By the time Sallia and Felix were awake again, Anise and I had started to recover from our poor moods. Sallia and Felix both glanced at us, and seemed to realize what we had been thinking about, before they opted not to say anything. Instead, all four of us exchanged a few hugs and had a quiet breakfast, taking comfort in each other’s company. Finally, around midday, we started preparing for our future raids in the Market.
Sallia and I, in particular, needed time to rebuild our runes. I also needed time to rebuild my attunement, as did Felix.
Sallia, interestingly enough, could rebuild her magic circles incredibly quickly. She had built four magic circles during our sprint towards Anise’s location. She had spent a bit more time than she perhaps should have focused on her manifestation magic system over her runes, in order to experiment with the new, Keyword-based version of the magic system, and now wanted to catch her runes back up.
It was good to know that Sallia’s manifestation essence setup was working exactly the way she had hoped it would. One of the bigger reasons to take manifestation essence had been the fact that it took almost no time to rebuild spell circles, and spells would theoretically work no matter which world we went to. Sallia could rebuilt four magic circles, a rune, and part of another rune inside of a week, meaning that she wouldn’t be vulnerable to attack for very long once she regained control of her body.
The spells Sallia was using weren’t 100% effective, possibly because they were based on laws of reality that weren’t entirely present within the Market: however, they were still close to full efficiency.
We spent two weeks building up our abilities and training, working to make our future raids as fast as possible. I also did a great deal of experimentation on how my soul-sight worked in the Market.
The first thing I discovered for certain was that skeletons didn’t have souls. I had already started to notice something odd about the way skeleton souls and candles of life worked while we were running towards Anise, but now I could actually sit down and confirm that skeletons weren’t just hiding their souls somehow - they simply didn’t have one at all.
The implications of this interested all of us.
First, I started wondering if the reason skeletons didn’t resist being altered was because they had no souls. I tried teaching Felix my trick for breaking skeleton spines instantly, and Felix managed to pick it up after only a few hours, indicating that anyone with a decent alteration essence magic system could probably off skeletons pretty fast.
I had already realized that the skeletons probably hadn’t played much of a part in the fall of the Market, given how weak they seemed compared to us when we were only two worlds old. However, this just cemented that idea. There was no way these skeletons were anything more than cannon fodder against the Market - in fact, I started to wonder if they were even strong enough to be qualified cannon fodder.
Felix started talking about experiments we could run in the future, to see if there were other creatures without souls who we could mess with.
Sallia and Anise, however, were more curious about how something could exist without having a soul. After all, so far, I hadn’t seen anything without a soul that was even reasonably ‘alive.’ Even moss and spiders had souls. Since that was the case, why did these skeletons in particular not have souls?
It was decidedly odd.
For now, we filed that away as ‘potentially some weird but unimportant quirk of a magic system we don’t understand, and potentially a clue about the downfall of the Market,’ and decided to get back to that idea later. After all, there wasn’t much we could do about it right now. We were so weak compared to the Market at its peak that we would probably get instantly annihilated if we poked too deeply at the mystery. The strange living void of space that had killed us last life was probably about what we should expect the stronger enemies of the Market to look like, and right now, I would consider it a miracle if we lived more than a second against something like that.
Apart from that, during some scouting I confirmed that not every creature that resided within the Market had no soul.
At one point in time, I caught another glimpse of some wooden butterflies, all of which had small souls stapled on to their bodies. For the sake of experimentation, I tried using some alteration essence to simply twist their bodies into splinters, and failed miserably. I could see its body twist a little bit, but just like other living creatures, it actively resisted my attempts to manipulate it.
After that, I had to run for my life as a giant swarm of butterflies nearly ripped space apart to kill me. Luckily, my rune ability successfully shut down most of their attacks, and I was able to dodge the rest.
For now, I decided to assume that all creatures with souls had some resistance to being altered, and decided not poke at the wooden butterflies or other strong creatures of the Market until everyone was ready.
Felix managed to bring his attunement back up to basic, which allowed him to start messing with our weapons again pretty successfully. Unfortunately, the Gravitite modification to Sallia’s sword had been ‘healed’ by the Market upon our return, so Felix started trying to improve Sallia’s sword and my sword using other random metal components we found in the Market. Most of his attempts weren’t very successful, but Felix did successfully make Anise a shield and a sword, meaning our entire party was armed. He also tried to play with the plant core that we had grabbed during our last life, and claimed to be learning a lot from it. However, he wasn’t at the point where he could make anything useful out of it yet. I suspected that he needed a more specialized magic system to properly craft items in the Market, but since he seemed happy and claimed to be learning a lot from his experiments, I was glad that he was getting something out of the material he had paid 20 Achievement to bring back to the Market with us.
Meanwhile, Sallia successfully built her first three runes, making her incredibly strong, fast, and quick-witted compared to the rest of us.
Sallia now had grade 9 for all of her physical and mental stats, making her movements so fast I had no hope of physically keeping up with her during spars. It seemed that now and in the future, in purely physical fights I could expect to get trounced by Sallia every single time.
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Apart from that, Sallia picked up the ability to manipulate wood, and the ability to lock down space with her two new rune abilities. Her spatial lockdown ability was a bit more specific than mine - while I could just send out blasts of anti-spatial magic, so long as they traveled through water first, Sallia’s anti-spatial magic ability was more based on thickening up the space in our area, preventing it from happening in the first place.
Together, the two of us could create a relatively large space where hostile spatial manipulation just didn’t work. We hoped that would let us clear out the wooden butterflies fairly easily, since they hadn’t displayed any abilities besides spatial manipulation. Of course, we had no idea what other nonsense we would run into in the Market - but at the very least, the wooden butterflies were probably worth a fair amount of Achievement, which would help us grow stronger for the fight we were really worried about.
Interestingly enough, even though I had no hope of keeping up with Sallia’s physical movements during training spars, I could still see her movements just fine, unlike Felix and Anise. My body was simply unable to keep up with Sallia’s movements. A large part of the reason I could still mentally track her movements was because I had formed my second rune, and gotten my Willpower to grade 9 and the rest of my mental stats to grade 8. I was also beginning to appreciate just how much Sallia’s high mental stats complemented her high physical stats. The Orukthyri had stronger bodies and faster potential speeds than Sallia, and had sometimes just disappeared completely from my vision during fights. However, because their minds weren’t able to keep up with their body’s speed, the Orukthyri had seriously struggled to control their speeds, and thus couldn’t make very effective use of this ability. Even though Sallia’s movements were technically slower, they were much more deliberate and dangerous during spars.
Sallia wasn’t the only one who managed to form more runes. Since the total cost of forming new runes had dropped drastically, I also managed to form a second rune.
Power: Condense your second rune out of absorption essence
Achievement +160
For my second rune, I decided it wasn’t a bad idea to have the ability to teleport myself around. Frankly, teleportation was a massively useful utility and combat skill. I had teleportation during my first life, and it had been incredibly useful. During my second life, I had been forced to focus on other abilities - but that didn’t mean that I had forgotten how insanely useful being able to just pop around on the battlefield had been. As long as the creatures of the Market didn’t have a way to stop me from teleporting, I could just teleport away from attacks, as long as I reacted in time. I also needed to be touching water to rend space apart and move myself around, but with my dress I was always touching water anyway.
I was beginning to appreciate my intention of pivoting from being an all-rounder to a ‘mage’ type build more and more. Teleportation was able to make me invulnerable to most physical attacks on its own if my [Perception] was high enough. Perception also let me spot sneak attacks more quickly, and helped my eyesight. Even though I hadn’t originally thought about it, I was becoming an incredibly good scout as I improved my ‘mage’ build.
Teleportation and Perception were a combination that made me incredibly annoying to deal with on a battlefield, even according to Sallia. Being able to not get used as a sandbag by Sallia whenever we enabled ability use during our spars was the greatest affirmation that my build had potential in it, especially since in a real fight I would naturally sprinkle in extinguishes left and right. An untouchable mage teleporting around and killing enemies with drops of water sounded terrifying to fight against.
Of course, that didn’t mean I abandoned my swordsmanship entirely.
Skill: Gain [Basic] Mastery of a one-handed swordsmanship technique.
Achievement +30
Due to your {Basic One-Handed Swordsmanship} Ability, reaching Basic Grade in one-handed swordsmanship gives extra rewards
Strength +5, Agility+5, Fortitude +5
Admittedly, I stopped training my swordsmanship the moment it reached [Basic] Grade. I just didn’t see a point in training it further. Having a little stat bump was nice, but it didn’t seem that important to me overall.
If we came across a Skill Center and I could figure out how removing abilities worked, there was a decent chance that I would remove my swordsmanship skill the next time I needed some free glut penalty. It was something to think about. But for now, I would enjoy my extra 15 stats.
Finally, I worked on my attunement.
In three total weeks, I managed to push it to [Intermediate] again.
Power: Form a [Intermediate] Grade attunement
Achievement +200
Every single time I pushed my attunement forward, I could feel my extinguishes improve by leaps and bounds. It was a bit of a relief to know that my strongest weapon was online again.
It was also a relief to get 390 Achievement just from doing some training in the Market. I sometimes forgot how quickly and easily Achievement could come at the beginning of a new life, just from retraining all of my Skills. Even if the gains started to drop off insanely quickly, the fact that I had managed to get 390 Achievement in the Market just from training was honestly a testament to just how efficient some training and power related Achievement boosts could be. I had exited our last world with a little under 20,000 Achievement after 35 years. I had just gotten around 2% of that total in 3 weeks.
Finally, Sallia helped me kidnap some skeletons to experiment with extinguish on, for the final part of our two weeks of training.
I wanted to have my strongest ability online, and the first thing I needed to do was figure out how to adapt it to fighting against creatures like the skeletons. Even if Felix and I could wipe out basic skeletons incredibly easily, we had no idea whether skeleton mages had souls or not. And I also wanted to learn how to adapt my extinguishes better so that I could use it against other, stronger creatures.
Of course, using extinguish to remove the ‘flame of life’ from a creature that was undead was a challenge. However, after a great deal of experimentation and warping the way I visualized my ability, I stopped imagining the candles of ‘life’ I was attacking as being related to life itself. Instead, I made the idea a little bit more nebulous. Instead of just life, I started working to wipe out a mixture of life and energy when I wanted to hit something that wasn’t properly alive. I was reasonably sure that it would work against more powerful skeletons, such as the skeleton casters. And it would probably also do something against robots and golems, if we ever ran into those creatures in the future. Using extinguish to blast away energy, instead of just life force, definitely lost a huge amount of energy efficiency - after all, it wasn’t quite what my attunement was built to do. But it was good enough for now. I could think about how to improve it more next life or when I ran into circumstances that my current version of extinguish couldn’t handle.
Once I finished rebuilding my attunement to intermediate grade, the four of us decided it was time to get to raiding the Market.