When Frank’s eyes opened again, the scenery had changed yet again. This time it was a lush green forest with multiple animals walking around, or wait, not walking, just standing around in poses as if they were walking. He then noticed that all the trees stood still as well, and no wind was blowing. “Where am I? Is this the other world?” But as one would expect, no answer came. No, it could actually be said that an answer came, just not a direct one. A half transparent blue square with a gold border appeared before him.
Before you’re allowed entry into the world, please create a physical body to inhabit since you currently don’t have one. Your race, and age, has been preset to match your previous one, but you can change the appearance and name if you wish.
Once he finished reading, a mirror image of his own body appeared before him.
Aware that this might be the only chance he’d get to change how he looked in major ways, Frank took a good look at his own body before changing anything. “Short, light brown hair, good; blue eyes, good; face, good enough for me; musculature, not too much, but I’d rather earn it on my own; and height is fine as well, I don’t have any particular wish to be taller or smaller than 190 cm. Alright, I’ll keep my name as well, I’m already used to that.”
With that said and done, the message on the square changed.
Thanks to the blessing of Geb, you’ll have to create another appearance that you can change form to at will. This time you’re free to create it fully to your liking.
Thanks to the multitude of crazy and unusual things that had happened within a short span of time, Geb’s last words had completely escaped Frank’s mind. “Oh yeah, he did mention something about another appearance.”
Before Frank, a white doll like figure appeared, along with another square with some adjustable options on it, stuff like: Gender, Race, Name, Age, and the like. “Hmm, if I really can change my form, then I might as well make this something I’d never have experienced back on Earth.” So, the first thing he did was to set the gender as female, followed by pressing the ‘pick a race’ button, which revealed quite the dropdown list. To name just a few of them, there was: human, elf, dwarf, dragonborn, tiefling, goliath, beastfolk, and the list went on.
“Oh boy. That’s most certainly overwhelming” -he selected elf just to check if that’d give him some explanation of the race’s traits, but nothing happened. “Bruh. I have to select this without knowing any specifics? Damn, that’s rough.” After mulling over it for a bit, he eventually picked elf, as in his experience with the fantasy genre, they had some of the most consistent traits of any race, alongside humans and dwarfs. The features that made him pick that over a dwarf, was elves tend to be treated like regular people if not better, they can normally live for a while, they normally don’t age physically after a certain point, and most importantly, they’re often given some favorable relation with magic. Since mana was the reason he was here in the first place, he decided to bet that being good at that would be a benefit.
When he then looked back up at the doll thing, it had now gained pointed ears, a fair skin color, simple clothes to cover the otherwise naked female body. A quick look at the age slider told him that the current body was set at 24 years old, six more than his current age. As he turned the slider down, he saw the body turn smaller and more childlike, while when he turned it above 24 nothing happened. “24 is probably when they stop physically aging, so I’ll just keep the age at that.”
With all of the settings besides the name done, all that was left was to actually customize his character, which he was unsure what to do. ‘Dammit, how do I change the hair to golden blonde? Oh, I guess that’s how.’ Just as he finished his thought about it being golden blonde, the silver hair changed to match his thought. “Hmm. How tall to make her. I think I’ll go with 180 cm for now, that’s pretty close to my current body.”
A couple minutes later, the body before Frank had fully changed to now resemble a pointy eared girl at around 19-20 years of age, with leaf-green eyes and golden blonde hair that went down to the middle of her back. Her bust was quite sizable, though barely matched by her hips and thighs, giving her a very striking figure all in all. “Alright, I think that’s good. Time to give her a name. Maybe Eleanor? No, too normal. Something like Sylvain.” After another couple minutes of brainstorming, Frank finally found something he liked. “Sylvia, that’s good. Now for the last name.”
This time he came up with a couple options he liked quite quickly, but he had a hard time picking which one to go with. “Qibeth or Hisprit? Both certainly sound elfish enough to me. Hmm, I think I’ll go with Hisprit, Qibeth reminds me too much of an old D&D character of mine.” With his mind made up, he inputted the full name into the field and mentally confirmed that he was done, which seemed to be all that was needed.
The message on the square changed once again,
You will now be set into this world in the first body you made, it’ll be up to you to survive and grow stronger. As a final piece of guidance, if you sound the word ‘status’, even mentally, your status screen will pop up. With that said, good luck in your life on Terra Dios.
Before disappearing.
Around Frank, the animals returned to life and the wind resumed blowing, as if they had never been stopped in the first place. To his big surprise, it actually took multiple seconds before the few animals noticed him, but as soon as they did, they all hurried away. “Huh. I guess they were all prey. Regardless, I should probably take a look at that status thing. I hope it works similar to a game.” But before he did that, he took an actual look around, to see if there was anything screaming danger.
Around him, all Frank saw was a lush forest with trees multiple tens of meters tall and a lot of undergrowth. All in all, it looked to be a natural and untouched forest. When he turned around, he could, from the little clearing he was in, see a mountain not to terribly far away. With there being no clear signs of danger, he decided to check his status in the way the square had described, and not a second later a red box with a black border showed up in his field of view.
The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
Name: Frank Carter Race: Human Age: 18 Gender: Male Level: 1 Class: Classless MP: 40/40 Titles: [Person of Many Faces]
[Unusual Mana Growth]
[Blessed by Geb, the Fertile Destruction] Strength: 10 Vitality: 8 Endurance: 9 Mana: 2 Wisdom: 8 Perception: 7
Skills, titles, and abilities [Person of Many Faces] Rating: Mythical
Created from a synergy between God of the Earth, Geb’s gift, the user’s unnatural mana, and the transfer of the soul through different worlds.
The user has the ability to gain multiple forms to swap between at will. Each form shares the level, base stats, and titles (though the user can set them as hidden for each form), as each other, but the class, racial ability, and appearance will differ from one form to the other.
List of available forms:
-Frank Carter, Male, Human, 18, Classless
-Sylvia Hisprit, Female, Elf, 24, Classless [Unusual Mana Growth]
Rating: Impossible
The user managed to awaken mana in a world where it shouldn’t exist at all.
-Mana increases by one each level.
-Any mana gain is doubled.
-The mana pool is doubled and will increase with the user’s growth.
-The quality of the mana is increased and will increase with the growth of the user.
[Blessed by Geb, the Fertile Destruction] Rating: Legendary
The user has been blessed by Geb, the Fertile Destruction.
-Vitality increases by one each level.
-Increases the regenerative capabilities of the user.
-Medium increase in affinity with the element of earth.
-Minor increase in affinity with the element of nature. {Human} Rating: Racial ability
-Classes level up quicker.
-Skills level up quicker.
-No racial limit in elemental affinities.
-Ability: Warcry (Release a warcry before a battle, and as long as at least one other human responds, the user's and other targets' abilities are raised slightly for a period of time. The range is the scope of the battle and the targets are anyone thought of as friendly/allied. Each human that joins in raises the effects little by little. Targets other than humans have the boost halved)
For at least the second time that day, Frank felt his jaw drop at what he read. Despite not knowing anything about the stats or what they did, the titles and their descriptions were most certainly far out of the ordinary, that much was obvious. “Jesus fucking Christ, this certainly seems like a bit more than ‘some special ability’. I may not know this world’s standards, but those ratings seem way too overkill for someone at level one. Though, I won’t complain, as it should help my survival. Ah right, survival.”
At the thought of survival, he immediately began wracking his brain on what to do. “Firstly, I need to find running water; secondly, I need to find some food that’s hopefully safe; thirdly, I need to find shelter in case of bad weather; and fourthly, I should probably get working on some basic tools. Everything else will be done after I’ve done those thing or when I need to do other stuff.” Now with a plan in mind, he set course for the mountain, as that would give him a chance to find a mountain creek and possibly an uninhabited cave.
As he walked through the forest, he stopped once in a while to pick up a stick and see if seemed suitable in length, straightness, toughness, and weight for a tool or weapon, before discarding most of them. Every so often he also spotted an herbivore eating, most of which quickly ran away after seeing him. Sadly, if they weren’t grassing or eating leaves, they usually took their food with them, but after multiple misses of seeing what they ate, one of them finally forgot their lunch. When he walked over and picked it up, he saw that it had the shape of a turnip, size of watermelon, and the orange color of a carrot, and it was almost half eaten.
“Damn, this thing is weird, but hopefully it’s edible. That deer looking creature seemed to like it, so hopefully it won’t kill me. I wonder, could there maybe be a couple more around here?” As he didn’t know enough about the world to trust that he’d be able to find food as easily again, Frank spent the next 10ish minutes looking around for more carnips, as he had decided to call them. The tall grass made it hard to find the green from the carnips, but he eventually managed to find a patch of five-six of them, of which he only took two to carry along with his five sticks and the half eaten one. Taking more would’ve made it to carry it all, at least harder than it already was. So he resumed his way towards the mountain, hoping that he had found actual food.
Luckily for Frank, the mountain wasn’t too long away, so a bit over an hour after finding the carnips, the forest began to thin and he was able to get a clearer view of the mountain side, though still far from a perfect view. “Water. Water. Please say that there’s water.” As he continued to approach the mountainside, he mumbled to himself about finding water. At least that was the case until a small gurgle of water entered his right ear, and those thoughts were replaced with a focus on reaching that sound as fast as possible.
The sound turned out to originate from fairly sized creek just couple minutes away. After a quick look around and finding no animals, Frank ran straight over to the water, placed his things by his side, and knelt to get down to the water. “The water looks clear, check. The water is running at a good pace, check. And it’s hopefully coming from a freshwater source on the mountain, as it’s coming from that direction.” After quickly considering some of the survival things he’d learned through YouTube, he cupped his hands and lowered them into the surprisingly cold water. “Ah… this is so refreshing.” He said after drinking multiple cups worth of water.
“I think I’ll follow the creek up to the mountain; I’d prefer to be close to the creek wherever I make my base.” With those words said, he grabbed his carnips and sticks and got moving again.