[Realm Transfer Complete. Body Destroyed By Void. Beginning Body Reconstitution...]

[Body Reconstitution Process Complete. Beginning Soul Binding...]

[Soul Binding Complete.]

[Perk Gained: Origin Physique - You have a physical body crafted by the Origin. A completely reconstituted body free of illness and disease, more resistant to negative effects and less affected by age. Gives an exceptional Physique and a greater Lifeforce creation and manipulation ability. Greater receptivity to Ether.]

[Welcome To The D Class Realm - Nargavta.]

[Time Till Transfer To Earth: 6:56:01:25.]

Marc's eyes opened to a series of screen notifications and he skimmed through them quickly.

"Huh," he groaned as he sat up, a wave of his hand causing the notification screens to disappear like mist. "New body, that's cool."

His vision was clearer than before and the long scar on his forearm was gone. He felt like a new person. A new, hungry person with a new hungry body that hadn't eaten.

"Seriously, System or Origin or whatever you want to call yourself. You could have at least placed me somewhere I could have found food. A forest would have been nice," he said, surveying his surroundings.

He was sitting on top of a small dune and sand in his hair and clothes. There was sand everywhere, brown and fine. Looking to the horizon, all he could see was sand and occasionally, some rocks.

He was in a desert. Thankfully, the System had seen fit to provide him with clothes. He didn't want to imagine waking up naked in the desert.

"An oasis would have been cool, too but I guess you don't want to make things too easy for me," he muttered. "OK, Marc. Get a grip. The System Apocalypse happened. You're in a different world. Explore."

He stood up and examined the clothes he was wearing. A simple, loose, beige tunic and a pair of soft and smooth cloth pants. Comfortable, if rustic. His feet were bare but the sand wasn't as uncomfortable as it should have been to his soles.

It felt kind of weird standing alone in the desert, no one near him - as far as he knew. Only the gentle wind sweeping about dust made any sound. The picturesque scene he'd only seen on screens made him feel like he'd been abandoned in the desert by a tour group - or maybe an exploration crew or a spice caravan - to survive on his own.

He briefly imagined Bear Grylls being dropped alone in a monster-filled wilderness by the System and smirked a bit.

'The ultimate test of survival,' he thought, 'without a film crew to help.'

The wind briefly picked up around him and he shielded his eyes with his arm to protect from flying sand. In less than a minute, it died down to a sedate stream. For a moment, he just stood there on the sand.

This was real. It felt real, although he wouldn't know if he'd experienced a mind break. There was a popular quote that said something about crazy people not thinking they were crazy. He didn't think he'd gone mad, but if he had, he might as well go along with it.

His senses all told him he was here, standing in a deserted desert instead of in his apartment like he'd been minutes - did time flow at all in the Void - ago. He could feel the wind, the heat of the sun, the sand grains slipping through his fingers. This was a real System Apocalypse.

"At least it isn't a zombie apocalypse. I've always hated those," he spoke out loud to dispel the relative silence as he jumped in place and did some stretches.

Zombies had always creeped him out. He was reasonably sure that if he'd ended up in a zombie apocalypse and managed to survive whatever the catalyst was without turning, the zombies would be of the fast variety. Which basically meant a couch/bed potato like him wouldn't have survived long.

Even if they weren't fast zombies, the dead were supposed to stay dead, not run around eating people. The undead were a mistake that should never have come up in the human psyche.

While stretching, he distinctly felt the changes that had happened to him. His body felt stronger and his reactions faster than before. The changes weren't too much but they were noticeable. His stomach, which had always held that slight potbelly he'd given up on getting rid of, was now flat. No six-pack or any ab definition, just a healthy, flat plane.

His mind felt slightly faster and his memories clearer. Turning around, he found that he noticed things a lot easier now. Everything felt... more. The colors were brighter and richer, the sounds - those present - fuller. The wind caressed his more sensitive skin.

He also had a vague sense of a flowing energy in his surroundings. He could also sense it within him. He felt like if he just reached out...

His feet felt the sand shifting beneath him and he moved just in time to avoid becoming monster chow.

"Ah!!!" He yelled, hurriedly backpedaling as the sand opened up just where he had been standing. A giant mouth about three feet in diameter ate through the sand and continued upward to reveal a giant worm.

"Fucking hell!!! I get tossing me in a desert but you couldn't drop me somewhere I could get my bearings first?" Marc cursed at the System but didn't waste time waiting for the worm to eat him.

He ran. He was happy he had leveled up his Physique and Psyche as he was pretty sure he wouldn't have sensed the worm otherwise, let alone moved fast enough to escape from it.

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As he ran, he looked around for somewhere to hide/fight.

Off in the distance, there was a rocky hill. Marc immediately shifted his course to it. His aim was to climb up the hill and hope the worm couldn't chew through rock, which, come to think of it, was kind of a long shot.

This was a magical worm. It was highly likely it could chew rock and even if it couldn't, its size would allow it to climb up the hill. It wasn't a very good idea but it was at least better than fighting it on the sand where it could go underground anytime and emerge without him knowing.

He cast a quick glance back at the worm. It wasn't above ground but was following him from underground, only revealed by the the way the sand bulged as it moved.

He needed a weapon... Wait a sec, he did have a weapon. Or at least, he could create one.

One of the most well-known abilities of ice users in fiction was creating weapons and other constructs from ice.

His legs continued to pump hard as he thought of what type of weapon he wanted.

A blade would be a good weapon. Maybe a dagger. Classic and lethal. He felt a trickle of something leave him at the thought as the image of a long blade appeared in his mind.

A jagged blade of ice nearly a foot long formed right in the air front of him and a quick grab had it being held in his hand. It wasn't as cold as normal ice and felt just like holding a piece of metal. A quick thought reshaped the ice blade to form a comfortable hilt.

Well, he had a weapon now. Yay to magic powers! He just had to reach his chosen battleground and actually succeed in using it against the worm.

He was unfamiliar with running on sand and he kept slipping and sliding on the desert surface. However, he didn't fall or slow his pace and in minutes, he was climbing the hill's slope which was only slightly steep. The exertion had only made him sweat a little and breath slightly harder.

Before, a sprint like this would have left him panting hard and made his sides ache.

The hill was craggy and rough and there were plenty of hand and footholds for him to grab onto. He climbed up maybe 10 feet before he heard the sound of the worm rising out of the sand once more, sand sliding off its carapace.

He chanced a quick glance back to confirm it wasn't chewing through the rock to get at him. It wasn't but it was climbing the hill, inching or perhaps footing its way up towards him.

He grabbed a stone and tossed it at the oversized invertebrate. It bounced off its carapace without harming it but made it flinch back for a second.

Marc hurried to the top of the hill, a wide, rough area about 7 feet in diameter. He looked back at the climbing worm and finally had time to appreciate it.

The worm was nearly 10 feet long and 3 feet wide. Its body was covered in a brown, hard carapace that looked like an ant's shell and had a thin shallow gouge in it on its head. It had small, red, round eyes set into a face that was dominated by its mouth. Its head was much larger than other sections of its body. However, it had no visible nose or ears and its mouth was filled with several rows of long sharp teeth, getting shorter further into the mouth.

It looked kinda cute, in a horrifying, oh-shit!-this-monster-wants-to-eat-me kinda way. Scaled down - way down - and inanimate, he could see it being a nice children's toy. Probably without the teeth - those would give kids nightmares. Heck, they scared him.

Marc raised his hand overhead, and hoping greater physique translated to better dexterity, threw his ice blade at it.

A combination of luck and his will guiding the blade made it strike true. The blade struck the roof of its mouth, between two rows of teeth, and was hooked there.

The worm shrieked in earsplitting pain, its head and upper body lifting up reflexively. Unfortunately, its sudden move didn't send it pitching down the hill, a combination of the hill not being steep enough and the worm's lower body clinging strangely to the rock.

The worm started tossing and turning, trying to remove the blade in its throat.

Still feeling a faint connection to the ice blade in the worm, he reached for it, willing it to elongate. It felt harder than shaping the blade when it was in his hand, like talking to someone in another room through tin cans tied with string.

He forced more energy into the connection and the blade responded to his will. A sudden wave of exhaustion hit him as the blade became easier to manipulate. Several spikes grew out of the icy construct and began digging into the worm's head, causing it to let out a heart-chilling wail.

Vibratory waves emitted from the worm's body and mouth and started shaking the hill from where it stayed. Loose sand and rocks started rolling down the hill and Marc saw a stone that moved past the worm get disintegrated into powder.

Marc crouched on the hilltop, hands gripping the rocks to try to keep his footing and catch his breath as he maintained focus on his ice blade. The worm suddenly stopped moving and a notification in the corner of his eye confirmed his suspicion.

The worm was dead.

[Killed T0 Creature, +170 Essence.]

The waves emitted from the worm died down and the hill stopped shaking. He felt the ice construct in the body fade away.

Marc was torn between staying on the hill and leaving to examine his abilities and status. The hill was sure to be unstable from the seismic waves the worm had let out in its dying throes and its wails might have attracted more predators.

On the other hand, leaving might see him encounter another predator, one he wouldn't be able to beat without at least a greater understanding of his abilities and energy.

However, caution won out in the end. He hurried down the hill as carefully as he could, slowing down some when a wrong step had the rocks crumbling away from his foot.

At the foot of the hill, he looked around for the nearest high ground and started striding towards a tall dune in the distance.

|||

"So, I'm stuck out here in the middle of a magic desert for a week with nothing. No food and water. No change in clothes. No toiletries. No company except for monsters trying to kill me," Marc monologued to himself as he watched the reddish sun climb to its zenith.

A fucking red sun. If that wasn't evidence he was on another planet, he didn't know what was.

He was sitting on the sand at the top of the dune. Thankfully, it wasn't noon in whatever world he was in so the heat wasn't intolerable. Yet.

He was pretty sure, if this was before his body had been modified by the System, he would already have fainted by now. As it was, he was only sweating profusely.

There was a hole in the side of his tunic, courtesy of a close encounter with a magic fox that could spit out wind blades. Thankfully, the blades were more thin than wide or he wouldn't just be sporting a scratch in the side but a slice in the guts. He had killed it with an ice blade to the head before it could shoot him full of holes.

Still, despite the close shave, the fox had netted him 250 points, nearly a hundred more than the worm had given.

On the way to the dune, he'd met several other creatures and killed them, most of them small and weak. There were some rodent-like creatures that were fat and covered in long, trailing fur that were buried under a thin layer of sand. There was a tiny, humanoid twig creature that pretended to be a stick lying in the sand.

There was also a flat, silver-colored creature that surfed over the surface of the sand like a manta ray in the sea, extending thin corrosive tendrils around it to grasp prey. He almost hadn't noticed it coming up from behind him and although it had grabbed his leg, it had only left some welts on his skin before he instantly killed it.

None of them were as big, strong or fast as the worm and the fox and they had only given little points but in total, he'd accumulated 610 points. His Essence Points total was now 10,610.

"On the other hand, magic. I have cool powers now, emphasis on cool, and I can level up by killing monsters," Marc said as he brought up his status screen with a thought. " I just have to survive for a week."

"Now, let's see about increasing my odds of survival."