Worldwide Class Change: Minimal Effort, Maximum Reward!-Chapter 113, The Bureau Convenes (1)

The Awakening Bureau’s emergency response protocol activated at four minutes past the worldwide system notice.

By the time the notification had been on every registered hunter’s player panel for twelve minutes, the Bureau’s central command in the global administrative district had a full emergency council assembled in the primary analysis chamber. Bureau Director Lan Weiming had been in the middle of a routine quarterly review when his personal alert device produced a sound it had never produced before in twenty-two years of service. He had read the notification twice, forwarded it to three department heads simultaneously, and reached the primary analysis chamber in nine minutes.

The room was already half-full when he arrived.

The primary analysis chamber was not designed to be impressive. It was designed to be functional. Long tables, ranked seating for up to forty council members, a central projection system that could display any registered data feed from any dimensional rift zone worldwide, and a direct line to every national hunter administration office in the network.

The walls were lined with screens, most of them running live feeds from rift monitoring stations that were currently showing the same thing. The worldwide notice. The activation signature. A classification code that the Bureau’s automated database system had processed and then returned an error on because the classification did not exist in any of its records.

Director Lan took his seat at the head of the table and looked at the assembled faces. Department heads, senior analysts, two representatives from the global hunter council, and at the far end of the table, a small man in his mid-seventies who was already reviewing a paper document that he had apparently retrieved from somewhere before arriving, which meant he had been carrying it, which meant he had been expecting something like this, or had at least considered it possible.

"Dr. Fei," the Director said. "You have something already."

Dr. Fei Guangming looked up from his paper. He was the Bureau’s Chief Historical Analyst, a title that most people in the organization treated as primarily ceremonial, because history in the context of dimensional rifts meant events spanning at most a hundred years of documented data. His appointment had been considered generous when it was made fifteen years ago. The Director had been one of the people who approved it, and he was now looking at the paper document with significant interest.

"I’ve been maintaining this file for eleven years," Dr. Fei said. He set it on the table and smoothed it flat. It was a printed document, not a digital file, which meant it predated the Bureau’s current database systems. "Since I found the original records in the pre-digital archive during my research appointment in year two." He looked around the table. "What has just appeared on every hunter’s player panel worldwide happened once before. One hundred and fifty years ago."

The room was quiet.

"One hundred and fifty years," the Director repeated. "The gates have been open for two hundred years. The Bureau has been operational for ninety-two years."

"The event preceded our operational history," Dr. Fei said. "It predates the Bureau by years. In that period, the dimensional rift system was not yet understood. Hunters existed but the classification system we use now did not. The records from that time are incomplete, contradictory in places, and were largely dismissed as mythology or exaggeration when the Bureau was founded and began establishing the historical baseline." He paused. "I did not dismiss them."

A department head further down the table, a woman named Chen Liangyu who ran the threat classification division, leaned forward. "What does the record say about the nature of the event?"

"The original event was called the Sub-Class Awakening by the hunters who experienced it," Dr. Fei said. "The terminology is consistent with what appeared in the worldwide notice this morning, which suggests the naming didn’t originate with the notice. It originated with the event itself, one hundred and fifty years ago.

According to the surviving accounts, every hunter alive at the time of the original event received the same notification that every hunter has received this morning. A dungeon event had activated. It was global. Its parameters were unknown."

"And what happened?" the Director asked.

Dr. Fei looked at his document for a moment. "Nothing happened," he said. "Or more accurately, nothing that anyone could document as a concrete outcome. The event was active for an unknown period. Hunters who entered dimensional rifts during the event period reported unusual phenomena. Additional challenges within existing rift environments. New dungeon instances that appeared in locations where rifts had been stable for years." He paused. "And in a very small number of documented cases, hunters returned from dungeon environments with abilities that had not been present when they entered."

The room was extremely attentive.

"New abilities," the Director said.

"Not new class abilities," Dr. Fei said. "Something separate. The accounts describe it as an additional layer of capability that existed alongside the primary class, not replacing it, not developing from it, but parallel to it. They called it a Sub-Class." He looked around the table. "In one hundred and fifty years of documented hunting history, every hunter awakens one class. One. The class determines your role, your skill set, your developmental ceiling. That is the fundamental structure of how hunters operate." He paused. "The Sub-Class Awakening event is, based on the historical record, the only known mechanism through which a hunter can awaken a second distinct class structure."

The silence that followed was different from the silence before. This was the silence of people revising something foundational.

Chen Liangyu spoke first. "A second class," she said. "Not a second skill. A second class."

"With its own skill trees, its own developmental pathway, its own ceiling," Dr. Fei said. "Separate from and additive to the primary class."

"And in the original event one hundred and fifty years ago," the Director said, "how many hunters successfully awakened a Sub-Class?"

Dr. Fei looked at his document. He looked at it for a moment longer than the answer required. "None," he said.

The room made a collective sound that was not quite words.

"None that we can document with certainty," he continued. "The accounts are incomplete. As the documentation that would confirm a successful awakening by Bureau evidentiary standards does not exist." He closed the document. "Which means we have a worldwide event of unprecedented classification, one historical precedent with no confirmed successes, and approximately sixty million registered hunters worldwide who received a notification this morning and are currently asking their respective organizations what it means."

Director Lan looked at the screens on the walls. The live feeds from the rift monitoring stations were showing elevated activity readings across multiple zones globally. Not new rifts. Not rift expansions. Something inside the existing rift environments had changed. The readings were consistent across all monitored zones, which was itself unprecedented. Individual rift environments had their own characteristics, shaped by the specific dimensional layer they accessed. For a change to manifest uniformly across all monitored zones simultaneously was outside the documented range of normal rift behavior.

"The talent," said a voice from the middle of the table.