Markets and Multiverses

 

Endless Hunger of the Ocean is able to be evolved. You have (3) options for upgrades. If you would like to unlock other options, it is recommended that you use this ability in new and interesting ways and acquire large quantities of Achievement using the Ability before you die. 

Note: Ability evolutions must be purchased within 72 hours of returning to the Market after death. If you fail to purchase any available ability evolution within this time period, you will forfeit this chance for evolution, and will need to earn an Ability evolution in another life.

The current text of {Endless Hunger of the Ocean} is written below.

Endless Hunger of the Ocean:

Keywords: Ocean, Madness (2 Keywords.)

Glut Penalty: 20

While you are submerged in water, your body will generate absorption essence, regardless of whether the local dimensional laws support the existence of absorption essence. Furthermore, contact with water will naturally remodel your body and brain to support absorption-essence spellcasting.

 

Absorption essence may be spent to form ‘runes,’ a unique magical structure created partially within the brain and partially within the body. 

 

These runes have varied effects, mostly relating to strengthening the body and mind and allowing limited control over specific abilities. (This rune system is copied directly from the world you were previously living in.) You will also recreate the relevant dimensional laws within your body.

 

Whenever you use water-related abilities to drive something insane, you will collect Achievement as if you had killed it. Madness-related keyword Abilities will be slightly easier to form and upgrade in the future, up to [Master] grade.

 

Killing an enemy with a water-related ability or with water for the first time in each body will allow you to form a skill related to that creature. You may absorb this skill into your current body in order to permanently enhance yourself.

Note: Only Achievement-granting creatures can form abilities. Only three abilities from this effect may be ‘held’ at once. You may delete a copied Skill from this ability at any time to replace it with a new one.

Held Abilities:

1. +8 to all Phys. Stats and boosted magic resistance (Exceptional Magic Resistance)

2. +10 Manifestation Stat, Crude Fireball spell, wind symbol (Crude Manifestation Essence)

3.  +9 Alteration, you may absorb the black sun/organic matter/oxygen to convert into alteration essence (Emptiness)

 

Available evolution paths: 3

(Note: All currently available evolution paths will change your ability from [Basic] Grade to [Intermediate] Grade unless they state otherwise.

Direction 1: Weakness correction

Cost: 8,000 Achievement

Glut penalty: 20 -> 30

You have often used the runes formed by {Endless Hunger of the Ocean} to make up for your innately weak body, to great advantage, and have accomplished exceptional things using your powerful body. However, your low mental stats are frequently a weakness that you struggle to overcome. 

Effects:

This Evolution direction will merge the effects of runes 1-3 and runes 7-9, making your first 3 runes give +20 to your physical stats AND +20 to all of your mental stats.  Your seventh and above runes will act as if they were 3 runes higher, meaning that you will, in essence, compress the early runes of this magic system together, advancing faster and farther with the same amount of time and absorption essence. 

In addition, you will no longer be penalized for trying to form a number of runes significantly higher than what your body can ‘naturally’ maintain at certain grades of your Absorption stat, making it much easier to form huge numbers of runes if you have the talent, time, and essence regeneration for it.

Direction 2: Spatial manipulation

Cost: 10,000 Achievement

Glut penalty: 20 -> 40

Twice now, you have used your runes to interact with the power of space. Once, in your first life, you did so with the help of outside resources, gaining a glimpse into the fragmented space of that world and how to manipulate it. In this life, even without the help of a special resource, you have managed to interact with the underlying principles of spatial manipulation, proving that even without special resources, you have the ability to evolve in this direction.

Effects:

The original effects of the first 9 runes in this magic system will be completely altered.

The first three runes, instead of enhancing your physique, will now grant you +20 to your mental stats AND an ability. This ability MUST be related to space, and use the ocean or water as a medium. You will have significantly enhanced control over what ability is formed here.

The fourth through sixth runes will now fundamentally alter one sensory organ, providing +10 Perception per level, and also giving you improved vision when trying to see space. Additionally, each rune will provide you with a significantly increased ability to resist external spatial manipulation targeted towards you or the area directly around you.

The seventh through ninth runes will now grant +10 to each physical Stat and begin attuning your body to the power of space, allowing your body to innately interact with the idea of space, regardless of which dimension you are in. This will replace the standard fusion and condensing boosts that runes 10 through 12 would give you, and give benefits such as decreased wind resistance, the ability to teleport without reliance upon rune abilities at all, and increased ability to sense space using your skin.

In addition, every keyword activated within the past week and every rune you have condensed will also give you a moderately increased ability to control madness, as well as madness-adjacent magic such as illusions and mental attacks. 

After condensing your tenth rune and above, you will continue following the boosts of the original rune System, as if you had just formed your thirteenth rune.

In addition, you will no longer be penalized for trying to form a number of runes significantly higher than what your body can ‘naturally’ maintain at certain grades of your Absorption stat, making it much easier to form huge numbers of runes if you have the talent, time, and essence regeneration for it and diminishing how limiting the Absorption Essence stat is.

Direction 3: Skill copying

Cost: 4,500 Achievement

Glut penalty: 20 -> 25

You seem to derive a great deal of strength from the Skills you absorb using this Skill. This will push this skill in the direction of granting auxiliary, supplementary skills.

Effects:

The 3 skill slots provided by this ability will be expanded to 7, and it will be slightly easier to absorb and gain new skills than before. Skills will also be slightly improved.

I looked over the three ‘evolution paths,’ feeling a bit of curiosity as I did so.

Currently, it seemed that I had three major directions I could take while upgrading {Endless Hunger of the Ocean}. First, I could correct the major weaknesses of the ability, or I could focus the ability in a more spatially oriented direction, or I focus the ability on copying more skills from monsters I fought and killed using powers like extinguish.

I thought carefully about each option.

The ‘Skill’ direction was interesting. It more than doubled my skill slots, and it was also extremely cheap in comparison to the other options. I wouldn’t need to worry as much about how to divide out my Achievement in the future when purchasing things in the Market, which was certainly a relief. 

However, it also seemed like the weakest evolution to me. 

The other two ability evolutions would continuously get stronger the more Absorption Essence I had, because compressing the abilities of multiple runes into the first few runes would also save me quite a bit of absorption essence normally spent on upkeep. This meant that I would advance further into the rune System with the same amount of absorption essence, which would significantly increase my strength in future lives. Moreover, without the help of the rune magic system, my stats would return to being rather average in every world I reincarnated into, until I invested far more Achievement into myself. 

Furthermore, even though the three Skills I had gathered with {Endless Hunger of the Ocean} in this world were very useful, it also wasn’t guaranteed that I would find good Skills in future worlds. After all, for my skill slots from {Endless Hunger of the Ocean} to be useful, I first needed to find relatively powerful monsters and kill them with water. If there were no powerful monsters in a given world, or if the monsters were too strong for me to fight, my skill slots would be quite useless, since I needed to kill something to activate them. My skill slots were an incredibly powerful tool: but they were also very dependent on my environment, and didn’t help me in situations where I was already struggling to get by in a given world. 

I decided that it wasn’t a bad option, but I probably wouldn’t take it. The other two options simply seemed far more appealing.

Next, I thought about the Weakness Correction direction.

When it came to my runes, they offered me something that, at least in this world, had proven incredibly valuable: a way to strengthen my body. Creatures like the Orukthyri were several times more powerful than the average Orthanoid in this world. In terms of physical strength, it wasn’t difficult for an Orukthyri to outmatch ten or more trained soldiers, which was the primary reason the creatures had such an advantage over Orthanoid soldiers. The difference between somebody with grade 12 and grade 5 in a stat wasn’t small: it was probably around an order of magnitude plus some change, based on my experiences fighting Orukthyri in close combat. If I was stuck with the same frail body as everyone else in this life, I didn’t know whether our group would have survived the journey to this city. My strong body had been a blessing that had evened up the difference between me and some of the more common creatures in the middle of the food chain.

However, my limited Perception stat, in particular, was a huge weakness right now. My physical stats were well below what they could be, since my ability to perceive and control my own body seriously weakened me.

The Weakness Correction option for evolution basically solved this problem. It didn’t do anything more exciting than correcting my weaknesses and saving me the upkeep cost of maintaining runes 7 through 9 in the future. However, it was, in a sense, a huge leap forward.

On the other hand, the Spatial Manipulation direction was the most expensive and most interesting evolution path of all. 

In this world and the previous one, being able to manipulate space had made a huge difference when it came to combat abilities. The ability to be attacked from dozens of kilometers away had proved nearly crippling for our group in the wastes, because the fog creature had been able to attack us without us being aware of what it was doing or how to protect ourselves.

I didn’t want to be on the receiving end of such long-range, frustrating attacks in the future. The spatial direction would help me resolve this problem, and create lots of other unique and interesting abilities such as teleportation. It would even allow me to enhance my mental attributes early on, AND give me the ability to interact with magic related to madness, illusions, and mental attacks as a free ‘add on’ for each rune I built. My first three runes in future lives would give me access to spatial abilities, madness abilities, and mental stats. All three things would be incredibly valuable going forward.

However, it also totally removed the physical enhancements I was used to getting. I would need to reach the seventh rune to strengthen my body, and I would only get 10 points in each stat instead of 20. This would drastically reduce my strength in direct physical combat. It also meant that I would potentially need to wary of diseases again. So far, I hadn’t really worried about getting sick, because my incredibly high Fortitude made me essentially immune to diseases. If I lost access to the 60 points of Fortitude my first three runes gave me, I might need to be wary of getting sick until I invested more in Fortitude.

This evolution direction would definitely resolve some of my weaknesses and enhance my strengths. However, being healthy might become a problem again until my absorption essence stat increased significantly. And my close-range physical abilities would also suffer as a result of taking this evolution direction.  I would basically be cut off from physical enhancements, potentially for several lifetimes.

During my first fights against the Orukthyri, Sallia and I had discovered a rather unpleasant fact.

The Orukthyri had incredibly thick, hard to pierce skin. Coupled with their incredibly high Fortitude, our strongest attacks were often only enough to inflict surface wounds on the Orukthyri. Part of this issue could be attributed to our young bodies: we hadn’t finished growing up yet, and so we still experienced a stat penalty because our bodies weren’t grown.

However, if I traded away all of my physical stat boosts, I might run into this problem even more often in the future. While there might be ways to make up for this using spatial abilities, I hadn’t experimented enough with spatial manipulation to know for certain what I could do with it. It was hard to say what benefits this evolution direction might offer me in the future.

I thought about it for a moment, but ultimately, at least for now, I felt like the spatial enhancement direction made the most sense for me, despite its weaknesses.

After all, Sallia was already part of our group, and she was able to handle most direct physical confrontations. She simply lacked the means to deal with ‘weird’ powers and long-ranged attacks right now. Until her abilities evolved and she got more ways to address this weakness, I felt that it made sense for me to step in and fill that role. If I worked as the back-rank fighter, Sallia took over the front rank, and Felix built us items while filling other roles on a case-by-case basis, I felt that our group would be at least reasonably balanced. 

I nodded to myself. My plans might change by the time we died, since my friends might also get new abilities or ability evolutions, but at least for now, I was leaning towards the spatial manipulation route.

As I was thinking about my ability evolution, Sallia finished pulling me out of the river.

“Did it work? Did you find a way to stop whatever the fog monster is doing to everyone?” She asked.

I nodded, grinning. “I also got my first ability evolution. I’ll tell you about the results later, but first, let’s go fix everyone’s injuries. I can’t deal with the long-term damage yet, but I can at least stop it from getting worse.”

Sallia smiled, relieved, and gave me a quick hug. Then, the two of us started making our way back to the house we shared with the others.

 

 

acaswell

Shameless plug - you can read up to 21 chapters ahead on Patreon!

Join my Discord!