Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK

By the time Ethan had absorbed his way through most of the Legendary-rated tomes, the novelty had started to wear thin the way novelty always did once it became routine. He’d gained a small pile of passive skills he barely remembered the names of — something about elemental resistance, something else about ”innate mana sensing” that he genuinely couldn’t tell was doing anything at all — and the process had settled into a comfortable, mindless rhythm: tap tome, absorb, glance at whatever new ability appeared, move to the next one.

He was down to the Unique-tier stack, scrolling through his void inventory with the same half-attentive boredom he’d apply to flipping television channels, when he noticed one entry sitting slightly apart from the rest, its listing formatted differently than everything else.

[TREATISE ON VOID MAGIC, VOLUME III]

[RARITY: LEGENDARY]

[CONTENTS: TIER-10 SPATIAL MAGIC — ”THE UNBOUND STEP”]

[WARNING: THIS SPELL IS CLASSIFIED AS GRANDMASTER TIER]

[WARNING: GRANDMASTER TIER SPELLS TYPICALLY REQUIRE DECADES OF DEDICATED PRACTICE TO SAFELY MASTER]

[WARNING: PREMATURE ABSORPTION CAN RESULT IN CATASTROPHIC BACKLASH FOR UNPREPARED USERS]

Ethan squinted at the warning, mildly more interested than he’d been in the last dozen tomes purely because it had the decency to sound dangerous. ”Grandmaster tier,” he read aloud, poking at his rice, which had gone cold sometime during the last hour of absent-minded book absorption. ”Catastrophic backlash. That sounds like a ’don’t’ kind of warning.”

He considered it for exactly as long as it took him to remember that every single warning the system had thrown at him so far — the sword’s four-ton weight, the Void Cave’s ”total losses” history, the anomalous boss the system rated ”significant” — had turned out to be catastrophically overqualified for his actual circumstances.

”Eh,” he said, shrugging, and tapped absorb out of pure, bored curiosity, mostly because he was tired of his rice being cold and figured whatever ”backlash” the system was worried about probably wouldn’t be worse than that.

The tome dissolved into golden light and flowed into his chest exactly like the others had — except this time, the sensation didn’t stop at his ribs. It kept going, spreading outward through his whole body in a warm, expanding pressure, like his entire nervous system had briefly been rewired to accommodate several decades of theoretical magical education compressed into a span of about four seconds.

[ABSORBING...]

[ABSORBING...]

[WARNING: SPELL COMPLEXITY EXCEEDS STANDARD ABSORPTION PARAMETERS]

[RECALCULATING...]

[USER STAT THRESHOLD SUFFICIENT — PROCEEDING]

[ABSORPTION COMPLETE]

Ethan sat very still on his couch for a moment, blinking, waiting for the ”catastrophic backlash” to arrive in some dramatic, alarming form — nosebleeds, maybe, or his hair catching fire, or at minimum a headache severe enough to justify the warning label.

Nothing happened. He just felt, distinctly, like he suddenly and completely understood the entire architecture of space itself, the way you understand how to ride a bicycle after you’ve already learned — not as new information you’re processing, but as a fact you’d apparently always known and simply hadn’t gotten around to using yet.

[SPELL ACQUIRED: THE UNBOUND STEP]

[TIER: 10 (GRANDMASTER)]

[EFFECT: INSTANT TRANSPORT TO ANY LOCATION WITHIN 50 KILOMETERS, REGARDLESS OF LINE OF SIGHT OR PRIOR VISITATION]

[COST: NEGLIGIBLE, DUE TO USER’S MANA POOL EXCEEDING MEASURABLE THRESHOLDS]

[NOTE: THIS SPELL IS TYPICALLY RESTRICTED TO MAGE-CLASS PRACTITIONERS WITH A MINIMUM OF 40 YEARS OF FORMAL TRAINING]

[NOTE: USER ACQUIRED IT WHILE EATING COLD RICE]

”Fifty kilometers,” Ethan repeated, sitting bolt upright, rice entirely forgotten now. ”Fifty kilometers. Without even needing to have been there before. That’s— hold on.”

He stood up, phone still in hand, and thought, deliberately this time, of the one place he genuinely wondered about but had never actually visited: the old city center, roughly forty kilometers from his building, a place he only knew existed from pre-apocalypse maps and the occasional secondhand rumor about whether the central government buildings were still standing.

He pictured it as best he could — the general coordinates, the rough shape of the skyline he vaguely remembered from old news footage — and thought the word there with genuine intent for the first time since unlocking his teleport ability weeks earlier.

The world didn’t just blink this time. It folded, briefly, space itself rippling outward from his position like a stone dropped into still water, and Ethan found himself standing on a cracked, overgrown plaza in front of a massive, half-collapsed government building he’d genuinely never set foot near in his entire life, the wind carrying a faint, distant hum of activity from somewhere beyond the ruined skyline.

”Whoa,” he said out loud, staring around at completely unfamiliar surroundings, genuinely startled by how far he’d just traveled without so much as breaking a sweat. ”Okay. That actually worked. That’s — I’ve never even been here.”

[SPELL FUNCTIONED AS INTENDED]

[NOTE: MOST GRANDMASTER-TIER SPATIAL MAGES SPEND YEARS PRACTICING THIS EXACT SPELL BEFORE ACHIEVING RELIABLE ACCURACY]

[NOTE: USER ACHIEVED FULL ACCURACY ON FIRST ATTEMPT]

[NOTE: THE SYSTEM WOULD LIKE TO FORMALLY REGISTER ITS EXHAUSTION]

Ethan laughed, a genuine, delighted sound, turning in a slow circle to take in the ruined plaza around him — cracked marble steps, toppled statues, an entire abandoned government complex that had clearly seen its own share of chaos in the weeks since the apocalypse began. It felt strange, standing somewhere his own two feet had never carried him, a whole unfamiliar slice of the world suddenly accessible with nothing more than a passing thought.

He thought about staying, exploring a little, maybe seeing what remained of the old capital’s infrastructure. Then he remembered his rice, cold and abandoned on his couch forty kilometers away, and made his priorities clear with the same efficiency he applied to everything else in his post-apocalypse life.

”Actually,” he said, ”this is cool, but my dinner’s getting worse by the second.”

He pictured his couch — clearly, specifically, every detail of it locked firmly in his memory from weeks of daily use — and thought there again.

The world folded a second time, and he landed back in his living room precisely where he’d left it, bowl of rice sitting exactly where he’d abandoned it, now thoroughly, unforgivably cold.

[NOTE: TIER-10 SPATIAL MAGIC MASTERED WITHIN THE SPACE OF ONE COMPLETE ROUND TRIP]

[NOTE: PRIMARY MOTIVATION: RETRIEVING COLD RICE]

[NOTE: THE SYSTEM NO LONGER FINDS THIS SURPRISING]

Ethan sat back down, picked up his spoon, and considered the rice with the mild disappointment of a man whose grand magical breakthrough had ultimately failed to solve his actual, pressing problem.

”You know,” he said, poking at the cold rice, ”all that power, and I still don’t have a way to reheat food outside the void inventory.”

He solved that particular issue thirty seconds later by simply storing the rice in his void inventory and immediately pulling it back out, the temporal stasis field resetting it to whatever state it had been in the moment he’d first stored it that afternoon — which, conveniently, had been hot.

He ate the rest of his dinner in warm, satisfied silence, forty kilometers of newly explored territory and an entire grandmaster-tier spell absorbed into his repertoire without a single moment of genuine effort, while somewhere across the city, an entire coalition of mages and spatial-magic specialists remained blissfully unaware that a teenager eating cold rice on his couch had just casually surpassed decades of their combined expertise in the time it took to walk to a fridge and back.