Picking Up Attributes From Today

Meng Lei was the weakest nobody in a world where being born human is a curse. Heaven's Vault Continent belongs to winged Colossal Dragons, mountain-tall Titans, beast people, and forest fairies; the human race has no empire, no freedom, and no place except the very bottom of the food chain. Then, during a beast tide that should have ended him, a cold mechanical voice speaks: "Ding! Dropped item discovered. Will you pick it up?" The Most Powerful Pickup System has arrived, turning everything the world drops into his growth. Strength, spirit, gold coins, spells, battle aura, bloodlines, even fragments of the laws of nature themselves: if it can be dropped, Meng Lei can pick it up.

The things others discard become his ladder.

One pickup at a time, the powerless boy climbs. A wounded guard's stray vitality becomes his first strength; a slain magical beast's loot, his first fortune. The academy that judged him by his thin talent file watches, stunned, as the quiet transfer student casts Ninth-Grade spells while his seniors grind out the Fifth. And when an ant tide three hundred miles wide swallows the kingdom's defenses, Meng Lei flies out alone and burns the tide away while the experts argue about retreat.

But every attribute he picks up pulls him into a bigger battlefield. The Dragon God Empire's royal family hides old sins, and Meng Lei is exactly the sort of person who digs them up. A fallen fire dragon's dying wish puts an ancient debt on his shoulder, and a little golden ant monarch marches beside him, determined to take back the underground home that was stolen from its swarm. Then there is the Tower of Time, the legacy of the fallen God of Time, guarded by a shrewd, squawking spirit named Dodola who holds treasures Meng Lei wants badly, and trials that test what he plans to do with them.

Because power alone will not keep him alive among gods: faith must be farmed from mortal believers, divine cores taken from dead deities, domains carved out of a hundred existential planes crawling with demons and divine clans. Along the way Meng Lei gathers a court of his own: Ol' Amos, the last pure-blooded fire dragon, bound to the spear that killed him; Thaniel, a careful elder who knows that information wins wars; Puhaman, a sealed ex-king, neither human nor ghost; and one small ant who never stopped marching. Each of them carries a grudge against the old order, and each finds in Meng Lei's rise a second chance at everything they lost.

The system's voice never changes: pick up everything. The world's answer keeps changing. Dragons, demon emperors, half-deities, Chief Gods, and things older than the gods themselves all line up to put the human upstart back in the dirt, and every time they discover the same uncomfortable truth: the trash they threw away has been quietly becoming the strongest existence in the universe.

Picking Up Attributes From Today is a progression fantasy about a transmigrated office worker with a hoarder's superpower and a survivor's patience. In a world that throws the weak away, he picks up what others drop: one attribute, one grudge, one broken limit at a time, all the way to the top of the food chain.