The next few days passed quietly. I was finally aware of my surroundings, and so I decided to mess with my abilities a bit. {Echoes of the Deep} let me choose whether to embody life or death, and I immediately chose to embody life, since none of the bonuses from embodying death were useful right now. This gave me a 1-grade boost to my Fortitude, a boost to healing spells, a mild regeneration boost when exposed to sunlight, and the ability to breathe underwater. Most of these abilities were useless, but I appreciated the 1-grade Fortitude boost. Being healthier certainly felt nice, and I was more than happy to ward off the influence of whatever illnesses I could contract from factory fumes and whatever else was in the air in this world.

However, apart from the fact that I was conscious again, most of what I observed over the next few days was not promising.

My mother’s actions quickly confirmed many of my initial suspicions. She left late at night and often came back blissed out in the morning. She wore clothes that exposed a lot of her body. She walked in a way that was meant to emphasize the swaying of her hips. She could also have been an exotic dancer or something, but at the very least, she was some kind of red light district worker. I learned from…that kind of industry wasn’t illegal in this country. Most brothels were entirely legal. However, it wasn’t a great job, either socially or financially.

My mother was often absentminded when she was blissed out on her drugs. She remembered to give me food more than half the time, but she sometimes forgot to feed both me and herself. My malnutrition clearly wasn’t going to be fixed as long as I remained in this situation.

Only once, when my mother thought I was asleep, did I see anything other than a drug-induced haze out of my mother. While I laid down, focusing on my attunement, I felt my mother pick me up and gently cradle me, before sobbing and whispering that she was sorry over and over again for several minutes, before she set me back down and left the room.

That, at least, helped me make up my mind a little bit. I definitely wanted to at least try to help my mother in this life. I wasn’t sure if it was possible for me to help her, but I would definitely feel bad if I didn’t try.

I also learned quite a bit from talking with Sallia, Felix, and Anise.

First of all, I learned that Felix’s situation wasn’t urgent, at least. He was a valuable test subject, so nobody was going to harm him in the short term. That could definitely change in the future, but for now, Felix wasn’t in imminent danger - he simply had greatly restricted freedom. We could take some time to rebuild our abilities before we rescued him.

Sallia also confirmed that there was magic in this world, but it was rather… limited.

In the first world, I had developed a rather specific impression of what a Tier 2 world might look like. Giant sea monsters capable of teleportation and shooting lightning bolts out of their skin had roamed the seas, and the very ocean itself was a giant pool of magic water that could drive people insane if they looked at it for too long. I had originally thought that Tier 2 worlds were still rather extraordinary as far as magical potential went.

In the world of the black sun, I had instead started to wonder whether our first world had been abnormal. Perhaps it was a world on the verge of being considered a Tier 3 world, or perhaps some part of the planet had a far greater concentration of mana than the rest of the world.

In this world, I could confirm that our first world had been abnormal somehow. The environment we had lived in on our first world had probably been closer to a Tier 3 world than a normal Tier 2 world.

This was because this world was barely magical, despite also being a Tier 2 world.

There was only one major discipline of magic in this world. It was known as Alchemy. Some parts of Alchemy weren’t even things I would have considered ‘magic’ if I hadn’t been aware that essences were involved. Many parts of alchemy resembled chemistry, rather than spellcasting as I was used to thinking of it.

There were two major sub-branches of alchemy: Transmutation and Affixation. There was also a minor sub-branch.

Transmutation was the art of converting one physical substance into another physical substance. To me, it looked basically like magic chemistry - with a strong emphasis on ‘chemistry’ over magic. The only real divergence from proper, nonmagical physics was that an alchemist needed to imbue binding essence into whatever substance they were transmuting in very specific ways, or else the entire conversion would usually fail - possibly explosively. It also had a lot fewer limitations than ‘normal’ chemistry, even if it was still pretty specific about what worked and didn’t work. One could, theoretically, convert dirt into gold through transmutation - however, doing so was apparently insanely hard. There were a lot of restrictions about what could be changed into what, but at the end of the day, transmutation was the art of taking multiple substances, using essence to make them react to each other, and creating new substances as a result of those reactions.

Affixation was more obviously ‘magical.’ It involved stapling a concept from one object to another. For example, one might take the ‘melting point’ of one object and affix it to a completely different object, creating wood that would melt at the exact same temperature as iron instead of catching fire when it got too hot. One could even affix more complex and bizarre ideas to objects with enough skill, such as affixing a sword with the concept of ‘growth’ and making a sword that grew sturdier and repaired itself on the battlefield with each soldier it killed. Affixation was much harder than transmutation, and required a lot more creativity to use effectively.

Affixation, interestingly enough, was actually the less popular of the two disciplines. Several hundred years ago, Affixing powerful ideas to swords had been the most prestigious path an alchemist could take, but these days, guns were just better. And whatever people did while making guns in this world, it was much harder to enchant a gun than a sword. After all, the most important part of a weapon affixation was usually attached to the part of a weapon that made contact with an enemy, and enchanting every single bullet a soldier was likely to use in a fight was downright impractical. Enchanting the gun was sometimes useful, but given how rapidly technology evolved these days, people tended to focus more on developing better guns than developing enchantments for those guns these days.

Of course, Affixing hadn’t fallen completely by the wayside. A competent team of Affixers could still perform miraculous feats of magic, if they had the right materials and time. Affixers sometimes created practical enchantments to heat up the baths of the palace, or filter water for the wealthier sections of the city. Most importantly, alchemists who mastered both transmutation and affixation could create potions with miraculous, magical effects, such as healing grievous injuries and drastically extending the lifespan of the drinker. This was considered the most valuable part of affixation, and it remained the dream of many alchemists. The discipline as a whole, however, was no longer seen as the ‘superior’ path for an alchemist. Much like the art of transmutation, it was changing and adapting to the endless march of technology in this world, and it was having a much harder time of it than the other branch of alchemy.

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Finally, there was a third, less popular form of Alchemy known as ‘super creation.’ Some of the potions created by an affixer who was talented in transmutation could even affix a person with some sort of unique, special ability, such as super-strength or the ability to control flames with their mind. Such potions were pretty rare, however, and people who drank them sometimes ended up getting nothing at all after drinking the potion. I strongly suspected that this sub-branch of alchemy was where all of the absorption essence of the dimension was put to use, since even though the magic system didn’t really resemble the rune system from our first life, giving people one specific superpower and strengthening their body strongly reminded me of absorption essence. Sallia didn’t know much about the potions beyond rumors, since her parents were living in the middle of the slum, but both of us intended to check out these potions and analyze them whenever we got the chance. It was the first time we had seen a ‘duplicate’ essence during our travels through the multiverse - and it seemed to have developed its own, entirely unique magic system.

Felix was also rather interested in comparing what little we had seen of Sekundyrr’s magic System and this world’s local magic system. Sekundyrr had managed to communicate with our minds, most likely by ‘binding’ our thoughts to his. However, this world’s magic System had no equivalent ability at all, and instead focused entirely on binding things to physical objects.

Finally, I learned that every single human being on this planet had the potential to become an alchemist. Unlike the world of the black sun, there was no such thing as being born without access to an essence. Everyone could theoretically learn alchemy, as long as they spent time learning to control their essence and practicing. The discipline of Alchemy was simply very difficult to learn, and also quite expensive to experiment with, so most people didn’t bother.

After getting this background information from my conversations with my friends, and analyzing the situation of my mother, I started working on rebuilding some of my alteration and absorption abilities. Since more obviously ‘magical’ feats, such as controlling water with one’s mind, were rare but known, I fully intended to make myself look like someone who had drank one of those rare potions. I also wanted to pass myself off as a novice alchemist. This would open some doors for me to learn ‘more’ about Alchemy in the future, and it would also give me a proper avenue of making money in the future. Potions that cured specific illnesses nearly instantly or mended the body were well-known in this world, and were neither common nor rare. Most alchemists tried to learn at least a little affixation, just so that they could put together some basic healing potions. So it wasn’t too uncommon to find a few alchemists peddling their wares in middle-class parts of the city. With my renewal spell, I could probably mimic a healing potion pretty well. With some work, I could pretend to be a novice alchemist, which would hopefully go some way towards fixing the situation my mother and I were in.

With these thoughts in mind, I managed to take the first step in rebuilding my attunement again.

My Attunement was nothing new - I had already formed my attunement based on the ocean of souls twice, and I currently saw no need to change it. Extinguish and Renewal were incredibly potent abilities that I wanted to retain access to in this world.

Power: Form a [Basic] Grade attunement (Note: this dimension does not have the laws to support alteration spellcasting. Significant Achievement penalty).

Achievement +50

It would take a little longer to form my attunement in this dimension, since the laws of reality didn’t really support alteration essence, but I could still probably get back to [Intermediate] grade in a week or two, at most, and I doubted it would take more than a year to push myself back up to [Expert] grade attunement. It was several times more convenient than the rune magic system, even after my Ability Evolution had made it faster and easier to regain my runes.

With my runes, I decided to go in a slightly different direction this life. I had grade 6 in my absorption essence, and even if it wasn’t very common, there was enough absorption essence in this dimension for me to absorb a bit. I guessed that I could probably push my way up to 7 runes, if I kept both of my keywords consistently activated. Maybe I could even go up to eight runes. This led me to a very careful bout of planning, during which I discussed what Sallia and I were planning to do with our runes.

sent Sallia. she said.

I said.

said Anise.

said Felix.

I thought.

said Sallia, after a few moments of thought. she said.

With that, Sallia and I kept passing along the days, working on forming our first runes and setting up for this world. At the same time, I started to get more worried about my mother and myself. I was getting hungrier, and my mother didn’t seem to be getting any better. I needed to find a solution to my living situation and figure out what I was doing about my mother, and I needed to do it soon.