Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK
Chapter 36: Double the Speed, Double the Loot

Chapter 36: Double the Speed, Double the Loot

Ethan’s late lunch turned into an early dinner, mostly because he’d gotten distracted watching his avatar’s newly doubled efficiency chew through dungeon after dungeon, and by the time he actually got around to eating, the sun outside had already started sinking toward evening.

He was three bites into a bowl of void-preserved rice when his phone, sitting quiet on the couch beside him for most of the afternoon, suddenly started buzzing with an intensity he hadn’t experienced since before he’d set up the auto-loot filter weeks earlier.

[ITEM ACQUIRED: ANCIENT TOME (EPIC)]

[ITEM ACQUIRED: ANCIENT TOME (EPIC)]

[ITEM ACQUIRED: ANCIENT TOME (EPIC)]

Ethan glanced at it, mildly annoyed. "I filtered out common stuff, why’s it—"

He checked the timestamp gap between notifications. Less than a second apart. Then another one came through, and another, each labeled the same way, each rated Epic or higher, each one apparently significant enough to slip past the filter he’d set up specifically to keep this exact kind of thing from happening.

[ITEM ACQUIRED: ANCIENT TOME (LEGENDARY)]

[ITEM ACQUIRED: SPELLBOOK OF THE FIRST FLAME (LEGENDARY)]

[ITEM ACQUIRED: ANCIENT TOME (EPIC)]

[ITEM ACQUIRED: GRIMOIRE, SEALED (UNIQUE)]

"Okay, what is happening," Ethan said, setting down his rice and pulling up the avatar feed properly, genuinely alarmed now by the sheer volume of high-tier notifications flooding in faster than he could process them.

The feed showed his tiny pixel avatar standing in the middle of what looked like an enormous underground library — towering shelves stretching up into darkness, thousands upon thousands of books lining every surface, the whole chamber glowing faintly with the accumulated magic of what had to be centuries of careful preservation. His avatar wasn’t fighting anything. It was simply walking down the aisles, and every single shelf it passed triggered another wave of loot notifications, books simply detaching themselves from their spots and getting sucked directly into the void inventory as the avatar strolled past.

[LOCATION: THE FORGOTTEN ATHENAEUM]

[ZONE CLASSIFICATION: S-RANK LIBRARY VAULT]

[STATUS: UNGUARDED — WARDS DEACTIVATED DUE TO USER’S OVERWHELMING PRESENCE]

[NOTE: THIS VAULT HAS BEEN SEALED FOR OVER 300 YEARS]

[NOTE: THE PROTECTIVE WARDS RECOGNIZED THE AVATAR AS EXCEEDING ALL DEFENSIVE THRESHOLDS AND SIMPLY DEACTIVATED]

"They just gave up," Ethan said, half-laughing, watching the notifications continue to pour in. "Same as that guardian statue. You just walk into a place and it goes, ’yeah, no point,’ and hands over the keys."

[CORRECT]

[THIS APPEARS TO BE A RECURRING PATTERN]

The notifications kept coming, faster now that the avatar had apparently reached the vault’s central archive — a section the system flagged with increasing urgency as containing material of genuine historical significance, tomes that predated the current apocalypse framework entirely, remnants of whatever civilization or system had existed before the world turned into a game.

[ITEM ACQUIRED: THE COMPENDIUM OF SPATIAL MASTERY (MYTHIC)]

[ITEM ACQUIRED: TREATISE ON VOID MAGIC, VOLUME I (LEGENDARY)]

[ITEM ACQUIRED: TREATISE ON VOID MAGIC, VOLUME II (LEGENDARY)]

[ITEM ACQUIRED: TREATISE ON VOID MAGIC, VOLUME III (LEGENDARY)]

[ITEM ACQUIRED: THE LOST GRIMOIRE OF ELEMENTAL SOVEREIGNTY (MYTHIC)]

Ethan sat frozen, watching the count climb, genuinely losing track of how many books had already been absorbed by the time the avatar reached the far end of the archive.

[VAULT CLEAR: COMPLETE]

[TOTAL ITEMS ACQUIRED: 4,127]

[BREAKDOWN:]

[- COMMON TOMES: 2,890]

[- RARE TOMES: 891]

[- EPIC TOMES: 240]

[- LEGENDARY TOMES: 89]

[- UNIQUE TOMES: 15]

[- MYTHIC TOMES: 2]

"Four thousand books," Ethan said slowly, staring at the number with something between awe and mild indigestion. "I have four thousand books now. I don’t even read the instructions on my noodle packets."

He set his phone down, rubbed his eyes, and considered the sheer, absurd scale of what had just happened — an entire ancient library, sealed for three centuries, casually vacuumed up because his avatar’s dual-wielding upgrade had apparently boosted its clear speed enough to stumble into a zone that, based on the notification’s own framing, hadn’t even required combat to loot. It had simply walked in, and the vault’s own defenses had recognized him as too powerful to bother resisting.

Curious despite himself, he pulled up the void inventory and scrolled to the newly acquired tomes, tapping open the first Mythic-rated one out of pure impulse.

[THE COMPENDIUM OF SPATIAL MASTERY]

[RARITY: MYTHIC]

[CONTENTS: COMPLETE MASTERY OF SPATIAL MAGIC THEORY AND APPLICATION]

[READ TIME: INSTANT (USER STAT THRESHOLD EXCEEDS COMPREHENSION LIMIT)]

[DO YOU WISH TO ABSORB THIS TOME?]

"Absorb," Ethan repeated, eyebrows raised. "That sounds easier than actually reading it, which, frankly, appeals to me on a spiritual level."

He tapped yes, mostly out of curiosity, half-expecting nothing to happen.

The book in his void inventory dissolved into a soft golden light that flowed directly into his chest, and for a brief, strange moment, an entire library’s worth of theoretical spatial magic simply existed inside his head — not learned, not studied, just present, the way you suddenly know your own name without ever remembering the moment you learned it.

[SKILL ACQUIRED: SPATIAL MASTERY (PASSIVE)]

[TELEPORT RANGE INCREASED: 15M → 500M]

[NOTE: USER MAY NOW TELEPORT WITHOUT LINE OF SIGHT TO PREVIOUSLY VISITED LOCATIONS]

Ethan blinked, sat up straight, and immediately tested it — pictured his kitchen counter, five hundred meters well within the new range, and blinked there without hesitation. He landed cleanly beside the sink, grabbed a glass of water purely for the sake of confirming the skill worked, and blinked right back to the couch.

"Okay, THAT," he said, grinning now, "is an upgrade I actually asked for. Five hundred meters. That’s — I could teleport to the bakery now. I could teleport to the market."

He glanced back at his void inventory, at the remaining thousands of unabsorbed tomes still sitting there, and felt a small, giddy thrill build in his chest — the specific excitement of a man who’d just discovered his pile of forgotten clutter was actually a treasure trove of instant, effortless self-improvement.

"Okay," he said, cracking his knuckles, settling back into the couch with the same focused enthusiasm he usually reserved for a new season of television. "Let’s see what else is in here."

He opened the next tome. And the next. And the one after that, absorbing centuries of lost magical knowledge one lazy, couch-bound tap at a time, utterly unaware that somewhere across the city, an entire regional council was still debating emergency containment protocols for a threat they hadn’t even identified yet — while that same threat spent his evening turning himself, without any real effort at all, into arguably the single most magically educated being currently alive on the planet.