Even after walking up to the entrance of the cabin, we still hadn’t seen any monsters. This made me more than a little nervous. All of the other pools of reincarnation were swarming with monsters. This was true for even the weakest and least specific of reincarnation pools that we had used in the past. This cabin was empty - and none of us had any idea why. The decorations were also odd. When we saw most Market buildings, they were either reduced to rubble or in a state of disrepair. However, in most cases we could still tell what they had once looked like. The Market had gone all out on some pretty crazy construction projects - they had created magical, futuristic buildings that would have put a child’s fairytale book to shame.
This building wasn’t like that. The dilapidated cabin looked like it had been in disrepair long before the Market had fallen. It had no real coherent decoration theme, or anything that made it look fancy or magical. If it were a store, we might have assumed that it just hadn’t been very financially successful. However, this was supposed to be a gateway to a Garden world. Would the people capable of transforming an entire dimension struggle to refurbish a single building in the Market? The idea seemed ludicrous. In other words, the way this building was decorated was intentional. It had to be. And none of us could figure out why.
The only thing that brought me comfort in these anomalies was Sallia’s theory - that the reason this building had no monsters was because of its impoverished-looking decorations. We hadn’t figured out how, but the monsters of the Market always congregated around expensive items. The more expensive something had been during the Market’s heyday, the more defenders it had. New monsters even drifted in to replace the dead after they were slain, keeping a constant level of threat up for any new transmigrators. However, the monsters clearly had to have some way to assess the ‘value’ of any building or item. Otherwise, there was no way they would congregate around expensive areas. Sallia theorized that this cabin was abandoned because the decorations were so impoverished that monsters just… didn’t think this was worth protecting.
It was a theory that felt a bit forced, but it was our best guess for how a Garden world had remained unguarded by any big, powerful monsters. Assuming that this place was, in fact, unguarded, at least. The other theory Sallia had was that there was a Guardian here, and we hadn’t noticed it yet. A much more terrifying - and plausible - theory.
Sallia swallowed nervously, and readjusted her grip on her sword.
Anise hesitated for a moment, before she nodded and moved to the back. She pulled out a few of Felix’s grenades, and I readied an extinguish. Even though I couldn’t see anything inside of the cabin using soul-sight or spatial sight, there was no reason to be unprepared.
Sallia swallowed nervously again, and then kicked open the door, before immediately pointing her sword at the interior of the cabin.
Nothing sprung out at us from the darkness. Instead, we were greeted with more silence and emptiness. Sallia took a cautious step inside, followed by the rest of us.
The inside of the cabin itself was also small and cramped, at least by Market standards. It was still much larger than a real cabin - but over half of the floor space was taken up by a pool of reincarnation at the center of the room. The pool was situated right in the middle of the room and the other parts of the floor were cramped and unsteady. If one of us tripped, it would be easy to fall into the pool by accident and take an early trip to the next life. On the other side of the room, one of the floor components was a bit larger, leaving just enough space for a large metal chair that was bolted to the floor.
“Is this really it?” asked Sallia, as she glanced at the pool. “I was expecting more.”
I also frowned. I had expected that perhaps the interior of the cabin would look different, but it also looked like a dump.
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Anise and Felix gave the area cursory inspections, as they started to circle the room. Sallia kept her sword at the ready, but none of us could see any danger in the area.
“The lack of monsters is kind of disturbing, if you ask me. Do you think maybe this ‘Garden World’ is a scam?” asked Felix, a few moments later.
“A scam?” I asked, as I swallowed nervously.
I hadn’t thought very much about it before. However, the Market had seemed like a rather chaotic environment during its golden age. Where there was chaos and profit, there were also people who skimmed a little money off the top. I didn’t know if the Market had any sort of countermeasure in place for handling thieves - but if they didn’t, it was entirely possible that there were counterfeit products in the Market. Such as reincarnation pools that didn’t send people where they were supposed to. If we had used a fake pool of reincarnation during the Market’s heyday, it would have been a huge inconvenience to us. However, it wouldn’t have been the end of the world, even if we couldn’t recover the Achievement we lost. If our findings from last visit to the Market could be believed, lives hadn’t been that expensive before the collapse.
However, that was only true before the collapse of the Market. Now, we had no easy way to purchase more lives. Reincarnating in the wrong world would cost us far more than a few thousand Achievement - it had a high chance of costing us any chance we had of our continued survival.
Just as my heart rate started to spike, and I wondered if I had led my friends into a dead end, I realized something was odd about Felix’s theory.
“If this was just a scam, it doesn’t make sense for it to be located on this street,” I said. “After all, the corporation that set up this street seems to have bribed all of the corporations in the area to keep everyone in line. Having a defective reincarnation pool would tarnish the reputation of this street, and then all eight reincarnation pools would lose business. Unless the company had some way to silence criticism of any users… but I’m not sure how they would accomplish that. The Market makes it very easy for people to ‘escape’ and give warnings to others, because the moment someone dies, they return to the Market and start sounding the alarm bells. Even if the companies that set this street up were somehow ‘in on it,’ I think they would place a scam product somewhere else. Maybe a few streets away, so that any complaints wouldn’t lead back to them. Instead, it would reinforce people’s beliefs that they should use this street, with its high entry fee, and avoid using untrustworthy external pools of reincarnation. So I don’t think this building is an outright scam, at least.”
Felix relaxed slightly. “That makes sense. Then what gives? Why is this building so… run down? Surely a company that can afford to set up a Garden world can afford basic decorations? I can’t imagine that it costs more to do some basic decoration than it does to terraform an entire dimension.”
“Let me check something,” said Anise. “There was a series of books that I really liked last world, and while it might not be the same here, I could always give it a try.” I blinked in surprise, but nodded as Anise started to test various walls, odd latches, and oddities in the room. A few minutes passed by, as she continued to fiddle around. Just as I was about to ask what she was doing, Anise moved to the metal chair, and her eyes lit up.
She shifted something, and I heard a few clinking sounds, followed by a hiss. Then, a hidden door popped open, right next to the chair.
I blinked in surprise. Anise turned towards the three of us, and gave us a smug, happy grin. I walked over to her and gave her a quick hug, which Anise returned with a giggle.
“There was a similar situation in a book I liked!” said Anise, enjoying her moment in the spotlight. “In that book, a Zelyrian mage had a… I forget the name the author of that book used. But basically, a Zelyrian mage used magic to create a sign. To people who used a certain spell in front of the sign, it would reveal its real nature - a set of instructions for how to get to a hidden room, where you could buy the real wares of the shop. Then, there was a fake store front for guard inspections and regular customers, and that part of the shop had regular wares. I know we didn’t use any spells in front of the advertisement out front, but I figured that the Market could have a much more effective way to find customers. It wouldn’t surprise me if the advertisements here can directly sense what we ‘want,’ or maybe the entire district overheard our conversation about what we wanted for our next life.” Anise shrugged. “Either way, I thought it was worth trying.”
“Well done,” said Felix, as he gave Anise a quick headpat. “I didn’t think in that direction at all.” He turned towards the empty chair. “The chair is probably to show interested customers the way to the ‘real’ wares of the shop.” Then, Felix frowned. “However, we still don’t know why this shop felt a need to hide the Garden world.”
Anise glanced down the secret hatch she had found.
“Maybe the answers are down there?” she asked.
I nodded, and glanced down. I couldn’t see the bottom - it just looked like a gaping abyss, with only a flight of stairs to show us the way. Somehow, the stairs existed without any source of light, or walls, so it looked like the stairs just led us out into the middle of space. Even more confusing was the fact that I couldn’t see the end of the stairs - the area was definitely messing with space somehow, because my all-too-human senses could not make heads or tails of the area.
But even though the sight made me nervous, this Garden world was too valuable to pass up. So the four of us began making our way down the dark, spatially contorted staircase and hoped for the best.