Worldwide Class Change: Minimal Effort, Maximum Reward!-Chapter 114, The Bureau Convenes (2)

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

Everyone looked. The speaker was a second analyst from the threat classification division, a younger man named Rui Danping who had the specific quality of someone who had been sitting on a piece of information and had reached the point where holding it was less useful than releasing it.

"There’s a second component to the historical accounts that Dr. Fei hasn’t mentioned yet," Rui Danping said. He glanced at the older analyst. "I’ve read the same archive."

Dr. Fei looked at him. Something in the older man’s expression acknowledged the addition without resistance. "Go ahead," he said.

Rui Danping looked around the table. "In the original accounts, the Sub-Class is described as one outcome. But the accounts also describe a second potential outcome that was considered even more significant. Something the original hunters called a Talent." He paused. "Not a skill and not a class. Something that existed above both. A fundamental enhancement of a hunter’s core capabilities that didn’t operate through skill activation or class mechanics but was simply present. Always active. Permanent."

"A passive enhancement," Chen Liangyu said.

"More than that," Rui Danping said. "The accounts describe it as an edge that couldn’t be trained for or worked toward. A blessing, some of the records call it. A divine advantage. Something that made the hunter who possessed it categorically different from peers at the same level, the same class, with the same skills and the same training." He looked at his own datapad. "The original accounts describe specific hunters who returned from the event period with combat capabilities that exceeded everything their class and level should have permitted. The attributed explanation was Talent." He paused. "None of those accounts are confirmed by the Bureau’s standards. But they are consistent with each other across multiple sources and multiple geographic regions from one hundred and fifty years ago."

"So the event offers two potential outcomes," Director Lan said. "A Sub-Class, which is a second class structure awakened alongside the primary. And a Talent, which is a fundamental permanent enhancement."

"Yes," Rui Danping said. "If the historical accounts are accurate."

"And in the original event, no confirmed successes in either category," the Director said.

"No confirmed successes," Dr. Fei said. "In an era before the classification system existed, before structured hunter training existed, before the Bureau existed. Sixty million registered hunters worldwide in the current system, all with the classification infrastructure and the training background to understand what they’re being offered." He looked at the Director. "The baseline conditions are different."

Director Lan looked at the central projection, which was displaying the worldwide activation signature. A pattern in the data that the Bureau’s automated systems had flagged as requiring manual interpretation because nothing in the existing parameters covered it. He looked at it for a long moment. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

"How long does the event last?" he said.

"Unknown," Dr. Fei said. "The original event had no documented end trigger. The accounts simply stop describing the unusual phenomena after a period that the records suggest was several months. Whether the event ended or whether the documentation stopped for other reasons is not determinable from the surviving archive."

"So we have no duration," the Director said. "No confirmed mechanism for awakening the Sub-Class or the Talent. No historical successes to reference. And sixty million hunters worldwide who received a notification this morning." He looked around the table. "What is the Bureau’s official response?"

Chen Liangyu spoke without hesitation. "We document everything," she said. "Every hunter who reports an unusual dungeon experience during the event period, every reading anomaly at monitored rift stations, every claimed awakening that comes through any national bureau office. We build the database we wish had existed one hundred and fifty years ago."

"National bureaus need guidance on what to tell hunters," another department head said. "Sixty million people received that notification. Every hunter organization, guild, and independent contractor in the world is going to want a statement within the next few hours."

"We tell them what we know," the Director said. "Which is what Dr. Fei has described. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity of a kind that has not existed in any of our lifetimes."

"The guilds are already mobilizing," Rui Danping said. He was looking at his datapad. "The major guild networks have been on emergency communication channels since the notification appeared. They’re calling it the biggest event in registered hunter history."

"They’re not wrong," Dr. Fei said. "If even a fraction of what the historical accounts describe is accurate, a hunter who successfully awakens a Sub-Class and a Talent during this event doesn’t just become stronger." He looked around the table. "They become a different category of thing entirely."

The room absorbed this.

On the screens, the rift monitoring stations continued to display their elevated readings. Uniform. Global. Patient. Whatever had activated with the worldwide notice was already inside every dimensional rift environment on the planet, waiting.

Director Lan looked at the screens for a long moment. Then he looked at Dr. Fei.

"Eleven years you’ve been maintaining that file," he said.

"Yes," Dr. Fei said.

"Why?" the Director asked.

The older analyst was quiet for a moment. He looked at the document on the table in front of him, the printed pages that were fifty years older than the Bureau itself.

"Because the accounts describe something that the hunters who lived through the original event couldn’t understand with the tools they had," he said. "They didn’t know what they were experiencing. They didn’t have the classification system, the training framework, the accumulated knowledge base that every hunter alive today has access to." He paused. "I wanted to make sure that if it happened again, someone was ready to explain it."

Director Lan looked at the central projection one more time. "Brief the national bureaus," he said to the room. "Full disclosure of the historical record. Tell every guild and every registered organization what they’re dealing with." He stood up. "And Dr. Fei."

"Yes," the older analyst said.

"Send me a full copy of that file," the Director said. "Tonight."

Dr. Fei nodded. He picked up the document from the table and held it for a moment, eleven years of patient maintenance represented in printed pages that nobody had wanted to read.

"Of course," he said.

The meeting continued. Outside the Bureau’s walls, in every city and every region where hunters operated, the mobilization had already begun. The worldwide notice sat on sixty million hunters, read and reread and forwarded and discussed.

Sub-Class Awakening.

Once in one hundred and fifty years.

And it had just started again.