There was nothing around me, it couldn’t even be called void since void is a lack of everything in a place. I was surrounded by nothingness. That's probably how astronauts felt when they saw space for the first time. I tried to look at myself and I found out that I’m nothing more than a flickering orb that is burning in green and blue fire.

My nerdy side was praying that green fire isn't a corrupted form of magic while the rational side was analyzing what can I do in this environment. After what felt like a day I figured out how to move or rather shift my point of perspective. I achieved this marvelous feat by trying to extinguish the flames. I couldn’t do it physically so I thought really hard about it and the fire diminished slightly and all would be good and candy if not for a strange system-like message that popped into my view.

System? I thought my nerdy side trembled with excitement that was quickly cooled off by the rational side. I don’t know if abilities granted by a system can or cannot be deleted by said system. I thought for a while and came up with a devilish plan.

“I don’t want the bonus and the System instead I’d like innate ability to manipulate mana and organisms and create them at will, additionally I want this ability to be unstrippable by any entity that exist on the world I’m going to” This was risky because there was a no way in hell to be certain that I will go to a world or to afterlife or wherever. But by wording my request like so I may have guaranteed myself to go to a magic world.

The window flickered a bit before showing me that I needed to confirm my choice. I didn’t wait or inquire more because the whatever entity that oversees this system might be too impatient so I pressed the confirmation button for confirming and I blacked out immediately.

After god knows how long I woke up in an earth fissure and I panicked right after, not because of something so silly as being stuck no I couldn’t feel my legs and arms hell I couldn’t see as well. Then how did I know where I was? I don’t fucking know it was just my innate feeling that I was there.

This fucking sleazebag of a system screwed me over!  After this and a solid hour of non stop cursing I calmed down enough to think rationally. Turns out it’s not an innate feeling but a very trippy sixth sense or more like the first one because every sense that I previously had was merged together. 

I could feel the cold of the surrounding walls as well as their bland earthy smell and taste. When I focused really hard I saw a glimpse of bacteria moving here and there without care in the world, seeing and tasting bacteria are two different things and I won’t ever do that again.

What was even more strange was that I didn’t really need to breathe air this and the fact that I could now feel the composition of air in this fissure. After goofing about for a while I noticed that this fissure wasn’t on the surface meaning there wasn’t any source of light yet I could see every detail like this whole place was lit up with a bunch of industrial lights.

After taking in the environment I again tried to see myself and this was a mistake because from all those shocks and surprises today this was the most horrifying. What I found in the place where my body should be was a perfectly round crystal that wasn’t connected to walls, it kinda was just there. My last thought today was that even if I ever get to see my parents again I might get mistaken for jewelry someone lost and then I blacked out.

I opened my eyes and saw a good old fissure in exactly the same place I awoke last time, but turns out you can’t have a normal day in this world because I found out that my sense also allowed me to interact with energy that filled the air and everything, even my crystal form. I thought about all that nerd stuff I did in my past life and decided to call that energy with the most cliche name ever ‘mana’.

Since I’m a crystal orb underground that figured out quite quickly how to interact with mana that means that I’m a dungeon core? Upon this realization I started testing out all of that stuff the dungeons did in novels I read.

1. Trying to absorb stuff did nothing (I suppose I have to have some sort of storage or special ability to turn materials into mana)
2. Trying to summon menu/system did nothing (Well I confirmed that I don’t want system there’s no use by crying over spilt milk)
3. Forming thin threads from mana and using them to cut stuff worked but was very slow

Seeing no other way about this I started cutting stone walls near me to see if I could use mana to manipulate inorganic objects… Fuck! How am I supposed to be an dungeon If all I can do is cut stone! Seems like the system was very literall I got innate ability to change life and create it but not to change and modify inorganic objects.

Hmm what would happen If I made those bacteria feed on mana and become multicell organisms that would help me excavate this whole thing? What could go wrong? It’s not like I wanted to be sent here, Heh, Apocalyptic Disease Here I Come!

I looked at one of the bacteria and noticed that it sustained itself mostly by absorbing heat and eating stone and other bacteria. I selected the whole species and ordered it to move to a safe spot where they would evolve into cells of small insects. The bacteria that mostly ate stone and didn’t really absorb heat got enlarged and made so that it would evolve into a plant that glows in the dark and mostly eats stone, warmth and mana.

Next I tried spawning a whole bunch of each species, 1 trillion (in long scale) to be exact. Would it destroy the local ecosystem? Yes it would but by giving them all the ability to feed off mana they would survive. Fast forward a few cycles of micromanaging my farm and blacking out of mana I noticed that I could stay longer awake the more plants and insects were present. Meaning that flora and fauna made by me either increased my reserves of mana or increased my mana regen.

That was huge, it was an incentive for making rich ecosystems but also it gave me an idea to give my insects some limited sentience so that they could create a city and give ideas how to enrich the environment.

Today my first insect queen would be born along with a new plant that I worked on in my free time. The plant creates a mana that poisons everything around it, the idea was to make some stationary defences and baptize my insects with it so I could have mini mages to help fend off invaders.