I sat up with a gasp. Huff huff. Panting, I looked around. This wasn't Gregory's house. I was currently in the shade of a large oak tree. A sea of grass surrounded me as I felt bare dirt beneath me.

  Blue screens started appearing in front of me.

  "Open Status."

  Great. I was right back where I had begun. Still, maybe I could use this to my advantage.

  Actually, I needed to check on my nanite count before I started anything.

  501 Chunks, 69 shards. Maybe it was wrong, but I believed that the extra nanites were from the wolves I killed. I remember that I gained 1 chunk for completing the wolf monster wave, so that was where most of my suspicions came from.

  Anyway, this was a blessing, of sorts. After all, I knew a lot more about the shop and the weapons. Speaking of the shop, it was supposed to be updated. What kind of updates were they?

  All the tabs were there still, though there were three additional tabs. I really needed information right now, so I tapped on it, causing another screen to appear.

  The list of things available continued downwards. Math, chemistry, physics, and other textbooks were being sold alongside famous novels and more obscure books. There seemed to be no rhyme or rythm to how they were listed, they were just thrown in the list.

  I guess the information tab was short for 'everything written.' Still, I immediately bought the Basic Map when I saw it.The map formed from my hands in a now familiar manner. Looking at the map, I realized that things had changed.

  This was not, in any shape or form, the world that I had grown up in. Unlike Earth, where it was mostly ocean with some land, this was the complete opposite. The world was instead completely composed of land. There was what appeared to be a large lake in the exact middle of the map with many streams and rivers flowing throughout the world before looping back around to the lake. I wasn't sure if it really was water though. You wouldn't think that nanites could survive water.

  Mountains were scattered here and there, deserts usually around them. Large swathes of forests cut through the land and grasslands were also frequent. There wasn't any names or towns, no signs of any civilization on the map. There was no evidence that humans had ever existed on the planet according to the map. Then again, I had only bought the basic map. Maybe there would be more on an advanced map?

  Anyway, now would be the time to check out the rest of the shop. I clicked on Combat Upgrades, the blue screen appearing below.

  There wasn't just these upgrades though. There was at least 50 more upgrades besides this. Homing upgrades for bullets and grenade launchers, plasma upgrades for grenades, and even an infared upgrade for a laser to make it invisible. All sorts of things were available for sale.

  Tapping on weapons, I decided to see if there was anything in there. Nope, nothing new.

  Armor was the same, though there were now hand-held shields that were available for sale. There were metal shields and very expensive energy shields. When I selected tools, it was pretty random. Things like nuts, bolts, nails, hammers, forks, knives, and other household objects were included.

  Cosmetics popped up a screen with a replica of me on it. My blonde hair, glasses, blue eyes, 191lbs, and 5ft 10 height. For 30 shards, I could change anything about my body that I wanted. Voice, height, eye color, gender, and even species. Though, I did notice that there was a disclaimer changing the species did not increase or decrease stats. Another thing was the ability to change the appearance of my armor and weapons to a 'variant' form, though the usage of the weapon wouldn't change at all.

  I could change my laser rifle to be a Spatan Laser Cannon, a stormtrooper's E-11 blaster, or even a Star Trek Phaser. Popular guns from all genres appeared. It only changed the appearance and at 50 shards, I wasn't going to be doing that anytime soon.

  So, Cosmetics was a pretty much useless section of the store. When I opened liesure objects, there were Holo-projectors, TV's, spas, shampoo, and everything else that involved the word 'relax.' Again, fairly useless. I was assuming, at this point, that I wasn't going to be sweating. I might be wrong, but I'm sure I would know fairly soon.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  I checked out the last thing that had been locked before. Property. When I tapped on it, something unlike all the others happened. It was a view of everything around me from a bird's eye-view. A blue grid covered the aerial view, each square of the grid havig a pricetag in the middle. Most of them were under a hundred shards, though a few were almost worth a chunk. This was most likely how you bought land. I didn't see an option to build anything, but I likely had to own a piece of land first.

  What I found really odd was that there wasn't any trees at all in the property view. There was grass, but even the tree that was directly behind me was gone on the property view. The land slowly faded out as well before turning grey the farther it was from me. I assumed that this was sort of like the fog of war from most other games. I wasn't quite sure how it worked, and I didn't have the time to find out about it.

  With the new tabs out of the way, I went to abilities.

  Yeah, they were the exact same. I bought Creature Summon, Flight, and Electric Emission. I checked the ability upgrades now.

  Well, that was good. The price of the abilites didn't change, even though they became more powerful. I checked the nanite count. 391 chunks, 69 fragments. The damage from my purchases really showed. I went ahead and bought the laser rifle, laser pistol, and a sniper rifle from the shop.

  Moving on, I checked the blueprints. Or at least, I tried to. Instead of getting a list of available blue prints, I got a bluescreen.

  Well, I wasn't quite sure what to do with that. I needed some form of transportation, but I wasn't sure how rare that would be. I went to the search and looked up ATV. It cost 70 chunks to buy one. Well, I didn't need a blueprint. I just needed a ride. I sold the chunks and bought the ATV, leaving me with 521 chunks and 69 fragments.

  I had more money to play around with now. Last time when I had to face the wolves, I'd felt overwhelmed. I had energy to spare, but not enough firepower to bring them down. I bought the scope, laser sight, energy capacitator, burst, bullet converter, and grenade launcher, leaving me with 515 chunks, 54 fragments.

  Whenever I got the first upgrade, it was simply a round ball with the label [Scope] on it. I was very confused by that. I pulled out my laser rifle and touched the ball to the rifle. When I did, the ball melted and crawled up the rifle, forming a scope on the top of it. Cool. I promptly added on every upgrade I had bought except the bullet converter.

  I put the bullet converter on the sniper rifle, eager to see what it would look like. What happened was that the clip for the gun expanded slightly, becoming longer and thicker. A blue screen with directions prompted me on what to do. I took out the clip and grabbed a handfull of dirt. Stuffing the dirt in the clip where the bullets went, I watched as the dirt turned silvery before forming several large bullets. The bullts then melted through the bottom of the clip before dropping to the ground.

  I saw a flickering out of the corner of my eye and focused on it. It was the nanite counter. Beside each diamond shape was a bullet shaped icon. Just like with the diamond shape, they became progressively larger with each one down. The largest one had now been updated, now displaying the number 6. I assumed that the large bullet was a sniper rifle. I wasn't sure about the medium or small bullets, but they were probably for assault rifles and pistols.

  Now I had 515 chunks, 54 fragments. Plenty to mess around with. Now, I would leave me around 50 chunks like I had last time to buy anything else I needed. That meant I could buy 232 ability points, 26 more than I had last time.

  I started thinking as I started tallying up things. The last time, I had upgraded my charging, storage, and shield. Undoubtedly, shield was important along with charging to keep my shield up. Storage though, that wasn't completely necessary. So long as I was recharging just as much energy as I would be using, I didn't need a large storage.

  The laser rifle used 2 EP per shot, though I wasn't sure about the beam mode. Electric stream was 30 EP/second and flight was 5 EP/second. By my estimates, I needed around at least 18 more charging points and then I needed to add 1 point to charging for every 2 points in shield.

  Lets put the shield at 50, so I needed 43 charging. Lets calculate that then... 86 EP regen rate. Subtract 50, which gave me the 36 EP I needed. Give myself a little buffer by increasing the charging to 45 and now I had 40 EP. Enough to where I could use Electric stream with flight or I could use the laser rifle in beam mode. Great.

  93 stats claimed. I have 139 left to spend! Being rich was amazing. Intelligence was necessay since it helped me see threats, but agility was necessary too since I needed to be able to react to it. Strength was defenitely required, since I had, in one way or another, gotten close and personal with several wolves. Dexterity... I still wasn't quite sure what Dexterity did but I probably needed it. Storage was a dumping ground for points since my regen rate might be off and having some extra energy to tap into didn't sound like a bad idea.

  To summarize. Priority Intelligence and Agility, second priority strength, leftover would go to dexterity and storage. So, probably 60 Intelligence and 60 Agility, left me with 21. Since I was increasing my 1 Intelligence to 60, I really only spent 59 status points. Ugh. This mental math was really starting to get to be a pain.

  I looked down at the ground where I had scribbled in the dirt with my hand. Okay, maybe not all mental math. Still, thinking over so many numbers was bound to give anyone a headache.

  I decided to increase strength to 15 before increasing dexterity to 4 and storage to 5. That was all of my status points. Let's check it out!

  Alright, I was looking significantly better than before. Nanite count time. 51 Chunks, 54 fragments. Easy come, easy go. I went ahead and bought ten grenades for the grenade launcher. Now, I was fully prepared for whatever it was that was going to try and kill me.

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