Chapter 66: [66] : The Second Synchronization, Abyssal Core

The transition out of the Grid was rarely a smooth experience, but this time, it felt like being shoved backward through a meat grinder.

Declan gasped violently for air. His eyes snapped open.

He was lying flat on his back inside the stolen corporate dive pod. The heavy gel padding was completely soaked in his own sweat. The mechanical halo around his head clicked loudly and retracted, pulling the sensory needles out of his neck with a sharp pinch.

The air in the real world hit his lungs. It didn’t smell like toxic mud or rotting flesh. It smelled like dust, old concrete, and the faint metallic tang of the massive Iron Bastion forges humming just a few hundred yards away outside his warehouse.

He was back in his actual physical body. He was back in Sector 7.

Declan pushed his hands against the sides of the metal pod and slowly hoisted himself up. He felt incredibly heavy.

He looked down at his right hand. He was still holding it.

The Abyssal Core had transitioned with him. The dark purple and jagged crystal pulsed with a heavy suffocating energy right there in the real world. It cast a dim and eerie light across the dark and empty warehouse.

He had brought a Level 55 Entity’s core straight through the dimensional gap.

Declan didn’t wait. He didn’t want to hold onto it and admire the glow. He knew exactly what this item was for. The NPC had made it perfectly clear. If he wanted to survive the real world convergence, he needed to force the system to download his avatar’s power entirely into his physical vessel.

He needed a higher synchronization rate.

Declan raised the pulsing dark crystal to his mouth. He didn’t hesitate. He took a massive bite right out of the glowing code.

It didn’t shatter like glass this time. It felt like biting into a solid block of raw static electricity. The core instantly dissolved into a thick and heavy liquid energy that rushed down his throat.

The reaction was instantaneous.

Declan dropped the remaining half of the core into the pod and fell to his knees on the concrete floor.

"Argh!" Declan grunted, gripping his chest with both hands.

His digital vision forcefully booted up in his optic nerves, hijacking his real world sight. A massive and glaring red warning panel completely overtook his vision.

[CRITICAL ALERT: Massive Data Injection Detected.]

↳ Abyssal Core Consumed.

↳ Forcing Physical Vessel Overwrite.

↳ Synchronization Rate Jumped to 45%.

The pain was absolutely blinding. It was vastly worse than the first time he had consumed a boss core. This wasn’t just his muscles getting denser. This was a fundamental rewrite of his biological skeleton.

He heard a sickening and loud crack echo in the empty warehouse. It was his own ribs.

Declan bit his lip hard enough to draw blood to keep from screaming. He felt his bones literally splintering and reforming in real time. The standard human calcium was being aggressively purged from his system. It was replaced by a dense and dark mythical alloy pulled straight from the game’s code.

His forearms cracked. His spine popped loudly, aligning itself with a terrifying new posture. The veins running along his arms and neck bulged outward. They turned entirely pitch black as highly concentrated raw mana began physically circulating alongside his blood.

The agony lasted for exactly thirty seconds. To Declan, it felt like three hours.

Slowly, the intense burning faded. The red warning boxes in his vision dissolved into tiny blue pixels.

Declan remained on his knees for a moment, breathing heavily. The concrete floor beneath his bare hands was completely cracked, spider webbed out from where he had gripped it during the transition.

He slowly pushed himself up to his feet.

He stood in the middle of the dark warehouse. And nothing else about him looked like a debtor from Sector 7 anymore.

He felt entirely different. The sheer physical weight of his body had changed. He felt like he weighed a thousand pounds, yet his movements were completely effortless. The base Agility of his Eclipse Sovereign class was now heavily integrated into his actual muscle fibers.

He walked over to a dusty and shattered mirror leaning against a nearby concrete pillar.

Declan looked at his reflection. His face was the same, but his eyes were completely gone. The whites of his eyes and his irises had turned entirely pitch black. They looked like two tiny bottomless voids staring back at him. Faint wisps of dark purple energy drifted lazily off his skin.

He looked like a monster. He looked exactly like an Abyssal Sovereign.

"Forty five percent," Declan whispered. His real voice was so deep and resonant it actually vibrated the glass shards on the floor.

He needed to test the threshold. The system had locked him out of his high tier gear previously because his physical body didn’t have the density to hold them.

He raised his right hand. He didn’t pull up the digital menu. He just focused his mind on the specific inventory slot.

The air in the real world warehouse instantly distorted. The space around his hand warped and screamed, struggling to process the item he was pulling through the gap.

A massive heavy iron handle materialized in his grip.

It didn’t glitch. It didn’t flicker with gray static like the cleaver had in the alleyway. It rendered perfectly into physical reality.

Declan fully manifested the +40 Eclipse Severance.

The massive dark matter halberd dropped into his hand with a heavy and satisfying weight. The razor thin blade made of the night sky hummed loudly. The tiny black hole spinning in the center of the axe head instantly began pulling the dust and loose debris of the warehouse right into it.

Declan swung the weapon casually in a slow arc.

The blade effortlessly cut a clean and perfect line right through the heavy concrete support pillar next to him. The top half of the pillar slid off and crashed to the floor, leaving a perfectly smooth mirror like cut behind.

He was holding a physics breaking super weapon in the middle of a real world slum.

Declan rested the massive halberd on his shoulder. He looked toward the heavy steel doors of the warehouse. He could hear the faint and distant sounds of sirens and monsters out in the toxic rain of the city.

Apex Paradigm thought they could send bomber drones to wipe him out. They thought they still controlled the board.

Declan smiled, his pitch black eyes gleaming in the dark.

The tutorial was officially over.