Programming :: Assigning Bash Variable With The System Command In Awk?

I am having all sorts of trouble trying to assign a variable within an awk script with the system command. I know there is a lot of ways around this problem, but for efficiency reasons, I would like to, within my awk script, do something like

system(x=3)

or

system(x=NR)

and, latter on the shell script which calls the awk script, use the variable $x. But nothing is passed to x. I have already tried things like

command = "x=3"
system(command)

and also used a pipeline within the system to pipe it to /bin/sh In fact tried a lot of stuff like that, using $(( )) etc etc etc I can create directories e write to files (yes, i could write to a file and read from there, but I dont think it is efficient, plus I am puzzled).