Merit shop and Officer rank

[It's time.]

"Right... system restart"

This time, Vero got sent back to the same old pill pod. He pushes himself up from it to be greeted by the same old medical room.

"I have finished all the training, right?"

[Well, not all courses, but a basic one].

"There's more?"

[Yes, there are three more: intermediate, advanced, and expert. After intermediate training, you will be able to specialize in one of several fields.]

"Wow, cool. Can I do that now?"

[Sadly, you don't meet the requirement. You have completed the basic training with a high score, but you don't have the officer rank.]

"What's that?"

[It's a rank that would normally be granted upon becoming a subject of our Chronus project. But the rank can only be given out by another Dumo personal and as you can see, we're not the best in that field]

Vero looked around the room again, searching for another person, but the only thing he saw was a working robot running the facility. Glancing at the robot that repeated its action so many times, he wonders what it's like to be stuck repeating the same action and upholding the system for so many years.

Would it be sad? Would it be dull or happy?

He shakes that thought off and asks the A.I.

"Then how do I get the officer rank or whatever then."

[There's only one option at the moment. Please open up your terminal and connect it to our local network.]

Vero tapped on his wristband to get a blue square panel to pop up and tapped the option to connect to their local network.

The loading finishes and Vero are greeted with a barrage of pop-ups advertising many different types of products. The bottle of flesh air from the Uriana sea claims to make you feel right at the beachside. A tree that can grow a pencil, just in case you need one, and a ball that always misses the mark and lands in the wrong place.

Vero is extremely confused by how this is a real product. Seeing a confused Vero, the A.I. explains.

[When humanity is at its peak, nothing can rival us, and living expenses are nonexistent, so these products aim to make living more convenient or more exciting.]

"People of the old world are weird..."

[That's beside the point. Please click on the Merit Point Shop option.]

Vero proceeded to click the merit option and another window popped up, but this time it was a huge banner of pink that is decorated with all sorts of cute cats. At the center of it is a girl with pink hair making a cat motion. The most stand-out feature of it all is her cat ears that wiggle from time to time.

"What is this?"

Vero points at the girl whose name is Nyannyacutecat320.

[It's a promotional campaign designed to attract more people to use the merit shop]

"Does this really work?"

[You would be surprised how effective some influencers are in the age of space. This campaign specifically rose our engagement rate of the merit system by 2000% and all the users say that this is the best collaboration in recent years.]

"What??"

Vero scrolls past the promotion banner to see the thing that they offer. Nyannyacutecat pasters herself on different ranges of products like a fan, a tree, and a vehicle, most of the items here are sold out.

What perplexes him, even more, is the fact that the most expensive item, the NyannyaCuteCat exclusive bathroom time with Nyanyacutecat, is sold out. That thing cost a whopping 3,000,000 merit points. Even if he doesn't know how much he could earn, the amount is inhuman.

[For reference, the guy who bought the most expensive item rose from citizen rank to commander rank solely to purchase the item.]

"I don't know what it takes to be there, but he must be really committed." Are these people that bored!?

[Indeed]

Vero.... decide to move on from this disturbing fact. The reality that someone could sell their own body for a lot makes him sad.

He slides past all the Nyanyacutecat stuff and arrives at the bland page. This page offers a lot of survival tools and supplies. Vero search for the officer rank in the search tab and it pops up.

**Officer rank **

50,000 points

-This proves that you're a good citizen and trying to make this world a better place. This rank will give you a lot of privileges and services that are normally exclusive to our global united army. But in exchange for your privilege, you have to follow our line of command. You can read more about that on our official site.

Seeing the number of points needed to complete his objective, he thinks back to the three million point reward. If getting officer rank is this hard, then that guy must have put in a lot of work. For reference, Vero can earn about 500 points if he does the daily quest that the merit point system gives him. At that rate, he would earn the rank in 100 days of work.

"Isn't this too expensive?"

[The price range has been engineered to get people addicted to working with us. giving them more rewards and more privileges. But don't worry, we will give you a unique request that has an inflated point gain.]

"Can't you just give the points to me?"

[Negative. Our system would flag us as defective if we violated the rules and dispose of us in a matter of seconds. We can only give you a request. That's the most we could manage.]

"OK, so what do I need to do?"

[There are two requests that we can give you at the moment. Exploration and extermination The exploration will have you chart out the landscape and cities of the surrounding area or other civilizations. The Examination quest will have you kill all the ruined trackers]

The first one looks kind of easy for him, but the second one is not so much. He grabs both of them as the A.I. suggested.

Vero also got an old-world kitchen knife and a plastic bag to store some of his stuff. The kitchen knife is given as a reward for passing the test. Vero asks why he only got this and the A.I. answers that he doesn't have the officer rank, so he could only get this item.

He changes back to his ragged shirt and puts the old world one in the plastic bag along with another useless relic to make it look worthless. Vero also requests some items from the A.I. to make his journey more successful.

After packing all the stuff, Vero is now ready to go out.