I Found a Door to the Elven Realm-Chapter 46: Half-Elf Eren and Emily’s New Peaks ";)
Eren woke up suddenly and immediately knew something was very, very different.
Not bad-different, it was like weird different.
Different in the way a car engine sounds after a mechanic replaces a broken part you didn’t even know was broken. Everything was running like before but better!
"Huuh.." Eren took deep breaths to calm down. But he realized very quickly that calming down was impossible. Everything was too weird.
For example, he could somehow feel the air touching his body now. A faint breeze from a tiny crack in the wall was brushing against his skin.
Yeah, this isn’t creepy at all.
When a few seconds of trying to calm down didn’t work either, he figured Emily must have carried him to bed and turned his full attention to the gorgeous elf lying beside him. It was still hard to believe that a woman this beautiful had actually been interested in him, let alone been with him. But he didn’t spiral into the same self-pitying thoughts as those first days.
He was living in this world now and had to accept his situation. Right in the middle of his inner conflict, he discovered another creepy detail.
He could hear Emily’s heartbeat!
Not figuratively. He could literally hear the blood pumping through her body.
The system notification from last night still floated in the dark corner of his mind. Evon system said it was a Soul Evolution. At the time, he’d been half asleep in a deep dreamlike place and the words meant nothing. Now, lying in bed with his wife’s warmth against his side, the meaning was hitting him.
All his stats were fully unlocked now!
Strength 36. Agility 36. Endurance 36. Perception 36. Every single one had been running at twenty-one percent capacity since the day he arrived in this world. He’d been walking around with the handbrake on for twenty-one days now and never knew it.
The handbrake was off now.
Maybe extra weights or safety mechanism metaphors would be more fitting for this situation. But isn’t this actually about relativity? Even two people in the exact same situation experience different things because they have different perceptual awareness. So technically, no analogy can ever truly represent another thing...
Eren truly felt the boost from his Intelligence and Agility stats for the first time. He was thinking faster now. But it was as much chaotic and hard to control as it was a good thing. He would need to learn how to concentrate. Also, he wasn’t academically successful back on Earth, but maybe now he could learn mathematics or something mechanical. If going back to Earth was even possible, that is..
He pushed himself up from the bed and three things happened at once. First, his arms generated so much force that the bed frame cracked under his palms. Second, he overshot the movement so badly that he stumbled forward like a drunk. Third, his hand caught the stone wall to stop himself and a spiderweb of cracks exploded outward from the impact.
Shit! Emily is going to kill me..This is one of the rare stone houses in the whole village. It must be precious.
Dust trickled down from between the stones. Eren stared at it with his mouth half open.
"If I ignore the scolding I’m about to get, I just cracked a wall. With my hand. By accident." This time he muttered without noticing.
He looked at his palm. Looked at the wall. Looked at his palm again. Not a scratch. Not even red.
A laugh escaped him. He needed a mirror and immediately. The polished metal surface on Emily’s dresser wasn’t great quality but it was enough. Eren stood in front of it and actually took a step back in shock.
The man in the reflection was him. Same face. Same eyes. Same slightly crooked nose from that glass door incident when he was fourteen and never told anyone before, ehem. But the important things was his new body was attached to that stupid face and transformed overnight.
He was big. Not just taller, though he was clearly pushing a hundred and ninety-five centimeters or around that range. His shoulders were wider by a visible margin. His neck was thicker. Every muscle on his arms, chest, and abdomen was defined without flexing, like his body had been sculpted and then wrapped in skin that was noticeably paler than before.
I became paler and white. Whole Asian countries would hunt me down to learn my method hahaha...
He raised his hand and touched his own face. His jawline was sharper and cheekbones more defined. He was glad he didn’t have that unnatural face lines like it is made with plastic surgery.
To sum up, all of the changes were on the same foundation but made him in an evolved version. Like someone had taken his features to a computer and optimized every angle. His base charisma stat was 36 and it wasn’t just a number on a screen. It was physically manifested on his body and aura.
And his ears.
Wait a minute!
He turned his head slowly. The tips were pointed. Subtle, maybe a centimeter of extra length as barely noticeable unless you were looking for it but they were there. Half-elf ears!
Eren stood there staring at himself for a long time.
He remembered his reflection from a month ago. Tired eyes. Thin frame. A man whose fiancee looked at him with disappointment because he couldn’t afford a decent car, new house and so many other things. She wasn’t predatory or anyone bad but he felt her gaze and suppressed demands in their relationship. He wasn’t even funny or handsome to cover some lacking parts.
But, that man was gone.
The person in the mirror was a hundred-plus kilos of dense muscle, standing nearly two meters tall, with the face of someone who belonged on the cover of a magazine and the body of something that could crack stone walls by leaning on them too hard.
Every stat at 36. Every single one operating at full capacity for the first time.
An average person in the Evon Universe or Earth had base stats around 5-6. Eren was at 36. More than seven times the average. His body wasn’t just strong. It was built from a completely different blueprint than everyone around him.
"HAHAHAHA!"
The laugh came out on its own from a place of pure, stupid joy. He flexed his arm in the mirror like a teenager and watched the muscle respond with terrifying definition.
"Look at this. LOOK at this! Twenty-five years of being the weakest person in every room and now I could probably arm-wrestle a car."
Then the hormones arrived!
It came crashing in like someone had kicked open a door inside his body. Heat flooded his chest, his stomach, his entire lower half. His Testosterone levels, his adrenaline, every chemical that had been operating at a fifth of normal capacity of the optimum state for twenty days suddenly fired at full blast.
All the stats should have this much effect on his body already but his situation didn’t allow it. But now his hands were shaking. His skin was hot with too much energy. Everything was too warm and too sensitive and too much...
"I need to.."
And Emily was lying on the bed. Wearing almost nothing, as usual, because this woman slept in a cotton shift that barely qualified as clothing. And she looked too pure and defenceless.
Eren gripped the edges of the dresser with both hands. The wood creaked.
Control yourself. You are an adult human being. You can handle basic biological impulses. Think about taxes or...actually why the hell should I suppress myself?
He had felt this urge before, on the day he and Emily were together for the first time. But since then he had become stronger, smarter, and had far more potential. Besides, this woman was his mate.
So technically there was no reason to hold himself back..?
She moved slowly. She looked over thirty years old but all Eren saw was too much cuteness or plump body. Emily let out a familiar sound she made when she was waking up, half-sigh half-hum.
"Eren?"
"Eren, why are you walking like that? And why is the wall cracked? And... are you BIGGER?"
"Turn around, come closer."
Emily’s voice had changed. The grogginess was gone. That was her hunter voice. The one she used when she spotted something interesting in the forest. The one that said I am going to investigate this whether you cooperate or not.
Eren walked to the bed and Emily was already sitting up on it. Her hair was a mess. Her eyes were sharp and alert in the way only a woman who’d been killing monsters since childhood could manage at six in the morning. She looked at Eren’s body from head to toe and then back up again. Slowly.
Her lips parted.
"What..." She got out of bed without finishing the sentence. She walked toward him. Each step was careful, like she was approaching something dangerous, which technically he was. Her eyes ran over his arms, his chest, the new width of his shoulders, the height difference that had grown by at least ten centimeters. She reached up and touched his jaw with her fingertips.
"Your face. It’s the same but it’s..." Her thumb traced his cheekbone. "...better."
"Thanks girl. I think."
She looked at his ears. Her eyes widened. "Your ears are pointed! Eren, you have elf ears!"
"Yeah, I noticed."
"How is this possible?" She pressed her hand flat against his bare chest. Her fingers spread across the muscle and made him shiver with excitement. Then she pushed. Not hard, just a test. The kind of push that would have moved the old Eren back a step but he didn’t budge.
Emily’s eyes snapped up to his face then lower to his below side. And something changed in her eyes. Something heated in both of them.
It was Charisma 36. It was the physical transformation. It was every stat screaming at full capacity. But mostly it was the fact that Emily had always been the stronger one, the faster one, the one in control, and she had just pushed against his chest and felt a wall.
"Do that again," she said.
"Do what?"
"Stand there while I push you."
Did she get a new kink?
He stood there. She pushed harder. Both hands this time. She was level 50 but Eren’s feet stayed planted on the ground.
Emily’s face flushed red from her cheeks to the tips of her ears.
"Get naked. Now!" she ordered with a flushed face and she was already pulling him by the wrist.
When she saw his face was frozen with her shameless demand, she ordered again.
"GET NAKED AND COME HERE, MISTER!"
Eren obeyed the order with great enthusiasm.
