V-00001.4 – Recognition.

  I awoke my legs feeling numb and soaked, with my entire lower body submerged in water and my ripped jeans clinging. Staring up into the sky, the dust-covered air was dark. With only faint rays of light poking out over the horizon.

  Lazily, I looked around, trying to get my bearings, as I felt like I’d been hit by a train that then decided it wanted my wallet after and backed over me. Pushing my elbows underneath me, I raised myself into a sitting position and pushed my feet against the soggy, wet ground, crawling backwards out of the water.

  My joints snapped as I moved, my elbows and shoulders popped, and my legs screamed at me in pain—a hateful agony I had almost begun to forget coming back at me full force as my ankles and knees popped with a flex of my muscles.

  My head was swimming as, looking down at myself, I was convinced I had somehow concussed myself. Black lines settled in a red glow kept slipping into my view over my arms and fingers like tattoos before fading away into nothing but white skin.

  The ephemeral lines of black and blood red came and went with no rhyme or reason, but as my thoughts began to stabilize and my blurry vision turned into crystal clear imagery, the line tattoo’s faded and didn’t come back.

  Ravenous and thirsty, I suppressed the haptic buzzing I felt in the back of my skull and dragged myself back to the lake and pushed my head into the water. Taking greedy gulps down my throat, I lubricated my insides, pulling myself away from the lake. I forced myself to my feet and endured the pain as my joints set and protested.

  Walking back to my hut, I finally stopped suppressing the buzz in my head, letting the system open and showing me the notifications I’d been ignoring since before I passed out.

  “Holy fucking shit... That is a lot. What the hell does half of this even mean, titles and feats? I didn’t even know that was a thing. What the fuck does it mean by I’m a Legacy Beast?”

  I could feel my pulse quicken as I stared at the new notification. What the fuck does it mean I’m the last of my kind... Did humanity somehow die out while I was unconscious?

  “What do these stats mean.?”

  “Your fucking with me right; you can’t seriously expect me to choose this shit without even knowing what I’m looking at.”

  Alright, let’s think about this. Authority and nobility seem like social stats, so those are out. Soul and aura just seem like more focused versions of intelligence and wisdom. Renewal... honestly, I have no fucking idea. That leaves resilience and death, resilience that could be a defense stat? Or maybe it’s just another more focused version of wisdom that focuses on the mental strength aspect... Fuck it when in doubt; go for the most unique shit available.

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  “I chose to inherit the Death attribute.”

  A moment after making my choice, I felt an otherworldly chill enter my bones before slowly fading away, and I saw the weird ethereal black substance that clung to the coyote’s corpse slide over my skin and seep into me.

  “Seriously… more of this shit, let me guess I’m still not permitted to know.”

  I groaned loudly, fighting a growing headache. “Fucking seriously? You wouldn’t let me see what my attributes meant before because you put the dying breed title first... Fuck you. Define the attributes I can choose.”

  Alright, that’s pretty fucking great. How about the rest?

  Ok, so madness is just fucking awful... Why would I want to be crazier, Fuck that. Vampirism is cool, but honestly, it doesn’t sound like it will be useful for a long time; it basically just offers what parasite already does. Terror is definitely useful, but it feels pretty mundane next to Soul and Infernal. Soul seems like it will make me better at magic in general, and Infernal seems like it will give me access to unique aspects of magic similar to the death attribute.

  “I select Infernal as my Legacy attribute,” I said to the system and braced myself, expecting another weird sensation, and within moments I was proven right. My heart hammered hard, and a bloody red aura flickered to life over my skin as my black tattoos made another appearance and glowed bright infernal runes the same color as my aura inscribed into the tattoos before fading away.

  Waves of pain rolled over my body and mind as I was twisted and warped by the system; my nerves and twitch muscles were needled and liquefied, and so was the rest of my muscular and skeletal systems; my ears, eyes, nose, skin—everything I could feel through was on fire and going insane as masses of sensation assaulted me and my brain learned to filter the new onslaught of data. Ice filled my veins and permeated my bones as my tattoos kept flashing in and out, infernal bloody symbols flaring to life in the black.

  Several long minutes of agony washed over me and went away as the sun was raising up into the sky, and once that orb of fire finally escaped the horizon and became a full circle, I was free once again able to move.

  “Fuck me, that was the worst; it seems like that sensation gets worse the more stat points get invested at once, and let me think plus 3 to everything and an additional 3 to my legacy stat; that’s ten stats, so three times ten plus another 3, Christ, I just gained thirty-three stat points that... Six and a half levels worth of upgrades to my body.”

  Looking down at my body, I hardly fit in my clothes anymore. I’d always been big and strong and wore baggy clothing, but now I have the body of an Olympian. My musculature was broad and massive; I was lean without a shred of fat on my skeleton, and muscle plated every inch of me. My skin looked even paler than before, and the arteries under my skin were no longer pale blue but almost a glowing red.

  The scars that covered me hadn’t disappeared, but they were neater, more clean, and less jagged, as if I’d spent hours under the knife with the world’s best plastic surgeon cleaning my ruined skin up. My hair was thicker and glossy, and so was my body hair, long and delicate and conforming to the shape of my body closely.

  My voice was foreign to my own ears; it sounded similar except the gravely sound from years of smoking and having my throat cut up was completely absent; it was deeper and had a more base sound, completely clean, like I had warmed up for to sing.

  My body was brimming with untapped potential and power, and it wasn’t just physical; the electricity I could feel in the air was clearer and more present in every sense, and I could really feel it. Before, it was like this liquid that slid away from me and off my skin like water to a duck's back, but now, with a focus on my will, I could feel it folding around my fingers, conforming gently to my will.

  My grasp on the mana in the air was tenuous at best, more like it was choosing to do what I wanted than I was controlling it, and when I tried to flex my control to pull on it harder, I could feel myself losing it. The energy surrounding me almost seemed to reject me, only dregs of it did as I willed condensing around my fingers.