The window was still there.
I blinked. It stayed.
I waved my hand through it. My hand passed through like it was air but the window didn't move. It just floated there, glowing softly, completely unbothered by my existence.
[Are you ready?]
I had just recognized two characters from a manga I read in my bedroom in Ohio. I had just figured out I was dead and in a fictional universe. My brain was already running on fumes.
And now THIS.
"A system," I said out loud.
A system. An actual system window. Like in those manhwas.
Okay so here's the thing. I don't read manhwa. I read manga. There's a difference and if you don't know the difference I can't help you. But I'd skimmed enough manhwa covers and summaries online to know exactly what this was. Guy dies. Guy gets system. Guy becomes overpowered. Guy says something cool every three chapters.
I read the first few chapters of like two of those things before stopping because the main characters all had the same face and the power scaling made no sense.
And now I had one.
This was humiliating.
---
I stared at the [Are you ready?] button for a solid ten seconds.
Then I pressed it.
The window flipped to a new page. Clean layout. Simple text. Very professional looking for something that appeared inside my eyeballs.
I read it.
I read it again.
[RAGEBAIT SYSTEM]
[Earn points by provoking emotional reactions from targets. Each successful ragebait earns 1 point. Points can be spent on attributes, skills, and items.]
I put the tablet down.
There was no tablet. I put nothing down. I just needed to do something with my hands.
"Ragebaiting," I said. "The system. Is ragebaiting."
I looked around the room like maybe someone put a camera somewhere. Like this was a bit. Like someone was going to jump out and explain that the real system was something cool like a combat analyzer or a dungeon interface.
Nobody jumped out.
The system was ragebaiting people.
I was going to become the most powerful person in the Jujutsu Kaisen universe by being annoying.
---
I clicked through the rest of the pages because I needed to know how deep this rabbit hole went.
The system had three main tabs. Attributes. Skills. Shop.
Attributes was straightforward. Speed, strength, agility, stamina. All sitting at zero because I was a sixteen year old who skipped gym class. And one extra one at the bottom that made me stop scrolling.
[Cursed Energy Output: 0]
Cursed energy. An actual stat. Which meant I could actually become a jujutsu sorcerer if I farmed enough points.
I clicked Skills next. A list of things I could learn. Techniques, combat abilities, movement skills. Stuff that would take a real sorcerer years to develop.
Then I clicked the Shop.
---
I want to be clear that what happened next genuinely hurt me.
[Kamehameha: 1,000,000 points]
[Sharingan: 100,000 points]
[Rasengan: 10,000 points]
I scrolled up and down to make sure I was reading correctly. Dragon Ball. Naruto. The system had techniques from entirely different animes sitting in a shop like this was some kind of crossover gacha game.
I checked my current points.
[Points: 0]
One point per person I ragebait.
One.
To buy the Rasengan alone I needed ten thousand people.
The Sharingan was a hundred thousand.
I was going to need to ragebait the entire population of a medium sized city just to get one ability from a different anime entirely.
I set the system window to the side of my vision and stared at the ceiling.
"Okay," I said quietly. "Okay."
---
"Are you okay?"
I turned my head.
There was a kid sitting in the bed next to mine. Couldn't be older than ten. Small. Pale. Wearing one of those hospital gowns that are too big for everyone.
He was bald.
I felt bad for half a second.
Then I looked at my points. Zero. Then I looked at the shop. Ten thousand for the cheapest thing worth buying.
I looked back at the kid.
The kid had been staring at me this whole time while I was talking to myself about anime techniques and invisible windows like a person having a full episode. He looked curious. A little concerned. Very much a captive audience.
"Hey," I said.
"Hi," he said.
"Can I ask you something?"
He nodded.
"Do you think," I said slowly, "that Naruto is a better character than Goku?"
He thought about it seriously the way kids do. "I think Goku because he's stronger."
"Wrong," I said. "Goku would lose."
"No he wouldn't."
"He absolutely would."
"Goku beat Frieza!"
"Naruto fought a guy who rewrote reality itself, what are you talking about."
The kid sat up straighter. His face was getting red. "Goku has ultra instinct!"
[+1 point earned]
[+1 point earned]
[+1 point earned]
The window was going off like a slot machine. I kept going for another four minutes until the kid was practically yelling and a nurse came in to tell us both to be quiet.
I checked my points.
Seventeen.
Seventeen points from one bald ten year old in a hospital bed.
I looked at the system window. Then at the shop. Then at my attribute page. Then back at the shop.
One person. Multiple ragebaits. Each one counted.
I didn't need ten thousand different people.
I just needed to be really, deeply, consistently annoying.
---
I leaned back against my pillow and looked at the ceiling.
This world had cursed spirits. It had sorcerers. It had people who could punch through buildings and move faster than sound.
And I had a system that turned being insufferable into a superpower.
I had spent my whole life being the invisible kid. The one who sat in the back. The one who nobody remembered was in the room.
Not here.
Here I was going to be so loud, so impossible to ignore, that the entire Jujutsu world would know my name.
And I was going to be strong enough that when they said it, they'd say it carefully.
I closed my eyes.
Finally. A goal worth getting hit by a truck for.