Some blessings do come in disguise. My soul was ripped apart when I tried absorbing the dungeon core that was still alive. Bigger half with most of my powers stayed in The Eternal Storm dimension while the smaller part, the current me, was flunged into an abyss where I severed the system link after my first death.

I have died twice already, the first time was in a modern world without magic from aggressive and unwilling procrastination in a cold dark room. Yes Josh died because some asshole after watching some game with squids tried doing the same in real life. The only difference was his games were a lot more depressing and damaging to the body.

My second time was due to giving into greed and curiosity while lowering my guard. That was when Josh Organic died or rather gave his life to his children that rose from his mistakes. Big Josh Organic stayed in the world of TES while I left unvoluntarily.

The abyss wasn’t that interesting, just a vast expanse of empty space with an uncountable number of dark balls floating around, some crashed into each other. This occurrence had only two possible outcomes so far. Explosion or absorbtion, the former outcome just anihilated crashing balls making them spill stuff out that quickly evaporated into nothingness. The latter was random sometimes the smaller absorbed the bigger sometimes the bigger did the reverse.

After spending what appeared to be days in this state finally an end came. A sick ball that moves erratically in every direction touched me, unlike healthy ones that just zoomed in one direction, this one was slow and had irregular shape making it appear sick.

I already realised that this abyss is just a planeless unspace, unreality, not dimension these balls were dimensions everytime dimensions collided and the contents spilled entire civilizations fell into this abyss getting vaporated by the lack of laws of physics that kept their bodies together.

-”Welp, I guess living in a sick world is better than floating around here for all eternity.” The ball sucked me inside….

-

I awoke in my home from my first life It was first day of the 2021 year. Last night I watched the fireworks with my friends while they were getting shitfaced in a pub. My first life ended however during that night when I was captured and shipped to Polish Games with squids. After sometime I felt something on my palm. It was my dungeon core not used to my human body anymore. I accidentally dropped it on the floor.

The second the ball left my hands my consciousness shifted and now I was back in the core, but I could still control my old body just fine. My life manipulation powers were diminished but I still could work my magic to a limited degree like burning waste products that accumulated over the years in the muscles and excess fat that is quite pronounced on my belly.

With all of the calories I optimised the cardiovascular and nervous system. Right now my veins could hold twice as much blood as before before becoming strained. At max I could increase blood pressure 2.01 times before anything starts going to shit. This will allow my body to exert like 1% more force in the same time frame as before or the same amount of force as before but twice as long.

Nervous system upgrade allowed me to shorten reaction time enough to attempt catching tailors needle. To catch bullets I would need to upgrade eyes, brain, arms and torso in this order of necessity. Better eyesight would allow me to see the gun barrel in crispy 4k even from half a kilometer. A better brain would let me calculate the trajectory of the bullet faster. And arms would need to be reinforced so the bullet won’t tear a hole through them when I catch it.

Torso upgrades are necessary only because when moving a hand you don’t only use muscles in the hand but actually use quite a lot of muscles in the torso. After another minute or so of wondering what to upgrade I decided to firstly swallow dungeon core inside my fleshy body and shape my body in such a way that it will work as a mage core where mana gathers and allows mage to move it more easily.

The job was quite easy. I placed the core near my ribcage and opened it with my power shoving organs a little. I placed the core right next to my heart. When I attached several strings of connective tissue eventually wrapping it in it entirely. I also extended some nerves from the brain to the place and forced some nerve endings into the core.

I knew some runes my mage caste used. The most common one was Alcasd, often portrayed as a tree with wind around it. It was used to gather mana into one spot when enough mana is gathered it will start forming mana metals or mana crystals, affinities depend on the environment or other enchants.

I picked up one of my watches that hadn't been used in a long time because it’s batteries ran out. I craved Alcasd into the inner workings of the mechanism along with Ulthqn which symbolized life/nature.

Then I used geometrical shapes such as triangle and a circle to make the mechanism self-sufficient. Mana will flow into the watch and will turn it’s shitty alloy into life/nature infused alloy and then will start growing mana crystals inside the battery compartment.

I hollowed out some of my bones and placed the enchantments there as well. Those bones were then connected with semi-physical mana pathways I had to make for my mages, later they optimised it even further so I just copied their results. The enchantment will enhance my bones and then all of my body to the life/nature alignment, allowing me to survive even the worst injuries like losing brain or heart and will make me immune to the diseases. My immune system won’t fight them off however because of their inability to do anything.

Which will make my blood very dangerous after surviving in this world for decades. I don’t believe that this world is my old one because magic exists in my first world it did not. So I shall become the greatest being ever!

But first I need to secure a source of calories, later I’ll need information and then shelter. While I’m in the exact copy of my room from my first life, I don’t remember everything from that time which will make others notice my activities more.

I looked around the condo and noticed that except my room I don’t recognise anything, even the floor is different outside my room. Seeing my current predicament where my room looks like it was teleported here because it’s so out of place. I went to the kitchen and opened my chest and began stuffing it with various solid foods while drinking any liquid inside the fridge. I used my poor mana reserves to speed up the digestion.

It took me about an hour to devour everything in the fridge and digest it. Using all of that mass I made my muscles a lot denser and organs more efficient and smaller. The stomach lungs and heart were enlarged and reinforced by magic to make them easier to strengthen later with mana. Thanks to optimised and bigger lungs I could for example breath normally even with high muscle strain and therefore use less energy.

With spare calories made external bone arm guard that will regrow even after being destroyed. I tweaked my body to also regrow lost limbs but instead of relying on cell division for that I tweaked it to rely heavily on my passive mana regen from the enchants inside some of my bones.

Then I grabbed valuables from wallets and shelfs and was dressing myself to leave. But the moment I grabbed the door handle the door was opened by some teenager that looked edgy af the moment he saw me his muscles on his throat tensed up and I knew he would try to scream so I hit him in the stomach and grabbed his throat to silence any sound coming from him...