‘U, n, l,’ Mathew repeated the three letters that he figured out to fix them in his memory. And then, his eyes focused once again, delving into the world confined within a single drop of sweat on Nadia’s back.
‘O,’ Mathew thought, after wiggling his head for the tiniest of bits to change the angle of his look.
‘U, n, l, o,’ Mathew repeated all the letters he managed to decode.
‘I bet this is going to form some sort of word around unlock.’ Mathew could tell as much just from the first four letters that he managed to uncover.
Yet, what he was trying to read, wasn’t the usual status windows that he could check in a normal reflection properly later on. What he was trying to read were system messages.
Announcements, notifications of change.
And Mathew couldn’t really tell what sort of behavior they would represent.
‘Assuming that they work the same way as the level donation notification, I will only ever get the chance to see them once,’ Mathew conjured an idea.
As a human being, someone used to operate within the framework of a world he could understand… Mathew struggled.
He struggled to just accept things on the go as he saw them. Because in order to properly figure out the situation he was in, Mathew felt the need to understand the underlying rule of the world, not just accept its wildness as something given.
‘Fuck, I got distracted,’ Mathew cursed, only to direct his eyes towards that particular drop of sweat on Nadia’s back that proved to be so helpful.
And only a few moments later, Mathew could officially confirm that his earlier guess was correct.
‘Unlocks Challenge Rewards’ the young man attempted to voice out the first of the messages that he managed to decode, only to watch how the entire pop-up window within his reflection vanished on the spot.
‘I guess that proves I’m right?’ Mathew guessed, only to mentally shake his head and look deeply into the drop of sweat again.
And then, a disaster struck.
Nadia, in her sleep, wiggled around a little, slightly adjusting the way in which she laid down on Mathew’s chest.
And that alone was enough to kick that particular drop of sweat out of its stable spot, killing the one source of reflection that Mathew managed to find.
‘Her skin may be shining, but it’s impossible to read stuff out of it,’ Mathew thought, desperately looking over the girl’s naked back. Yet, rather than focusing on her gently curving spine, the sideboobs created by the girl squeezing her bust against Mat’s chest…
All Mathew looked at were the drops of sweat that remained on her skin.
‘I’m running out of time,’ Mathew thought when he realized something that should be obvious long before that point.
And it was that Nadia’s sweat… continued to quickly evaporate.
‘There!’ Mathew finally found another drop of sweat that could serve his purpose. Yet, just as he looked towards it, Nadia moved again, rustling about atop his chest.
‘Damn,’ Mathew’s breathing somehow produced a small whistle. ‘That was close,’ he thought as he looked at the wiggly curve of the single drop of the girl’s sweat.
‘C.’ Mathew’s moved on to decode another message.
‘h’, ‘a’, ‘c’…
‘I guess it’s another challenge,’ Mathew thought, recognizing the shape of the entire word rather than opting to decipher each of the letters one by one.
“Challenge achieved!” Mathew uttered in a tiny voice.
Now that Nadia couldn’t pester him for answers or push her dare to make him react, Mathew managed to recover quite a bit of his strength.
It was still way too little for him to move his body, but the young man finally became comfortable with a slight whisper.
And following Mathew’s tiny voice, another message disappeared, allowing him to look at the ones hidden underneath.
‘S’,’y’,’s’,’t’…
Mathew’s thoughts froze for a second.
‘System,’ he thought, refusing to waste his time checking every last letter of the word.
In the end, there was a limit on how long he could take to decipher all of that. If he were to delve into every word for so long, there wouldn’t be any point in his task at all!
In the end, he would be able to read it all at once the second he would find a proper mirror!
“System levels up,” Mathew mouthed, guessing more than half of the letters in the message.
And as he continued to play around, the young man became more and more efficient with this strange task reading the world from the drop of sweat on his crush’s naked back.
‘Unlocks Skill Display Function,’ Mathew read out another message within his mind. And just like before, yet another message disappeared from his view, only to reveal a window of a structure he didn’t recognize at all.
‘That’s a good thing, I guess,’ Mathew thought.
While he would take up the task of translating everything within that new window to his system, it was reassuring to know that his system now would recognize and display the abilities he could use!
‘I wonder what sort of exciting stuff I will be able to do once I regain my strength,’ Mathew thought, a primal sense of excitement exploding in his insides.
‘Unlocks Wives Development system,’ Mathew read out another message, a sense of satisfaction over had good he became at his task filling his soul.
‘I guess that message is all about the changes to the wives’ status?’ Mathew initially thought, only to mentally shake his head a second later.
‘No, that wouldn’t be. The displays became more informative; there weren’t any interactive options out there at all!’
If this was a development system for his wives, then it had to allow Mathew to interact with them at a level he couldn’t before.
And while he could see the display status of Nadia changed in regards to how it was before, Mat couldn’t see any sort of function that he could use.
“Oh, I see,” Mathew muttered, not even realizing his voice leaked out.
‘Unlocks self-view of the system,’ the message spoke. And then, as soon as Mathew got it right, it disappeared.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,’ Mathew thought, all the strength that he regained now leaving his body.
Only for all the system windows that Mathew had to painstakingly decipher before, now to freely appear in his vision, floating all over the place right at the edge of the young man’s perception!