As Eli started to wake up he felt a stinging pain in his left hand and on reflex swung his right hand over to itch it, not remembering that he still had his hammer in his hand and he ended up crushing his left hand breaking several bones and causing the pain to spike even harder. When he looked down to see the damage his hand seemed bloodier and more gory than he thought it would. Looking more closely at his left hand, there was a headless rabbit sitting there gushing blood out its neck. The body of the rabbit fell over near some small antlers that also seemed to be missing a head, he focused on the headless body to get some more details.
"White Jackalope"
"A rare animal, prized for its delicious flesh."
"Treasure Animal - Rare - Food"
He groaned and sat up, checking his body for injuries, but he seemed to be healed for the most part, very exhausted but he was no longer injured. The sun was coming up and the first rays of light were poking through the forest canopy giving Eli the first well lit look at his transforming world. He decided to climb a tree and get a look around since the dense trees prevented him from being able to see more than about 75 feet. The first thing he saw was that he was at the foot of a volcano, with ash coming out the top and faint orange magma shining visible through the ash occasionally. The second thing he noticed was the volcano was directly north of him between him and the dungeon he had to get to or die trying. Lastly the entire area was wilderness, mountains to the west, volcano to the north and forest everywhere else as far as his eyes could see. There were no buildings, roads, towers or anything man made visible in any direction, as if he was the first human to ever step foot on this planet.
After jumping down from the tree in kind of a daze while starting to realize that this really would be a whole new world if no man made structures survive the change. He is going to have to find some kind of shelter tonight or he will end up getting attacked like when he just woke up. Putting those problems in a folder in his head labelled "Future Eli's Problems" and adding some more duct tape to it, he decided to grab his loot and get moving. First he poked the large ash pile that was not being blown around by the light morning breeze coming through the area and rustling the leaves overhead.
"Huh, that's odd," Said Eli to himself.
"Would you like to loot: Ash elemental?"
"Yes/No"
Eli hit yes with his mental hand and the loot process happened just like it had happened the other times, except this time Eli could feel something a bit more magical entering him and he quickly started reading the loot notification.
"You have received 200 system credits"
"You have received 1 minor ash affinity gem"
"You have received 1 minor fire affinity gem"
"Items have been auto-looted to personal storage space"
From the feeling that Eli had while the looting was going on, the affinity gems come from the magic that the monster had been essentially made from, like lingering traces of its existence able to be looted. He took the fire one out and it burned his skin so he put it back in his inventory. Then he took the Ash one out and held it in his hand, it was hot also, but not enough to burn him, it did leave soot behind where it touched. He focused on it hoping the system would explain itself.
"Minor Ash affinity Gem"
"Crystalized Ash affinity magic"
"Magic item - Crafting material - item enhancer - node enhancer"
"Neat," Eli said out loud again.
He put the gem back in his inventory then moved on to looting the jackalope, but it didn't work. He poked it and even picked up the body, but still nothing. He then tried to put its body in his inventory and it worked, but a number appeared in the corner of the inventory box, a clock counting down. It appeared that things could go bad or spoil in his inventory and he had about 46 hours for this rabbit which made him think about his quest to get to the dungeon before a clock ran out. He realized that he didn't know how much time was left or how long he had been unconscious, when did this whole thing start, at what time. Now that it was morning he might be able to tell working backwards because if there was a large gap from before and after this system took over that would mean he is missing that time and there is no telling what could have happened to him.
His thoughts started to spiral wondering if he was even still himself, but he fought it and pushed the thoughts away since he still wasn't safe. He knew this wasn't a permanent fix but he should be able to force his emotions to the side until he got to the dungeon. He wasn't sure exactly why but going straight to the dungeon didn't feel like a good idea, it would cost him time but something about the energy coming off the volcano gave him a sinking feeling, there were strong monsters up there. He plotted a course in his mind to go around the volcano and started running. He was going to need to make up time, at least until the timer warning came up again so he knew how much time he had left. Which happened after about 15 minutes.
"Time to reach the dungeon: 40 hours."
He stopped running and did the math quickly, it was probably about 6am this time of year which means this started around 10pm last night and it was about 7pm when everything changed. 3 hours unaccounted for if he was dropped in the same time zone as he was in before everything started. Not too much time, this whole interface and stats and such seem to have taken a bit of time to implement, with that thought came another, just how much was changed.
"How strong am I now," Eli said out loud, which he realized he was doing more and more as time went on.
Eli started walking this time while pondering how to test himself in a reliable way. His first thought was just punch trees until he figured out how much damage he could do, but the trees definitely felt like they had magic in them. It was not like the magic from himself, or like the magic he felt off that monster, it felt more subtle and slow, like it was a thin pipe of magical sap running through the middle of the tree trunk then getting so thin he couldn't sense it as it spread to the branches.
Now that he was paying more attention to it, his own magic felt strong, fast and chaotic, feeling it he had a thought and tried to control it. He imagined it as a pond that someone was constantly throwing handfuls of pebbles into causing the surface to be a mess of waves in all directions, uneven and random. As he pressed his will on the surface of that pond he felt the ripples slow down but not around a few spots on his body, they seemed to be resonating with the waves, copying them into themselves and pushing the same back out.
He stopped walking and took a breath to collect his will and make his senses sharper, the mess of movement and density now felt familiar since he was focusing more deeply. This was a very small amount of that tension and panicky adrenaline feeling he felt when he was fighting but it was also different. The feeling now was more of ripples on a pond while when he was fighting it was more like throwing boulders in a fast moving river, like the energy would push through no matter what anyone did. The one time he was able to hit something with it, it was powerful but it took so much out of him it wasn't a reliable sort of power. He practiced suppressing the ripples for another couple minutes until he felt like he could at least calm it down enough to maintain focus while fighting.
Back to his original task of determining how strong he was, he started walking again while he was thinking, not really looking where he was going but letting his new magical senses take in his surroundings. He thought maybe he could punch a rock, but he didn't know much about rocks and he could be hitting something hard or soft and not know which was which. His next idea seemed flawed as well but it was something that would hurt him if it ended up being harder than he thought. He was going to throw a heavy rock, since he was what determined how heavy the rock was. It wasn't perfect but it wouldn't hurt him to throw it. After another ten minutes walking a little closer to the volcano he found a stone that probably weighed about 5 pounds and held it like a baseball pitcher. Throwing a rock this heavy like a baseball would probably mess up a shoulder but he was confident that it would heal since he was pretty mangled when that elemental blew up and he woke up about 5 hours later in perfect shape.
Eli wound up and threw the rock at a tree about 20 feet away, and missed the tree entirely and the rock flew off into the distance. It didn't hurt his arm and didn't move particularly fast but it didn't hit the ground until it was out of sight which didn't seem possible, if it wasn't falling to the ground shouldn't it have moved much faster he thought while trying to think about if this was helping him determine anything. He felt like he was definitely above a pre-system baseball pitcher since his 5 pound rock moved like a fastball, while being much heavier. He walked toward where he threw the rock and he couldn't find anything, so he tried again, with a closer tree.
This tree he hit, but his mouth gaped open when the rock and a chuck of the tree exploded into splinters and tiny pebbles. Maybe he was stronger than he thought and this wouldn't be as hard as his other fights going forward. He was wondering this when he remembered that he passed out after his last fight and didn't see the messages about winning and gaining experience since he was passed out. He took a glance at his stats and he did have a free stat point and it said he was level 4, feeling like his strength was already good, he put it in vitality so he could recover from fights faster. He knew he was going to take damage while he figured out what each enemy did and how to defeat them. Hopefully now with a vitality of 6, he could recover faster and get moving so he will make it in time to the dungeon. He started running again, a bit quicker this time to try and work out how fast and far he could go before he got tired.
After about 20 minutes of what felt like his old top speed he was only slightly winded and he came upon what looked like a fancy orchid flower growing out of a tree stump with red orange and yellow pedals. He could feel the magic coming off it from a dozen steps away, a pure and clean magic that just felt like the light of a beach sunrise. He walked up to it slowly and as he got closer the light felt warm, the flower wasn't giving off heat, it was more like the light made you feel the sensation of warmth. Like how a woman's smile gave him warm feelings that didn't actually have anything to do with temperature. He examined it up close and the system gave him a description.
"Sunrise flower of warm light"
"You should eat this immediately after picking"
"Treasure Herb - Rare - Plant"
This was new, it was kind of a mix between a warning and instructions Eli thought as he scratched his head with his bone mace which he now carried in his right hand almost constantly. He did think that the 'rare' tag on the item meant it was valuable, but he wasn't sure if he should eat it, the warning did sound more like it would go bad soon after picking so you should eat it. However what if it's something that requires compatibility or it has some other effect like it makes you glow but gives you the squirts. He decided to go with his gut and just felt the magic coming off of it with his hands for a few minutes examining how it interacted with the magic in his body. To his surprise, it seemed to enter his right hand but not his left, and travel up to his right shoulder where it encountered one of those spots in his body that felt like it was causing the churning of his internal magic. It was a small reaction but it seemed to swirl around this spot then fall into it giving him the same sensation that his magical senses were picking up, and he knew what to do.
Eli picked up the flower and ate the whole flower, stem and all as fast as he could, swallowing as often as possible so it would be inside himself before any could go bad. After his final swallow, he had a dirt taste in his mouth mixed with the subtle scent of flowers and morning dew. Then he started to sweat and that tense feeling returned and his inner magic went completely nuts, like a raging river flowing through his body and when it got too dense and crammed together it smashed into him causing sharp stabbing pain. This pain wasn't like physical pain, it was like being kicked in the nuts of your soul with pointy boots.
Eli threw up, but not the flower, he threw up a brown sludge that was sticky and smelled like rotten meat and burnt hair. He rolled on the ground groaning in pain away from the stuff and continued to sweat while trying to gain back his focus and push his will onto his internal magic to calm things down. After regaining his wits he could feel the magic in him trying to expel the foreign magic from his body by punching his insides until they became his outsides and focused on what the foreign magic was doing. What was the sunrise magic doing inside him, it felt like it was going to cause him to self destruct like the elemental did. But it didn't have intent like his internal magic did, it was just expressing its sunrise feeling, except for around his right shoulder spot which was absorbing it and changing its flavor to be more inline with his internal magic.
After some more observing he decided to use his will in singular spots to take clumps of this magic and push it into his shoulder where it felt like it became his. Not like his possession but his power, like he could control it and his body did not reject it. It took another hour to get it all pushed into his shoulder and his magic was almost all calm now, but his shoulder felt like it had a rock in it and it was pressing against his muscle and bones. He poked it with his mental finger and it felt very close to exploding, like a balloon with too much air and any more will cause it to pop.
He just lay there on the ground waiting for the pain and pressure and sweating to stop but it wouldn't, no matter how hard he poked it, it just wouldn't budge. So he did the only other thing he could think of and started pressing his will onto his magic and pushing it into the spot inside his right shoulder and after a few attempts he got some in and it popped. There wasn't a noise or an explosion that physically hit his body, this damage was all to his soul. He felt like someone grabbed his soul out of his body, shoved a grenade into his armpit, pulled the pin, then shoved his soul back in. He almost blacked out from pain alone but a notification from the system showed up and distracted him from the pain enough to stay awake.
"You have opened your Magic node: Light"
"Light based skills are now stronger with every node level"
"Your light node has reached level 1 - 'body'"
Another 15 minutes and the pain was small enough to push to the back of his mind while he focused on his internal magic, which now seemed to be flowing a little. It was getting the beginnings of a current at least around his shoulder; it would flow around his shoulder node in a smooth motion, some going in and some coming out of the node with a touch of light flavor to it. Its flavor of light was not warm but more like the light of justice showing the truth, he was confused why it didn't have that warm feeling but he could sense his own magic in it.
He guessed he was being a bit dramatic about his plans but he wouldn't change his convictions because his magic wanted him to be a soap opera character who comes in to shake up the story line every couple of weeks. Being strong enough to scare the world into not being evil pricks to each other just cause no one around is strong enough to make them stop was going to take a lot more pain than this. He needed to find more fights and get to that dungeon, he was on a clock and needed to get as close to level 10 as he could while on his way there since it was a level 10 to 20 dungeon.
Eli pulled some light magic into his right hand and his hand glowed a little but didn't do anything else.
"Baby steps," Eli said to himself, "it's not even been a day, I'll get there."