Markets and Multiverses

After finding Anise, the four of us spent a few hours preparing to raid some nearby stores for alcohol, snacks, and other supplies we needed to take a day off. We had just died pretty horrific deaths, and then spent days running through the Market to catch up to Anise. All of us could use some time to unwind.

As we got ready for the food raids, Felix got a bit more familiar with his attunement, Sallia managed to finish building her first rune, which gave her a small dollop of Achievement, and with some difficulty, I also managed to build my first rune, much to my surprise.

Power: Condense your first rune out of absorption essence

Achievement +80

I didn’t even bother counting my new Achievement. For now, whatever I got was Felix’s. I wasn’t sure if we could do it, but if possible, I hoped he could get up to grade 2 of Binding essence before we left the Market. Sure, the odds were high that the next world we reincarnated in wouldn’t have any binding essence in it - but it was good to have it ready as soon as possible, just in case.

I was surprised by how quickly I managed to form my first rune. Apparently, Grade 7 Absorption Essence, combined with my ability evolution, played a larger role in improving my rune formation speed than I had thought. I had never before managed to form a rune in only a week and a bit of change: that was really more Sallia’s thing. I wondered if this was the new ‘normal’ for me after only a single ability evolution. If so, I was certainly looking forward to how much faster I could get through the growing and training period we went through at the start of each life. It didn’t seem like the cost of maintaining my first rune had changed at all, but the cost and difficulty of forming each rune had certainly gone down quite a bit.

Sallia’s first rune also gave us a little more information about how her Ability worked now. Based on the word choice, we had assumed that Sallia’s first rune would give her +60 to all of her physical stats. However, it appeared that this wasn’t the case - instead, it gave her +20 to her physical stats, +20 to her mental stats, and one ability. It was like she had formed her first rune, fourth rune, and seventh rune all at once, instead of just condensing all of her early runes together.

For her first ability, Sallia opted for the ability to manipulate bones. There were a lot of them laying around in the Market, and skeletons were also made of bones, which Sallia figured she could use to just rip apart skeletons with almost no effort. And, hopefully, that would also extend to skeleton Mages - they had proven a major pain in the neck the last two times we were in the Market, and having easy ways to remove them would be very welcome. And if we fought something like a wooden butterfly, it would still be easy to find ammunition sources in our surroundings.

The three of us had vaguely been thinking about trying to raid a few higher-level stores after we finished relaxing a bit, so I decided to build my first rune to counter the wooden butterflies. Therefore, my rune ability was built to snuff out any spatial distortions near me. I needed to channel the ability through some sort of water first, meaning I needed to push it through my dress - but with my ability, I could now create a giant ‘no spatial manipulation’ wave and toss it around with minimal essence costs.

Immediately after creating the ability, I had a very weird new sense added to my body, in addition to my more normal senses like sight, smell, etc.

Suddenly, I could feel any spatial manipulation happening near me. Or, perhaps more accurate, I could feel any spatial manipulation happening near water around me. 

Luckily, this included my {Lake-Gazer’s Dress}. Meaning that I had a nearly perfect 360 degree surveillance on spatial manipulation in my surroundings, as well as the ability to immediately snuff it out.

With decent positioning, I could still totally shut down the abilities of any future wooden butterflies we encountered. With any luck, they wouldn’t have other tricks up their sleeves to make our lives difficult.

Apart from that, I also felt another, slightly strange ability that was far more recognizable than before. It took me a bit of scrolling through my ability to figure out what exactly it was.

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. 

I realized that in addition to the ability granted to me by my rune, I now had access to a small pseudo-mental attack. It was actually surprisingly similar to the whirlpool of madness that I had used in the world of the black sun. However, unlike the whirlpool, this ability didn’t need its targets to see it first. Instead, it seemed to form some sort of spatial connection between my rune and the target, and then just directly pump mental attacks into whatever I wanted to hurt.

Even if it was very weak with only one rune and two keywords active, it was also exceedingly difficult to dodge. 

Of course, it was almost certainly useless against some of the resident creatures of the Market as well. Skeletons didn’t have brains, so there was nothing there I could try to drive insane. But in future worlds I would definitely find uses for it.

After that, the four of us quickly raided another soul fragment store, letting Anise buy a +20 to all of her Stats and looting another 92 Achievement. Anise got a small cut, because she wasn’t indebted to Felix like Sallia and I were - but 75% of the store’s Achievement went to Felix, along with the Achievement I had earned from making my first rune.

Then, we hit up some shops that were more focused on entertainment. We found a shop selling booze, another shop selling snacks, and luckiest of all, a working TV with some shows in an abandoned electronics store.

We carted it all back to a house, cleared out the skeletons nearby, and then settled down to relax for a day or so.

Anise, Sallia, and Felix had never actually seen a television before, and I only had vague memories of how to get it to work. It took us some fiddling with it to figure out how to power the blasted thing and make it turn on - apparently, there was a spot near the back of the TV where one could just directly toss in random essences to recharge the battery. The on/off switch was, for some reason, a carrot-shaped lever neatly folded into the side of the device. Luckily, figuring out how to get the TV to use the TV shows we had found were much easier - each TV show was contained in a small box the size of my palm, and I just needed to make the carrot-lever scan each DvD like a bar code to get the whole thing to work.

Halfway through, I was interrupted by a ‘useful’ advertisement.

Tired of needing to manually scan entertainment boxes into your TV? Do you want direct access to thousands of shows, all at your fingertips?

Buy telebox! The best entertainment service of all, delivered straight to your TV!

Only 25 Achievement a month.

I sighed, and closed the annoying advertisement.

Then I redirected my attention back towards getting the TV set up, before taking out the drinks and snacks we had scavenged from the nearby stores.

Anise ended up not being too interested in alcohol. She claimed that she hated the idea of having something influence her mind. I made sure to keep chatting with her and making her feel welcome, even if she wasn’t drinking with the rest of us. I personally still enjoyed a bit of alcohol when we had time to spare, but my friends were free to make their own choices in the matter, and I didn’t want Anise to feel left out.

The TV show was interesting, if rather strange. It was a show about a squid and a rabbit going on adventures throughout the multiverse, all while ‘archiving’ their adventures. Each record the two made of their adventures was hilariously wrong and inaccurate, and the show leaned into that to turn it into a recurring pun. I was pretty sure it was a kid’s show, which made me wonder how many people in the Market were actually kids.

Overall, it was surprisingly entertaining, even though I could tell that I wasn’t the target audience for the show.

Felix and Anise seemed fascinated more by the TV itself than the show, while Sallia was happier laughing along with the plot.

After we finished several episodes of the show, Sallia and Felix started to get tired since there was a decent amount of alcohol in their system. Felix had watched over Sallia and I last time we had returned to the Market, so I had consciously restrained my drinking to ensure that I didn’t end up feeling tired. Felix and Sallia deserved to take a break, and I could keep watch for a while.

Once Sallia and Felix were asleep, Anise looked at me thoughtfully.

“So Miria, what are we planning for the future?” She asked, as Sallia started to snore in the background.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Are you asking about what we’re planning to do for the rest of our time in the Market?”

“No. Well… yes, that too, but I mean… how does this work?” asked Anise. “I don’t know, I’m just… the past week has been a lot of time dodging skeletons, since I figured I should wait for you guys to arrive. And then you guys showed up and totally demolished all of the skeletons that I was having a hard time hiding from. I didn’t get to keep my spellcasting abilities from last life, and I’m just-”

“Relax,” I said, and pulled Anise into a hug.

We stood there for a moment, before I gave Anise a small pat on the head.

“Look,” I said. “You don’t have to worry that you don’t have a magic system. We care about you because you’re Anise. Even if you never pick up a single ability for the rest of your life, you’ll still be one of my best friends. So don’t feel bad. We’re going to keep reincarnating over and over again. Whenever you find a magic system that you feel happy using, we’ll make sure to rig the odds as much as we can so that you get a keyword ability for it. It may not be the same spellcasting system you used before, but you can still become an amazing spellcaster once we find a good magic system for you.”

“But what are our plans?” asked Anise, stressing the last word. “What are we doing in the Market? What are our plans for the next few days? I just…” she sighed. “I want something to focus on for a while.” She sounded a bit choked up at the last words, and it wasn’t hard for me to guess why.

All of us had left someone behind in the last world.

And the hurt of losing people we cared about didn’t get any better the second time. I could feel little holes in my heart where Ella and my family had once lived. I was never going to see them again, just like I would never see my father or mother from my first life ever again. I would never fly a boat with Olav again, I would never see the surface with Ella again…

I sighed, and focused on Anise’s question. Suddenly, I wanted something else to focus on for a while as well.

“Right now, we were thinking about raiding a higher-tier shop in the Market,” I said. “And we could also really use more information about the Market and the Multiverse as well. The last world was fully capable of traversing the Multiverse using the local magic system, and I’m starting to think that while it’s probably rare for a world to explore the wider multiverse, it’s not a bad idea to know how to open or close portals to other worlds. Just in case we run into a similar situation in the future. I’ve always wanted to find and raid a library in the Market, to get more information - but we’ve just never managed to find one. At least, not yet. I’m thinking that after today, we’ll spend a few weeks training up our abilities, and then we’ll start breaking down doors and looking for items for all of us. And then, with new items and some more Achievement, hopefully we’ll find a library.”

Anise nodded. She looked like she was focusing on my words. 

She was focusing way too much on my words, as if she needed to use them to distract her from her thoughts.

I sat down on the couch that we had borrowed, and rested for a moment.

After a few moments, Anise scooted closer to me, and we sat there for a while. We didn’t say a word, but we took comfort in each other’s presence, as well as the distant sounds of Sallia and Felix tossing and turning in their sleep in the other rooms of the house.

Even if we had lost people along the way, at least the four of us had each other.

It would never plug the holes in my heart where I had left behind two families, but it was something to hold on to.

 

 

acaswell

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

Join my Discord!