Markets and Multiverses

“Are you completely sure that it’s somewhere in this building?” asked Felix, after a few moments.

“I’m sure,” I said.

“Then let’s look for it. If we can break off the connection between the two dimensions, this world can survive. And we’ll be rolling in Achievement afterwards,” said Felix..

At Felix’s words, Anise paused for a moment. She looked nervous, although she also nodded afterwards.

“Are you worried, Anise?” I asked. “If you are-”

Before I could finish talking, Anise violently shook her head. “I’m not afraid to move forward. I’m just worried that something powerful might come through the connection between our dimension and the black sun’s dimension, and that we’ll be in danger afterwards. I don’t want to slow you guys down, though,” she said. Then, she glanced through the hole in the palace wall that we had crawled through, and sighed. “Besides, I don’t think this world is going to last much longer if we don’t do anything,” she said. “Nothing has stopped us so far, but I’m worried about something happening at the last second, such as a monster popping out.”

I glanced around the ruined palace, and then paused to sample the heavy, cloying taste of space being manipulated. Then I nodded.

If there was any place creatures from outside this dimension were likely to show up, this Palace was it. 

“Let’s make sure to stay cautious and keep an eye on our surroundings,” I said. The others nodded.

The four of us started moving again. The hallway went in two directions, but unfortunately, my spatial-manipulation sense weren’t precise enough to give me a more specific idea which direction we needed to go. So we just chose a direction and started walking. I kept my soul-sight ready so that we would be forewarned if something was around the corner, and Sallia took the lead. Even though Anise didn’t have Sallia’s ridiculous arm strength, she also didn’t need to use her hands for battle, so she ended up carrying Sekundyrr and staying in the middle of our group, right next to me.

Felix stayed at the back, since his senses were also excellent, much like Sallia’s, and thus he had a good chance of discovering ambushes if Sallia and I missed something. 

The palace hallways didn’t change after nearly twenty minutes of walking. There were no rooms to the side, no research materials scattered throughout the hallways… there was nothing in our surroundings except for the stakes and the occasional moldy painting, to let us know that we were, in fact, making progress.

At least, I was pretty sure we were making progress. Twenty minutes of walking should have normally let us cover quite a bit of distance, so the fact that our surroundings hadn’t changed much made me extremely sure that some sort of spatial manipulation was happening inside this building. I didn’t know why the old Orthans had decided that the best use of spatial manipulation was to construct a giant never ending hallway, but it was very much annoying to walk through.

Then, in the distance, I saw something with my soul sight. It was a giant glob of mana wrapped around a soul. In my soul-sight, the soul, and the candle of life it was attached to, were both so massive that I wouldn’t be able to extinguish them even with ten times my alteration essence reserve. And it was oddly familiar.

“Stop,” I whispered, grabbing Anise’s arm as Sallia and Felix froze. I stared at the odd, massive soul in the distance and tried to figure out where I had seen a similar soul in the past. It took me several seconds, but eventually, I remembered what the giant soul looked like.

“Dragon,” I said. In the distance was a giant dragon’s soul. It wasn’t moving at all, which baffled me.

It was common knowledge that dragons hated outsiders. Even if the White Dragon from our home city had been too lazy to help us fend off the Orukthyri invasion, I was confident it would have helped if the Orukthyri had been outsiders instead. This was because every single historical record was very explicit about just how much dragons hated outsiders in their territory.

However, this dragon just looked like it was asleep. This palace was right next to whatever connected us to the dimension of the black sun, and I had no doubt that outsiders were at least somewhat more common here than in other parts of the world. Since that was the case… why was the dragon still here? Shouldn’t it have moved somewhere else?

Not to mention, there wasn’t much that a dragon could eat here. After we had escaped to Silver City, I had looked up what people knew about dragons. Apart from being inconsistent about helping their ‘subjects’, being worshiped as gods, and spending most of their time asleep, it was a well-known fact that all dragons needed to eat metal and had no other major components to their diet, except for mana. There wasn’t much metal available in this area though, besides the metal stakes and cables. But a dragon eating at the metal stakes and cables over the centuries should have left tears in the metal stakes that looked more like bite marks, rather than resembling unraveling twine.

“There’s a dragon here?” asked Sallia, sounding just as confused as I felt.

Felix and Anise also gave me blank looks, as if they were asking me whether I was sure. 

“I don’t know why it’s here either, but I’m sure it’s a dragon. It’s over there, through that wall,” I said, pointing forward and a bit to the left of the direction we had been walking towards.

“I think the bigger question is whether it’s hostile or not,” said Anise. “I mean, normally, I would expect dragons to be a neutral or slightly helpful entity, depending on whether or not they’re asleep,” she said. “The worst most dragons would do is nothing. But I also have no idea whether this dragon is normal, or a guard hired by the Orthans that just hasn’t woken up since the empire was destroyed, or what..”

Why stop? Sent Sekundyrr, as we pondered Anise’s words in silence. I sense other creature in that direction. Other mind. Cannot bind to my own mind to communicate.  Creature is asleep. Have not tried to wake it to talk. Maybe creature test subject? Can free. Help. Like Sekundyrr!

I blinked.

That was a distinct possibility. While dragons might be one of the strongest species of the world right now, during the heyday of the second Orthan empire, dragons hadn’t really been able to match the stronger Orthan spellcasters, according to most history books. Considering how little respect the Orthans had for any life besides their own, it actually made perfect sense that they might capture a dragon and use it as a test subject.

After realizing that the dragon might be held here against its will, I thought about the reward we had gotten from freeing Sekundyrr. If we could help a dragon escape, that had to be way more valuable than helping a member of Sekundyrr’s species escape. It would be a nice Achievement boost. Right? 

“So… free the dragon, get a nice Achievement bonus, and maybe get some information about what was happening in this facility? I mean, assuming the dragon doesn’t try to murder us.” I said. “Alternately, we could just avoid the dragon altogether. After all, if it tries to kill us I’m not sure if there’s much we can do about it. But it could be a helpful ally and a big Achievement boost if things don’t go horribly wrong.”

Sallia thought about it for a moment, and then shrugged.

“No risk no reward, right? I think it’s at least worth checking out. If it turns out to be dangerous, Miria, how much of its life force do you think you can remove with an extinguish?”

“Dragons have much stronger vitality compared to Orukthyri. I might be able to shave off around 7-8% of its life force with a full-powered extinguish, but I would have no chance at all of killing it. And considering how much it outclasses me, I doubt removing that much life force would really weaken it much. 

“Instead of thinking about killing it if things go wrong, we’re probably better off thinking of ways to slow it down and run away. But I can’t think of a good way to use general shaping to slow it down. I have no idea how strong its mind is, so I’m not sure how useful madness bubbles would be. And there’s no way I can use a spell to stop it if it wants to eat us.”

“It might be hard to delay it with any magic system, honestly,” said Sallia. “Dragons are supposed to be one of the strongest creatures in the world right now. I have a hard time imagining that they’re so easy to fend off, even if all of us get very clever in how we use our spells and other magic systems. Since dragons sleep a lot, they might not have an easy time resisting any sort of magically induced sleep, though. Maybe if you turn your madness bubbles into sleeping bubbles, it would let us flee if needed?”

I thought about it, and felt that Sallia’s words made sense. I turned towards Felix and Anise. “You two have any other ideas? If you guys want to dodge the dragon and avoid it, now is the time to speak.”

Anise, oddly enough, looked pretty eager. “I think it might be a good idea to set the dragon free. After all, since they hate outsiders and we’re right next to the dimension of the black sun, freeing the dragon could give us a powerful ally to keep outside creatures away from us.”

“I’m okay with seeing if we can befriend it and free it,” said Felix.

I nodded, and started testing how to make my whirlpool of madness water from my fourth rune ability turn into a series of sleeping bubbles. Due to my innate talent in manipulating alteration essence, It only took me a minute or two to get an ‘ideal’ sleeping bubble, although I did accidentally make Sallia and Anise drowsy a few times during my experimentation, and I also accidentally knocked Sekundyrr unconscious. I made a wake-up water bubble after another few minutes of experimentation, thus refreshing Sallia and Anise. And the same wake-up bubble completely failed to help Sekundyrr at all, because Sekundyrr’s eyes were closed while it was asleep.

It took a few minutes for it to wake up on its own.

The empty hallways continued on for nearly ten more minutes of walking. However, the dragon’s soul grew closer and closer with each step. 

Eventually, we reached the spot where the dragon’s soul was located.

And then, I felt slightly confused.

There was no door, or window, or any other way for us to access the dragon.

I was now sure that we were standing right next to the dragon. It was just behind the wall on our left. If the wall weren’t present, I could probably touch it if I walked just a few steps forward.

However, I couldn’t see any way to access the creature.

“It’s right behind the wall,” I said. “But I don’t see a way to access it.”

“Perhaps it’s stored in some sort of pocket dimension, or something like that?” suggested Felix. “Or maybe there’s some sort of hidden room?”

The four of us decided to look for a ‘hidden room’ first, and began examining the area much more carefully. However, we couldn’t find anything.

Eventually, Sallia tried stabbing the wall with her sword a few times, which, unfortunately, accomplished nothing. 

That is, until Sallia put some manifestation essence into her sword. Then, the gravitite in her sword activated, and the stones in the wall started to dig themselves out of the wall and float towards her.

I frowned, and looked at Sallia’s sword. The magic gravity created by her sword was in no way, shape, or form strong enough to drag around the massive bricks of stone that made up the interior palace wall. Since that was the case, why had her sword managed to move the wall around?

Before I could resolve my confusion, a second layer of the wall was peeled away, and I felt a very small amount of the taste of spatial manipulation slip away. 

On the other side of the wall lay a dragon, sleeping. Its scales were a pure crimson color, akin to the color of rubies, and its metallic body was sleek as polished steel. And it was chained to a research table, much like Sekundyrr had been. 

However, while Sekundyrr had seemed incredibly pleased to see us, the dragon didn’t even stir. Despite our presence, it was fast asleep.

The chains binding the dragon were made of a stone material that I recognized, although it took me a moment to figure out what it was. It was Prismium, the stone we hadn’t figured out the use for after discovering it in the Dimensional Habitat facility. After we had seen it used as a heat-shield, we had assumed the stone could somehow be used to absorb heat, but when we had tried using fire spells near it, nothing had happened, causing us to give up on using the stone for the time being.

We stared at the dragon for a few moments, before Felix softly snorted.

After being abducted and used as a test subject, the first thing the bloody dragon had decided to do was take a nap for a couple centuries. Typical.

Just as I was about to ask my friends if we still wanted to free it, the dragon stirred fitfully, and then opened its eyes and stared right at me.

For the first time in this life, I had come in contact with an awakened dragon.

 

acaswell

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

My other story now has volume 1 available on Kindle! It’s about a girl getting transported to a new world, and then exploring the nature of the weird RPG System that governs that dimension using the power of the scientific method!

https://www.amazon.com/Small-Town-Southern-Illvaria-Scientist-ebook/dp/B0CFW34H98

Join my Discord!