The last thing George Bush remembered was his phone.

  Specifically, he remembered the exact notification that had been open on it — a LinkedIn alert informing him that someone named Derek Mollins, a man he had met once at a company mixer in 2019 and immediately forgotten, had just been promoted to Senior Associate Vice Director of Regional Partnerships. George had been staring at this title, trying to understand what any of those words meant in sequence, parsing the hierarchy of Senior versus Associate versus Vice versus Director as if parsing it would make it make sense, which it did not, when he had stepped off the kerb and been introduced, very suddenly and very finally, to the front end of a delivery van.

  The driver had probably been fine.

  George, less so.

  He had approximately two seconds of the specific kind of shocked silence that comes right before your brain admits something terrible is happening, and he spent those two seconds thinking, in this order:

  Oh.

  That's a van.

  Derek Mollins is a Senior Associate Vice Director.

  I am going to die having read that notification.

  He had.

  He woke up face-down in grass.

  Not the thin, defeated grass of a city park that had given up trying. Not the suspicious perfectly-even grass of someone's lawn that had been threatened into uniformity by a decade of weekend mowing. Real grass — thick, tall, springy, the kind that grows where it wants and how it wants and has absolutely no interest in your opinion on the matter. It smelled like everything alive had agreed to be alive in the same place at the same time. It smelled like somewhere that had never had a commute.

  George lay in it for a while.

  This was not laziness. This was a reasonable response to waking up somewhere unexpected after being hit by a van. His brain was doing what brains do after significant disruption, which is to say it was running diagnostics in the exact order that instinct prioritizes them:

  Am I still a person? — yes, the grass-feeling confirmed this.

  Do I have a body? — also yes, current status: face-down, both hands detectable, legs present and correctly attached.

  Where is the van? — no van. Positive development. Points in favour of this situation.

  What is that smell? — meadow. A real one. The kind he had seen maybe once in his life, on a family holiday aged nine, and had filed away as places that exist somewhere but never where I am.

  He pushed himself up.

  The grass released him with a small rustle — the precise sound of a very comfortable thing reluctantly letting go of a person who had been lying in it — and George sat upright and looked at the world.

  The world was, to put it gently, not London.

  It was a meadow. A proper, committed, architecturally genuine meadow, the kind that doesn't apologize for itself. Wildflowers in confident clusters. A treeline on the far horizon doing impressively scenic things. A dirt road maybe a hundred metres away, cutting a lazy curve through the grass in a direction that eventually led to a smudge on the horizon that might be buildings. The sky was blue in the middle, the way sky is supposed to be, but at the edges — at the horizon, all the way around — it had gone amber, the specific shade of amber that exists at dusk but was currently happening at what felt like late morning, as if this world's atmosphere had learned how sunsets work and decided to just run them all the time.

  And there were two moons.

  George looked at them.

  They were both up. Both visible, in daylight, matter-of-factly present the way a moon sometimes is when you can see it during the day, except multiplied by two. One was large and pale and vaguely familiar — the kind of moon you could look at and think, yes, that's a moon, I accept that — and the other was smaller and copper-coloured and looked like it had gotten the paint job at a different facility. They sat in the amber edge of the sky like they'd been there for four billion years and considered his staring to be, if not rude exactly, then at least not interesting.

  George looked at them for a long moment.

  He looked away.

  He looked back.

  Still two.

  "Right," he said to no one.

  He thought: I am either dead, in a coma, or Derek Mollins's promotion has triggered a psychological collapse of a scope that medical science has not yet fully documented.

  He thought: The grass is too good for a coma. Coma hallucinations don't smell like this.

  He thought: I am dead then. I have died. The van killed me. I am somewhere else now.

  He sat with this for what felt like a respectful amount of time — maybe thirty seconds — and discovered that he felt, about his own death, something very close to fine. Not happy, obviously. Not relieved in any active sense. But the specific, low-grade existential dread he had carried around for eleven years of financial data processing — the vague, formless weight of Monday mornings and quarterly reviews and LinkedIn notifications about Derek Mollins — was completely, entirely, surgically gone.

  Whatever this was, it wasn't that.

  He was willing to work with it.

  Then the screen appeared.

  It materialized in the air in front of him with the casual confidence of something that had been doing this for a long time and didn't need to make a production of it. Translucent, blue-tinted, rectangular — the unmistakable aesthetic of a video game interface, hovering at monitor height despite there being no monitor, no desk, and no office, just a man sitting in a meadow looking at a floating screen.

  George had read enough web fiction during particularly slow Wednesday afternoons at work to know exactly what this was.

  Oh, he thought, with the particular flavour of recognition that comes when something you previously considered fiction turns out to be a documentary. It's one of those.

  The screen read:

  WELCOME, REINCARNATE Your previous life has concluded. A new existence has been assigned.

  Soul Assessment: Complete Trait Assignment: Complete

  UNIQUE TRAIT: Universal Skill Growth Every action performed becomes a registered skill. All skills level automatically through repetition. Skills may fuse at threshold levels to produce new abilities.

  Good luck.

  George read it once. He read it again. He read it a third time, slowly, with the focused attention of a man who had spent eleven years reading documents for things that would cause him problems later.

  The first part was clear enough. Previous life concluded, yes, he was aware, the van had been quite thorough. New existence assigned, fine, he was in it, confirmed by the grass and the two moons and the general situation of being here.

  The trait he read three times.

  Every action performed becomes a registered skill. So — everything he did became a skill. Everything. Any action. The system would observe it, categorize it, file it under a name, and begin leveling it through repetition.

  He looked at his hands.

  He flexed his fingers experimentally.

  He looked back at the screen, expecting something. Nothing came. Either finger-flexing wasn't enough of an action to register or the system was giving him a grace period to absorb the information, which he appreciated.

  Skills may fuse at threshold levels, the screen had said. That was the part that nagged at him. Fuse. Combine. Like chemistry, like — you take two things that have been developing separately and at the right levels they produce a third thing, something neither of them was on their own. That implied there was a logic to this. That implied the system wasn't just handing out participation trophies for breathing; it was building toward something. The breathing fed into something. The walking fed into something. All the ridiculous micro-skills of existing fed, eventually, into combinations that had real value.

  Maybe, he thought. Or maybe Breathing just fuses with Existing to make Biological Continuity and that does nothing useful.

  He made a mental note to test everything.

  He looked at the last two words: Good luck.

  He stared at Good luck for a very long time.

  "Good luck," he said, to the screen, to the absent god, to the general management structure of the universe. "That's what you've got. Good luck. You've killed me, reincarnated me in what is clearly a fantasy world with a game system, given me a trait, and your parting guidance is good luck."

  New Skill Acquired: Speaking — Lv1

  George looked at this notification. He looked at the screen. He looked back at the notification.

  "I spoke two sentences," he said. "Eleven words. And you're — you're tracking that."

  Skill Level Up: Speaking — Lv2

  "Right." He paused. "Okay. I see how this works."

  He stood up.

  This was a slightly larger project than usual — his legs had been folded under him and had opinions about being asked to function — and it required putting his hands on the ground and pushing, which the system observed with the attentiveness of a wildlife documentarian who had been waiting all morning for something to happen.

  New Skill Acquired: Sitting Up — Lv1

  George paused, halfway to standing, and looked at this notification.

  He had received a skill. For sitting up. He had been performing the act of sitting up successfully and without incident since approximately age two, and the system had looked at this entry-level human manoeuvre, nodded with what he could only interpret as sincere respect, and allocated it a skill level.

  "Sitting Up," he said to the screen. "That's a skill you've decided to track. Sitting Up."

  The screen didn't respond. The screen was a screen.

  "Brilliant," George said. "Really sets the bar accessibly."

  He stood the rest of the way up. The world did not spin. His legs worked. He was upright. The notifications arrived:

  New Skill Acquired: Standing — Lv1 New Skill Acquired: Breathing — Lv1 New Skill Acquired: Blinking — Lv1 New Skill Acquired: Existing — Lv1

  George stood in the meadow and looked at these notifications one at a time with the focused, methodical attention of someone cataloguing damage after a flood.

  Standing. A skill. For standing up. For being vertical. For doing the thing that distinguished him from a pile of laundry. Lv1.

  Breathing. A skill for breathing. Involuntary. Reflexive. Something his brainstem had been doing on autopilot since the moment of his birth, requiring so little conscious input that he sometimes went entire hours without thinking about it. Lv1.

  Blinking. He was going to need a moment with this one. Blinking. The periodic, automatic, biologically mandated moisturization of his eyeballs, which occurred every few seconds without his knowledge or consent, which he had never once in his entire life chosen to do deliberately except when doing the thing where you wink at someone, which was a different action entirely — was a registered skill. The system had looked at his blinking and said: yes. This is a skill. We are tracking this.

  And then there was Existing.

  Existing Lv1.

  He had a skill. Called Existing. Which he was performing right now. Which he would continue performing, presumably, for as long as he was alive, which meant the skill would level indefinitely for as long as he continued to be a person who was present in space and time. He was going to eventually have a very high-level Existing skill. He didn't know what it would fuse with. He didn't know what that would become.

  He wasn't sure he wanted to think about it.

  "Okay," he said, to the sky, to the moons, to the retreating back of whatever god had set this up and was presumably now very far away. "I have skills for breathing, blinking, standing, and existing. I've been conscious for approximately"— he checked his internal estimate —"four minutes. We're off to a tremendous start."

  Skill Level Up: Breathing — Lv2 Skill Level Up: Breathing — Lv3 Skill Level Up: Breathing — Lv4

  Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  George looked at these three level-up notifications, which had arrived in the time it had taken him to finish the sentence.

  "How long have I been breathing since I woke up?" he said, working it out. "Eight minutes? You've been — you've had this running in the background this whole time, haven't you. I was lying in the grass having an existential moment and you were sitting there counting my breaths."

  The meadow offered no comment.

  "Fifteen breaths a minute," he said, doing the maths. "I've been here roughly ten minutes. That's a hundred and fifty breaths. And I'm at Lv4, which means—" he trailed off, working through the implication. "By the time I reach those buildings I'm going to have Breathing Lv40 and I'll have done nothing except walk and exist."

  He paused.

  "Is that useful?" he asked. "Is high-level Breathing useful? Does it fuse with something? Does Breathing Lv50 make me better at something or does it just mean I am very good at breathing, which, honestly—"

  Skill Level Up: Breathing — Lv5

  "—which is not the power fantasy I was hoping for," he finished.

  He looked at the dirt road. He looked at the smudge of buildings on the horizon. He looked at the two moons, which were still there, still copper-and-pale, still absolutely unbothered by any of this.

  "Right," he said. "Buildings first. Existential crisis about skill taxonomy later."

  He started walking.

  New Skill Acquired: Walking — Lv1

  "Obviously," he muttered.

  The road was well-worn and honest about it — two cart-wheel ruts ground deep into the earth by years of loaded traffic, with a strip of persistent weedy grass running up the middle that had survived purely through the stubbornness common to all plants that grow in inconvenient places. George walked in one of the ruts because the middle strip was uneven and he had already established that he was the sort of person who tripped on things.

  The notifications followed him down the road the way seagulls follow a chip.

  Skill Level Up: Walking — Lv2 Skill Level Up: Walking — Lv3 New Skill Acquired: Looking Around — Lv1 New Skill Acquired: Noticing Things — Lv1 Skill Level Up: Breathing — Lv6 New Skill Acquired: Confusion — Lv1

  George stopped walking.

  He looked at Confusion Lv1.

  "I didn't do anything for that one," he said. "I'm just confused. I'm confused because I died and I'm in a fantasy world and you're tracking my breathing, and now you're also tracking the fact that I find all of this confusing. You've given me a skill for being confused about the skill system."

  He stared at the meadow.

  The meadow was, as always, unmoved.

  "That's recursive," he said. "That is genuinely recursive and I need you to know I've noticed."

  Skill Level Up: Confusion — Lv2

  "Right," said George. "Great. Wonderful. I'll walk faster."

  Skill Level Up: Walking — Lv4

  He walked faster. The road curved gently, following the natural preference of terrain for going around things rather than over them. The smudge of buildings on the horizon grew incrementally more specific — he could distinguish shapes now, taller and shorter, the suggestion of something flag-like, the definite presence of smoke from chimneys. People. Fire. Probably food. George's stomach had, in the last two minutes, begun making its position on the food situation very clear.

  "I wonder if eating gives me a skill," he said to nobody. "It's going to give me a skill. Of course it is. I'm going to gain Eating Lv1 the first time I have a meal. And then Chewing Lv1 separately because the system distinguishes between the mechanical process and the act of consumption. And probably Swallowing Lv1. And Tasting Lv1. I'm going to have seven skills from a bowl of soup."

  He thought about this.

  "That's fine," he decided. "If they all fuse into something, that's fine. If eating soup eventually makes me better at combat somehow, then I will eat the most soup that has ever been eaten in the history of this world."

  A bird flew overhead. George looked up at it with the automatic attention of someone whose Noticing Things skill was already developing opinions about what constituted a notable event.

  The bird was purple.

  Not sort of purple, not purple in a certain light, not the iridescent near-purple of a starling when the sun hit it right. Actually, unambiguously, committedly purple, with three tails spreading behind it like a trident, beating its wings in a pattern that looked slightly too efficient to be natural. It was about the size of a large crow and it moved like something that had done a great deal of flying and considered itself quite good at it.

  George watched it cross the sky from one treeline to the other and disappear.

  "Three tails," he said to the empty road. "It had three tails. That was a bird with three tails." He paused. "I'm going to assume that's normal here. I'm going to file three-tailed purple birds under local fauna, probably fine and not allocate any more mental energy to it."

  Skill Level Up: Looking Around — Lv2 Skill Level Up: Noticing Things — Lv2 New Skill Acquired: Staring — Lv1

  "I wasn't staring," he said to the screen. "I was observing. There's a difference."

  The screen maintained its position that there was not.

  George walked on.

  The road was doing what good roads do, which is pretend it isn't sloping upward when it is, so that by the time you notice you're climbing slightly, you're already at the top and it can honestly say there was no hill. George reached the modest crest of one such non-hill and found that the buildings were now close enough to resolve into an actual village — stone and timber, close-set, a wooden gate with a crossbar, a guard standing outside it with the bearing of someone who had been standing outside gates for a long time and had made their peace with it.

  He opened his full status screen to take stock before arriving, which required thinking at it in the way these interfaces apparently worked, and scrolled through the list.

  Fourteen entries. He'd been conscious for twelve minutes.

  Breathing Lv7. It had been ticking up the entire walk, autonomously, without any input from George whatsoever, the world's most self-sufficient skill.

  Existing Lv2. He had been existing for slightly longer, hence the level up.

  Walking Lv7. This one he could take some credit for. He had been walking actively and with purpose.

  Confusion Lv2. He had been confused consistently. Also active and with purpose, arguably.

  And then, near the bottom, the one he couldn't quite shake:

  New Skill Acquired: Approaching Things — Lv1

  He had gained a skill for walking toward a gate. Not for reaching the gate. Not for entering the gate. Just for the act of moving in the direction of a thing. Approaching Things Lv1. He was level one at approaching things.

  "I need to understand something," George said, looking at this notification while stopped on the road twenty metres from the gate, close enough that the guard had begun to notice him standing there and frowning at thin air. "Where does Walking end and Approaching Things begin? Is Walking the general movement skill and Approaching Things the targeted movement skill? Are those genuinely distinct enough to warrant separate entries?"

  The system had no explanation to offer. The system felt the answer was self-evident.

  "I have a skill," George continued, still talking to himself but now with the quiet, focused intensity of someone who has found a single thread that will, if pulled, unravel something important, "called Approaching Things. I am level one at it. Presumably with repetition I will become better at approaching things. Does that mean I will eventually approach things faster? More accurately? With greater commitment? What does a high-level approach look like? Is there a—"

  He stopped.

  "There is definitely a fusion," he said slowly. "Walking plus Approaching Things plus probably Running at some point fuses into some kind of movement skill. That's what this is. The system isn't tracking Approaching Things because approaching things is a skill worth having on its own. It's a component. It's an ingredient."

  He looked at the skill list.

  He looked at it with new eyes.

  Every single entry on it — every ludicrous, granular, overly-specific micro-action skill — was potentially an ingredient. Breathing wasn't just the system being eccentric. Blinking wasn't the system being thorough to the point of comedy. They were all raw materials. They were all, at sufficient levels, going to combine into something.

  He didn't know what. He didn't know the recipes. But the system had told him the mechanic up front, which meant it wanted him to understand this. It had given him the fusion mechanic in the opening tutorial because the fusion mechanic was the point.

  "Right," he said, much more quietly. "Okay. That's different. That changes how I think about this."

  He looked at the gate.

  The guard was now squinting at him with the open professional concern of a person whose job was to watch for threats and who had just clocked a man standing in a road staring at nothing and talking to himself.

  George walked toward the gate with what he hoped was a normal and non-threatening gait.

  Skill Level Up: Approaching Things — Lv2 Skill Level Up: Walking — Lv8

  "Getting somewhere," he said quietly, to himself, to the screen, to the general project of figuring this out.

  The guard was a solid, middle-aged man with a moustache that had been allowed to reach its full potential and a set of light armour that had been well-maintained over many years without anyone mistaking it for new. He was reading something on a folded piece of paper, but he looked up as George arrived, with the automatic efficiency of a man who had been performing this exact motion — document down, eyes up, assess — for so long that it had stopped requiring any conscious participation.

  He looked at George. He took in the boots, the linen clothes, the complete absence of visible weapons, and the general demeanour of a man who had recently had something significant happen to him but was choosing to be professional about it.

  "Adventurer?" the guard asked.

  George thought about this question for approximately three seconds.

  He had no class. The screen had not mentioned a class, which meant he almost certainly didn't have one. He had no guild card. He had a trait — one trait, Universal Skill Growth — and a skill list that currently included Existing, Confusion, and Approaching Things. He was, by any meaningful technical definition, not an adventurer. He was a dead financial data processor standing in front of a gate in a world with two moons having just walked here while gaining experience for breathing.

  "Yes," he said.

  New Skill Acquired: Lying — Lv1

  He clocked this notification immediately and thought: I'm going to have a very high Lying skill by the end of the week, aren't I.

  The guard waved him through with the benign indifference of a man who had seen enough adventurers that another one barely registered.

  New Skill Acquired: Walking Through Gates — Lv1

  George walked through the gate and into the village and stopped on the other side to read this notification, which he felt he deserved a moment with.

  Walking Through Gates Lv1. A skill for walking through a gate. Separate from Walking. Separate from Approaching Things. A distinct registered skill for the specific physical act of crossing a gate threshold, which he had now done once and which the system had apparently been waiting for him to do.

  "I wonder," he said quietly, "what Walking Through Gates eventually fuses into. Is there a skill called Dramatic Entrance? Is there an ability called Threshold Crossing Mastery that activates every time I walk into a room? Is there—"

  He looked up from his muttering and took in the village.

  It was a nice village. That was the first thing. It wasn't threatening or grim or the picturesque ruins of something that had been better before. It was just nice — stone-and-timber buildings that had been built to last and had lasted, a well in the centre of the square doing exactly what wells are supposed to do, a market area with three stalls arranged at comfortable distances from each other, a building with a notice board out front that had guild written on it so clearly that George felt slightly patronized, and an inn whose sign showed a badger sitting in a chair with a cup of something. The badger looked comfortable. The sign said The Comfortable Badger. George felt an immediate and specific kinship with this badger.

  People were going about things. Farmers and merchants and two young people with swords who had the particular posture of individuals who had recently acquired those swords and were absolutely performing for anyone who might be watching. A woman with a market basket. A man moving barrels. The texture of ordinary life in a small settlement that had seen enough adventurers pass through that one more arriving at the gate didn't merit a second glance.

  George stood in the square and looked at it all.

  He looked at the two sword-wielding young adventurers and noticed, with a pang of something, the clean, efficient confidence of people who had a path. A class. A defined skill tree with defined nodes and a defined direction. They knew exactly what they were doing and exactly where it led and exactly which skills they needed to develop to get there.

  George opened his own skill list.

  He scrolled to the bottom.

  Approaching Things — Lv2 Walking Through Gates — Lv1 Existing — Lv4 Confusion — Lv2

  He closed the screen.

  "Brilliant," he said very quietly. "Very impressive stuff. Really striking build."

  He found a bench near the well and sat down.

  New Skill Acquired: Sitting — Lv1

  He sat on the bench. He thought about what he knew, laying it out in the methodical way of a man who had spent eleven years turning incomprehensible data into reports that other people could act on. He knew: he was dead, he was in a new world, he had a trait that turned every action into a skill, those skills leveled by repetition, and at threshold levels they fused into new and presumably better abilities. He knew: he had no class, no money, no contacts, and no plan. He knew: he needed food and shelter and income, in roughly that order.

  He also knew: somewhere, under all the Breathing and Blinking and Existing, there was a build. He could feel the shape of it the way you can sometimes feel the shape of a solution before you've worked out the specifics. It was going to come from the fusions. Everything was going to come from the fusions. He just had to do enough things, at high enough levels, to find out what they were.

  He could do that.

  He had done less promising things. He had spent three years modelling projected depreciation schedules for assets that no one had ever asked about and that turned out not to exist. He had survived the 2021 all-hands meeting where someone had presented a slide deck about company culture with the word synergise on it thirty-seven times. He had read Derek Mollins's LinkedIn notification.

  He could figure out a magic skill system.

  He stood up.

  Skill Level Up: Sitting — Lv1 (...Lv1 again. You sat for less than two minutes.)

  George looked at this notification. The parenthetical. The gentle, systemic note that he had not sat long enough to achieve a level up through genuine repetition and had therefore remained at Lv1 despite the new instance.

  "Are you," he said slowly, "are you judging me? For not sitting long enough?"

  The notification continued to say what it said.

  "I sat down and stood back up," he said. "That's a complete sitting event. I performed the action. Beginning, middle, end. There was a full sit. You should—"

  Skill Level Up: Breathing — Lv9

  The system had moved on.

  George stood in the square with his hands in his pockets and made one final assessment of the situation. He was in a village. He had skills for breathing and existing and sitting that the system apparently considered subpar effort. He had one point in Lying and two points in Confusion. He needed a job, a meal, and probably a quiet place to spend several hours tripping over things on purpose.

  He was going to be fine.

  He was going to work this out.

  The alternative was the delivery van, and frankly, this was better.

  He looked at the inn sign. The badger looked back, steam rising from its cup, armchair beneath it, the expression of a badger that had found a comfortable arrangement and was not interested in disrupting it.

  George walked toward the inn.

  Skill Level Up: Approaching Things — Lv3 Skill Level Up: Walking — Lv10 New Skill Acquired: Optimism — Lv1

  He saw the Optimism notification and, despite everything, laughed.

  It wasn't loud. It wasn't the laugh of someone who found everything funny. It was the specific laugh of someone who had just received experience points for deciding to be okay about something, and who found that either deeply funny or deeply touching, and had decided, at Lv1, to go with funny.

  He pushed open the door to the inn.

  New Skill Acquired: Opening Doors — Lv1

  "Of course," he said, and went inside.

  End of Chapter One

  George Bush | Level 1

  Skills: Breathing Lv9 · Blinking Lv4 · Standing Lv2 · Existing Lv4 · Walking Lv10 · Staring Lv2 · Confusion Lv2 · Noticing Things Lv3 · Observation Lv3 · Sitting Lv1 · Approaching Things Lv3 · Walking Through Gates Lv1 · Tripping Lv2 · Stumbling Lv1 · Catching Yourself Lv1 · Speaking Lv2 · Optimism Lv1 · Opening Doors Lv1 · Lying Lv1

  (22 skills total)

  The Comfortable Badger awaits. George is hungry, confused, and in possession of Lv1 Optimism, which the system considers a skill worth tracking. This is either encouraging or deeply on the nose. Possibly both.