Ren was strolling the land. Understanding the world he was in. It seemed like something out of an RPG. The kind that opens with a village, stone cottages, and a blacksmith hammering in the distance. Where people fight monsters with swords and cast spells from open palms. A medieval period, straight out of a ballad or an old tale.
Magic followed rules. It was elemental at its core—fire, water, wind, earth. The basics. On top of that, there was light magic and dark magic. Those were less common, rarer affinities. Not many people could use them. Magic itself required mana.
That said, magic also responded to visualization. With enough affinity and control, you could cast without a word. You pictured the flame. You felt the heat. You fed it mana, and it came to life. Pure intent.
It didn't stop there. Not everything powered by mana was a cast or the element.
One could manipulate raw mana. A barrier, for example. You could pour mana into space and compress it, forming a wall to block an attack. Not a spell. No circle. Just raw manipulation. Mana control . Visualization mattered here too of course. Skill, experience, and clarity of thought made the difference.
Then there were skills.
Skills were different from magic. They didn't usually consume mana. They weren't learned from books or cast with incantations. A skill was something you had—or earned. Some were born with one. Most had to grind for them.
Skills could be anything. Ridiculously broad in scope. There was a "Jump" skill. Literally made you better at jumping. A "Kick" skill that turned a basic strike into something sharper. Some had "Identify," "Climb," "Dash," "foresight", "sneak" There was no thematic consistency.
Most people didn't start with a skill. They had to trigger one through effort. Repetition. Purpose. You could jump a hundred times, two hundred, a thousand times, trying to gain the Jump skill. And even then, there was no guarantee it would happen. Some people jumped every day for years and never got it. Others picked it up by accident, without realizing.
And even if you learned a skill, it didn't mean you mastered it. Skills had levels. Tiers of effectiveness. You could obtain the Jump skill, but that didn't mean you'd soar over walls or leap onto rooftops. It just meant you were starting from somewhere. Everything after that was training, refinement, pushing limits.
Some skills were passive. Always active, like "Night Vision" or "Heat Resistance." Others had to be activated. Some were straightforward. Some were powerful. Some were borderline useless. But all of them could change how someone lived—or survived.
There was no cap on how many you could have. A person could stack skills endlessly, as long as they could earn or find them. But some skills couldn't be learned at all. You had to be born with them. "Appraisal" was the most famous example. If you didn't have it from the start, you'd never get it. It let you see things others couldn't—people's affinities, mana pools, their skill sets. Without it, you were in the dark.
That's why appraisers were a thing. Entire careers were built around it. If you didn't have Appraisal, you went to someone who did. You paid them. They checked your skills, your affinities, your mana capacity. They gave you the numbers. No one could see their own stats on their own, not without a skill for it. So the appraisers made money. And a lot of it.
Ren didn't have Appraisal. So he didn't know exactly what he had. Just that he could do things others couldn't, and he felt power moving easily through him. But the specifics? He just was guessing.
He didn't know his mana capacity. He didn't know if he had a skill or not. He didn't want to know. He could be disappointed.
...
..
.
His mind was brought back to reality, and he started to think about how he could live out his isekai life.
The thought was both thrilling and exhausting.
There he was, in a world straight out of someone's meticulously balanced tabletop campaign, with layered mechanics and a rulebook so thick it probably needed its own library wing. And yet, he—Ren—had no real direction.
He sat under a tree and considered the possibilities.
He could travel. See the world. Cross mountains, explore ruins, meet strange races and stranger customs. That seemed like the obvious isekai thing to do.
So maybe the world tour would need some...adjustments.
Then there was the adventurer route. Classic. Join a guild, take quests, fight slimes until you level up and accidentally break the economy by slaying a dragon by sneezing on it.
Except—minor problem—he couldn't join the guild.
"So, okay," he muttered, flicking a pebble at a passing beetle, "no adventurer's journey. No heroic leveling montage. Fine. What about being a merchant?"
He laughed then sighed and leaned back against the tree trunk. For all the potential this world had, it was weirdly...quiet. No demon lords. No corrupt kings. No apocalypse prophecies. Not even a petty noble scheming in the shadows. Just festivals, clean streets, polite citizens, and slightly too-polite nobility.
He didn't have a purpose.
In his old world, that was fine. The bar was low. Wake up, eat, don't die. Maybe binge a show or two and scroll until morning. But here? In a place filled with literal magic?
There had to be something more.
"Maybe I could just...pretend there's a villain," he muttered. "Stage an evil cult. I could hire actors, fund the whole production. Create a fake conspiracy. Then slowly uncover it like a mystery and 'defeat' it dramatically."
He paused.
"…No. But maybe...."
Still, the idea of orchestrating his own story had appeal. If the world refused to give him a narrative, maybe he had to write it himself.
He stood up, brushing off his robes.
"Hmm."