Two hundred years ago, the world changed. No one knows how or why. Some called it a divine intervention, others an alien experiment. All we knew for sure was that on that day, a mysterious, omniscient force settled over the planet, and a Ranking System was imposed on everyone.
Society didn't crumble. It mutated. Old values of heritage, wealth, and nationality were ground into dust, replaced by a single, brutal metric: your Number. The lower the number, the better your life. At the age of eighteen, every human on Earth would receive their rank. A number would be seared into their destiny, visible to all, a permanent brand that dictated their worth. Out of twenty billion souls, you were either a diamond or just another piece of gravel to be crushed underfoot.
What made the rankings everything? The prizes. Every month, the system rewarded us. For the top rankers, it was power beyond imagination, artifacts that could bend reality, fortunes that could buy nations. For the masses in the billions, it was a pittance—barely enough to scrape by. For the dregs at the very bottom, it was nothing but a reminder of their own uselessness. The prizes could help you climb, and a better rank meant a better prize. It was a self-perpetuating cycle of power, a ladder where the rungs were made of the backs of those below you.
My name is Charles Anderson, and in three minutes, my life would either begin or be formally declared over.
The peeling paint on the ceiling of my cramped, shit-hole apartment seemed to mock me. The place stank of cheap booze and stale despair, a scent that had long ago seeped into my own skin. It was the smell of my father. He was a low-ranker, a man broken by the system, who decided the best way to deal with his failure was to take it out on me with his fists and his belt. He was addicted to gambling, always chasing the impossible win that would fix his life, but only ever succeeded in digging our hole deeper.
Then there was my mother. She was a different kind of scum. Where my father was a storm of rage, she was a void of neglect, too busy chasing the fleeting validation of other men to remember she had a son. In a way, I was lucky she ignored me. My life was already a living hell; I didn't need her adding her brand of poison to the mix.
Because of them, my reputation was already garbage. In this world, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, and my tree was rotten to the core. Everyone in our block of subsidized housing looked at me with pity or contempt, a walking testament to a failed bloodline. They whispered that I'd be lucky to rank in the bottom five billion. I couldn't even disagree with them. Hope was a luxury I had never been able to afford.
The digital clock on my cracked phone screen flipped. One minute left.
My heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic drumbeat counting down to my execution or my salvation. I had no illusions. My life so far had been a string of unending misfortune. Framed for things I didn't do, caught in freak accidents, even the shack we used to live in was destroyed in a bizarre gas line explosion that somehow only targeted our home. It was a miracle I was still alive. A miracle I sometimes wished hadn't happened.
I hated this world. A world that promised power to the worthy but gave people like me parents who were nothing more than anchors, determined to drag me down with them.
Ten seconds.
My breath caught in my throat. This was it. The moment of judgment. I closed my eyes, bracing for the inevitable crushing weight of a multi-billion-digit number.
*Three... two... one...*
Nothing happened. No thunderclap, no divine voice. I slowly opened my eyes. A faint, illusory light was formed in the air before me. It wasn't a number branded on my face as I'd heard, but a series of sharp, blue-lit prompts that materialized in my vision, visible only to me.
`[User: Charles Anderson.]`
`[Age: Eighteen Confirmed.]`
`[Information Received.]`
`[Status Confirmed.]`
`[System Activated.]`
My hands trembled as I read the lines. The system. It was real. The final line of text shine even brighter than the others, and I felt a number settle into my mind, a piece of knowledge as fundamental as my own name.
`[Ranking: 5000/20,000,000,000]`
I stared. And stared again.
Five… thousand?
Not five billion. Not five hundred million. Five *thousand*.
The number was so absurd, so utterly disconnected from the reality of my life, that my first thought was that the system had made a mistake. A glitch. It had to be. People with ranks in the thousands were elites, geniuses, the chosen ones who lived in sky-high penthouses and commanded universal respect. They weren't scum from the gutter like me.
I rubbed my eyes until they burned, but the number in my mind's eye remained. 5000. Out of twenty billion people, I was in the top five thousand.
A choked sound escaped my throat. It might have been a laugh or a sob.
"Hahahaha…"
It started as a quiet, broken chuckle before erupting into a full-blown, manic peel of laughter. Tears streamed down my face, hot and real. The suffocating weight that had been crushing me for eighteen years wasn't just lifted; it was annihilated. This wasn't a mistake. This was a ticket out. A sledgehammer to smash the walls of the prison I was born into.
Just as my hysterical laughter began to subside, two more prompts appeared, followed by a soft glow on the filthy floor beside my bed.
`[Congratulations! Starter Reward Generated.]`
`[Reward: Physique Fortifier Vial (1), Skill Tome (1)]`
In the glow, two items materialized. One was a small, clinical-looking vial filled with a shimmering, silver liquid. The other was a thick, leather-bound book that looked ancient, its cover completely blank.
The Physique Fortifier Vial. I'd heard of these. They were common rewards for high-rankers, items that could purge the body of impurities and remake it from the ground up. It promised a new beginning in the most literal sense.
The Skill Tome was a greater mystery. Some people were born with innate skills, magical abilities that could dramatically improve their ranking. Others never got one. A tome suggested I could learn one. Or, perhaps, awaken what was already there.
My hands, still shaking, reached for the items. The vial felt cool to the touch, the book strangely warm. The laughter died down, replaced by a cold, sharp clarity.
My father was passed out drunk in the other room. My mother was probably out with god-knows-who. This apartment, this life, this history of misery—it was all in the past now. Today would cement what my life would be. And for the first time, I felt like I was the one holding the hammer and the nails. I was going to build my own future, and if anyone got in my way, I would build it right over their corpse.