I was ready to resummon the book once we were done swapping out items. This time, Felix wasn’t distracted, so instead of just Sallia and I, all four of us crowded around the book to listen to it and see what other information we could dig up about the Market, the past, and how we should proceed forward. I quickly caught Felix and Anise up on what Sallia and I had learned already, before I resummoned the book and we continued questioning it.
“So, I believe I last asked you about mana and switches…” I said, trying to pick up the conversation with the book where I had left off.
“This book has no awareness of any events that happened more than fifteen minutes ago!” chirped the book cheerily.
I sighed. This book’s limitations were rather frustrating to navigate.
“How exactly do essences and mana interact with each other?” said Felix. “I think you should try asking that instead. Also, I want to know if the book knows of any way to see how old our souls are, since I think it would be interesting to know how many lives we’ve had and just don’t remember before we joined the Market. Also, I want to know how souls are born. Since souls occasionally die in between reincarnations, but the multiverse is apparently expanding, there must be some mechanism that keeps creating more souls. If I had awareness of that, we might get some interesting insight into the Market and its mechanics. Also, I want to know about any other major multiversal factions, since those would be really good to keep in mind. If the Market was able to move between one world and another, and the old Orthans from the world of the black sun were able to cross dimensions, there must have been other factions that managed to do the same. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are giant interdimensional empires floating around in the Multiverse somewhere and we just haven’t encountered them yet. Also…”
Felix started slinging out ideas for useful information, a great deal of which Sallia and I hadn’t thought of yet. This turned the questioning session of the book into a strange question and answer session, since I needed Felix to run through his list of questions again before feeding those questions into the book.
The first thing we confirmed was that the book had no awareness of the greater multiverse. Anything that happened outside of the Market simply wasn’t programmed into its database, meaning we still had no information on what the greater multiversal factions looked like. No matter how I rephrased the question, it simply didn’t have an answer for us.
It also had no way to tell us how old we were. As far as we knew, we could have been ‘born’ five lives ago, or five hundred. The book failed to respond when I tried asking it about other places to check the age of our souls, no matter how I tried to rephrase the question. Even though this had been one of the less important questions Felix had brought up, it was still a bit disappointing that the book had no information on the subject.
The book also didn’t know what the ‘most common’ ways of crossing from one dimension to another were, or the best way to farm Achievement, or what training methods would guarantee that we reached Heroic Grade with our abilities. The book DID have a lot of useful tips for how to push from Master to Heroic Grade, at least.
It also had some tips on how to move from Expert to Master grade, although this information was much less detailed.
I still filed most of that information away for later. We would need to cross the first great barrier eventually, and although the book couldn’t help us get up to the wall of the first great Barrier, it was explicitly built to help people pass through it. A lot of the book’s advice was related to how to internalize a law of reality. It contained useful insights such as ‘some parts of a given dimension are more distorted or bent towards a specific idea than others - so environment can help a lot,’ as well as what types of environment we should keep an eye out for. It also mentioned that some dimensions were easier to train in than others. Apparently, during the golden age of the Market, there had been some dimensions explicitly kept as ‘gardens’ by larger corporations, where the laws of reality and the entire society of a planet were maintained to make some specific type of skill very easy to train and improve. Many Transmigrators would use specific reincarnation pools to ensure that they reincarnated in that world and then push through the barrier to Heroic grade; and those reincarnation pools often had even more specific sub-pools that let one choose what kind of family they would be born into, among other things.
This was immediately followed by nearly twenty minutes of advertisements for various garden worlds we could use to push through to Heroic Grade, depending on what ability we were trying to shove through the great barrier. Even Anise’s eyes started to glaze over during the long-winded advertisements. Which was miraculous, because so far Anise seemed pretty fascinated by the weird and miraculous aspects of the Market.
After the very long commercial break,, there were two final things we learned from the book.
The first was the biology of souls. Even though the book didn’t explicitly have data related to how souls were born, it did have useful information about how souls were structured, which was information I accidentally stumbled onto while trying to rephrase my question.
Souls basically had four layers to them.
The first layer, and the layer of the soul that got subjected to wear and tear most often, was the layer where Achievement was stored. Most souls didn’t store Achievement quite as efficiently as a soul from the Market, making it rather prone to deterioration. The Market actually did a sort of quick surgery on our souls the moment we got integrated. This made our souls store Achievement in a form that was less prone to deterioration. It was kind of like the difference between raw beef and frozen, perfectly preserved jerky. Normally, souls actually leaked Achievement quite quickly when they weren’t in the middle of a life, but after the Market changed the way we processed and stored Achievement, it became far more resilient against corrosion from the ocean of souls or damage from not being housed inside of a proper body. It also allowed souls to easily remove Achievement, making it suitable as a form of currency.
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This layer of the soul was also the first line of defense against both hostile soul magic and the ocean of souls.
Sadly, the book didn’t have any information on what Achievement actually was, or how it was made.
The second layer of the soul was where memories were stored. This layer of the soul was rather easy to damage, which was why most souls lost their memories from one life to the next. The first layer of the soul tended to get damaged while in between lives, and unless one had a totally ridiculous amount of Achievement, the first layer of the soul usually failed to protect the second layer of the soul perfectly, even if the soul in question had a lot of Achievement. This soul damage created little holes in people’s first line of defense against the ocean of souls, and through those little gaps, the ocean of souls leaked into the soul and erased people’s memories. While this layer of the soul was easy to damage, it was also very large. This meant that most soul damage from the ocean of souls erased Achievement and memories, but didn’t reach the third and fourth layer of the soul very often.
The third layer of the soul was basically where people’s ‘soul to brain’ interface was. Without the third layer of the soul, even if one successfully reincarnated, they would probably be a vegetable, or would have serious issues controlling their new body. The third layer of the soul contained a bunch of ways for souls to interface with the brain, allowing them to do things like think, walk, and breathe.
The fourth and final layer of the soul was where the ‘self’ was. It was the least understood aspect of the soul, and it was also what made people… themselves, for lack of a better description.
The fourth layer of the soul was also where affinities for an essence were stored. The Market had tried (and failed) to manually improve people’s affinity for essence through a very wide variety of ways, although there had been no successful attempts in all of the time the Market had existed.
The second thing we learned was about the ‘specialties’ of the four essences. I had asked this question mostly to get a better grasp on what the four essences actually were. Instead of the information I wanted, I ended up getting a rather surprising bit of information back.
“Regarding the four essences, naturally, every single essence has millions of different magic systems that can be created around them. These magic systems tend to be a mix of the local laws of reality, and whatever system the natives of a dimension build to use those laws. It’s not unusual for a magic system in a given world to look totally different from the magic system in another world, and it’s also common for magic systems to do something completely different from the ‘specialty’ of an essence. That being said, each essence still tends to be good at one thing in particular, even if one doesn’t have to focus on it.
“Absorption essence tends to be most used by warriors and people who fight with weapons or their fists, usually backed up by very light specific, contained abilities such as laser vision, super strength, flight, or other miscellaneous abilities. These abilities tend to be very easy to activate and highly specific in what they do, but also very limited in how they can expand.”
I blinked, and looked at Sallia.
She definitely fit the bill for being a warrior who fought with physical objects. However, I was pretty sure laser vision, super strength, and flight were all characteristics of… something I vaguely remembered hearing about a lot in my first life. I tried to remember what it had been, but my memories of my first life were just too fuzzy. Still, for some reason I kept thinking of people flying around in capes…
“Manifestation essence tends to lend itself more towards squishy ranged fighters who rely on their thoughts and pure essence as their main weapon,” said the book. “The most normal manifestation essence user is someone who is relatively physically weak and has excellent long-ranged and mid-ranged abilities, as well as a lot of different spells they have learned, the ability to create new spells with enough study, and a need to study the world around them if they want to expand what they can manifest using their magic system. Of course, there is still plenty of variance from one magic system to another - some manifestation essence users instead do things like try to predict the future, or use telepathy, or toss objects around.”
I glanced at Anise. She fit the image of a classical ‘manifestation essence’ user pretty heavily. However, I also noticed that I was explicitly trying to fit myself into a pretty similar set of characteristics. Perhaps my ‘new direction’ was a mistake?
Before I could get lost in my thoughts, the talking book continued on.
“Binding Essence users are rather unique. The major characteristic of binding essence is that it can bind ideas and physical objects together, depending on how the magic system works. Binding Essence users are far more reliant on the laws of reality related to their magic system, while other essence users tend to have a little bit more freedom. They can specialize in anything from cursing people by binding bad things to other people, to enchanting items, to binding useful abilities to themself or others and working as a support mage. Of course, Binding can also be someone who has bonded with a specific item and become a knockoff absorption essence user, or a community that has bonded with one item and created something like a communal ‘divine artifact…’ really, binding essence can go in a lot of different directions.” said the book.
I saw Felix perk up a bit at the mention of enchanting objects and divine artifacts. The moment the book mentioned it, I had a pretty good idea what kind of magic system Felix would be aiming for in the future.
“Finally, there is Alteration essence,” said the book. “Alteration essence tends to specialize in changing things, though what exactly gets changed varies a lot from one magic system to another. Alteration Essence magic systems tend to specialize in illusions, tricks, shapeshifting, and dimensional terraforming.”
I blinked, and thought about my own magic system.
I had briefly used illusion magic when I was on the islands world, but I had effectively abandoned most of that ability set. And I had done that entirely using absorption essence. Currently I wasn’t that good at illusions.
I wasn’t really very good at tricking people either. I wasn’t quite sure what a trickery based magic system would even look like.
I hadn’t even thought about shapeshifting before, although now that the book mentioned it, I could certainly see that the shaping System from the world of the black sun could do shapeshifting and dimensional terraforming. The Orutkhyri had been humanoid at one point, and after the old Orthans had modified them, they weren’t even really intelligent anymore. That was effectively a type of extreme shapeshifting.
I had none of the abilities my essence specialized in, and had a lot of characteristics usually limited to manifestation magic systems. I was specialized in long-range attacks such as extinguish, as well as healing spells. At least, right now.
I didn’t think it was a bad idea to go in my own direction. However, the book’s notes about what alteration essence usually specialized in still gave me some ideas.
Perhaps there were lots of ways to use my main essence that I hadn’t tapped into yet?