Chương 81: (B2 Chapter 32)

I shook my head at Madelline's question, and then opened up the system store at her insistence, and what I saw there was nothing at all like what had been there earlier. The categories which had previously been completely empty were now full of items. Weapons, Armour, Skill Books, Spells, Materials, and Miscellaneous were the categories, and previously only Miscellaneous had a small selection of basic items, while the rest were completely empty.

Now though, every single category had a long, long list beside it, which could also be further drilled down into sub-categories. Like when I opened weapons, I had a seemingly never-ending list of random weapons shown. However, I could define a sub-category of daggers in it, and put the rarity as uncommon, and it would show just uncommon daggers. It was honestly pretty useful… but at the same time still had a very basic selection in terms of rarity.

There were no weapons, armours, spells, or materials higher than uncommon rarity. I knew for a fact that epic rarity existed, but that wasn't even listed as an option to filter, the highest filter being rare. I really wanted to go through all the skills and see if I could get some with my money, but Madelline spoke up beside me again.

"Focus on the Miscellaneous section," she said, and I stopped my perusal of skills to instead address the matter at hand. With the constant sound of children crying in the background, I navigated to the Miscellaneous section and at Madelline's direction, filtered it to food, and right at the top, we found the answer to one of our major problems. Listed at just 1 bronze was a pack of 10 'new-born human nutrients pack.'

That wasn't all, as right beneath it, a 'human nutrients pack' was also listed, at the same 1 bronze. Both of these items had a small, blinking, red 23 next to them, which I thought looked like a timer, but I wasn't sure. If it were a timer, I wasn't sure if it was 23 days, hours, or minutes, or it could even be years. Still, the important thing was that it looked like the food problem was sorted for now. That is, if we can trust the system to provide adequate nutrients for the newborns.

Moreover, Madelline also mentioned that there were now basic straw mattresses also available in the store, which would help immensely with sleeping arrangements. But in my mind, bedding wasn't a major problem at the moment. Sure, people may have to face a couple rough nights on the floor, but we were surrounded by countless buildings that had apartments, and more importantly, beds in them. All we needed to do was go to them and take the beds or mattresses into our inventory and bring them to our base.

Plus, those mattresses would be much better than these straw ones that the system was giving out. That being said, it was still a convenience, and I was sure people were going to buy them. There were other useful things as well, like straw pillows, basic clothes, and most importantly, water was now available.

All in all, the store was going to help a lot with some of the problems we were suddenly facing, however, at the same time, it wouldn't do much to address perhaps the biggest problem of all – the fact that almost everyone who had shown up at our doorstep today would need care, some even round-the-clock care, and there simply weren't enough people to provide that. Will levelling up or healing help them…? I didn't know… actually… do they even have access to the system…?

I scanned through the crowd and saw a person who couldn't have been older than thirty and was in a wheelchair due to his missing right foot. The system had given these people a basic wheelchair each, but hadn't transported prosthetic limbs with them. The person I was looking at was justifiably confused, but otherwise looked alert and was trying to make sense of things instead of being angry or panicking like most of the others. Not seeing anyone better, I approached him.

"Hey there, I'm Alex," I introduced myself to him. He gave a small start at being spoken to, and looked at me in confusion for about a second before responding, "Hi, I'm Scott."

"Nice to meet you. Can I ask you a question?"

"Why?" he asked.

"Because you seem like you have your wits about you," I answered. He looked at me for a few seconds before answering, "Sure, but I don't think I'll be able to answer whatever question you may have," he shrugged.

"That won't be a problem. Tell me, did you get any sort of message from the system, or know about your status screen?" I asked him. The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

"I don't know what any of that means, but I did get a weird holographic message in front of my eyes when I got here, something about being transported to the nearest gathering of same species Users on a planet with a long number, is that what you're referring to?" he looked at me confused.

"Exactly," I nodded.

"That message you saw is from something called the system… it's a long story, I'm sure you'll be filled in on it later. Now, try thinking hard about your 'Status Screen', and let me know if something happens." Once again, he looked at me strangely for a few seconds.

"Status screen? What's that?"

"Just try it out… you'll see if it works…" I encouraged him. After a few seconds of him staring at me like I had lost my mind yet again, he sighed and concentrated on… something… presumably on trying to open his status screen. Just a split second later he gave a jolt and his eyes widened in shock.

"What is this?!" he exclaimed. Okay… so they do have access to the system… I gave him a quick run-down of his status screen, and then excused myself, leaving him staring at his status in wonder. My mind was racing, and a few possibilities came to mind. The first one was a scroll still in my inventory. I took it out and confirmed the system screen that popped up. Would you like to use the Skill Scroll (Rare) to learn the Skill: Regeneration? Obviously, I didn't know what this skill actually did.

It could be referring to the regeneration of body parts like cut-off fingers or even amputated limbs. At the same time, it could very easily be referring to resource regeneration like giving a boost to stamina or mana regeneration. Until Marcus learned the skill and used it, we couldn't be certain. Speaking of Marcus… is he still unconscious…? I asked Madelline, and she confirmed that Marcus was still out for the count.

Marcus had already woken up when this much time had passed in the tutorial, so it was weird he was out cold for so long. Did it have something to do with how his ability had filled up all our resources instead of just restoring health? I shrugged, not knowing the answer, and hoping he would wake up soon. I knew he was alive, and this was just like when he had used the ability in the tutorial, so I wasn't too worried at the moment.

Moving on, I placed the scroll back into my inventory and thought about the next thing I had in mind. Apart from this skill which had the potential to heal others, there was also levelling up… or more specifically, increasing stat points. I still remembered getting completely healed of all my injuries and burns when I went past the ten threshold in vitality after the fight with that goblin elite mage. Could something similar happen to these people?

And if so, would going past the threshold actually regrow missing limbs, or would it just heal the injuries present? And what about the other stats? Would improving intelligence or wisdom cure dementia or other mental health problems? Could increasing perception heal deafness or blindness? If someone were to dump points into dexterity, would it improve or outright stop uncontrollable movements that some people faced?

When strength would be increased, would it increase someone's missing muscle mass or under-developed muscles? I didn't know if any of these would be true, but I did know that it was our best bet. Not that it would be easy in any way, especially with how the system doesn't let someone power-level. If going past stat thresholds didn't work, then there was one other thing that could; improving one's grade. I remembered how reaching E Grade had felt.

It had been like being changed on a fundamental level to something more. Everything about me had improved, so is it possible the system would 'improve' these people to their ideal states when going up a grade? Clearly, we had a lot of answers to search for, and as I looked at Lucas standing on top of the reception desk and still being swarmed with questions and demands of contacting the police, I knew we wouldn't be getting them anytime soon.

It took a long, long time for things to settle down somewhat. Hours of constant back-and-forth between panicking, confused, and angry old people and Lucas, Mason, and the others had finally ended with a few basic measures. Interestingly, Scott had been instrumental at getting people to calm down. He had gotten a few more to access their statuses, and from there the voices had grown. Some of the basic measures were: Anyone in a wheelchair or otherwise not able to climb stairs would be assigned the ground floor.

The rest of the group would go upstairs. We had also discovered that the timer was indeed hours, and we had bought thousands and thousands of the 'new-born human nutrients packs' and 'human nutrients packs.' It was enough that we wouldn't have to worry about providing essential nutrients to others for the foreseeable future. We had also tested both packs, and the one containing human nutrients essentially worked at eliminating the need for food.

It was a small pellet that we could swallow and magically get all the nutrients needed. No one was keen on testing the pack for a new-born child on actual children, but when a few of the babies started crying non-stop, we decided to give it a go. The pack was different. It worked as soon as it opened and we didn't need to actually feed the babies anything. The pack vanished as soon as it was opened, leaving us initially thinking it hadn't worked.

But no, the baby who had been crying non-stop since about an hour had immediately quietened down, leading us to believe that it had actually worked. Soon, the baby was fast asleep. Something similar happened no matter how many times we tried it, the babies calming down immediately after using the pack, with some falling asleep while others even started playing. It looked like the pack really did work.

Makes sense it would work with proximity instead of trying to get a child to swallow something that was almost definitely not going to have a pleasant taste. I watched from the side as Lucas, Mason, and a few others directed the new members of our base to areas where they could lie down. I admired the patience of Lucas and Mason, as I knew for certain I wouldn't have been able to stay so calm in their situation.

Still, now that things seemed to be somewhat settling down, I knew I could focus on something that I had been itching to do for the past few hours. I opened the system store and navigated to the skills section.