viewed differently.
Stan stared at the page for several seconds..Then he closed the book.
The soft thump of the cover sounded unusually loud in the quiet apartment.
He lowered himself onto one of the stools at the kitchen counter. The bronze pill sat a short distance away. The jade elixir rested beside it.
The book remained in his hands.
For a moment, he simply sat there. Reflecting. The morning replayed itself in fragments. Vivian’s crisis. The Wanhai meeting. Maya’s investment proposal. Breakfast with Amelia. The favorability rewards. The system upgrade.
By any reasonable standard, it had already been an absurdly eventful day.
And somehow none of it felt as significant as the object currently resting in his hands.
After all this was an explanation to his long list of questions, at least the beginning of one.
With a cultivation pill on his counter. An impossible elixir within arm’s reach.
And, at long last, something that looked suspiciously like answers.
Stan opened the book once more. Then he turned the page. And began to read.