“AAAAAAH!” Flynn screamed as he plummeted 19 feet backward through the air. His hands reached out, grasping nothing but air that whirled past him as he fell. Fearing the worst, Flynn screwed his eyes shut even as he continued to scream his lungs out.

Flynn’s back impacted the ground, driving all of the air from his lungs and making him see stars. As he laid there wheezing, Flynn realized something important, “I-I’m … alive. I’m alive!” Flynn propped himself up and looked around. He had fallen in a rather large puddle of mud, cushioning the impact of his fall and keeping him safe. Experimentally, he patted his body to check for injuries, but upon finding nothing wrong he sighed in relief and collapsed back into the pool of mud spread eagle.

For a few minutes Flynn just laid there, staring up at the cloudy sky above. The occasional drops of rain that misted down from the heavens helped to slowly clean the mud on his face. Flynn was content to just lay there in the mud and let the relief wash over him, paranoia and worries forgotten in the face of surviving a near death experience.

Eventually Flynn pushed himself up out of the mud, wiping as much of the gunk off his body as he could. Flynn sighed as he turned toward the tree and prepared to climb back up to his hollow, he had sour fruits to eat.

It took Flynn a few minutes to climb back up to his hollow, wet hands occasionally slipping on the already wet bark. Though there wasn’t much Flynn could do about it, his t-shirt and boxers were already soaked through with muddy water.

Flynn had to squirm around in his hollow, trying to fit both himself and the 3 large fruits in the small space at the same time. Eventually he settled into a comfortable position with all 3 of the fruits resting in his lap.

Flynn’s face scrunched as he took the first bite of his harvest, the sourness of the fruit easily exceeding any of the sour candy he had tried back on earth. Surely there was something, anything, that could distract him from the taste of the fruit.

Flynn’s eyes widened as he remembered the blue screen he had seen in the strange space between dimensions. In all of the rush and panic since he came to his world, he had totally forgotten about them.

Going off of popular tropes, surely the only thing Flynn had to do to be reunited with his blue screens was to say, “Shtadus!” Flynn exclaimed with a mouth full of sour fruit. He frowned when nothing happened, he was fairly sure that that was supposed to work.

Gulping down his mouthful of fruit, Flynn tried again, “Status!” and smiled when a semi-transparent blue box appeared in front of his face.

===================

Name: Flynn Vaughan

Age: 23

Race: Human

Class: ---

Title: Transmigrator

Skills: Regeneration: Level 1 | Eternal Youth | Double Skill Points

*(0 Available Skill Points)

===================

Flynn examined his status page in detail for the first time. Why did only Regeneration have a level? Was it because Eternal Youth and Double Skill Points were skills that could not get any more powerful than they already were? Experimentally, Flynn began tapping on different parts of his status, starting with his skills.

===================

| Regeneration: Level 1 |

Significantly speeds up the body’s process of natural regeneration.

| Eternal Youth |

An Unaging Body of Eternal Youthfulness.

| Double Skill Points |

A Racial Skill unique to beings from otherworlds. Receive twice as many Skill Points whenever Skill Points are earned.

===================

Flynn frowned as he read through the descriptions. Sure, it was nice to have the additional information, but it didn’t exactly tell him much other than things he could already guess.

Regeneration’s description gave little indicator what fueled the healing it provided which could prove fatal if Flynn ran out while fatally injured. Sure it boosted Flynn’s natural regeneration, but he wasn’t quite knowledgeable enough about the human body to know what fueled the body’s ability to heal. Nutrients? Calories? Carbs? One of those sounded right.

Meanwhile Eternal Youth was entirely self explanatory and the description was supremely unhelpful.

Double Skill Points was the only actually useful description. Besides telling Flynn that this was his one and only mythical cheat skill for being isekai’d, it also told him that Skill Points were earned. Not received or rewarded, but earned. That meant that Flynn had to accomplish some kind of task to earn SP.

===================

Currently Available Classes:

Artist

An Artist is one who pursues every aspect of Art, not content to let any facet of artistic creation pass them by.

Starting Skills: Drawing | Sculpting | Painting

Painter

A Painter is an artist that has specialized in the artistic stylings of paint, brushes, and canvas.

Starting Skills: Painting | Eye for Detail

Shut In

A Shut In has shut themselves off from the rest of society, living their entire lives alone in a single room.

Starting Skills: Ignore

===================

Flynn’s face paled, his estranged mother had been right all along! His art degree was worthless!

At least in this current situation … and most possible future scenarios. And the Shut In class was just insulting! Sure, Flynn may have spent most of his free time alone in his room, but he went out … occasionally … once in a while … for sure. He definitely didn’t go out just to go to classes, or get a takeout meal, or go grocery shopping. Definitely…

In his defense, Flynn had planned to get out of the house and backpack across Europe painting vistas after college.

But more importantly, all of these classes were totally useless! Maybe he could use sculpting to make some kind of clay tools, but what good would those be, and how would he fire them? Eye for Detail sounded like it could be some kind of appraisal skill, something that Flynn sorely needed, but it was more than likely just some kind of perception skill focused solely on painting.

Flynn sighed and mentally willed the class selection box to disappear, he wasn’t about to choose one of these dud classes when there was a very real chance that whatever class he selected right now would be permanent. Flynn shivered at the thought of being labeled as a Shut In for the rest of his life.

Tapping on the rest of his status revealed no new information (age was a calculation of how many years you had lived and Transmigrator was a title given to people who had transmigrated, go figure!)

As Flynn continued to absentmindedly fiddle with his status screen and eat his fruit, a rustling movement made him pause. Was it the dead eyed sausage? The shambling horror? Some new abomination?

Flynn let out a sigh of relief as he saw a woodpecker-like bird land on the rim of the hollow. The beak was shinier and a couple inches longer than the woodpeckers that Flynn was familiar with but otherwise it looked to be a completely normal bird from earth. Flynn could deal with what he knew, it was the unknown that terrified him.

“Sorry bud, this spot’s already taken,” Flynn said while kicking his right foot out toward the bird to scare it off, “buzz off.”

Instead of flying off, the woodpecker just stood there and cocked its head, then drew its head back and drove its beak straight through Flynn’s foot.

Flynn’s eyes widened as a lance of pain drove itself into his mind, flight or fight instincts kicked in, and Flynn acted without thinking. He pulled his foot back, taking the small bird still impaling his foot with him, then slammed it into the side of the tree. And again, and again, and again, and again…

2 minutes later, Flynn sat in his hollow breathing heavily and covered in sweat. The wall of the tree he had been kicking was painted in layers of blood, both his and the woodpecker’s. Somewhere along the way the bird’s neck was snapped by the repeated blunt force trauma, but Flynn wasn’t quite sure when that had happened.

Now that the adrenaline was wearing off, it was clear to Flynn that he had made several mistakes. This was an entirely different world from his own, he shouldn’t have presumed to ‘know’ anything.

That, and he had overreacted. It seemed obvious in hindsight that being impaled through the foot wouldn't actually kill him. However, fear and panic can make a man mad.

With the loss in adrenaline, the pain in his foot returned to the forefront of Flynn’s mind. Wincing, he carefully reached down and began negotiating with the bloody pulp that had been the woodpecker. Even with most of its body pulped, the woodpecker’s beak still stubbornly impaled Flynn’s foot.

Flynn breathed through his teeth as his hands slipped the first few times he tried to grab the blood splattered beak and wiggled it around in his wound. Taking a more careful approach, Flynn delicately grabbed the base of the beak, making sure he had a good grip on it. Then, in one fluid motion he ripped it out of his foot.

Flynn groaned at the pain and finally got a good look at his injury. There was a clear hole going through the center of his right foot, allowing Flynn to see right through it.

Flynn looked around at the bloodstained walls of the hollow. Even he could smell the blood in the air at this point, who knows how well magical super predators could smell it. He had to get out of here.

Before he did, Flynn took the time to rip a part of the base of his shirt off to make a wrap, tying it around his foot. Regeneration should help the injury, but at level 1 who knows how long it would take to fully recover.

Flynn grabbed his two remaining fruits and made to leave the hollow before pausing at the lip. He hesitated in leaving the first sanctuary he had found in this new world. But safety came before comfort. Flynn dropped out of the hollow into the misty forest outside.