Markets and Multiverses (A Serial Transmigration LitRPG)

Time passed.

Felix ended up choosing one of the already-fleshed-out magic systems of this dimension - the one that I had witnessed shortly before Anise woke up. He decided to gain the ability to sing materials into existence. From Felix’s perspective, he claimed that the ability to generate useful materials in new dimensions could sidestep a lot of early materials shortages. In most dimensions, he needed a while to really get his manufacturing set up - he needed to gain some wealth and power, get materials, establish supply routes for repeat purchases, and handle a host of logistical issues. This magic system could let him skip several early steps and cut straight to the important part, if he somehow melded it into his already-existing Keyword ability. The other three of us thought that was a pretty good idea. If the magic system were a bit different, Felix might have been able to solve the metal shortage instantly, or even sing ‘sunlight’ into existence as well. Sadly, each material had a specific, corresponding song - and the more ‘off’ the singer was, the less material was created.

Felix’s new magic system also created an unexpected point of amusement - at least, for Anise, Sallia, and I. Felix didn’t exactly have a great singing voice, so the sound of him trying to get a musically oriented magic system to work was pretty funny. I didn’t tease him about it in case it hurt his feelings, but it definitely made me grin. Eventually, through the input of Elder Veridian, we learned that it was possible to use the singing of other people to generate materials - the binding essence user and the one providing their voice could be two separate people. Of course, this would require that other people know the correct song for the desired material, and have really good teamwork with the material creator - but it was viable.

I suspected that she had just gotten tired of Felix’s singing attempts. In any case, once we learned that, Anise, Sallia and I learned some of the simpler material songs so that we could help Felix out when needed.

Felix hadn’t found the right song for metal yet, only stone laced with bits of metal, but he was more than happy to have a way to create new materials on a whim. It was also fun to sing together as a group of friends. Anise had a high pitched and sweet singing voice, while Sallia had a singing voice that was a lot lower and huskier. My voice was something of a mix of the two - a bit more on the melodious and higher-pitched side, because I had made several small tweaks to my voice since my last reincarnation. Since I had picked up singing as a hobby, I wanted to be at least decent at it, and a good baseline voice was an important start.

Apart from working on material creation magic, Felix also spent a large amount of time manufacturing more copies of his flight boots. He replaced the metal with stone, but that didn’t change how useful the boots were. Since his boots granted people flight with no essence cost, the city was ecstatic to get as many of them as he could create. After all, most enemies that attacked the city were flying, and the city had a massive need for aerial combat. They had scraped by with a few flying defenders and projectiles - but with actual flight, the city’s defensive strategies started to change drastically. The city could now send defenders outside of the island itself to fight off weaker swarms of monsters before they even hit the city. It caused far less property damage and casualties during smaller raids. It might not have been enough to change the course of this civilization, but it certainly helped keep people safe. The boots weren’t very hard for him to make, either - the biggest time cost had been figuring out how to get them made in the first place. After Felix had a working blueprint, he could churn out about a dozen pairs of flying boots a week as long as he didn’t spend essence on other things. Since the city only had a handful of flying defenders at first, Felix doubled the number of fliers in a month and then just kept going.

Felix said that he got a pretty good harvest of Influence Achievement from every raid as a result, and I got a much smaller amount since I helped sing the materials into existence.

This did have a rather unintended side effect - as the city upgraded its defenses, and set itself up to protect its citizens better, weaker raids stopped entering the city at all. Fortunately for the city, no strong raids appeared either… meaning that the four of us didn’t have a good source of Slaughter Achievement, and I didn’t get to pick up any new skills, either. It was a bit unfortunate, but based on Felix’s Achievement earnings, it was more than worthwhile. 

Besides, most of the skills I had collected so far weren’t really doing very much for me. They were nice to have, but the monsters in this world were mostly weird fleshy horrors. That seemed to tilt their skills towards the same kind of body-horror related skills, and as a human I had a hard time making use of them. I was more focused on our research, since that was much more likely to impact our future after we returned to the Market. 

In any case, the 18,200 Achievement I got from constant ‘distant participation’ in each raid added up, and brought me from 32,481 Achievement to 50,681 Achievement. A wonderful, sizeable amount of Achievement that I was eager to spend when we returned to the Market.

Sallia didn’t end up going for the more well-established absorption system in this dimension, because the quantity of well-made, powerful enchanted items in some future dimensions would probably be far more limited than in others. In her opinion, it would synergize well with Felix in other worlds - but the magic system was a catastrophe in the Market. She instead went for a different, half-recorded absorption magic system that was built around absorbing certain ‘elements’ and turning them into a kind of addition to her body. Users of this magic system could, for example, spend a great deal of time in a pool of water, and slowly absorb water into themself to create a ‘water body.’ This would make their body much more resilient against things like cuts, because their body would genuinely become made partially of flesh and bone, and partially of a pool of spatially trapped water - much like my dress. In addition, someone who had absorbed water would be able to do things such as breathe underwater, control water with their mind, and their body would become much stronger. Any singular ‘concept’ could be absorbed, and the effects of the body differed wildly based on what concept the user focused on.

It was actually quite interesting. I was a bit tempted to try it myself, but I had enough on my plate with the dimensional terraforming system.

Sallia also noted that she didn’t anticipate using the ability set long-term - she was more curious to see a ‘similar’ magic system to her own rune system, and then see if she could get inspiration for a good Ability evolution. In short, she was learning the magic system more as a reference point than a way to supplement her own abilities.

More time continued to pass. We turned twenty, but due to the inability of the school system to teach us what we needed, we didn’t go. We continued to be taught by Elder Veridian instead. As she got older, she also started bringing a few other well-known Mages to help teach us - although none of them had quite the mastery of multiple magic systems that Elder Veridian did, each at least had some familiarity with the new magic systems that we were focusing on.

Anise eventually figured out how to transmute ‘fake’ illusions into real, physical attacks or objects. The key, according to her, was in further developing the eye that the entire magic system was based around. Anise tried a variety of methods for improvement. She had made the eye bigger and packed more essence into it, but that didn’t solve anything. She tried a variety of other things - but discovered the correct solution almost entirely by accident.

Anise was messing around with her illusory eye, and then, since she still preferred having four eyes instead of the usual two, she also decided to try doubling the number of magic eyes… just to see what happened. 

A very specific variation of creating a second eye turned out to be the correct way to make this magic system work. By creating a secondary eye, and then using essence to link it to the primary eye as a type of ‘sub-eye,’ one could record images with the main eye, then convert them into reality with the second eye. Anise was ecstatic when she figured it out, and she also got a hefty Achievement reward for restoring one of the missing magic systems of this world. I was also glad to know that Anise got an option for a new Keyword ability from it - and an option to upgrade her current Keyword ability. Based on Anise’s words, she could only take one option - but the fact that she could incorporate this new magic system into her old keyword ability proved one thing. It was entirely possible to mix and match magic systems into the same keyword ability if we fulfilled the right conditions. Anise wasn’t sure if it was the right direction yet, but said that she would think about it.

Elder Veridian was gratified to know that one of us had finally found a way to make one of the ‘lost’ magic systems useful again, and two years later, the first crop of Mages trained in restored magic system joined the city’s defenses. Anise got another hefty Achievement boost for helping to train them.

It was nice to see that one of us already had an option for a good ability evolution.

More time continued to pass, and we continued working on my sun project. We made progress here and there, but we never reached the breakthrough we needed to really make the project a reality. We kept running into logistical difficulties. Creating a sun was now within our understanding - it was entirely possible to create one and then fuel it with alteration essence. However, we couldn’t let it interact with the rest of the dimension, because once it left its spatial pocket, it would quickly collapse. Since we couldn’t figure out how to let rays of sunlight escape this pocket dimension either, we kept running into the same issue as we researched and experimented. Finally, we turned fifty, meaning that something else we had been looking forward to had finally arrived. We could ascend the stairway of heroes and see what ‘power boost’ the creators of this dimension had left for us. And, with any luck, we would get some inspiration for how to fix our problem.