The panel hovered in the air before him, calm and golden, waiting.

Ash stared at his stats.

[STR : 10 INT : 10

DEF : 10 AGI : 10]

Tens across the board. Balance. Perfectly balanced, which practically amounted to saying that he was perfectly average in everything, including having no skills whatsoever.

At level one, with thirty skill points to distribute, the only thing left to consider was where they might be of use.

Thoughts whirring through his mind like a thousand tiny wheels, Ash tried to sort them out, to understand which one was worth considering more than the other.

There was strength, obviously, with the ability to hit harder; defense, its inverse, letting him withstand more attacks; intelligence, somehow affecting mana pool.

More mana translated directly into more card uses and more times he could fire his Ember Shot🔥 spell.

But there was also agility.

Agility was speed, quickness, the difference between getting hit and evading an attack and between reaching the desired point and missing it.

With only eighty mana to spare, one offensive card and no skills in a world where his enemy could be just about anything, being able to move faster than this enemy became more important than surviving its attacks until he ran out of mana.

’Twenty into agility,’ he decided finally. ’Ten into strength.’

Even before he could finish thinking it, the numbers changed. They adjusted themselves as if reading Ash’s mind, shifting and rearranging in the blink of an eye.

[STR : 20 INT : 10

DEF : 10 AGI : 30]

Not being able to feel any tangible difference in his physical abilities while standing still, Ash nevertheless decided to trust these changes in the interface for the time being. He would know the meaning of his new stats soon enough.

He shifted his gaze from the interface to the grassland, watching it as the interface disappeared back into wherever it came from.

Green and still, interrupted by nothing except the occasional swaying of grass. Two unmoving, unchanging suns hovering high in the sky. There was no road ahead of Ash, nor any traces of life, smoke or other signs of civilization. Nothing that hinted at anything being built.

He had felt it right when he first appeared on the grasslands, but knowing it and standing in it for another long minute without it changing were different experiences.

"Why did he send me so far from people?" he muttered, kicking at the grass.

It waved slightly under his feet and then returned to its original position. His hand clenched into a fist again as he continued walking.

"It’s time to keep walking."

-----------------

It proved to be hard to track time without a watch and without a city surrounding him.

Ash did not know how long he had been walking, but somewhere between twenty and thirty minutes had clearly passed since he stepped out of the stream into the unknown. In the meantime, the surroundings had started changing gradually.

First the occasional trees here and there, signaling that the world was not entirely void of life and vegetation. Then more of them, appearing frequently enough to distract him from the sameness of his surroundings.

Trees were a welcome sight, because they meant life – animals, shelters and, sometimes, water. And where there was water, there would soon be people, and vice versa.

His mouth was dry.

’I should have drunk at least once.’

This realization was accompanied by the sense of something done badly, a mistake made at a wrong time. Too engrossed with the interface and its strange reflections, Ash had walked away from the only source of water he could see in the distance without taking a single sip.

There was no way of going back for more, because Ash was not sure which direction the stream was now and turning around meant losing the little bit of progress he achieved in the last few minutes.

He swallowed the thought and kept going.

Thirst was not a problem yet. Just a discomfort he could tolerate.

Far less tolerable was exhaustion of his lower limbs. This body was young, but it had been walking non-stop for half an hour. The novelty of his weightlessness wore off somewhere around the twentieth minute.

A thick tree caught his eye, not far from the path. Not particularly tall, but quite wide and with plenty of shade below. Its canopy spread generously and promised anyone beneath it well-deserved rest.

Leaving the path temporarily, Ash moved towards the tree and leaned against its trunk.

He exhaled deeply.

And closed his eyes for a moment, enjoying the sensation of rest.

The wind whispered through the canopy overhead and light filtered through the leaves above, creating an odd lighting effect on the spot. All things considered, this place was pretty comfortable.

Schlorp.

Ash heard this sound.

Schlorp... Schlorp... Schlorp.

It was wet, rhythmic and approaching steadily.

Opening his eyes and turning his head, Ash found himself staring at an object completely foreign to the other world he knew. Its size and shape were comparable to that of a large ball and it was perfectly round and translucent like a piece of thin glass, the liquid inside it glimmering with the rays of the two suns overhead.

A slime.

It was, without a doubt, a slime.