Evan thought about the two long years he had spent almost dying multiple times at the hands of the forest beasts during Percival's hunting trips.
At first, he hated those trips and more than once thought about dragging the fatso along on one of those hunts and dying together, but the slave mark prevented that.
More importantly, doing so would have only made things worse, especially now that he could actually benefit from all of this.
The stat called "ESS," or Essence, was the energy he gained every time he killed any kind of living creature.
At first, he wasn't sure what it really was.
He had thought of it like mana, but it didn't exactly behave like that, so he considered it something diffrent used by the system to help grow stronger.
He kept accumulating it slowly, until the percentage finally reached 100%, and as he had expected, he truly awakened.
The process could have been faster if he had actively hunted beasts, but his routine depended heavily on Percival's whims, so he collected every crumb of ESS he could whenever possible.
But if that were all, he wouldn't have been as excited as he was now. In fact, there was more.
His system, as the name suggested, allowed him to create clones of himself.
What kind of clones they were, or how many he could have, he didn't know.
Only after asking the system did he learn that he had to meet certain requirements for each clone, and the first of these was to awaken successfully and reach F-Rank, a feat he had completed yesterday.
Wasting no time, he pressed on the clone section.
Immediately, he felt a tingling in his head, and before he could even understand what was happening, he found himself in a different place,
empty, vast, white.
An unfamiliar void, where apparently there was only him and what seemed to him like a black smoke sphere.
'Well, this is unexpected,' he thought, wondering what he was supposed to do.
He had assumed that pressing the clone section would show him his clone's stats or something like that, maybe even instructions on how to summon or use it,
but instead, he found himself in this strange space.
'How am I supposed to get out of here exactly? ' he thought, beginning to feel a hint of panic, but after a while, he calmed down.
There really wasn't much he could do for now.
Most of the system's functions were still largely unknown, and only by interacting with them could he truly get an idea of what they were or what they were for.
Finally, he looked at the black smoke sphere, about the size of a palm, and said:
"Hey Bruce, are you there? Are you the one behind all of this?"
[Yes, host. I am here. It is I who brought you to this place.]
A cold, mechanical, monotone voice echoed in Evan's mind.
"Where am I, and how do I get out of here?" he asked, letting out a sigh of relief.
Bruce was the system, or rather, the consciousness that seemed to manage it.
From all of his interactions, the consciousness seemed only to respond to his questions, showing no trace of personality or anything else. A monotone voice that was there for all system related needs.
Continuously calling it "system" felt odd and impractical to Evan, after all, who even talks to someone like that that way?
It felt strange to him, so he decided to give it a name himself. And what better choice than one inspired by his favorite figure, the one he even had a poster of?
Bruise Lee.
[The space you are currently in is your Soul Space, a place only your soul can access, and now also the souls of your clones, which are directly linked to it as they were generated from your soul.]
'Soul Space? There is such a thing?' he thought, a little surprised by the discovery of such a place.
But then again, he had died and been reborn in a world opposite to his own, in a situation beyond any common sense, so the existence of a place like this wasn't really that surprising.
That said, he put aside his immediate doubts, processed part of what Bruce had told him, and couldn't help but look at the black smoke sphere in front of him.
"So this would be my clone?" he said, asking the system while also seeking confirmation himself, trying to see how this thing in front of him could be his clone.
'I'm a ball?' he thought, remembering a conversation with another homeless person, a bit older than him, who had told him that what they saw wasn't real, and as far as he knew, they weren't real people but cogs in something bigger, and other stuff like that.
Evan's mental stability wasn't great, but after meeting that man, he realized that maybe there was still hope for him in this regard.
As if reading his thoughts, Bruce's voice sounded again:
[What you see is the clone you unlocked, but for now it is only a fragment containing its inheritance.]
[To develop it into its clone form, you need to touch it.]
Hearing Bruce's words, Evan snapped out of his thoughts and did as he was told.
He took a step forward, and just like in the outside world, he walked toward the sphere.
Although it was his Soul Space, the interactions inside it, as far as he could see and perceive, were almost identical to the outside world.
He approached the black smoke sphere, suspended at the height of his abdomen, and after a moment of hesitation, reached out his right hand and touched the surface of the sphere.
Although it appeared to be black gas, to the touch it felt like a liquid surface that wobbled, but he didn't have time to think about it, because the moment his finger touched the sphere, it began to swirl, the black smoke enveloping it becoming more turbulent.