“Ugggghh!”

A loud slap resounded through the forest as Kaltyr facepalmed, angry at herself for not paying attention to what she read from the guidebook when it could have saved her from some needless anxiety.

“Why am I so dumb?!” She shouted at nothing in particular, her hands stretching her face downwards.

A few moments of shame passed until the girl forgave herself and moved on to matters of more significance.

“This, uh, Magic Sense skill… I kinda get what a ‘skill' is, but how does it help me?”

Kaltyr felt no different from before she acquired the skill, which puzzled her because it seemed to involve having another ‘sense', like sight or smell. Shouldn’t she be able to ‘sense' magic, or something?

“Maybe I need to turn the skill on?”

The idea of turning on a ‘sense' was strange to the girl, but she figured she’d give it a try. And since the guidebook mentioned how she could add or subtract pages from it with her mind, as well as the fact that the message in her vision only appeared when she concentrated on what seemed to be its notification, she chose to attempt activating Magic Sense like that…

With no luck.

“Why's everything so complicated?!”

Only a few minutes of hard concentration and she was ready to give up.

“Oh, yeah… The book mentioned a ‘Status Profile’.”

Another self-punishing facepalm.

“Status page?” She asked aloud, not sure of what “willing it to appear" meant.

Kaltyr felt another urge to groan and sigh, but held strong—there had to be a trick to this that she was just too dumb to think of on the first try. With that in mind…

“Think, girl, think! The guidebook called it a ‘Status Profile'. ‘Status' just means ‘the state of’ something, while a ‘profile’ is a collection of information on something.”

Kaltyr crossed her legs and rested her hands on her lap—unintentionally seating herself in a meditation pose called the “lotus position".

“So, if I focus on imagining a profile filled in with my information…”

The girl stopped speaking as she dove into her thoughts, pulling up everything she definitively knew of herself and organizing that information in a list. While she did so, she managed to reach a state of serenity—albeit on accident—wherein she no longer paid much attention to the outside world. The wind calmly blew, making her hair and the forest sway with a rhythm, and animals sounded in the background, chirping, squeaking, croaking, and hissing. Kaltyr no longer seemed so out of place in the small clearing within the forest, as her lack of awareness allowed her to blend into the world…

“Banzai!”

Until she opened her Status Profile and let loose a celebratory shout.

Name: Kaltyr (Kal-tier)

Life Level: 0

Available Stat Points: 0 [Open List to View]

Effects: [None] [Open List to View]

???

Title: [None] [Open List to View]

Class: [None] [Open List to View]

Skills [Open List to View]

The girl felt impelled to dance a little jig from the sheer triumph she experienced from her success, but stayed focus on her task at hand—to figure out how to sense the magical essence that was supposedly ever-present around her.

With a mental tap, she opened the Skills List.

-General Skills-

-Class Specific Skills-

???

Magic Sense Lvl: 0

Kaltyr briefly considered ruminating over the question marks overlaying her vision, as the mystery intrigued her, but she put it off for later, keeping her attention on what she opened the Status Profile for in the first place.

“Damn. Nothing happens if I click the Magic Sense skill. It seems that it's not something to be activated.”

Giving up on her first conjecture, Kaltyr held a hand to her chin and closed her eyes.

“Since that led me to a dead end, I need to search for more clues. I don’t really want to bother trying, but I can’t give up. Just like with the Status Profile, there is an answer…I just have to search for it.”

And with another analysis of her Skills List, she found it.

“It says that my skill level of Magic Sense is at 0… This has to be it!” She celebrated again. “It must be that the skill level is so low that I can barely sense anything, meaning I just have to try to feel the magical essence until the skill level rises!”

However, the task was much more easily said than done, as Kaltyr soon after discovered. Many times did she try to relax and zone out like when she opened her Status Profile, but the state of mind was not easily replicated. She tried changing positions so that she lied on her back or belly, as well as hum, sing, and tap her fingers to a beat, but the elusive serenity from before irritatingly eluded her.

Eventually, whilst taking a break from trying to zone out, lying flat on her back on the grass, Kaltyr watched as the sky mysteriously began to change. It wasn’t a slow, lazy change, but an incredibly fast and frightening event that had the girl gaping in awe.

Behind the clouds, as though it were the backdrop to a stage, the sky just…switched, color. The vibrant orange hue it used to be neatly receded in a single direction, replaced by a bright yellow that felt even more unnatural than the two previous colors. When the heavens above finished their transition, all Kaltyr could say was…

“Another mystery for future me to solve.”

Before promptly taking a nap.