Cold water filled Steven’s mouth before he could even process that he wasn’t dead anymore. He sputtered, choking on dirty water that tasted heavily like wet copper and old moldy turnips.
"Get up you lazy little sack of manure!" a voice roared right above him. "I’m not paying you three copper bits a week to sleep on the floor!"
Steven scrambled backward, his weak arms sliding across damp stone. He blinked away the sting of dirty water and looked up.
Standing over him was a fat bald man with a red bulbous nose and a dirty leather apron that looked like it hadn’t been washed since the last century. The guy was holding a wooden bucket, glaring down with small angry eyes.
"Where am I?" Steven asked, his voice coming out way too high pitched. "Where’s the cops? Where’s the ambulance?"
The fat man squinted at him like he had just spoken in complete gibberish.
"Cops? What the hell are you blabbering about now Philip?" The fat man set the wooden bucket down with a heavy thud.
"Did you hit your head on the anvil again? Get your useless ass off the ground and start sweeping! Master Geron is coming by at noon and if these mana cores aren’t ground up, I’m taking it out of your food money!"
Steven looked down at his hands. They were small, bone thin, and covered in pale scars and black grease.
These weren’t his hands. Where were his rough calluses and missing knuckle? His arms looked like two dried twigs attached to a starving bird.
He was wearing a tattered grey tunic that smelled like rotten fish and wet sawdust.
"Holy crap," Steven thought, his heart racing like a runaway train. "I actually died. I got shot over a damn soup spoon and now I’m some starving kid in a fantasy slum."
"Are you listening to me boy?" Brandon, the shop owner, grabbed a heavy iron hammer from a wooden table and shoved it into Steven’s trembling hands. "Get to work on that pile in the corner! And don’t you dare touch any of the intact crystals!"
Brandon turned around and stomped up the squeaky wooden stairs, slamming the trapdoor shut behind him.
Steven sat alone in the dim cellar. The only light came from a single flickering oil lamp hanging on the stone wall and a faint, shimmering glow coming from the corner of the room.
He dragged his weak body over to the corner. Piled high against the damp wall was a giant heap of magical garbage.
Broken iron swords with faded glowing runes, cracked shield handles, shattered potions bottles, and hundreds of dull, chipped mana cores.
Most of the cores looked like worthless blue pebbles that had been smashed with a sledgehammer. They were leaked out of energy, barely holding onto a tiny spark of light.
"So I went from being a broke convict in New York to a broke slave in a magical dungeon junkshop," Steven muttered to himself, rubbing his sore neck. "Great. What a massive promotion."
He picked up a chipped blue core. It felt surprisingly cold, like a chunk of ice that refused to melt.
According to the faint memories lingering in this body’s brain, these broken cores were dangerous.
When crushed, they released raw, unrefined magic dust. If a normal person inhaled too much of it, their lungs would calcify and explode from mana poisoning. That was why Brandon made Philip do it down in the unventilated cellar.
"Of course," Steven sighed, lifting the heavy iron hammer. "The old bastard wants me to catch magical lung cancer."
He placed three cracked cores into a heavy iron bowl on the floor and brought the hammer down with all his meager strength.
CRACK!
The cores shattered instantly into fine blue powder. A thick, shimmering cloud of sparkling dust erupted into the air, completely surrounding Steven’s face.
Instinctively, Steven panicked. He tried to hold his breath, but his weak malnourished lungs couldn’t take it. He gasped out loud.
A huge cloud of glowing blue mana dust rushed straight up his nose and into his lungs.
Steven froze, waiting for his chest to detonate. He braced himself to die a second time in under ten minutes.
"Oh man, here it comes," he whined, closing his eyes tight. "Good knowing you world."
One second passed. Then two.
There was no exploding chest. No blood spilling from his mouth.
Instead, a wave of intense, blinding heat shot straight from his sinuses to the back of his brain. It hit him like a lightning bolt made of pure liquid electricity.
His eyes snapped open. Every single hair on his arms stood on end. His vision, which had been blurry and dim, suddenly turned sharper then a razor blade. He could see every tiny crack in the stone wall, every speck of dust floating in the air.
The dull ache in his knees completely vanished. The starving emptiness in his stomach was replaced by a roaring fire of endless energy.
His brain buzzed with a sensation so sweet and intense that his knees went totally weak.
"Holy..." Steven gasped, letting out a long, shaky breath that literally glowed with faint blue mist. "Holy shit!"
He looked down at his trembling hands. The pale skin was flushed bright red, and faint blue lines of energy were pulsing right beneath his skin like glowing veins.
It felt just like the highest grade stuff he had ever tried back on the streets, except ten times cleaner, stronger, and infinitely more addicting.
His soul hadn’t just reincarnated into this kid’s body. His absurd, unbreakable tolerance to bad substances had come right along with him. What would murder a normal mage’s lungs was giving him a nuclear power boost.
Steven wiped a trace of blue powder off his lip and stared at the massive pile of broken magical items in the dark corner.
A slow, crazy grin spread across his face.
"Forget sweeping," he whispered, picking up the iron hammer again with a laugh. "I’m about to eat good tonight."