Chương 44: The Book (Part Three)

A software engineer, also a decade-long beta reader of William Doe's books, had created a custom web interface. It counted and aggregated the total number of Unordinary readers across a dozen websites. From its starting point (zero), to a modest total of 2000 readers in early December, William stared unproductively at the slowly growing number on the interface for around an hour every day. On December fifth, Saturday morning, William woke up to a blackened blue sky.

He owed his body a debt of sleep, and it was still so dark outside his window that flakes of snow faded into the ether, but he was too eager to rest. He opened his laptop to privately message his beta readers, writing, Now's the time. We have a prophecy on our side. Start spreading the word. On the next day, the sixth, Unordinary's reader count was 2, 500. 4, 000 by the eighth. 7, 000 by the tenth and 12, 000 by the twelfth.

20, 000 by the middle of the month, at which point recommendations were surfacing in certain corners – and William made a public post just as planned.

"I was recommended this book recently, Unordinary, by an anonymous author. You guys should check it out. It's frighteningly good, better than anything I've ever written." He gave a very long, detailed, glowing review. Secretly heaping praise onto himself made him feel slightly like a fraud. Nevertheless the flood poured, critical mass broke, as three streams of readers flowed in. William's pre-existing audience, organic recommendations, and then site algorithms pushing Unordinary to webnovel communities.

20, 000 became 40, 000, then 70, 000, and 100, 000 by the twentieth. Kids left school for winter break around this time (or year-end break, for those in the southern hemisphere where winter was sometime else), and adults with the ability to vacation sent their perfunctory out-of-office emails. The growth was already so fast that William became skeptical of Meili's prediction - would the year-end holidays really accelerate things by as much as she thought?

The following day, as if to respond to his thoughts, the interface displayed a doubled reader count. The same happened the day after that. Meili sent him flurries of messages: first hyper, then panicking, then fearful and joyful. You're going exponential! she wrote to him, Literally, this is textbook, the equation is Readers = 100, 000 * 2^(T) where T is time!

William recalled from high school what an exponential graph looked like (a straight line upward), and this knowledge made him want to spend a whole week checking the reader count. Never mind that they had already played all their cards. Never mind that he could do nothing to affect the book's growth, anymore, whether positively or negatively. If trends held, a million readers was hardly a day away, after which came two million, then four, then eight and sixteen – he didn't want to miss a single number.

Beyond motivations of pride and vanity, William also understood what the numbers meant, what they represented. If a book like Unordinary reached ten million people, that equated to reaching two hundred thousand high-tiers, many of whom would be like his son. Powerful people, strong enough to one-sidedly beat down on those around them, who did so not out of glee or enjoyment but because it was what the world showed them, because it was simply the expected thing to do. Beyond his son, Unordinary was meant for them.

He hoped it would show them another way to live. I think I might not sleep for a while, he wrote back to Meili, not meaning it in the slightest as a joke. His eyes were glued to the large, bolded number that flew up continually on his screen. Beautiful Reader number 1, 035, 904: FictionFan52 www. Greatreads. com Review by FictionFan52 (Five-year Greatreads reviewer) Rating: ★★★★★ Warning: this review contains spoilers.

Unordinary is about a teenage late-bloomer kid named John who uses his new power to get revenge on a bully, accidentally brings him to near-death, gets arrested by his sector's combat forces, and gets forced to fight in a massive global war. This is what happens on a surface level. But Unordinary is also a world of entirely ability-less cripples, save for John, our main character. It's a story about a god-tier who hasn't realized the full implications of his power and doesn't know how to use it.

The story's drama isn't about whether he'll be strong enough to win his battles – he learns quickly that he is – but about whether he's fighting the correct battles to begin with. The story is also asking a question. What would it mean, exactly, to be far and away the strongest person on the planet? What responsibilities would you have? What would be the 'right' way to live your life?

By the end of the Unordinary, after tremendous mistakes on a global scale and painful trial-and-error, our protagonist figures out that he doesn't want either sector to win the war. He cares about bringing peace quickly and helping both sides heal. He wants to make the world a better place. I'm going to level with you and say that I found John to be morally preachy, whiny, a massive pushover, and entirely unrelatable. The ability-less authorities of the sector he lives in have truly no power…

but exert extreme control over him with just a few vague threats to his family. He thinks of armies killing each other as a pointless tragedy when - and this is very clear - both Sectors are trying to prove themselves superior and therefore worthy of ruling the world. He feels a truly ridiculous rush of pride and satisfaction when he saves a dozen cripple lives from a crashing airplane.

When he later learns that, actually, he failed to rescue a few of them, he feels such an intense pang of guilt and shame that I had to stop reading to facepalm. The protagonist of this story is an unambiguous doormat. So why am I giving this story five stars? Because the writer of Unordinary has some kind of supernatural writing ability: the incorporation of worldbuilding and character moments and little details to make everything feel natural and self-evident as a package.

The protagonist is not relatable, yes, but he is still sympathetic. He lives in a world where, before him, there was no conception of ability levels or tiers or hierarchy rankings. Naturally, his perspective which feels illogical to me and you is perfectly logical to him, being born in this place. But we are not told this; the story does not have to justify itself to the reader. Instead, through the gradual accumulation of details and scenes and thoughts, we are made to understand him.

TLDR: He's a doormat, yes, but I like him anyway. I acknowledge that my reviews can be a little pretentious by the standards of this site. If your eyes have glazed over so far, reading this, let me give you an example of what I mean. Yesterday, one of the few mid-tier students at my university was going to be late to her class. I saw the look of anguish on her face as she rushed through the hall, thought, ' might as well', and used my Spatial Rend ability to teleport her to the classroom.

I didn't get to see the look on her face when she realized that I'd saved her from a demerit - but it still felt surprisingly good, even better once she sent me a thank-you email the length of this review. This is the mark the book left on me. If I hadn't read Unordinary, there's not a chance I would have bothered. Finally, there's one more thing I feel I should mention about the book. At the end of the story, as a way to define the protagonist's identity, it coins a term that I've never heard before: 'superhero.'

As in, super and hero stuck together in one word. A superhero is a high-tier who utilizes their great power to help people weaker than them, expecting no reward or compensation in return. It's a surprisingly intuitive term, for something no writer has come up with before, though I'm unsure if it will see much real-life use. It straddles a fine line of believability even in the book.

Still, I'd like to think that I brought some small part of this great story into reality, this idea of a 'superhero,' by helping a schoolmate make it on time to class. Beautiful Reader number 2, 070, 842: Authority Agent Ingo The wide projector at the front of the conference room displayed a Greatreads review of Unordinary. Fifty men and women in suits sat at the five surrounding tables, one for each team of agents.

Agent Ingo sat nearest to the projector, as the leader of his investigative team - something he usually considered an honor and privilege. Unfortunately, on this day, his position brought him close to an unhappy Valerie Lingard. The tall blonde had dark circles under her eyes, and she was glaring out into the group of agents with an unconcealed irritation.

"Protocol demands," Valerie stated, "that I not yet provide this room with my thoughts. So. Are any of the brave souls here willing to take the initiative with analysis?" There was, of course, no answer. The issue with having a 7. 5 as the leader, in a room ranging from upper-fives to mid-sixes, was that no one wanted to offer a disagreeable take on a case. Especially with so little time to read the necessary material, Ingo thought.

The day before, they had been given urgent orders to read through all 400 pages of Unordinary, but the whole room was meant to be on year-end holiday. They'd been called back to headquarters in the middle of it. It wouldn't particularly surprise him if most of the room had been unable to finish; even he had just barely managed. Of course, Valerie also understood the pointlessness of a mass meeting that pandered to a single person.

"I suppose," she said, "that I'll have to return in half an hour." She shook her head, scanning the room a final time, and stalked out toward the exit. He knew that she despised this particular manifestation of the rules. There was a blip of silence, as though they were all children afraid of their whispered secrets reaching their parents' ears, though Ingo was certain that Valerie would never violate protocol by listening. He took a deep breath, calming himself with her absence, and stood up.

"The first offense I observed," Ingo said, "is the book's casting of The Authorities as villains. They are placed as antagonists to be criticized throughout the story, portrayed as manipulative, selfish, and generally incompetent. The protagonist's violation of orders and open rebellion are therefore made to seem justified. Already, two million people have consumed this anti-authority apologia, and we have done nothing to stop it."

"I disagree completely," Agent Monja said from across the room, also standing.

"The most ridiculous aspect of the story is that it portrays a god-tier listening obediently to ability-less cripples in positions of power above him. It would have been much more palatable if the protagonist began violating orders and acting as he pleased from the beginning!" Regretting having listened to her in full, Ingo replied disdainfully, "We're not holding a book review, Monja." She sniffed.

"Exactly what are you saying?"

"If you want to approach this as a literary critic, evaluate the story's merits, fine. But on your own time. That can't be what decides how we act." The green-haired god-tier stiffened.

"We're members of The Authorities," she said, crossing her arms.

"We can decide our actions using whatever method we like." Yes, Ingo thought sarcastically, if we really wanted, we could investigate and punish based on an arbitrary process and nonexistent criteria, that's true. But ultimately we don't, and there's a reason. There was no need to say as much. The two factional views on this had been expressed to death. But before Ingo could return to his observations, a red-haired man stood up.

"The only real problem I see here is a lack of regulation, which would have caught this weeks ago," the older agent said.

"'Unordinary' should be the responsibility of the digital regulation department. They've left the internet too unregulated for too long, and the consequences are thrown onto us." A female voice protested immediately.

"Martin, the novel is being hosted on a dozen large-scale novel websites. Only one of them hosts their servers in this sector."

"Once again you reveal a lack of education," another agent agreed.

"The internet is by nature distributed. How do you expect any department of ours to 'regulate' it?" Martin huffed.

"Fine - semantically, I'm wrong. Then I'll put it like this. With respect to whatever small part of this our sector can address - which must exist, because we're here - why shouldn't the work be left as a headache for the regulators?" There was a blip of silence; no one volunteered a justification.

Likely, Ingo thought, because they knew it would be taken as this sort of statement: why, yes, I'm very happy that we were called into headquarters in the middle of the winter holidays to do work that could have belonged to other agents. Rather than trap himself, Ingo took the opportunity to elaborate on his earlier point.

"It seems to me," he said, "that the ending of Unordinary could very easily inspire people to commit vigilantism, especially if there are other reviews like the one on the screen." Martin snorted in response, gesturing disdainfully at the Greatreads review on the projector.

"I truly doubt, Agent Ingo, that there are any high-tiers who surpass the stupidity of this 'FictionFan52' person. It's only a webnovel."

"…I don't know what you mean," Ingo said.

"I mean that ultimately, even if it seems to have tried to dress itself up, 'Unordinary' is still stuck in its genre. The book is a trashy wish-fulfillment story posted online, free of charge, so its target audience can get their fill of it - low-tiers who wish they were something else." The god-tier shook his head.

"For God's sake, it's about a cripple who suddenly gets to be the strongest in the world. A real high-tier wouldn't bother with it." As was typical (in situations like these, when Martin produced his blunt opinions unequivocally and without nuance), the most measured and data-driven agents rushed to scold him. Little of what Ingo would count as progress occured from then on.

For example, no one had much speculation about the future effects of the book's popularity, and there was no discussion about the implications, what it meant that this particular story was growing an audience so quickly. None of that happened. And then he realized that it had been thirty minutes - Valerie was soon to return. As he was searching for a chance to influence the discussion, the doors swung open, and everyone became immediately silent.

Valerie walked briskly to the projector at the front of the conference room. She scanned the faces of fifty agents.

"Agent Ingo," she decided.

"Has there been substantial enough discussion?" He felt himself stiffen with nervousness, though he'd half-expected to be selected, given he was a 6. 5.

"Yes."

"Give me the summary, then. No names." Ingo followed the order, condensing the points made, while all the agents in the room examined his version for accuracy and completeness. Over ten minutes there were no objections. Valerie nodded when he'd finished, considering, seeming generally calmer than before she'd first left the conferencing room.

"Interesting," Valerie said.

"Very reasonable thoughts about the book's harmful impacts, some of which I hadn't considered… that's quite good. Though it seems that no one quite captured my view, so I'll share it now." She activated her ability. Her eyes gleamed a sickly gold. A polygonal barrier shimmered into existence over her body, glaring the same shade, which she then condensed into a (in Ingo's experience) surprisingly functional pointer wand.

She dragged the brightened wand against the projector, underlining text from the Greatreads review.

"Here,' Valerie said.

"This is the most worrying point." He lives in a world where, before him, there was no conception of ability levels or tiers or hierarchy rankings. Naturally, his perspective which feels illogical to me and you is perfectly logical to him, being born in this place…

"The world described in the book is impossible," she pointed out.

"It could not exist in any universe. A modern civilization with reasonable analogs for our social and governmental structures, but without abilities, levels, the hierarchy… it's inconceivable on a fundamental level. Civilization exists, humanity in its current form exists, because we can organize ourselves into ordered structures with highs and lows. That is what separates us from animals. Hierarchies from high-tier to low-tier define us as humans." If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen.

Report the violation. Ingo nodded deeply at the eloquent restatement of truths, realizing that he hadn't questioned the premise of the story as he'd read it, that he had let himself be absorbed. … The writer of Unordinary has some kind of supernatural writing ability: the incorporation of worldbuilding and character moments and little details to make everything feel natural and self-evident as a package. The protagonist is not relatable, yes, but he is still sympathetic.

"I am not a fiction writer," Valerie said, tapping her pointer along the review text.

"I cannot determine what clever tricks the writer of Unordinary has employed, to make an ability-less civilization believable to even some high-tier readers. Regardless, this is a story that uses misdirection and lies to undermine the necessity - and therefore the goodness - of the hierarchy, ultimately the structure of our world. Although our authority is limited to the Great Lakes Sector, we should still combat it with a full effort." Her eyes searched through the agents.

"Lastly," she said, "someone validly argued that this case should be given to a regulatory department. If limiting the spread of the novel were our only goal, that is what would have happened. However, a strong precognitive-supported hypothesis says that the anonymous creator of Unordinary lives in one of two sectors: here, the Great Lakes, or the Northern Atlantic Sector to our east. There is a high chance we can find them."

Beautiful Reader number 4, 054, 331: Alicia Moore Alicia held a strand of hair in each hand, one from Valerie Lingard and one from Ingo Andersen, though she'd picked the far weaker Authority Agent to use her Vision Sharing on. It seemed counterintuitive on the surface, but one of the nuances she'd learned was that using the weaker one's vision let her read the lips of the stronger one, who typically offered more valuable information. The principle seemed to have held in this case.

She deactivated her ability, only shuddering slightly with the strain, and took a single firm breath to steady herself.

"So?" Meili poked her on the shoulder, smiling anxiously. Alicia shook her head.

"Seems like they know the two correct sectors." Meili let out a cheer in response, tipping back a little, and almost fell and ruined the sanitized floor. They were sitting parallel on close stools in Darren's private lab, Alicia already out of school for winter break while Wellston High still had a day remaining.

"I'm realizing," Meili muttered after a second, "that it's pretty sad to be celebrating a loss just because I'm at least avoiding total catastrophe. It's not good that they've narrowed the search from 8 billion to 80 million." Alicia shrugged. If they were going to celebrate anything, she felt, it would be the fact that they could view Ingo's perspective in the first place.

She'd been struggling to comprehend the level of focus it must have taken Meili, in the heat of an interrogation, to be able to think something like: once I'm done manipulating my own brain to pass a lie detector test, let me just make sure to steal a hair from this Authority Agent… It was almost scary.

"As long as you think it's worth the trouble, I guess," Alicia replied.

"I mean, Unordinary's been really good and all, but this seems like a lot of danger for just a nice story."

"Wait a second," Meili said.

"You already read it?" That's what demands a response?

"Not all the way, but yeah." Meili smiled.

"That's still faster than John," she said.

"I don't think he's going to read a single sentence before twenty million people are done with it, and William literally wrote it for him."

"John's definitely working way more than I am now," Alicia defended him.

"And I'm not even that far in, just to the part where they're trying to convince him to kill a bunch of people."

"If you're there, what did you think about the scene with his bully's parents?

"It surprised me. I actually got kind of close to crying." Meili nodded enthusiastically, like she was about to ask a lot more, but Alicia held up a palm.

"Seriously though." She frowned.

"About the risk of doing this. I know you're not technically who they're looking for, but if this ends up putting additional Authority heat on you that wouldn't have existed, then I think you never should have helped with the book at all." Meili blinked, sitting up straighter on her lab stool. She seemed to think for a moment.

"Are you calling me out for unoptimal decision-making?" Despite herself, even though she knew it was a stupid reflex, Alicia felt her muscles tense.

"... I am, yeah."

"Wow," Meili muttered to herself. Then, to Alicia: "If I said something like, 'I'm proud of you for feeling confident enough to voice your problems early instead of waiting until you want to quit,' how annoying and patronizing would you find that?"

"I would start wanting to hit you really badly," Alicia said, crossing her arms.

"And not just for that but because you keep dodging what I'd really like you to talk about." Meili held up both hands, surrendering.

"Alright," she said.

"I can explain why I'm so invested in Unordinary when John gets here. But let me just make it clear that I'll only say as much as I can, not everything - and I promise there's a good reason for that." The premise that Meili would be unable to tell her something critical, after having worked under an assumption of total information-sharing for months, caught Alicia off guard.

"You're not doing some weird information-withholding trick as a lie detector counter, are you?"

"All I can say is that it's way more convoluted than that." John arrived a minute later, and his first words upon entering the lab were, "Seraphina's coming in twenty minutes." That meant Alicia would have to leave in twenty minutes. Meili immediately dragged a third lab stool to the two they were already using, sat John down, and gave him the same set of disclaimers Alicia had gotten.

"John," Meili said when she was done, "the last time I asked you to compare the total amount of aura in Seraphina's channels versus yours, you said that it was something like a ten-to-six ratio in your favor - we're certain that's not going to change?" He nodded.

"I don't think my mom can incorporate more aura into her channel system, much less me."

"Okay. And if Seraphina's amount is six arbitrary units, you and Darren estimated that she'd need an ability-booster of something like twenty extra units to affect time on a macro-level scale, assuming perfect efficiency. I know I've been kind of absent lately - does that 'twenty extra' number have any hope of going down?" John rubbed the back of his head.

"I'd say we're being optimistic already."

"Alright," Meili said.

"Then let's assume that John's limit for sustainable and healthy aura extraction is the current 0. 2 percent per week. If that's true, and all the other numbers are true, it takes us at least nineteen years of accumulation to finally enhance Time Manipulation enough… But that can't be true, as long as we're going off the 'amber comet' Clairvoyance vision. How do we solve the contradiction?" They hadn't laid out all the numbers like this in a while.

Alicia pursed her lips, confirming that the calculations were right using mental math, but she still didn't understand what Unordinary's relevance was to any of it.

"I was kind of just at a point where I assumed that you two would get Seraphina to evolve her ability." John wore an expression of agreement. Meili made the 'so-so' gesture with her hand.

"Maybe it really is that simple - but there's another potential path. Remember that big scheduler document from NxGen, with the plans to start distributing ability-enhancing drugs in low-tier districts for testing? If Unordinary has the impact I expect it to have, then things could very easily play out like this…" Alicia listened intently. She felt her eyes widening. Meili gave some reasoning, and her eyes widened even more.

But how can you be so sure of that, when it looks like The Authorities have barely even hypothesized it? She had multiple massive questions. But before she had the chance to ask them, there was a knocking at the lab's door. Seraphina. Alicia turned immediately to John, whose eyes were already glowing amber with ability activation.

"Was 300 seconds of invisibility enough last time?" he asked, placing his hand on her shoulder.

"Give me 400 just in case," she answered, and suddenly she couldn't see her arms. Or her clothes. She waved her limbs around and received absolutely no visual feedback whatsoever. Invisibility, for some illogical but 'aurologically-fascinating' reason, worked by making you invisible even to yourself.

"Having to sneak around is already getting old," Alicia announced quietly.

"Now I can't even ask any of the questions I want to ask. If you guys could make Seraphina evolve into a halfway-tolerant person, I would really appreciate it." Obviously, the joke meant different things to each of them. Meili winced while John snorted, unaware that Alicia was also making reference to what they'd done to him - the playbook that they had used once and were using once more.

"I'm trying my best," he replied, and stood up to open the door for Seraphina. A few seconds later, he was welcoming the purple-haired, time-bending demigod into the lab – and Alicia made use of the still-open door to slip out into the hallway. Beautiful Reader number 8, 023, 657: Seraphina Galanis"Seraphina!" Meili waved to her from further back in the room.

"You were fantastic at Turf Wars yesterday." Seraphina shrugged her shoulders, body language that she'd only recently started using.

"Considering the levels, a sweep of our competitors was the expected result."

"Well, yes. I know." Meili's lips quirked sardonically.

"But with that logic I would only ever be able to say, 'as expected of you, Seraphina,' on repeat every day. If that's what you want…" Seraphina felt herself smile.

"No thank you," she answered.

"I suppose you're right." John had gone to the refrigerator (the standard refrigerator, for human-edible items rather than science projects), and now tossed her a soft drink. Seraphina thanked him and took a sip. She only ever drank the zero-calorie versions, so that she could better hide that she was violating the rigid diet her parents had set for her.

Being with Meili and John after school was very similar to enjoying zero-calorie soda - in the sense that visiting them in the lab just barely fit within the small cage of constraints that defined her life. Her two-hour time slot in the afternoon had to be spent on ability training, and if she slacked it would certainly show in her rate of growth. But being in the lab, using her temporal acceleration to speed up the development of an aurology project… it qualified as ability training.

Even if it didn't feel like training at all. Seraphina walked to the refrigerator (the one for science projects), and took out her targets for time acceleration: three shiny packets of extracted aura. They felt both heavy and weightless in her hands, simultaneously gaseous and liquid - she didn't know how they existed. She'd checked textbooks and websites, but none of them made a single mention of taking aura from the human body, even as just a vaguely theoretical possibility.

"By the way, Seraphina." Meili approached and held up her phone.

"I know you said that you liked the two novels I gave you… take a look at this." Seraphina read from the phone screen. It was a blog post by William Doe. I was recommended this book recently, Unordinary, by an anonymous author. You guys should check it out. It's frighteningly good, better than anything I've ever written. Earlier in the day, she had heard the title 'Unordinary' and a few details of it mentioned in class – she'd been mostly uninterested. Still, she thought. If William Doe is praising it so heavily…

"Do you have a copy?" she asked. Beautiful William had told Meili and himself that he wouldn't sleep. He'd managed this, up until the five million reader mark, when the clashing forces of excitement and exhaustion had forced him to lie down on his couch. He woke up the next day and realized that he'd slept for sixteen hours. It was afternoon, the rest had done nothing to stop his transformation into a scattered mess of thoughts, and his empty apartment had become overfamiliar and claustrophobic. He went for a walk.

The weather was white and frigid, as New Boston tended to be, at least without an ability. He shivered, and his feet moved him through snow-capped streets on nothing but habit. He felt in a dazed and instinctual way that he would spend the whole day like this, his mind overwhelmed with thoughts of potential futures, his senses filtering the world as a vague mess of shapes.

"…my choice would be Unordinary," said a voice. The shapes quickly gained definition. He was standing between two shelves in the bookstore he frequented, flipping through a hardcover without reading a single letter, the smell of printed paper wafting. A green-haired customer was speaking to Paige, the newest salesclerk - William saw them through a book-less space in the shelves.

"Of course," the salesclerk slouched a little, adjusting her glasses, "I'm not supposed to be pointing you to a book we don't have stocked. But Unordinary really does seem to match what you're asking for. It's incredibly engaging without being theme-less slop."

"Well, I would rather just read something I can get here today," said the green-haired man.

"Oh. Oh - no no, that's not it at all." Paige waved her hands in front of her face.

"You can read it online, completely free. Did I not mention that?" His impression was that she was young and a bit scatterbrained, a book-lover, but not great at the communication part. William suspected that they'd only hired her because of the 3. 7 on her nametag. The green-haired man, apparently skeptical that "something so good" could be available for free online, pulled out his phone and started reading Unordinary right there in the store.

Twenty minutes later, the man left without buying anything, engrossed in the text on his screen. Meanwhile William stood there, feeling some mix of prideful satisfaction and incredulity about the chance that he would see an Unordinary recommendation live… until it hit him, embarrassingly late, that the book was fundamentally more successful than everything else he'd ever written. With nearly ten million readers, what his old instincts told him was too unlikely would simply be the norm.

Smiling, he folded his unread book and returned it to the shelf, sending a silent apology to the author. He walked up to the salesclerk and said honestly:"I overheard a little about what you were saying about Unordinary, miss. I'm interested in hearing more."

"Oh." She blinked at him.

"Well, sure! Do you want my review, or did you already read one of the million good reviews online?" Only a thousand times or so.

"I haven't," he lied.

"Then first of all," she said, "the setting is something I've never read before, and I read a lot. It's a modern society, but it's really different from ours because no one has abilities - except for the main character, this guy who just so happens to be a god-tier. He can fly, his body is extremely enhanced in basically every way: you know, one of those generalist 'super-human' type abilities that some of the popular ability gladiators have." The salesclerk paused.

"Now, with just those details, you're thinking that it'll be a pretty standard power fantasy, right?" She looked at him expectantly, and he nodded and agreed primarily to keep her talking.

"Exactly, anyone would," she said.

"But the charm is that it isn't one at all. The protagonist has a really hard time. He makes a big mistake in the first chapter. And in this world, there are these two massive sectors at war; they can't agree on even some really basic things like an economic system. The main character lives in one of the sectors, and he helps them start winning the war, until he realizes that the other sector is actually right about some things.

Then there are some really good debates, and the war gets messy and starts being about the sectors trying to drag the protagonist to their side more than anything else…"

"You don't have to give me the whole deck of plot spoilers," William cut in. For a salesclerk at a bookstore, she truly wasn't doing a very good job. She held her mouth open in silence, then closed it.

"Oops," she said simply.

"Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that it's unique. The protagonist has different kinds of problems than in most stories. He's one of a kind in his universe and doesn't know how he should live. People are fighting and killing each other, which he doesn't want, but he can't just kill them to stop them because that would defeat the point. There's this weird philosophical concept called egalitarianism, I don't know if you've heard of it, but the book explores it a lot.

But it never feels forced, the writing is always beautiful, the story's always moving onward." I really appreciate the high praise, he almost said, then caught himself.

"Thank you for the run-down," he replied instead, typing Unordinary into his phone.

"It sounds like I should check it out." The salesclerk nodded and moved on, leaving William to 'discover' his own book. He felt a sudden irritation work its way through him at having to do this. He couldn't tell anyone that he was the author, not if he didn't know them or particularly trust them - Meili already thought that too many people knew. She'd even asked him to keep the secret from spreading to those he did trust. This wasn't a new issue.

Through multiple weeks, William had persistently told himself that it didn't matter - why should he care, really, about being unable to take personal credit? So what if he would never receive any admiration or accolades, personal lauding or praise? If a million reviews praised the book, that meant they were praising the author just as much, and William was the author: no amount of anonymity could take that away. But now he realized the problem with those arguments.

He could put what had been bothering him into words. Whether Unordinary reached one million readers or two million, or four or eight or sixteen or thirty-two, all the credit would go to a mysterious figure whose power level was unknown. And the common assumption, as it always was for achievements of great magnitude, would be that a high-tier was behind it. He already saw how it would play out.

Even as all the novel sites and smaller pirating hubs were forced to take it down, the title 'Unordinary' was already spreading through the globe's cultural consciousness. With that came a massive amount of respect and credit for the unknown author – naturally assumed to be of level 5. 0 plus, certainly not someone like William Doe. There would be no increase in respect for the cripple author, the man with a 1.

0 ability level, who had crawled all the way to the mountaintop without super-strength, without enhancements, nothing but mundane flesh and bone. Decades ago, amidst the daily high school beatings, he had wished for just one example of a historically noteworthy cripple. Just one person who had overcome their lack of ability to do something impactful, who proved with their existence that level could be overcome. Proof that even he had a chance to do something meaningful with his life.

That kind of person didn't exist." I'm not ashamed to be a cripple author," William had later claimed in an interview, hoping that he could be that significant person to other cripples, when a morsel of fame had made him cocky. It had utterly backfired, a wave of slurs and violent threats, which forced him to spend the next two decades hiding and obfuscating about his rank. Presently, thousands of published books surrounded him, some prize-winning or hailed as masterpieces, all stories he'd surpassed.

Joy and melancholy whipped within him in a dizzying tide. At last, William thought. Someone with no ability has accomplished something great. … It's just that no one is allowed to know.