[NunuNote: Thanks to tunderpower’s Magic Castle Gift, enjoy these 2 Bonus Chapters!]
When he woke up, even though he had slept in an uncomfortable, hard, moldy bed, Lohan felt better than ever!
After reaching Level 9 in Elysium, his sensation in the real world was as if he had also leveled up!
Lohan stood up with a lightness that the former owner of this body had never felt, noticing that his muscles—now defined by intense training and integration with Halon’s stats—responded instantly to every command his brain processed.
He walked over to the fridge and consumed a Grade A nutritional solution, feeling the nutrients being distributed throughout his body even faster than they had been digested in previous days, bringing a vitality that seemed to nourish even his mind.
Without wasting a second, he began his exercises on the apartment floor; where he had once struggled to complete a few push-ups, he could now perform hundreds of repetitions with seemingly endless stamina... as if his endurance were replenishing itself with every passing second.
As sweat dripped and his muscles revealed themselves to be proportionate and well-defined, Lohan smiled with satisfaction upon realizing that today’s change, though smaller than the three-level jump from the previous day, was still monstrous compared to when he was still Level 01.
He could finally feel Mana circulating through the internal channels of his body with ease.
Sure, it was still much weaker than his Slime body, even at the lowest levels, but just being able to feel it was an incredible sensation.
Tired from the intense grind they’d had the previous day, both Lohan and Lisa decided they’d take the day off from Elysium.
Neither of them specified what they’d do in the real world, but Lohan intended to go to college.
With the money he could earn in the other world, he didn’t even need to worry about the $500 stipend the college sent him every month. But as a precaution to protect his identity, he decided to keep showing up there to maintain the facade that he was just an ordinary kid from the Lower Zone.
Feeling generous with himself, he took a quick cold shower—a luxury he hadn’t been able to afford often in the past few days, considering that water wasn’t cheap on a planet as exploited as this one—and left the house clean.
After putting on all his protective gear and mask, you couldn’t even tell he was clean, but what bothered him was that even with this protective equipment, the dirt in the air still seeped through and touched his skin.
"I guess I’m dirtier as a human than as a slime... who would’ve thought." He thought with a sigh. ’If only I could digest this dirt on my skin like I do in Elysium...’
As soon as he thought that, he felt a slight vibration on his skin, and within seconds, the dirt that had been stuck to his skin—creating a thick, unpleasant sensation from the friction of his clothes—disappeared!
Unfortunately, here he didn’t have 360-degree vision like in Elysium, so he couldn’t confirm what it was, but his intuition—trained over weeks of using [Efficient Digestion] and [Digestive Filter] all the time—made it clear that this was likely the result of his evolutions!
’Wait, am I unlocking all my Slime skills in the real world?!’ He finally realized, shocked.
At first, he thought that only the more standard abilities, the ones that fit his human body, would work in this world!
With a bold idea in mind, Lohan decided to test a few things.
The first was to focus on a bus flying by hundreds of meters above the ground.
At that distance, a normal human eye would have trouble identifying any details of the passengers on that bus, but when he focused, Lohan felt the same sensation as activating the [Monocular Telescopic Vision]!
Discreetly pulling back a part of his glove, Lohan decided to try using one of the skills he relied on most in combat in the other world.
With a single thought, his skin—which had previously been white and pale due to a lack of vitamins and sunlight—slowly began to form hexagonal plates and turn black!
’My
And then, looking up at the tall buildings, an even bolder idea came to his mind.
Reaching his hand forward, touching the tips of his middle and ring fingers to his palm, Lohan made the iconic hand gesture that Web-Head used to shoot webs, but at the last second he snapped back to reality and quickly put the glove back on.
’Idiot, you’re going back to college to play the part of a normal kid from the Lower Zone—don’t give yourself away before you’ve even resumed your disguise!’ He scolded himself, calming his adrenaline and refusing to get carried away by fantasy.
As a huge Spider-Man fan, he really wanted to shoot a web at one of those buildings and swing up, maybe even hanging onto one of the flying buses and riding to college in the open air, but he knew how stupid that idea was, and how counterproductive it was to his plan of staying discreet.
But while he couldn’t test flashy Evolutions like that, he could test more discreet ones!
For example, all of his tracking and mimicry Evolutions worked perfectly in the real world!
Both the Magic Core he’d already used a few days ago and the new Natural Energy Core also worked perfectly.
The physical transformation Evolutions also worked on the human body, such as Viscous Flow, Body Density, Membrane Reinforcement...
All of these Evolutions worked just like in Elysium, only on a much smaller scale of power, granting him only a fraction of the potency and resilience they possessed in the other world.
’I don’t know what I can do to improve this synchronization rate, but considering that with every level I gain in that world I get stronger here, at least I have a path to follow!’
He just didn’t have the courage to test more flashy skills like Partial Division and Memory Resonance.
But that last skill sparked another curiosity in him.
’If I use Memory Resonance in this world to digest the brain of a person or creature, could I achieve some evolution here as well? And if so, could I bring that evolution to Elysium?!’
That single question filled his mind with ideas, but unfortunately had to be interrupted when he arrived at college.