Chapter 608: Old World - Markets and Multiverses (Patreon)

Once we finished looting the treehouse, the six of us took a quick vote. Afterwards, we confirmed our decision to ditch the inner district. It just didn’t have any facilities we hadn’t already seen before, and we had already taken the most valuable resources inside of it - the ones stored in this tree house. There was no need to go fight the stronger monsters deeper inside when we had already acquired everything useful for us.

Once we made our decision, we left. We took the same path we used to get to the tree house in the first place. Most of the monsters we had cleared out hadn’t been replaced yet, although we did still stumble across a few scattered swarms of insects - but their numbers were much lower than before. Since their numbers were so limited, Sallia had a few of the recruits with less combat experience rotate to the front of the group, before she used these swarms as an opportunity to get them some Achievement and basic combat experience. Even with these distractions, it took us less than an hour to leave.

Once we exited the inner district, we moved past the jungle-themed inner district and headed deeper into the Market. Since heading deeper had shown us a few interesting facilities already, I hoped that we could find a few more before the battle against the serpent. As we travelled, I constantly burned through essence, trying my best to understand everything I could about spatial manipulation, space, and the way reality and space interacted with each other. I didn’t intend to let the dagger Felix had made for me go to waste.

The difference was enormous. Before, when I tried to train my spatial abilities, it was like trying to push a boulder uphill. I had been making progress, but I had known that there was no way I could plausibly advance any of my abilities before the battle. Now, it felt like I was rolling a boulder horizontally, across a greased sidewalk with all of the potholes and irregularities smoothed out. I still needed to put effort into making progress, but there was real hope that I could achieve something before time ran out. Every single training session, my brain would naturally latch onto little bits and pieces of what I was seeing and how those pieces of information fit together. My vision had also improved drastically when I tried to perceive space. I saw folds and bends in space that I never would have been able to see before using the dagger. Most of these glimpses into space were useless - they were like little decorations in the ‘architecture’ of space, with little meaning or value. However, as I got more used to the dagger, I started to notice little half-formed cracks and contortions in space that weren’t useless. As far as I could tell, they were kind of like flaws in reality - places where space and the laws of physics within the Market had produced naturally made soft spots in the world. These were the natural ones.

There were also many flaws in reality that looked artificially made - perhaps the leftovers from old industrial teleportation spells or industrialized portals. They were old and faded now, almost healed by the long passage of time. Even so, both of these types of flaws in reality were useful to me. I was fairly certain that if I exploited them, I could make it a little easier and cheaper to create portals, or bend reality using hope. They were like naturally occurring amplifiers that could make my magic do more and cost less - because reality itself would fight me much less when I tried to get something done.

I didn’t acquire any Market-recognized new skills or ability evolutions during that week, but my understanding of space was improving by leaps and bounds. I had a good feeling about what I could accomplish in the future if I kept studying these flaws and space and structured my spells around them.

However, my training and our travelling was cut short when we found another inner district. This time, the inner district had a new inner facility that I had never seen before - and which looked remarkably useful.

“Celeste’s Dream Market - a District of Dreams, Glamour, and Alteration - an inner district built around alteration essence users of all sorts!

“Step into a world of dreams, and take virtual lesson with our highly experienced, expert instructors! Proficient in almost every category of alteration essence usage, and with a variety of combat styles to fit every transmigrator! Or, if you want to pay less, you can listen to thousands of handcrafted, pre-recorded lectures on almost every topic relevant to an alteration essence based transmigrator!

“Complete with a virtual arena, where you can fight against a digitized combat instructor and get real, hands on experience and instruction from one of our instructors!”

“It looks like this inner district specialized in teaching?” said Anise, as she squinted at the advertising billboard floating in midair above us. “It’s mostly built around alteration essence. It sounds pretty appealing, especially since Miria has that dagger right now.” Her eyes slid towards me.

“I mean, if it were an inner district specialized in spatial manipulation or conceptual manipulation, it would be a perfect fit for Miria. The problem is that this inner district looks like it’s more specialized in dreams and illusions, which aren’t really Miria’s thing,” said Sallia. She looked at me a bit nervously. “Do you think you can make use of this inner district anyway, Mir?”

I paused. Sallia made a good point. I wasn’t really very focused on illusions or dreams, and going into an inner district focused on those two things made me feel more than a little bit worried that we might go in and get nothing of value. Then, my eyes strayed towards my item slots.

{Endless Dream of Hunger} was one of the better items we had prepared for the fight for more lives, and the materials inside of this inner district should still be useful for us either way. I also felt that there might be something useful buried in the hours of lessons recorded here - even if I wasn’t focused on illusions and dreams, the sign had specifically mentioned that it was useful for all alteration essence users.

“Let’s hit up more than just the material warehouse,” I said. “The billboard claims that this region has lessons for almost any kind of alteration essence user. If I do manage to find anything related to spatial manipulation, this could pair really well with Felix’s dagger and maybe help me get a keyword ability evolution.” I already had some ideas how I might be able to evolve one of my abilities, after all, and if I could maintain this state I had some confidence I could get an ability evolution before the fight for more lives. However, Felix’s dagger would dissolve after a month and a half, which would throw a wrench in my learning process. However… if I could get the ability evolution before the dagger dissolved, that would solve the problem entirely.

“It’s the first inner district we’ve seen in a week,” said Kexley. “I’m willing to take the risk. Besides, I have a supporting keyword ability from the alteration essence group of keyword abilities, even if it’s not my main focus.”

“I have a keyword ability related to alteration as well,” said Felix. “It’s related more to material manipulation and alteration, and my main focus is on binding, but I might still get something out of this place’s lesson program.”

“I think we can spare a few days or a week or two to check out the video archives here. If we realize it’s useless, we can just leave, but clearing out the defender of this inner district shouldn’t be too much more dangerous than other districts, right?” said Valeksi.

Anise gave me a big thumbs up, and while Sallia still seemed a little uneasy, she didn’t seem truly opposed to the idea - just nervous that we might waste our time. Since nobody objected, we decided to do a deeper delve into this inner district.

We took a step closer. Suddenly, the air rippled and twisted, as if we had stepped into a massive portal. I immediately checked the area through my different kinds of vision, and to my surprise, the area around me was now flooded with an absurd amount of the concept of ‘dreams’ and ‘illusions.’ It was as if we were being dragged straight into a dream itself.

For a moment, I fought against the surge of essence, before I realized what I was doing was futile. This was for a simple reason - the district itself didn’t exist in reality. The district was a dream. The district beneath the billboard was more like a mirage than reality - there was no physical substance to back it up.

I relaxed, and entered the inner district.

As the world finished transforming from physical reality into a dream, I looked around us. Then, just to make sure nothing was playing with my senses, I swapped my communication bracelet back into my item slot and swapped out the shackle.

<Can you all hear me?> I asked.

<Yeah, I’m here. What just happened? It seems like we got teleported somewhere?> asked Sallia.

<If I’m not mistaken, we just used our physical bodies to step into a dream,> I said. I showed everyone the memory I had of entering this district. We took a quick headcount, to make sure the six of us were all within the dream, and then started to check on the recruits, who had followed us in. They couldn’t equip items, so we had a much harder time verifying that there was nothing wrong with them - but at least through my soul sight, conceptual sight, and the connection with her troops Sallia maintained via her abilities, none of us could spot anything off with the recruits.

Once we were satisfied that all of us had made it safely into the dream, we took in our surroundings.

In front of us was a large block of buildings. They were much, much taller than the broken down, dilapidated buildings in the rest of the Market. They were as tall as skyscrapers - each building was probably at least a hundred floors tall. The buildings were all connected by sky bridges at set intervals - it looked like there was a bridge that allowed passage every five floors or so. The buildings glowed proudly with neon signs, electricity, and advertisements plastered around the outside of every building - so many that it was hard to even count them all.

The buildings had a hazy, ethereal quality to them - as if one of them might move, shrink, or grow the moment I took my eyes off of them. With a start, I realized that wasn’t an illusion - the buildings really were shrinking and growing. Every couple seconds slightly changed the shape, size, and architecture of each building, although the change was subtle enough that it was easy to miss at first. Exploration here was going to be a nightmare of the building itself kept changing and warping around us.

However, apart from the realization that this was going to be a headache, I also realized something else. Unlike the other parts of the Market, this didn’t look like a long-forgotten, desiccated ruin. This wasn’t broken down by centuries of neglect and disuse. This absurd mixture of magic, technology, and impossibilities was what the Market must have looked like in its prime.

Author’s Note:

Join my Discord! (I’m at least sometimes active there, while I admit that I don’t generally check the comments section. I’m not very active anywhere, though - writers are antisocial people, okay!)