Dozens of thorn halves lay across the jungle biome as he sat with a determined look on his face—feathered arm replaced with his own once more and a deep crimson mist fluctuating between a monstrous abomination of a leg and—nothing.

  He had experimented—a lot. A couple of days straight if his sense of awareness was on point. It was hard to tell of course as the arena biome was lit by what must be System magic as the 'sky' was forever the black nothing of the void.

  What had he learned? Well. Firstly, he learnt that it was entirely possible to undo the Aberration type transformation by pulling apart the layered Essence, if you pulled Essence from an inner layer of the Essence it would hurt—progressively worsening until it turned to absolute agony as the layers beneath became less dense than the outer. If you removed only from the outer layer then it would only pinch. So that's what he had done. He had taken apart the layers of the transformation, each layer removed made feathers fall and his arm fluctuate slightly between human and Aberration. It was as though four layers was just the right amount to finalise a transformation and any less made it unstable.

  Once he'd removed the third layer, leaving only the final innermost layer—that was when it got weird. The entire part of the transfigured arm had begun to protrude in odd angles and jutt out in places as both human and feathered-beast. This made him speed up and he had finally reached the final slither of Essence, with great willpower he'd pulled it away—and to no ones surprise a myriad of pains shot through his arm, each invoking a curse as he felt every sensation of the transformation take place in what must have been seconds, despite feeling much longer.

  And with that, his arm had returned to normal—whilst still holding over four-hundred Essence. He had topped up regularly.

  He also felt an abundance of Essence having built up in his eyes, this was what he assumed was causing the red tint to his vision—he decided that he would simply leave that well alone. He wanted his eyes.

  Then, he'd initiated stage two of his plan—reconstructing a leg—he had an inkling now of how it could be achieved, mainly utilising the same layer system as the arm had. The problem he encountered during this stage was that, one: He had no channels to funnel the Essence through—he had no leg. Two: Everytime he funnelled the corruption energy to the end of his stumped leg and tried to force it out it simply emerged as red mist and he lost a significant amount of his control over it. It was as though any corruption energy leaving his body took five to six times the effort to manipulate—increasing the further away from his own body it was.

  Thus, he had, had to be creative; he'd decided to start his transformation above the stump and then attach Essence to the layers he was building above, then shunt it outwards as it was constructed. This had worked and he had slowly and methodically worked his way through the first layer.

  As he was constructing his layered Essence, he realised that it was becoming harder and harder to concentrate as his layer became bigger. Why? He realised that he was having to maintain focus on stabilising the Essence in his constructed layer at the same time as moving the free Essence to reinforce and grow the worked on layer.

  All in all—he'd learnt a lot and was putting everything into practice. He had a bead of sweat running down his forehead and was grunting with concentration as he assembled a third layer—pushing the last drop of Essence to it and allowing it to stabilise in place above the first and second layers. The layers took considerably more Essence to form that those of the arm, but he had no trouble finding extra. His only issue was the continual vomitting caused by his pulpy friends.

  As a side note, the liquid from the pulp did seem to both satiate his hunger and quench his thirst. The vomitting was due to the continual burning that he could only imagine was the thorns innate poison—his Life Force had only dropped twenty or so percent throughout his continued devourment of thorns and so he gauged he had plenty of time to work things out.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  The fourth layer was where he could see all his work coming undone. Each layer had gotten progressively harder and he could tell he was nearing his limit. Despite the echo of doubt, he began pushing essence into a fourth layer, bit after bit he continued. Grunting each time he aligned Essence—seconds turned to minutes and minutes turned to hours until finally; "Got you!" he growled as he forced the final slither into place.

  His eyes grew wide as the red mist solidified, purple mottled skin became visible atop a red veined muscular limb. It protruded out violently as it settled into a final shape—one not guided by Elias, but by the will of the Essence itself. He screamed, pain taking hold once more—worse than his arm and worse than his entire encounter of the Dungeon.

  He let go of his hold on his skill and allowed the stabilised Essence to work of its own volition as it warped reality to form a final abhorrent shape.

  He panted heavily and winced as he looked down to his new leg. He let own a small squeal followed by a "Ugh!" as he felt both amazed and repulsed by his own actions.

  The leg merged with his stump and quickly contrasted the white flesh of his skin with a darkish red and black tone—laced with mottled purple decay—bulbous red veins ran down from the stump all the way to his new clawed foot. It was back. The foot that he'd grown to—not entirely hate—was back.

  He fell to backwards into the ground as he looked at two flashing notifications.

  [Mana Manipulation - Basic - Tier 0 has increased from Level 13 to Level 14]

  Expected. He thought, Next?

  [New title acquired - Playing Gods - Part 1 - Unique - +3 to all attributes, +3 to life and mana, +3% to all attributes, +3% to life and mana - 'Think yourself qualified to alter nature? They did too, careful how you use this power of yours. It is not as you expect.]

  "What?!" He said out loud as he bolted upright having read the notification fully. This notification was embossed in pure crimson, the writing cursive and reminscent of the Dungeon Quest—telling him to enter or die.

  The benefits were great, but that wasn't what he concentrated on, no. It was the description. It was tailored specifically towards him and was it referencing…the Twins? Arwen and Arvos.

  "No, just a coincidence. System bullshit at its finest." He said as he shook himself a few times, he wasn't even finished with his plan and the System wanted to throw another curveball his way. "No more notifications until i'm finished, please!" he called out.

  He regained his composure and his breath before focussing on the final stage of the plan.

  So, the final stage of his plan would be considered two stages by anyone else, but no, all the final stage in his mind, and, he'd done it.

  He had began removing the Essence from the layers of his now formed 'Abberation leg' and had methodically wittled down the layers until he'd finally broken the last layer apart. His biggest payoff was that his plan had actually worked, well and truly.

  After he'd woken up again from the pain-induced blackout, he pulled his white fleshy knee to his chest and cried with joy. He'd done it. He'd really pulled it off. As the layers had begun to fall apart, he'd glimpsed his old leg begin to protrude as it had done with the Aberration leg previously. He'd continued to painstakingly rip out Essence until the transformation reverted, but instead of nothingness returning, his leg did. Just as it was before he'd left it flying over the plains of the arena.

  He obviously didn't get to witness this, as he was unconscious, but that's what he had gathered afterwards. Then to complete his plan in earnest, he slowly pushed Essence from his core, to the end of his limbs and out—draining the overexcited Corruption Core.

  He did this until he'd returned to a healthy thirty-five out of thirty-five Essence. The new safe limit for Essence since his fight with the Trial of Defiance. The question had come to mind how he had used so much Essence and not gained another level in his Corruption Core and ultimately—he couldn't explain it, so moved on quickly.

  He had two human legs, two human arms and everything else that was considered socially acceptable to have as a plain old human. He smiled, grabbed his few belongings in his arms and almost leapt through the portal, just before passing the event horizon, he shouted; "Fuck you Orus, and… Fuck your dung—"

  The darkness came next, the apathy of the void and all the disturbing sensations that came with it—all embraced longingly by Elias as he hit the cold floor of a stench ridden, rat corpse infested altar room. He could only grin.

  As he felt his senses return he took in the scene around him—it looked wildly different from before. Firstly, the furniture that adorned the room had been blown apart by something. Secondly there were large cracks across the walls of the room.

  He heard a noise from behind him and turned to see the previous crimson portal now completely entangled by orange veins of light—the portal shrunk rapidly before dissipating with a pop.

  "Maybe it was the system trying to close the Portal?" Elias wondered as he thought for a moment on the orange light embracing the corruption of the portal.

  "Doesn't matter—" He continued as he stretched his arms wide and smiled, "I'm back."