When I came to, I came to realize that I no longer had a visible body and that my consciousness was hovering high in the sky. Looking down, I saw the outlines of unfamiliar coastlines.

  What a disgraceful display I had put on during the preceding intervals, blubbering and begging. I am maddened just thinking about the humiliation and embarrassment. Most of all though, never again do I want to experience such excessive amounts of pain. I shudder at the thought. I’d do almost anything to prevent having to suffer through unendurable pain once again. Even Caesar had said that it was harder to find one man willing to endure pain than one hundred men willing to die for a cause. But my negativity would be cut short because suddenly, a window popped up and I heard an accompanying voice:

  “The System will now aide you in the incorporation process.”

  The voice then continued, “Please select the relevant options to complete the setup.”

  A menu then popped up in front of me, which I found to be adjustable apart from some settings which had already been set to a default:

  First off, I decided to find out more about the presets:

  Man, Dark Lords sure seem OP from the information I can see here, but then what about the likes of Porcus Minorus? How were weak pushovers like him ever conceived? I was getting a little antsy about the possibility of turning out to be a weakling.

  In any case I read on:

  Weakest of Pipsqueaks? Seriously?

  If the System wants to start a fight... there’s not much I can do.

  Except the Rank and Grade of the title was a big disappointment.

  From what I was taught, there were Ranking Tiers for titles, skills, classes, items and the like, as well as Gradations for the tiers.

  The tiers were as follows from best to worst:

  The God Tier: Supreme, Ultimate, Absolute

  The Heroic Tier: Legendary, Mythical, Epic

  The Realm Tier: Superb, Elite, Limited

  The Community Tier: Rare, Uncommon, Common

  The gradations were as follows from lowest to highest:

  F- < F < F+ <<

  E- < E < E+ <<

  D- < D < D+<<

  C- < C < C+ <<

  B- < B < B+ <<

  A- < A < A+ <<<

  S < S+ <<< SS < SS+ <<< SSS << SSS+ << SSS++ << SSS+++,

  and so forth.

  So, she was indeed a goddess. It’s a pity I forgot to ask the goddess for her name. The System clearly shows that she loves me. While it doesn't feel real, I'm also one who takes giant leaps of faith in my thinking. I can already imagine several scenarios why this might be the case... if it is indeed genuine.

  Ah, I must also mention about qualifiers to Ranking Tiers and Grades.

  There are certain special cases where there is an extra attribute coalesced to a tier and grade. Apparently, the ‘Exclusive’ qualifier on my Immortal Beloved title indicated that I was the sole proprietor of this designation.

  The Thunderstruck status in my Mentality field meant that I was dazed and confused, as well as retaining a hidden pain and hurt within my heart.

  The Neutral statuses indicated that I was in the middle of the spectrum on both the scales of Good vs. Evil and Order vs. Chaos

  With that done, I decided to now complete the currently blank fields.

  Hmm, name, there is actually a style to adhere to for dark lords.

  Either simply a common name, or a common name with a matching qualified name. In either case this is followed with a label unique to the dark lord.

  After thinking over what to name myself for a while, I came up with:

  Deprofundis Reprobate ‘Once Loved’.

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  Satisfied, I moved on to the next item.

  Hmm, I’ll leave Race for last, let’s decide on Skills right now.

  I came to understand that I would be allowed to choose one skill. The tier and grade as well as the particular skill itself would be chosen randomly once I selected a category. I was sincerely heartened at this because the skills list was literally thousands of pages long. Of course, I didn’t want to leave something as important as this to simple chance so I took a gamble and offered up a prayer.

  “My Goddess, one who is alive and who loves me, I beseech you, please heed my prayer. I ask for your guidance in the selection of a skill. A skill that could examine, identify, and appraise people and objects alike. I ask to be granted such a skill, if it favors you to do so.”

  A few moments after I finished the prayer, a notification popped up:

  I’ll be honest and say that I was slightly conflicted, wondering whether the goddess could be mean-spirited enough to give me a joke skill, but in the end I decided to trust her and accepted the proposal.

  There was a blinding flash, followed by intense waves of disorientation.

  I was secretly worrying about whether or not this would turn into pain, but after a couple of minutes everything settled down.

  I was completely overjoyed at acquiring such an OP skill and an exclusive one at that. I offered up my heartfelt thanks to the goddess with a big smile on my face.

  Finally, it is time to determine my Race.

  This should be interesting. Dang, there are a lot of different races, too many to list them all. In this case, I’ll go with the best amongst my aesthetic preferences. I’ve always been a stickler for history or visual appeal, going so far as to purposefully select a handicapped and disadvantageous class or race in mmorpgs simply because I enjoyed their looks or backstories. And one thing that I did in every single game was to create or select either a human, human variant, or mostly human in appearance character.

  “System, narrow down the available selections for race to Human variant or Human appearance, please,” I said.

  The list immediately shrunk.

  Human, High Human; What’s this, Ascended High Human!

  Let’s take a look:

  Heck yeah! There was no need to look at anything else, “System, I select Ascended High Human as my race,” I said excitedly.

  “Ascended High Human is incompatible with your Class: Dark Lord,” the system’s monotone voice rang out.

  My enthusiasm was immediately dampened.

  “Ah…” I sighed and metaphorically made some stretches.

  I couldn’t be bothered to go through the rest of the narrowed Race list.

  So I tried a different tact.

  “System, narrow down the current Race selection to those that are compatible and bring up some recommendations please,” I uttered.

  “There is one recommendation,” the system voice alerted me.

  I almost teared up. It was like this race was made for me.

  I selected Udumori as my race.

  Although I thought that I was done, apparently there was one final selection left:

  The location of my dungeon.