Markets and Multiverses

On the day of the festival, all of the villagers gathered in the village center, waiting for the arrival of the village chief to officially begin the celebration. Mothers and fathers stood with their children, holding their hands and smiling as they talked and laughed with each other. Children played or stood with their parents, buzzing with anticipation. The square where the goddess statue was housed was out of sight of the ocean, so parents could afford to be a bit more lax with their children as long as no one slipped past the adults guarding the edge of the festival area. The air was filled with a cheery mood, as everyone welcomed the end of the long months locked indoors.

I felt different from the other children when I stood among them. While I was also excited to see the festival, I had already attended plenty of festivals and parties in my previous life, and as I stood in the village center decorated with flowers and pearls, I couldn’t help but compare my vague memories of my first life with what I saw now. I really wanted to be able to cut off my memories and enjoy myself, but comparing this festival to the ones I remembered made me feel oddly sad. As I watched the other children bounce around and pester their parents, I wondered if I would ever feel anything like what these kids were feeling again. Even if my brain wasn’t fully developed yet, and I was still occasionally overcome by a bout of childishness, I had already grown up once. Being put in a position where I was expected to do so again just highlighted how different I was from ‘normal’ children.

It made me feel lonely, seeing the other kids bounce around while I tried to figure out if I fit in with the adults or the children.

Then, I spotted Sallia and Felix. They spotted me hovering near the edge of the crowd, and both of them started crazily waving at me. At that moment, my lonely feeling vanished. I laughed, and started crazily waving back at them. Their parents looked at me and suppressed chuckles, and my own parents also smiled as they watched our antics. 

Suddenly, I understood why friendship bracelets were so common in the Market. Why we had found friendship bracelets practically everywhere, and why they were cheap and mass-produced. 

It was because life in the Market without them would become a nightmare of apathy and detachment. As residents of the Market, we might never fully connect to the people we came across in other worlds ever again. The difference in perspective between residents of the Market, who died over and over again and worked to farm Achievement for their growth and survival, and ordinary people who had never seen what lay beyond their home dimension, was just too overwhelming to make friendships and connections easy to make and keep. The fact that market residents would live several lifetimes, while normal people would die and return to the river of souls after a single lifetime, only made this different in perspective bigger. But as long as the three of us had each other, we still had people to hold on to and care about.

A friendship bracelet wasn’t just a small item that let you spend lifetimes with your friends. It was what allowed one’s time in the Market to mean something more than just survival. Having a group of friends to reminisce with and spend time with was what kept us human. I didn’t know if previous Market residents had felt the same way. But I knew that I would have eventually lost my mind without the friendship bracelets, or broken under the stress.

I grabbed my mother’s hand, and began to drag her towards my friends. My mother didn’t say anything, and began to slowly slide through the crowd. My father tagged along a few paces behind us, and Sallia and Felix began making their way towards us as well. We reached each other and stood together just as the crowd began to buzz with excitement, and the village chief stepped in front of the crowd.

It was my first time ever seeing the village chief in person. The village chief’s steps seemed both steady and hesitant at the same time as he strode in front of the statue of the Ocean Mother. The man shared the same blonde hair and blue eyes as the other inhabitants of the islands, but stood nearly two meters tall. He didn’t wear a shirt, unlike most of the men in the village, instead opting to display his well-muscled arms and torso to everyone. Of course, it only took me a moment to realize why the man didn’t wear a shirt - he had eleven runes glowing proudly on his chest and arms. Opting not to wear a shirt was a method of asserting his power and combat ability to the rest of the village, and to any members of other villages he spoke with. While it was also risky to expose your abilities so blatantly to others, the intimidation effect of eleven runes was massive to someone like me who only had one rune.

Someone with eleven runes was absolutely terrifying. My father was considered a pretty normal adult for having condensed five runes, and most villagers sat somewhere between four and six runes. A few rare people would go beyond six, and those people usually joined the hunting teams to keep the village safe from landbeasts. But they were the exceptions, rather than the rule. The number of villagers with seven or more runes numbered less than forty in the entire village of six or seven hundred. For the village chief to display eleven runes was a testament to his hard work and his incredibly high quantity of absorption essence. And it was also a testament to how utterly terrifying the village chief would be as an enemy. Combined with my body’s growth over the past few months, as a five year old I was able to wrestle with a weak teenager from a normal world already. This was as a five year old who was just getting ready to start her second rune. The village Chief’s eleven runes were a form of intimidation that were impossible to overlook or ignore.

However, the Village Chief also had an interesting habit of shuffling nervously every few seconds. It was very, very hard to notice, but since I was paying close attention to the village chief’s movements I could just barely pick up on his nervous shuffling. I found the contrast between his obvious intimidation tactic and his apparent nervousness in front of crowds to be rather interesting. It gave him an oddly human side to contrast with his intimidating frame and rune count.

After the village chief made his way to the front of the crowd, the villagers quickly reorganized themselves, and within a few minutes several children and teenagers had been pushed to the front of the group. The first row of children was comprised of teenagers, all sixteen years old. The second row was comprised of six-year old children.

Seeing that everyone was gathered, the village chief gave the villagers a strained smile, before beginning to speak.

“Today, I welcome twelve new children into their first step towards adulthood. All of you have managed to reach six years of age, which means that if your parents haven’t started teaching you how to create your first runes yet, they will finally start to do so. This is an important milestone for you, and I congratulate you all on having finally turned six years old.”

“Heck yeah!” One of the kids, a taller young boy, yelled out, pumping his fist into the air. A few of his friends chuckled by his side, and I saw a couple of the adults also smiling in the crowd. The village chief’s smile became a lot less strained, and he seemed to relax a little.

“Now that you’ve finally turned six, apart from learning runes, you’re old enough to start helping out the village. What does this mean? Put simply, there are various tasks that provide for the village - however, none of them are as important as hunting the great fish. They provide food, bones, and scales for the village, as well as the organs we turn into fish glue and use to construct our homes and craft workshops. After the festival ends, the six year olds of the village will be tasked with finding a fishing boat to take them on their first hunt, so that even the young may learn to provide for the village and learn to respect the fishermen who put food on our tables. Those who need help finding a fishing boat, please see me after the ceremony. Those who are responsible for the fishing boats, as always, remember that children who are yet to complete their third rune have weaker bodies than you do, so you must find smaller and weaker fish to hunt, and you must be extra careful during the hunt. A few injuries or fatalities might be inevitable, But do your best to keep them to a minimum. Do all of you understand your roles?” The leaders of the fishing boats, who were standing to one of the sides, all solemnly nodded. The six year olds at the front of the ceremony seemed much less worried, and instead began giving the fishing boat leaders hopeful glances out of the corners of their eyes. Apparently, the mention of fatalities did nothing to deter the excitement of the children standing in front of the villagers.

“As for those who have turned sixteen, the eight of you who stand here today must learn to respect those who keep the village safe from land beasts. You will temporarily join one of the hunting crews and assist them in hunting down a land beasts. Hunting crews, I trust that you will ensure the new adults of the village pass their adulthood rite with as high of a survival rate as is reasonably possible. Again, it’s normal for a person or two to get maimed or die, but do your best to keep people alive unless it’s impossible,” said the village chief, his tone increasingly stern and focused. “We want people to learn to respect the land beasts that prowl the forests, and we want people to learn how to defend themselves in case of an emergency. But if they die, all of their learning will become useless. I trust all of you to do your best. Does everyone understand their roles?”

The teenaged crowd shuffled around, a bit as they began looking for the hunting crew leaders. Unlike the younger children, the teenagers seemed to feel a lot more nervousness, in addition to their excitement. The fact that they would be risking their lives during this village ceremony had clearly sunk in, and while they didn’t have the grim facial expressions people forced to commit suicide would have, they still held a certain healthy respect for their rite of adulthood. The hunting crew leaders, unlike the fishermen, didn’t have any visible change in their expressions. They simply stood there, silent and imposing, and I got the odd sense that I was looking at a line of statues rather than people. I didn’t see them change their expressions at all. However, just by standing still, I got a sense of quiet, tightly leashed deadliness that betrayed their experience fighting the land beasts of the forest.

“With that out of the way, let us give thanks to the ocean mother for what she provides. The Ocean Mother, each year, bequeaths unto the village the great fish, so that we of the islands may survive…” the village chief began to follow a more obviously scripted set of words, giving thanks to the Ocean Mother for the village’s bounty and prosperity each year. I found my attention beginning to wander as the village chief worked his way through his speech, and found Felix making funny faces at me when he thought his parents weren’t looking. Sallia seemed to pay rigid attention to the speech,. However, this impression was ruined by the fact that she was quietly tapping her thumb against her thigh, and occasionally fiddling with her hair. Even with all of her training as a noblewoman, she was having an incredibly hard time sitting still right now. I winked at both them, before I pretended to pay attention to the village chief’s speech again. It took a few more minutes before he finally finished up, then retreated out of the spotlight and blended back into the crowd of villagers.

“These speeches never seem to become interesting, no matter how many of them I go through,” said Sallia, heaving a melodramatic sigh after confirming the adults had stopped paying close attention to us. “And god-king’s beard, have I been through a lot of them over the course of my life. Lives.”

I laughed at that. “So these aren’t routine for you yet? I figured as a noblewoman you would have spent plenty of time dealing with speeches.”

“Oh, they’re routine all right,” said Sallia, grumbling. “And every time I listen to one I remember why I hate them. Just because I’m used to them doesn’t mean I like them, and I haven’t needed to brush up on my ‘I’m definitely paying attention to this boring speech’ face in four years now.”

“Why bother trying?” Said Felix, giving both of us a relaxed smile. “Nobody in this village is going to expect a four year old kid to stay perfectly still during a speech. Trying as hard as you do is pretty cute though. Like a kid trying to be a grown up. You just turned four by the village’s reckoning, so seeing you try so hard to pay attention makes you look a lot like your age, you - blaagh!”

Sallia swatted Felix in annoyance, before glaring at him.

“Rude!” Sallia said as she gave Felix a menacing glare. Felix was more than used to Sallia’s attempts at being intimidating by now, and just laughed in response.

“All right, it is pretty impressive that you manage to look like you’re paying attention to these things, especially since your Willpower is garbage. Still, keep in mind that you’re just a normal four year old kid, all right? You don’t need to try so hard. If you worry that much about being proper and looking like you’re paying attention, you’ll come across much weirder, especially as a four year old,” said Felix, giving Sallia a much more relaxed grin. Sallia seemed to think about his words, before turning to me.

“What do you think, Miria?”

I gave the question some serious thought, before I nodded. “I think you should try to keep some of your mannerisms from when you were a noble, in case you need to use them in a future world. Even if the etiquette is different, the training and posturing is something that might be useful to keep around as a sort of mental exercise for learning in the future, and I imagine it would make it easier to learn other habits of nobles and diplomats in future worlds. BUT, I also think you shouldn’t worry about it as much as you currently are. At the end of the day, you don’t need to be Sallia the Noblewoman, last of the Nostrausse house anymore. You can just be Sallia, and that’s enough. Keep the useful skills, but don’t feel stuck with them. At least, that’s my opinion.”

Sallia nodded thoughtfully, before Felix grabbed both of us by the arm. “Enough philosophy! Let’s join the festival and have fun!” He said, before dragging us into the crowd. 

The next few hours were a whirlwind of partying. Felix first dragged us to the food tables, which were lined up with rarities the village didn’t often have large supplies of such as tasty berries and specialties from the other villages. After that, a few of the adults rounded up some of the kids and taught all of us some easy to remember songs. During the next part of the festival, we sang slightly out of tune songs while the teenagers and adults danced. There were plenty of kids who forgot the lyrics to the songs, but if anything, the villagers seemed to consider that an addition to the fun. Then, after a while, the teenagers and adults sang while the younger children danced.

I couldn’t help but be glad this village was the first world we ended up in after entering the Market. It was a good place to think and take a breather while we got the hang of things, got to know each other, and prepared for our eventual return to the Market.

Hopefully, things on these islands would stay peaceful.

 

 

 

acaswell

My mother had a knee surgery today. Nothing serious. It went well, which is good. Random life updates. 

Reminder to those who haven’t read my earlier author’s notes that I’ll be going on vacation starting  December 23rd. I’ve already said this a few times, but in case you somehow missed the other notifications, here’s another one.

Shameless plug - On Patreon you can read 5 chapters ahead for $3! Or 10 chapters ahead for $5! Or 20 chapters ahead for $10.