\\NO ACTIVE CLASS DETECTED. PLEASE SELECT ONE TO START OR RESUME LEVELING YOURSELF.

  Blue text flashed on the periphery of my vision. I ignored it for now.

  I had landed in a forest clearing. The grass was bright green and soft, and as far as I could see, none of the gross kinds of insects were crawling around or worse, on me. It honestly reminded me of those signboards about some vacation biome up deep in the North with how idyllic it was. Of course the corpse put a slight damper on things.

  It was the bone monster, now thankfully dead with a detached skull half buried in the dirt. Did that mean that it had a brain? It had felt hollow when I had attacked it. Well, I would figure it out once I got used to the game-like interface that blinked in and out of my vision as I willed it. And hopefully after that, I'd find civilization before some wild animal ate me or I starved. Survival first, skeleton anatomy later.

  It always came down to that, get to place B from place A to not starve or die to the elements. Some things stayed constant across all worlds. Death, taxes, and being on a timer due to uncaring forces vastly more powerful than me.

  My shank was in my pocket but without a hunting dog or something, I didn't fancy my chances of catching a rabbit or squirrel or whatever animals roamed this world. With my luck, this place was so nice because it was the personal picnic grounds of someone really powerful who would have me executed if I were to be discovered. I imagined some fat noble in a gaudy purple and gold robe.

  I wondered if I should yell and hope some human hunter or something similar finds me but then I remembered that I was in an unknown forest. An unknown forest with unknown denizens. I cringed, trying not to think about how profoundly idiotic that idea was. I poked the dead monster beside me. It didn’t respond.

  ‘Okay Anya, focus. What do I know?’ I was conscripted in a war between what were ostensibly gods that was fought on a scale that was not even comparable to any war I had ever heard about, in fiction or in reality. And the thing that had conscripted me had marked me as a Knife candidate, whatever that was.

  I pulled my status back up into the center with a thought and focused on the trait. The interface seemed to only exist when I wanted it to. I briefly felt the concept of elaboration and tried to apply that to the trait. Bingo!

  \\The Knife Of Quiraion

  When the Great God Quiraion perished and his powers were seized by his enemies, he cursed those very powers to produce the bane of those that felled him. The Knife Of Quirion is bound by destiny and duty to slay the Bonelord Aster who bested Quiron in combat and the Unaugured God who drives this conflict and bring an end to this bloody conflict. The god Quiraion is generous but make no mistake, you are a soldier now regardless of your wiIs and you will serve, in life or through your death.

  EFFECT: Destiny itself twists and turns to create a crucible from which supreme power may emerge. Your skills and classes level faster and have an increased chance of evolving and consolidating. You will also face more opportunities to increase your power than most but proportionately peace will forever elude you. You will die if you abandon your goal regardless of your power. If it is determined that you are not bettering yourself for your confrontation, this skill will punish you. This punishment can become lethal depending on the severity of your trespass. These shackles upon your being will be released with the death of Aster. When facing Aster or The Unaugured God, you will be able to channel Lord Quiraion’s remaining essence. Once, you will be saved from certain death.

  No no no, was it too much to ask that my unique isekai skill would not kill me unless I destroyed a multiversal army and its god. Can't ever catch a break, can I? Caught halfway between being horrified and just annoyed I looked at another of the traits.

  \\Dead Quiraion’s Blessing

  Behold! The Great God Quiraion is truly great and merciful for he has further blessed you with a fraction of his power. When a god demands something, the world listens and it obeys.

  EFFECT: Your true gifts and origins are hidden to all but gods of scrying and information. This means that you will not be marked as a Godchosen from the beginning unless you choose to reveal yourself to someone. anonymity is its own reward when one is weak and yet has great potential. Furthermore, once a year you can succeed at a single system action if it has at least a 5% chance of success otherwise. A successful action will receive increased benefit from The Knife of Quiarion until the cooldown expires. When a single skill is boosted like this, nothing else will benefit from your blessings.

  Better. Much better.

  I briefly wondered if everything had descriptions this long and verbose. I doubted that, these felt like the sort of thing that I'd expect that a clergyman would care about. Right, holy war for the souls of the masses. My theory was proven right as I checked another.

  \\Unhesitant Murderer:

  You have killed before for your survival and will kill again for the same. Weakness is death.

  EFFECT: you don't hesitate during combat and the sight of death and gore doesn't faze you.

  Yeah. This is useful and good. Especially with Knife’s nonsense. The notification flashed before me for the third time.

  \\NO ACTIVE CLASS DETECTED. PLEASE SELECT ONE TO START OR RESUME LEVELING YOURSELF.

  I dismissed it again. I was NOT going to pick a class before I was done with the stats. One part of me idly noted that I was going through my screen from the bottom to top

  \\Low Maintenance:

  You have lived on scraps and leftovers, you have known scarcity and you will not forget it even in abundance.

  EFFECT: you require 15% less food and water for survival and you take 15% longer to starve. you also require 20% less resources for any projects you do completely alone.

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  \\Enduring.

  You have survived a lot and you will keep doing it.

  EFFECT: You have a preternatural sense for recognizing and escaping or surviving immediate danger.

  \\Mental Resilience:

  You have endured great trauma and now have metaphorical scar tissue.

  EFFECT: You are less likely to contract long term mental trauma due to the things you experience.

  I was pretty sure trauma didn't work like that but regardless I was done with traits. Oh well, I was not a therapist and I had never seen one in my life. Not my coffin, not my funeral.

  And now for the active skills.

  \\Find Weakness: 2

  That knight in resplendent golden armor may be stronger than you but she is dead to an arrow through the eye and you are not. By taking a moment to analyze your enemy, you can often find weaknesses that you can exploit to neutralize them.

  5 mana per use.

  I didn't think my status screen listed mana anywhere.

  //Improvised Tool Use: 1

  You don't always have the best gear or equipment but you can make do with what you have. You can improvise and make cheaper inferior alternatives and you can substitute similar enough tools for any task you want. This does not guarantee success.

  No mana cost.

  \\Scavenging And Scrounging: 2.

  You can go hungry or you can find food. You can die or you can find some clean cloth for a tourniquet. You can find or retrieve things from your surroundings faster and more efficiently.

  No mana cost.

  \\Intimidation: 1

  Fear is the oldest and the strongest emotion and you can lace your actions with it. To threaten or to demoralize, to convince or to scare, fear is yours to command.

  5 mana per use.

  Everything was at least mildly useful and I could see why the system thought I should have those skills. I looked at my passives and decided that all of them seemed relatively self explanatory.

  Basic Earth Education: 2

  Dirty Fighter: 3

  Quick Killer: 1

  Neurotic Observer: 2

  Knife User: 2

  I moved on to my stats instead, and attempted to expand them with the same elaboration trick. It didn't work. Of course it didn't, the one stat that I wanted to know about was attunement and it refused to tell anything about it. Dejected, I was about to move on when they finally opened up. Oh god, was the system lagging?

  Strength was obvious. Vitality was my overall robustness and health (not the video game kind of health). Celerity was speed and dexterity. Perception was again obvious. Acuity was interesting, it was the mental equivalent of celerity. Adaptability and mental reaction speeds. Willpower defined my mental resilience. Attunement was interesting but also the simplest in a way, just my total mana and mana regeneration. Nothing too weird or esoteric.

  I went back to the passives and looked at them. They were as I expected from the names. Basic Earth Education was just that, Dirty Fighter helped me generally win fights better, no hard numbers. Quick Killer sped up and steadied me if I was about to incapacitate or kill someone with the next blow, Neurotic Observer was just me noticing things like exits, potential hiding spots, possible weapons and so on around me. Knife User granted me basic competency and slightly better damage with a knife. None of them had actual numbers except for Knife User.

  //Knife User: 2

  The knife is the most subtle and forgotten weapon. In bloody battlefieldS, larger weapons reign and yet one blade in the dark can end wars faster than a thousand swords in the sun.

  You know how to use a knife in combat and knives deal 0.5% more damage per level. Current bonus 1%.

  As I read, I was still thinking about how to proceed. I didn’t hear any activity and so it was possible that the other knives ended up elsewhere in the world. That meant I was alone. And that moment of realization changed everything. I dragged myself closer to the dead(deader?) bone creature and leaned on it, suddenly exhausted as my eyes caught the sun and not dust clouds shining with some golden light that I was used to. I think I should have a greater reaction to being whisked away to a new world, but I felt muted. I should care about that, hell, I should care about the fact that I wasn't caring about that but I didn't.

  All my life, I had one little part of my mind that was cold and observed things without any emotion. But that part had always been a fragment of me but now, I felt colder than ever before. I wish I could say I was concerned about whether my traits or skills were altering my mind. I wished I could say that I hated it. But that would be a lie. It didn’t feel good, but I didn’t even care for that. I wasn't numb, I was still thinking about how to survive.

  I would lie about being attacked by wild animals and then being thrown in the woods by my people once my injuries made me incapable of working in the fields if it was a medieval fantasy type world. A factory incident for an industrial age. But what if healing that could fix my legs was commonplace enough? I couldn't just say that I was from a different world and was conscripted by some dead asshole. I would make something up. But first, I had to reach civilization and that meant mobility. Maybe I could use the monster’s legs as makeshift crutches. The voice had mentioned that this was a sanctuary world, whatever that was. My survival was a lot more important than my feelings about my circumstances right now and my survival demanded action.

  \\The traits Mental Resilience, Enduring and Unhesitant Murderer have consolidated into the passive skill Cold Blooded

  \\Cold Blooded: 1

  Hesitation is weakness and weakness is death, and so is failure to adapt. Your mind knows what it is and you are at peace with it. You are the mistress of your mind inviolate. To survive among monsters, you shall become one.

  Sentiments or base instincts don't make you hesitate to do what's necessary or distract you. To err is human and you will be more than human. You are almost immune to mental trauma and the waves of horrors that you face will not break you when you are in danger and mental problems that impact your performance will slowly fade away. Your focus and mental resilience increases per level. You don’t make mistakes because of emotional inadequacies or disturbance. Emotions that jeopardize you or compromise your judgment in an actively dangerous situation will lose their potency.

  Yes, this would certainly help me. I ruthlessly crushed the part of me that was screaming about losing myself, not important now. I noted that traits didn't have numbers besides them like passive skills and Quiraion’s Knife had mentioned leveling skills but not traits. So it was likely that traits were generally static and didn't improve unless they became skills like with Cold Blooded. Maybe Knife could be absorbed or evolved like that? Even if possible, I doubted that it would be easy to remove or alter a trait embedded into the very system by a god. Just something to keep an eye on. Another thing that was interesting to me was that passives improved as they levelled up but no active skills mentioned any improvement of any sort. Interesting.

  I would have to figure out what that actually meant in practice but that was for later. Too many things to deal with.

  What else was left? Oh yes, my race. It thankfully also opened up. Too bad the information there was rather scarce except for a line of information about how humans are the most common of all Elvenoids. Though I had no idea what a class factor was.

  \\Race: Human

  \\Family: Elvenoid

  \\Class Factor: 5

  \\The most numerous of all Elvenoids in the lands of the former Catrian Empire

  \\NO ACTIVE CLASS DETECTED. PLEASE SELECT ONE TO START OR RESUME LEVELING YOURSELF.

  Now that I was done with my status screen and understood as much as I could, given my immediate circumstances, it was finally time to pick a class.