Allay flew to the front door, with me a few seconds behind her.

  “You’re too slow!” She complained and, with a movement of her hand, I felt an invisible hand forming around the doorknob and opening, swinging the door open.

  Immediately, the invisible gas started spewing back inside. I was about to warn her about it, but she was already inside the gas before flying backward with her hand pinching the bridge of her nose.

  “Wow, Somi wasn’t kidding. This place stinks of corrupted aura!” She exclaimed loudly. “It’s so dense you can almost see it in the air!”

  “This gas in the air is this aura thing you were saying?” I asked as I saw that she was moving her hands, pointing to the gas entering through the door.

  “Exactly! It’s also what you eat. You won’t die of hunger, at least.”

  I felt the hunger that appeared when Allay fist came to be flash back into life. The situation between her birth and this moment was so chaotic that I had completely forgotten about it, but now that she had mentioned this gas was what I eat, I remembered it.

  I was curious, so I stayed in the gas path when it passed by me. There was a distinct smell to it, something I couldn’t describe with words. It was like the rotten smell of billions and billions of thoughts all mixed together into a fine dust that clung to everything. I felt dirty just standing there.

  I concentrated on the path the gas was taking, and my senses deepened. It felt like I was leaving my own body for a moment, my vision floating as traced the gas entering the room where my, I guess, true body was located, passing through several systems and entering the glass cylinder before being converted into something else.

  The hunger nagging in the back of my mind vanished and was replaced by a sense of fullness for a few moments. Then, that sense of fullness transformed into an uncomfortable bloat of having eaten more than I could swallow.

  Returning to my avatar body, I shoved the door closed with a loud cracking sound akin to metal hitting metal. I sat down on the floor as the dizziness and the urge to throw up swelled inside me.

  “Wow. Rude.” Allay commented, but I wasn’t in the condition to say anything back to her. “Hmm? Oh. It seems there’s so much corruption in the ambient aura that your magicule reserves hit the max, and you’re overflowing but can’t increase the ambient magicule levels fast enough, huh?”

  “Whatever you said,” I said, resting my head on the wall next to the front door.

  “Good news!” Allay cheered me up, “If you just wait a while, you’ll finish digesting all the aura that entered, and the ambient magicule will increase by a little.”

  I just trusted what she said and waited for a very good while that felt like days. Allay had flown away to the other rooms of the house, zooming past me several times as I stayed still next to the door.

  Eventually, the sensation faded, and I was able to get up and look for her in the house. I found her sitting on the coffee table in the living room with pale blue objects with different geometric shapes floating around and being piled on top of each other, creating other shapes. It looked like the holographic version of legos.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. Allay looked at me, and the objects dispersed into the air.

  “Oh, good. You’re back! It’s been years!” I raised an eyebrow at that sentence. “Actually just a couple of hours, but it felt like years to me!”

  I moved to the sofa next to the table and sat down. It felt like sitting on bricks, but I wasn’t that uncomfortable somehow.

  “You’ll need to limit the amount of aura you’re drawing in, you know? You won’t be able to process that much aura at the same time until you get a dozen or so more levels,” Allay said, making me blink. Levels? Like games?

  “Levels?” I asked, trying to make her explain more.

  “Yeah. Probably around level 70? I don’t know,” She said, not explaining a thing.

  “...And what are those levels?” I asked directly, maybe now she would explain to me.

  “Levels are levels, of course!” She started, but after seeing my face, she continued the explanation. “Ok, ok… Let me see… Levels, levels, levels… Oh, here.”

  She cleared her throat, which I doubted she needed to do, but whatever, and started. “Levels are a quantified unit to measure one’s growth. Every living creature, at the moment of their birth, starts with level 1 and the base stats of their species. Some exceptions exist. As you live and deepen your soul and fill it with energy, it grows stronger. This act of growth is called leveling up.” She said with a deadpan face that suggested she was reading the explanation out of somewhere. Then, her face returned to normal. “Basically, the higher level you are, the stronger you are overall. Easy, no?”

  “Isn’t this something out of a video game?”

  “Again, what is ‘video game’?”

  “Doesn’t matter right now. You said stats. Do you mean there are skills as well?”

  “How do you know that but don't know about levels?!” She complained, raising her little fists into the air. I just blinked.

  I tried to remember all I could about status and skills from all the anime and games I’ve watched. The memories felt fuzzy for some reason, like parts of them weren’t there anymore. I tried to will a status screen into existence, and to my surprise, it actually worked. In front of me was the telltale sign of a holographic blue system screen

  I looked at each entry with curiosity. My species being listed as a Dungeon Core and being whatever a Void Dungeon was confirmed what Allay had said to me. My age being 0 was weird, but I guess it makes sense if you consider that this is a type of reincarnation? I still had my memories, though. Then I had HP and MP, which were both in the thousands. I didn’t have any basis to compare whether they were high or not.

  My stats were… what the hell were those stats? Were those scientific notation? What? I decided to skip trying to understand my stats for now because I was a bit confused about them. Right below that, there were titles.

  I wasn’t completely sure what they meant, but having the title [Void Dungeon], which was the same as my species, should be something important. The same with the title [God Touched]. If I were to guess, it probably meant this Somi Allay talked about.

  And then there were the famous skills. The thing that exists in so many games and animes. Looking at the list, I only had racial skills and nothing else, and I could only imagine what four of them were. I had no idea what [Magicule Essence] did, but I could infer the others from my previous knowledge.

  “Hey. Are you listening to me?” I felt something hit me with the same energy as a falling feather. Looking at it, I saw Allay with her palm in a position that told me she had just slapped me.

  “Sorry. I was looking at my skills,” I said.

  “That’s exactly what I was explaining!” She huffed and crossed her arms.

  “I’m sorry. Could you explain them to me, again?”

  She pouted. “Please?” I asked.

  “Ghmmmm, FINE! I’ll repeat myself,” she relented.

  “The first thing you should know about skills is that they are an integral part of you. Just think about using them and BOOM, you’re using them.”

  I tried doing just that, testing [Spatial Manipulation]. The moment I thought of using it, I felt as if the space around me was made of clay that I could shape to my will. I could feel the spatial ‘clay’ was slowly moving downwards. Extending my hand and grabbing it, I pushed it upwards a little, making the entire thing become still.

  Immediately, I felt gravity cease, and I started floating with all the objects in the room.

  “Wha-. You did something with the gravity?” Allay asked, still floating in the same place she was before, not affected by the lack of gravity in the slightest.

  “I was just testing a skill like you said,” I explained.

  “I see. Continuing, then,” she continued to explain, ignoring the lack of gravity. “Most of your skills, if not all, are racial skills, meaning they are available to you because of your species. Some like [Creation], [Deconstruction], and [Pattern Database] are available to all dungeons because that’s how dungeons actually do stuff inside their domain.”

  I tried to use Creation, and a ghost cube appeared in my vision. At the same time, a material list appeared inside my mind.

  I selected water and felt as if something was channeled through my avatar, and I saw as the ghost cube disappeared and was replaced by a cube of water that immediately collapsed into a sphere. There was no gravity to push it down, so water did what water does and folded into a sphere

  “I see you discovered how to use the [Creation] skill,” Allay said.

  “Yeah. I’m just testing them as you explain,” I responded.

  She nodded before continuing. “The [Creation] skill on its own is almost useless. It has to work in tandem with [Pattern Database]. That should be the list of materials you have access to create with. Basically, that’s just an instruction manual to create matter using magicules-”

  “Wait,” I interrupted her. “I’m creating matter? Out of nothing?”

  “Don’t be dumb. You’re not creating matter out of nothing. You’re a child of Somi, the Goddess of Chaos. You’re reassembling magicules into matter.”

  “Oh, I thought I was breaking the law of conservation of mass-”

  “That’s what Vida does.” This time, it was I who got interrupted. “She can create matter, energy, magicule, souls, anything, out of nowhere. And then Maut is the opposite, as she destroys matter, energy, magicule, not souls tho, those she helps pass through the reincarnation process. But I think that’s just her, because I’m pretty sure she could erase souls just as easily.”

  “Okayyy… What about going back on track? You said [Creation] is just reassembling magicules into matter?” I tried to steer Allay back into the previous conversation.

  “Oh. Yeah! And [Deconstruction] is the opposite! It disassembles everything into magicules and stores the quantum pattern inside the [Pattern Database] skill. I have no idea what 'quantum pattern' is, but that’s what’s inside what Somi gave you.”

  “I think I understood. If I use it on something I don’t have in the [Pattern Database], it is stored there?” I said with a question intonation, trying to confirm if I got it right or not.

  “Exactly! And then you can replicate infinitely, or as long as you have the magicules,” she shrugged. “But considering magicules are what keeps you alive. If you run out of magicule, you’re dead, so… Infinite replication!”

  “Ahaaa…” I forced a smile.

  “Why don’t you try [Deconstruction] on this sphere of water you created?” Allay said.

  I nodded and thought about using the skill. Immediately, I saw the water sphere being “selected”. Trying to change the mental image of this selector, I discovered I could select entire things or, as [Creation], make a cube, sphere, or lines. I could basically choose what I wanted to deconstruct using the skill. As this was my first time using it, I just selected the entire sphere of water and triggered the skill.

  The sphere of water turned into rainbow particles that dispersed into the air, channeled through my avatar, and probably to my true body.

  “Good. That’s the basics done. Now, it’s time for us to tear this place down entirely and rebuild it as your first floor!”