Omni-Mastery

[ The Otherworldly anomaly that resides within your brain has been stimulated! ]

[ Extraction & Identification in progress... ] 

[ Stabilizing the connection… Remodeling... ]

[ Congratulations! Your Innate talent ability, 'Omni-Mastery', has been awakened! ] 

I woke up to several system alarms and notifs that filled my sight with blue, before making my way out of the sea of books I was immersed in.

Having collapsed yesterday after going through most of the books in the library, I wasn't exactly having a great morning, but that's what I get for being hard to stop once I started my most exciting 'reading time'. 

At the very least, it took only one night to achieve my primary target of filling the holes in my knowledge with the help of my photographic memory, otherwise, it would have been impossible considering the quantity of the books…

As I dismissed the blue screens in my sight, I tried to transmit a question about it in my mind in hope I would receive an answer from the game system.

'What exactly is this 'Innate Ability' supposed to be?'

[ Initiation has been confirmed to have taken place... Starting tutorial knowledge transfer, do you wish to proceed? ] 

'Yes…?'

"Argh…"

The same uncomfortable feeling that I got from the memory transfer was recreated as information flooded my brain, albeit in a less intense manner this time as the amount was much less…

However, this time, the information contained more vital bits in comparison to its size, which not only explained what this 'Innate Ability' was supposed to be, but also revealed the veil of the actual reason as to why the beta-testers were chosen. 

The whole talk about my 'Intelligence' and how I would perform better than other people was only the edge of that, the main reason was nothing else than this thing called the 'Innate Ability' by the system.

According to it, those in Virtual Domain somehow knew that we are all supposed to have this 'talent', which would in turn be the actual thing to boost our chance of living, meaning that the testing was likely to be more successful with us as the beta-testers.

This naturally made us worthy of being given certain promises, as our chances were also promising in comparison to normal testers who had random chances of survival.

As people who had abilities that worked like cheat keys, which was apparently quite rare, we were basically the best shot they had at stabilizing the connection before their staff could interfere more with this game world...

'That makes more sense now…'

Though it was a bit too straightforward that they just revealed information like this at the beginning of the game, it seemed like they didn't want our lack of knowledge to be the path to an early failure, well, not that we could do anything to them once we were inside of the game anyway…

With no one to target questions at, I could only keep them aside as I called out the name of my 'Innate Ability' to check out what sort of cheat code I got.

[ 'Omni-Mastery' Lv.1 

'Lv.0' - You can achieve skill acquisition much easily through knowledge accumulation & understanding.

'Lv.1' - You are able to acquire Mastery skills through skill & knowledge accumulation.

'Lv.2' - Locked.....]

Taking a quick look at the blue screen, I was pleasantly surprised as I looked at the very first line, this was truly a cheat ability…

The 'Tutorial Knowledge' transfer that I received earlier didn't only contain information regarding 'Innate Abilities', it also contained ones regarding skills and how to obtain them. 

Unlike other games where they could be simply obtained through 'Skill Books' such things didn't exist in the 'Lost Realm', skills could only be obtained through learning and training, another point that stressed the 'Realism' which was the obvious target of this game.

Only when one managed to get the game system to confirm reaching a certain threshold of mastery for the skill to be created would they be able to use it without complications.

Naturally, an ability that would ease this process seemed truly out of place in that case, but it also proved that the Virtual Domain staff's assumptions were correct.

Readily tapping the screen of 'Omni-Mastery' to check how it was exactly supposed to work, I was answered by the emergence of two more screens in succession...

[ Activating 'Omni-Mastery'... ] 

[ Primary skill acquisition list: 

- 'Sword-Mastery': Swing a sword 100 times {0/100} 

- 'Swift Swordsmanship': Repeat the 5 moves of the manual, 100 times each {0/500} 

- 'Horse riding': Successfully stay on the back of the horse and ride it for a continuous 30 minutes {0/30m} 

- 'Basic Spearmanship'... ]