Before we went to sleep for the day, Anise scooted over to me and stared at me.

“I feel like my control of manifestation essence is a little better than before,” she whispered. Even though she didn’t say anything, I could practically feel her excitement and nervousness radiating off of her.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Felix and Sallia looking at me nervously as well. Felix and Sallia knew exactly what was at stake here. Now that the three of us had included Anise in our circle of friends, nobody wanted to lose her when we died. I was the only one who could see souls, and I had already mentioned that I had observed people gaining Skills before using my soul-sight, and how it seemed to improve their stats. I could feel a nervous mix of anticipation and fear settling over the spot we were using as a camp.

And I grinned.

“I saw Anise’s soul change a little bit,” I said. “I think her aptitude improved.”

Sallia and Felix also smiled, before Felix stopped smiling and frowned. “Will that be enough?”

“I don’t know,” I said, feeling a bit of my own excitement dissipate. “Since it’s obvious that your aptitude towards an essence can improve, I don’t know exactly what the Market wants before it automatically brings someone into the Market. What exactly does ‘extreme affinity’ mean? Is it the absolute maximum possible affinity one can ever achieve, or is it just some sort of break point? I know Anise improved a bit, but now that you mention it… I’m not sure if that guarantees she’ll come with us,” I said. I started worrying again.

What if Anise hadn’t managed to reach the point where the Market would automatically include her? What if even after all of this work, Anise just disappeared into the river of souls? What if she became just another memory of somebody I had once cared about and would never see again?

Anise, Felix and Sallia also fell into silence as we realized that we still had no idea whether we would see Anise after this world. Eventually, Sallia sighed. “Let’s just hope this is enough, but let’s keep pushing. If Anise can help us shut down the portal between this world and the black sun using her manifestation essence, that would probably get her to the Market if she isn’t already going to show up with us, right?”

Felix nodded. “I think that makes sense. After that…” Felix glanced at his wrist, where his friendship bracelet would be located if it was currently materialized. Then, he shrugged. “Anise, we don’t know if we’ll show up in the Market together. I want to see you after this life, and we still have time to improve your affinity if this doesn’t go horribly wrong. If you do get to the Market, try to get a friendship bracelet and add us to your friends list, so that we can reincarnate together. We’ll keep an eye on our friendship bracelets - even though we haven’t ever tried adding somebody from far away before, hopefully it’ll work. And there are a few other things you should know about the Market…” Felix started outlining a quick plan for what we could do to meet up after joining the Market, if Anise ended up in a different Nursery, or a different part of the city than we did. After all, our arrival point was almost completely random when we returned to the Market, and while our friendship bracelets seemed to ensure that we ended up in the same spot, Anise didn’t have a friendship bracelet. Most of Felix’s plan boiled down to ‘try to get a friendship bracelet, be cautious of the skeletons and other monsters, and hopefully this works and we’ll meet up when we next reincarnate. If we end up in the same city, we can meet up earlier and plan together. We’ll try to find you, but bet on our next reincarnation being our meeting point.’

It wasn’t guaranteed to be useful information, but I desperately hoped that we would get the chance to see Anise again in the Market. I hoped that Felix’s plan would get put into use.

It wasn’t guaranteed, but Anise had already been incredibly talented in using manifestation essence when she was born. Hopefully, freeing the dragon had pushed her over the edge, if she hadn’t already been at that point.

After that, the four of us went to sleep.

The next day, Anise had recovered enough of her manifestation essence to keep going. The dragon woke up a few hours after we did, and the group got moving again.

We started walking through the ruined palace, looking for the link that connected us to the dimension of the black sun.

It took us about ten seconds to realize that the dragon was faster than us.

Much faster.

It didn’t move the way I had expected a dragon might - despite my images of a massive serpent flying through the sky on massive wings, the red dragon looked more like it was tunneling through air and space.

Every few seconds, I would get a slightly stronger taste of spatial manipulation, and the dragon would disappear and reappear a few steps forward. Apart from that, it slithered almost like a normal snake.

At least, if the snake was almost twice my height and several dozen times my length.

By some miracle the red dragon still fit in the halls of the ruined palace, although it was a bit of a squeeze. We ended up trailing a bit behind it, to make sure it had room to fit.

I also noticed that the dragon was simply crushing the metal spikes as we walked past. It even occasionally stopped to take a bite out of them.

“Is it safe to eat those?” I asked. I could still see that there was some sort of dimensional law being influenced by the metal spikes, and so I had been wary of messing with them for fear that they might suddenly explode or something.

“It’s safe for me,” said the dragon. Even though I couldn’t see its face, since it was facing away from us, I could hear the smile in its voice. “It is actually quite tasty. However, it would probably kill you if you touched them. I can tell that the old Orthans did something very interesting with the metal spikes - it seems like the laws inside them have been modified to let them hold way more energy than they were supposed to. At least, that’s my understanding - I mostly specialize in spells, admittedly. So my understanding of shaping is much weaker.

“Luckily, the energy that was being stored has mostly disappeared. It was either used or leaked out over the centuries. Either way, it’s no longer relevant,” said the dragon.

I paused.

“Wait a minute… these items have dimensional laws that are explicitly manipulating them to create unique effects?” I asked.

“Indeed,” said the dragon.

I paused, and thought about what that meant.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Did that mean that EVERY magic item was somehow related to manipulating the laws of our dimension?

If every single magic item was created by manipulating dimensional laws to make the item do something, I could certainly see why people would fail to recreate them. I had inspected several examples of using alteration essence to manipulate dimensional laws, and I was still completely baffled by them.

It was hard to say if my guess was accurate or not, but it was at least a hypothesis about how magic items worked. If we survived this, I decided it might be a good idea to return to the place where we had found Sekundyrr’s cage and steal a few more cages for research. Although I had no idea how the Orthans could have possibly manufactured anything like the tunnels and cities that we lived in if it they had literally warped the laws of reality to grant the cities and tunnels magical effects. Maybe it wasn’t a time consuming and difficult process, or there was a way to make it faster?

I shrugged, and tried not to let my mind wander off. Meanwhile, unlike me, someone else had been paying more attention to the implications of the dragon’s words.

“You said the power in these metal stakes might have been used. In that case, were these cords used to transfer power?” asked Felix, giving the metal stakes a curious glance. “Could that have been used to fuel the attempts to travel from one dimension to another? I mean, even if most of the magic items we’ve seen run off of no maintenance forever, I imagine that creating them still probably takes a fair bit of energy. If we assume that a portal to another dimension is the same…”

The dragon nodded. “That is what I believe,” it said. “I struggle to understand how anything like the travel to other dimensions you’ve mentioned could possibly be accomplished without massive quantities of shaping and spellcasting essence. Probably both. These must have been ways to power up the creation of the portal, if the old Orthans didn’t do something completely outside of my understanding.” It’s body squirmed a bit, and I could hear its voice take on a somewhat irritated tone. “Though, given their other actions, it’s hard to figure out what they might or might not have done. Come to think of it, I wonder where they got all of the essence to fill up these containers…”

I glanced at the dragon, and then thought about the fact that we had found it unconscious and strapped to a table. It hadn’t woken up when it was supposed to, almost as if something had been siphoning away its stamina…

I decided not to share my suspicion with the dragon, but I strongly suspected that at least some of the energy that opened the portal had been ‘donated’ by the red dragon. And perhaps there were other similar cells inside of the walls, which had once contained other prisoners that were used as batteries.

I decided to scan our area with soul-sight more often, just in case there were any other prisoners we could rescue. However, I didn’t see any evidence of anything else. Most creatures couldn’t survive centuries without food and water, after all.

We continued traveling for another ten minutes, before, for the first time, I noticed a fork in the passage. Given how long we had been traveling in one direction without leaving the building or seeing any turns at all, seeing a fork in the road managed to catch me totally off guard.

In front of us, there were two paths that branched out from our current location. If we wanted to go forward, we needed to choose whether we were going left or right.

I glanced out of one of the holes in the wall, and blinked in surprise when I realized that we were now significantly above the ground, despite the corridor that we had traveled through being entirely straight and not going upwards at all.

Space inside of this palace was even more strange than I had thought.

The dragon stopped at the junction, and seemed to hesitate for a moment. Then, it started moving left.

“I think this is the right way. It tastes more foul in this direction, at least,” said the dragon. “There may also be outside creatures here.”

The four of us continued jogging behind the dragon.

About twenty minutes later, Anise and Felix started to run out of breath. After all, unlike Sallia and I, they didn’t have the physical stats to simply jog nonstop for extended periods of time. In particular, their Fortitude was much lower than mine and Sallia’s.

Sallia and I picked them up, and I also grabbed Sekundyrr’s cage with my other hand. Then we kept moving.

Forty minutes of jogging later, we found our first hints of outsiders.

The metal stakes on the side of the hallway were normally quite dead - they were simply metal stakes with wires strewn between them. However, these metal stakes were different.

They had souls.

Starting from a certain point in the hallway, every single metal stake had a soul. And the moment the dragon grew closer, they opened their eyes and stared at the dragon.

And us.

I felt manifestation essence start to build up near the dragon, and decided to kill-steal a creature to see if it had a useful skill for me to use. I hit one of the metal stakes with an extinguish.

However, unlike other creatures the metal stake didn’t die from my extinguish. Its life force flickered, but didn’t quite go out.

All of the souls in the metal stakes turned towards me, and I felt alteration essence start to build up in the hallway.

And then, before the little souls finished whatever they were planning, the dragon finished assembling its spell.

I saw a single beam of light spring into existence in front of us. It was dazzling. It was as bright as the sun. It caused my eyes to hurt as light ripped into the hallway.

A moment later, as I blinked tears out of my eyes, I realized that the metal stakes were gone.

The souls in the hallway were gone.

The hallway was gone. The wall had turned into some sort of… glassy substance. The ceiling was now crystal. The floor was intact, so at least the dragon hadn’t destroyed our walking area. However, the rest of the hallway seemed to have been transmuted into random glass-like substances.

It took me a few more moments to realize how much essence the dragon had pumped into the spell.

The dragon has used a freaking eighth circle spell.

I looked at the dragon.

It didn’t even seem winded. The red dragon had used an eighth-circle spell to wipe out a single hallway, using an attack that I didn’t understand and that made Astrellium from the islands look like a toddler’s toy, and it seemed ready to fire another one at a moment’s notice.

The dragon grinned at me.

“I see that you’ve formed an attunement. Something related to death? And life? Quite a clever attunement, actually. Not the best I’ve ever seen, but in the upper tier of attunements, at least. However, these creatures seemed to be chunks of shaping essence brought to life - if you want to kill them using shaping essence, you should probably overcharge the spell a bit. Maybe make it about three times as strong as usual? That way you can punch through their resistance and kill them anyway.”

I nodded. I was used to specifically measuring how much life force a creature had and then applying exactly enough alteration essence to kill it with one extinguish. I hadn’t run into any creatures that were resistant to my extinguishes yet. However, it was also obvious that sooner or later, I would need to get better at dealing with creatures that weren’t quite so helpless against my strongest attack.

Anise, however, was focused on something else.

“That was amazing! What circle of spell can you cast?” She said, her eyes sparkling as she looked at the dragon and wriggled around in my arms. I quietly set her down.

The dragon chuckled. “I can do up to tenth circle spells, although I only know a few tenth circle spells. They are quite time-consuming to create, after all, and I don’t really see the need to reach for more. I have the essence to just barely cast eleventh circle spells, but I don’t seem to have the talent for it.” The dragon seemed to puff itself up, and I realized that the dragon might really enjoy it when people stroked its ego a bit. I filed that information away in case we needed to use it later.

The group continued onwards. The corridor went on for about another twenty minutes of jogging - and every single inch of it had been glassed by the dragon’s eighth-circle spell. A difficult corridor that probably would have taken us days to slowly clear out if we had been on our own had been destroyed by a single spell that took about four seconds to cast.

We found ourselves at another turn, and the dragon simply kept following its nose and removing any obstacles in our way using huge spells that annihilated everything in their wake.

Until finally, after five hours of running, we found ourselves in front of a thick, metal door. The taste of spatial manipulation was so heavy that it nearly drowned out my ability to taste the air around us. And the dragon’s expression of disgust grew deeper and deeper as we grew closer to the door.

We had finally reached our destination.