Technicality

When I woke up, I was cold. At first I thought that I had been saved and was at a hospital. But for that to be the case, I wouldn't be laying on the cold hard ground right now, would I. When I opened my eyes and sat up I realized that I was in a strange building. Everything was made of white stone, and there were 5 doors in each corner of the room. I appeared to be on an altar of some sort, So I stood up to take a look around. All of a sudden, some floating words popped up in front of my face, startling me. I took a step back and read them. They said "Welcome to the sanctum, please choose a class by heading through a door." When I finished reading them, they vanished and a floating blue window popped up in their place. "I know what this is!" I thought excitedly. Figuring that I had died, I realized that I had probably been what some people would call "Isekaied" or something. Back on earth I had watched a little bit of anime and read an isekai manga because a friend wanted me to.

"A friend… I guess my friends and family are pretty sad now that I am gone," I muttered. "I should get home as soon as I can! Well… I guess I should wait and see what this place has to offer first, I'll still try to find a way back though." I thought

Anyway I figured that the classic scenario had just happened to me. A guy jumps out to save some people and dies in place of them, then gets transported to an alternate world and becomes overpowered! Then I realized the flaw in my logic, I didn't exactly save anyone. If anything I just hurt the guy who hit me by adding manslaughter to his record. I silently apologized to the guy who was harmed by my stupidity, and looked to see what the floating window had on it. All that it had on it was my face, some basic personal info, and my levels and stats. " this is like a game" I thought. I decided that I would just call the window the "system" for simplicity. After briefly looking over the system once more, I tried to close it with my thoughts, and it worked!

One of the doors had a symbol of a man with wings coming out of his back, so I walked over to it. As I was about to open it, some words appeared on it. The words read "Shapeshifters admire the simplicity of the power of the beasts, and aspire to become their ideal version of an apex being. They do this by using a special skill to replace parts of their body with those of beasts and monsters. Flying becomes easy with the wings of a roc, swimming becomes natural with the gills of a shark, and seeing the unseeable becomes possible with the eyes of a dragon." The other doors had their own spiels, but this one captivated me the most. I also wanted to be a magician really badly but this suited me the best I felt. I walked back over to the shapeshifting door and walked through it. After I passed through the doorway, The system popped up again. This time it also showed that my class was a nadir shapeshifter. "I wonder what that is, sounds cool" I thought. It also showed that I had two skills now, being Language, and Shapeshifting skill acquisition(level 1). "What's Shapeshifting skill acquisition?" I thought. Immediately after I had this thought, a small system window appeared in front of me saying "Every time you level up, the skill level goes up by one. When you reach level ten with it, it will turn into the skill lesser shapeshifting. You can also donate skill points to the skill to make it reach max level sooner." I was a little bit hesitant coming through the door because I, being human, have no idea how to shapeshift, but this dispelled my worries. There was a table with a box on it next to another door. I opened the box and noticed that there was a sturdy looking dagger inside, a small amount of leather armor, and a couple of shiny gold coins. I took all the gear and whispered a thanks to whoever prepared these items. After a bit of tinkering around with the armor I managed to put it on, I sheathed the dagger, pocketed the coins, and stepped out of the door. I was greeted by a road that led to a nice looking town that was bustling with people.

As soon as I stepped onto what looked like the main road, I noticed someone, and built up some courage to go ask them a couple of questions. When I went over to ask my questions, I learned that I should go to a building that was owned by a group called the Brotherhood. Apparently, they were a place to go where you could sell monster drops, and sometimes the requests there granted exp somehow. I figured that exp was how you leveled up, just like in games. They also had lots of items that you could purchase that were helpful, like healing potions and maps. It was highly recommended that I register with them to earn money and stuff. I thanked the guy and headed over to the location he told me. The building was not too impressive but it was larger than the ones around it. I entered and walked up to the front desk. The person at the desk then had me touch a stone and gave me a card afterwards that identified me as a member of the brotherhood. She then pointed me over to the request board and recommended that I join a party. A party was just a group of people that did requests together, but I did not feel like joining one at the moment. Looking at the requests I saw that there were some continuous requests. Normally you have to take the request you want to do off of the request board and give it to the receptionist. This request becomes unavailable to others unless you fail at this point. You don't need to do that with continuous requests. You can just go out and do them, or so I'm told. One of the continuous requests was to pick some herbs that could be used to make various medicines/potions. It listed and showed pictures of ten, so I decided that I would try to gather those for some money. I asked where the herbs were gathered and I was told that anywhere in the forest would be fine. I was also told that to find my way back to town, just find the areas with less dense growth and keep in those areas for a while. You would eventually find town if you did that.

The forest had lots of plants on the ground, so in addition to being hard to navigate, it was also hard to tell where the correct plants were. I stayed for a couple of hours before leaving. I gave what I had gathered to the brotherhood and got a little bit of money. I was lucky that I had gotten money from the cathedral because I wouldn't have enough to eat and get a place to sleep otherwise. I continued doing this for a couple of days and managed to get decent at identifying the plants.

Later at the brotherhood I saw a new person looking for people to party with. After a bit of convincing myself, I went over to him and asked him,"Hey, wanna party with me." "Sure, how many people are with you?" "just me" "ok," after thinking for a while and figuring that I was better than nothing, he agreed to join me for requests for now. His name was Fifitrix and he was pretty nice. He was a swordsman and while he was content with gathering requests for a little, he wanted to fight monsters too. Eventually he convinced me to help him take out some slimes and goblins. At first we didn't come across too many, but I gradually began able to see the more obvious signs of monsters passing through areas so we came across them more frequently. I only killed the slimes, which were worth 2 exp each so by the end of everything I was only level 3. I upped my strength from 5 to 11 with the stat points I got, but I refrained from using the skill points. Fifitrix eventually left me because he was level 11 and I was just holding him back. This was fair and he was nice about it so I was fine with it. At this point I had been in this world for around a month or two. I thought that I might find a legendary artifact or something and get super powerful instantly, because that's how it happens in stories lots of the time. But it was clear that would never happen.

One day in the woods I got a bit confident and went a bit deeper into the woods than I usually did. I was picking herbs when I heard something next to me, and when I looked it turned out to be a goblin! I didn't know if I could win but I had to try. Fifitrix always defeated them so easily, but now that it was my turn it really was hard. As I was about to win, and was about to deal the killing blow, I saw another goblin lunge at me from the corner of my eye. I was about to try to run away when its head got blown away. I completed my strike and turned to see my savior. His name was Winter and it seemed like he was lost so I tried finding my way back to town. He asked me where I was from and I ended up panicking a bit and told a lie. I figured that my situation was unusual so I didn't want to bring unwanted attention to myself. On our way I noticed that I had gotten cut a couple of times and now there was a red bar in the left corner of my vision that was almost full but not quite. I figured that this was my health. "This world really is like a video game" I thought. I wasn't too bothered with taking the life of a goblin now that I thought about it. Even given their humanoid nature, to me they were just monsters trying to kill me. The monsters would also vanish after you killed them which helped. I got a bit lost during my inattentiveness and found the edge of the island instead of the town. I have heard people say worlds instead of world lots of times by this point, and it was only now that I understood why they were saying this. The sight was truly spectacular. Winter seemed to find it funny though. After making our way back to town, I was surprised to find out that Winter was an artist despite being such a powerful mage. I figured that Winter wouldn't want to stick with me but he ended up dragging me along to the Cathedral with him. Which I was grateful for.