The following two months were spent making another rune ability and trying to find better or more reliable ways to locate Felix without Sallia wasting a rune ability on it. Sadly, we couldn’t find a reliable way to search for Felix that didn’t involve magic from out of this dimension.

However, my attempts at disguise and shapeshifting magic went considerably better than our attempts to find Felix without rune abilities. However, being able to either disguise or shapeshift would be very important, if Felix was going to be able to live a normal life without getting hunted down and caught by whoever had created him in the first place. This was an aspect I hadn’t originally considered, but the more I thought about it, the more important a proper disguising ability seemed.

So, to turn space, water, and illusions into a coherent rune ability, I spent a lot of time thinking about what exactly I wanted. Eventually, I came up with a viable combination of abilities.

I didn’t remember exactly how photons worked in my first world, since my memory was too spotty and garbled. I also had no idea whether photons were even a thing in this dimension, since the specifics of how a dimension worked could change pretty drastically from one world to the next. However, that didn’t mean that I couldn’t use my own understanding of something as a visualization method for what I wanted, even if it didn’t agree with the local laws of physics.

Breaking physics and reality seemed to be what the Market’s abilities specialized in, after all.

So I started using my image of the way light traveled through water vapor in the space around me as the medium for my illusion ability. My idea was to make space and water vapor warp light traveling through them, creating a detailed fake image out of light. Then, I would use space again, in order to create a sort of artificial projector screen wherever I needed one - ultimately, this would create a set of illusory images that worked kind of like clothes.

Was this how light actually worked in this dimension?

I had no idea. Probably not, honestly. I was certainly missing several specific details behind how this ability should work, at least.

But luckily, absorption essence was able to run off of my idea of how stuff ‘probably’ worked over the local laws of physics. In other words, my rune magic system allowed me to brute-force the creation of my ability as long as it wasn’t totally different from this world’s laws of reality.

Thus, after two months of hard work, I managed to create my third rune. At the same time, I raised my attunement back to advanced grade.

Power: Form your third rune (Note: this dimension does not have the laws to support runes, although it does somewhat support absorption spellcasting. moderate Achievement penalty).

Achievement +210

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

Achievement +150

With these two rewards, my total Achievement increased from 962 to 1322 Achievement.

After forming my new ability, I spent a bit of time messing with it. I discovered that my rune ability worked slightly differently than I had intended it to work. I had imagined my rune ability being some sort of light-bending space-water prism, or something like that. Something that would make creating fake images easy.

Instead, the ability seemed to take a page from my first ability and work off of people’s perception first, before going into a light-water prism afterwards.

My ability to create illusions was based at least partially off of madness. Specifically, I could now ‘feel’ other minds in my presence while using my new ability, almost like a second version of the soul-sight I had from my attunement. The mild mental attacks that my ability itself gave me access to also became actually useful, since my third rune ability drastically enhanced them.

Upon using my new rune ability, in addition to my own eyes, I would look through the eyes of whoever I was focusing on. I could then blast their mind with absorption essence in order to totally warp what their senses were telling them, creating a fake image. This was, indeed, an ‘illusion,’ though it wasn’t quite what I had in mind.

Then, once I had used someone else’s senses to create a fake image, I could activate the second half o the ability.

After hijacking one person’s sense of sight, I could then force the light in the nearby area to copy whatever I was forcing the original target to see. It was sort of like creating a mental illusion in one person’s mind, and then using light to replicate that for everyone else. Which was a weirdly specific setup and limitation on the ability.

I also noticed that when I used all three of my abilities at the same time, my perception of the world started to get very weird. I had already noticed that when I used my first two rune abilities at the same time, it felt like I was creating the nascent form of a new magic skill. When I used all three abilities at the same time, this feeling grew much stronger.

When I used all three of my rune abilities in conjunction, I felt as if my mind was more real than my physical body. Instead of regular old Miria, the four year old kid plotting to rescue Felix, I felt like my mind was stretching and warping as I tried to see through every single drop of water in my surroundings. The minds of other people around me started to feel more real than the physical world, and every single drop of water became one of my eyes. Strangest of all, I started to feel as if the water vapor and droplets of water in my surroundings were my real physical body, and the sack of flesh I had been born in was simply an irrelevant temporary container.

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It was an exhilarating way of looking at the world. It was a maddening way of looking at the world. It was a sense of perception I had never once had. It was also a bit worrying.

I liked my sense of humanity, and this new sense of perception that I could tap into when I used all three rune abilities at once definitely pushed back against my sense of humanity. The way my sense of self and my brain stretched and warped in this state felt alien to me.

Luckily, since I didn’t like the way it changed my thoughts, every time I activated this ability I could feel my Willpower stat fighting against the strange alien senses this ability granted me. As long as I didn’t use the ability for too long, it didn’t seem to have any long-term effects on my sense of self or humanity - just weird, temporary out-of-body feelings. Still, it made me a bit nervous when I used it.

However, even though using the ability felt incredibly odd and alien to me, that didn’t mean I intended to completely abandon it. I just intended to be careful about how often I used it, in case there were some sort of hidden mental aftereffects to using it. I was still curious about what ability I would form if I developed this ability to a great enough extent, and I was pretty sure that as long as my Stats were high enough, I could easily manage the downside of this ability. I just needed to pay attention to my condition and carefully weigh whether this state’s benefits were worth the downsides. So far, the only actual benefit I had found from this state was that it was much easier to process information from my thousands of new eyes, and sensing and attacking other people’s mind was much easier. I would need to keep a lookout for other uses once I had a better handle on everything.

My attempts to solidify my illusions into real shapes didn’t go quite as well as I had hoped they would - but they didn’t completely fail, either.

Sallia and I continued to meet at Old Mo’s restaurant every week or so, and with Sallia’s permission, I tried using my newly developed rune ability on her to try my shapeshifting plan.

I ended up being able to make very small, limited alterations to my body if I hijacked Sallia’s eyes and then used alteration to warp my magic system, adding some layer of ‘permanence’ to the illusions I created.

However, illusions didn’t contain things like nerves, muscles, or any of the other bits of biology that made limbs and sensory organs work.

In other words, if I created something like a third arm, I needed to create it perfectly, one nerve and muscle at a time, or else the new arm wouldn’t work.

My binding essence, oddly enough, seemed to partially circumvent this problem. The moment my body had a new limb attached to it, my binding essence perked up and tried to attach itself to the limb, almost as if binding essence was made to activate artificial limbs. I found, to my surprise, that if I was willing to spend an obscene amount of binding essence, I could use a lump of flesh with no nerves or muscles as a functioning third arm - however, since there were no joints, muscles, or nerves in the new ‘arm,’ it wasn’t very good at moving around without help. It cost an obscene amount of binding essence just to use a third arm to pick up a loaf of broad. In short, it was slow, messy, and difficult to use.

Useless though this discovery may have been, it helped me understand how people had developed mechanical prosthetics in this world. People’s prosthetic limbs didn’t need very much to work on a basic level. If one carved a metal arm and added a few joints, it would theoretically be able to at least do something. The more realistic the limb was, and the better it was crafted, the less binding essence it would take to move: but theoretically, one could probably even cut off their arm and attach a tree branch to it, and it would still work as an artificial limb. It would just be mind-bogglingly inefficient.

Ultimately though, I needed far more practice and better understanding of biology to get shapeshifting working. For now, my dreams of growing a new pair of arms in the middle of combat, then using those arms to beat up my enemies were not viable yet. Perhaps they would be in the future, but for now, the most I could do without breaking stuff in my body was to make minor alterations to my face and skin. I could now totally alter my face if I had a couple hours, and my work would be dozens of times better than what the most skilled make-up artist could ever accomplish. But I couldn’t just triple my height overnight if I wanted to have a functioning spine afterwards.

Which was disappointing, since I couldn’t just shapeshift myself into an older body yet. But at least I could disguise myself as someone older if I used my illusion ability. It would cost a constant amount of absorption essence to maintain, but keeping it up for several hours would be entirely manageable.

As far as Old Mo’s shop went, Old Mo did eventually decide that he was all right with taking me on as a little helper, in exchange for one meal a day and help learning to read. He had me knead the bread that he used for baking every morning, and he seemed rather surprised by the fact that I could keep up with him, despite the fact that he was an adult and I was a child. I constantly healed my arms with renewal as I worked, which was the biggest reason I could keep up with Old Mo despite being four years old. At the end of the day, Old Mo was pleased with my help, even though I suspect he originally accepted my request for work out of pity rather than any practical consideration.

My attempts to corner my mother for a serious talk didn’t go anywhere. She almost never interacted with me when she was sober, and the one time I did manage to corner her without her being high, she had been throwing things at the wall and punching her pillow over and over again. I could still little sparks of lucidity appear in her eyes more often as the months went by, which I hoped meant that my nightly healing sessions were going somewhere. Hopefully, I would be able to have a real conversation with my mother sometime soon.

Meanwhile, I also paid attention to news about the war our nation was apparently caught in. For now, there wasn’t much news either way - the front lines were apparently holding steady against the enemy, but neither side was really making much progress in the war. Our nation was constantly conscripting more men to fight, and ordering more guns and gunpowder to be made by the alchemists across the country. But so far, at least, the war hadn’t really impacted my life very much.

While I worked on my abilities, Sallia also got her third rune ability working. She was able to confirm that Felix was beneath the city - likely in some kind of sewer or tunnel system. She was also close to forming her fourth rune. After compressing her first nine runes into three runes, this would mean that Sallia would step past the ninth rune for the first time ever. On the islands, someone had mentioned that the tenth, eleventh and twelfth runes started to combine our rune abilities somehow, and none of us quite knew what that meant. However, I was very much looking forward to seeing how that worked out.

However, before Sallia formed her fourth rune, the two of us decided that it was time to rescue Felix. Sallia had located Felix’s rough location, I had a way to disguise him after we broke him out, and I was reasonably confident that we could take down the people defending Felix by relying on swordsmanship, extinguish, and Sallia’s metal manipulation.

In other words, it was time to finally break Felix out.