Rpg Maker Developers Group

Hello! I'm prob committing some kind of RPG Maker sin here but after much trial and error leading me nowhere I am at wits end. Appreciate any guidance or help.

What I'm trying to do:
I want to set a default value to a control variable. Instead of default value 0 I want it to be 1 so I can display the current day of the game with an image e.g. Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 etc.
(I realized that I can just adjust the conditionals to check for Day 1 = 0 instead of Day 1 = 1 which kinda made me facepalm lol but problem remains that I still don't know how to set default variables without lag)

What I currently have:
I have a day/night time system running on one parallel process that updates the time and date. I read in a thread that it's possible to do so by creating a common event that autoruns and sets the variable to the desired value. To make that work I also have an event in the corner of the map that is on autorun to enable a switch for the common event. This map event has a self switch that erases the event on page 2.

Current state:
The variable works and has a default value of 1 but I get like 1fps and can't move the character. When I remove the autorun event and just have parallel it all works fine.

Here are some pictures of the autorun events

Parallel events
Protected downloadProtected downloadProtected download