Markets and Multiverses (A Serial Transmigration LitRPG)

With one of the wooden butterflies down, the clans on several nearby village-bearing beasts awoke. In seconds, they joined the battle, and began launching spells and arrows at the rats swarming their own towns.

I glanced at the warriors that had joined us, and located the [Sound Mage] that was responsible for sending messages to and from the other towns. I ran towards him.

“Tell the others who woke up to drop the wooden butterflies! Otherwise, the other clans will get annihilated and the enemies will keep coming!”

The [Sound Mage] immediately looked at the other clans that were awake, before he started pulsing with new waves of mana. Thirty seconds later, arrows and spells started to pelt one of the other three wooden butterflies, as the other clans that were conscious coordinated their efforts. It looked like the wooden butterfly would die within a minute or so.

I was almost entirely out of essence, since I had burned a lot of it in Anise’s four-person cooperative spellcasting, so I decided this was all I could do in this battle besides gather more information. I took a spare moment to pop open my Status Screen and take a look at my System messages.

The first thing I saw was the new skill I had gotten from killing a wooden butterfly with Extinguish. The moment I read it, I was glad I had ‘stolen’ the kill for the creature with an extinguish when it was nearly dead.

Endless Hunger of the Ocean has devoured Butterfly of Wooden Dreams for the first time. New Skill created.

Transportation of the multiverse: You possess the ability to spend a great amount of any kind of essence establishing a dimensional anchor in one location within one kilometer of you. Once at least two coordinates are marked using this skill, you may spend a much smaller amount of essence to open a passage between them. Every second this passage remains open will also consume a small amount of essence. Coordinates may exist between different dimensions, so long as they are in close dimensional proximity to each other. However, a great deal of extra essence will be needed to keep the laws of reality stable while creating portals that tunnel through the ocean of souls. DImensional Passageways can be any size, but larger portals require more essence.

I couldn’t help it. When I saw my new skill, I laughed aloud. When I had killed a wooden butterfly, I was originally hoping to get a copy of the ability they were using to knock us all unconscious. A massive, nearly unblockable sleep spell would have created an effective way for our alliance to minimize casualties during this journey - after all, we needed to keep as many people alive as possible during the battles ahead. I had been hoping for a good way to knock out all of these rats and make all of our future fights easy, thus keeping everyone alive right up until we got to the rift between worlds.

A part of me was still bummed out that I hadn’t gotten a sleeping ability - but this ability was just as useful as the sleeping one, even if its use was very different. This ability didn’t directly enhance our combat strength, or allow me to keep more people alive during fights, but it served a different, far more impactful purpose. It gave our clan an escape route.

All of us, myself included, had kind of suspected that we might not live after this mission. After all, the universal tree faction we were at war with had already shown that they were capable of responding to our attempts to halt or weaken their invasion. I didn’t think for a second that they wouldn’t continue to adapt to our actions in the future - just like any competent foe in a war. Once we cut off their connection to this world, closed the rift, and halted their efforts, they would respond. The only real hope we had of survival was the vague hope that they would have no manpower or attention to devote to us - which was possible, but unlikely. The only way that would really happen would be if the greater planes from our dimensional cluster were doing really, really well on their side of the war. However, even if they were winning and everything went according to plan, odds for our survival were still low, because we were still cut off from the greater planes, while the universal tree seemed a lot more capable of deploying manpower to our world than the greater planes were.

In other words, our previous best-case scenario still involved shutting down the rift, then becoming stranded in the middle of enemy territory while the enemy had displayed far greater adaptability and willingness to deploy manpower than our allies. I had honestly thought we would die after completing our mission. That was part of why Felix had rushed his production of the universal tree splinter so much - because all of us, myself included, thought we wouldn’t be returning.

This skill changed that expectation. The skill stated that I could open large portals over ridiculous distances with it - and that meant we had a way to flee after our mission was over. If we won, we would have a way to escape afterwards.

The moment after I slammed the skill into my fifth and final Skill slot granted by {Endless Hunger of the Ocean}, I began using my mana to fix a spatial coordinate into my skill. I could only place spatial coordinates in the area we were currently located - and I wanted to teleport us as close to the edge of the universal tree’s conquered territories as possible. We were still less than a day away from the unconquered parts of our dimension right now, so we would have a decent shot at escape before the universal tree created new monsters to deal with us.

A moment later, I grimaced.

The spatial ‘anchor’ required way more essence than I had expected in order to form. With my already depleted essence reserves, I couldn’t built a teleportation marker at all - I would have to wait until my essence pools refilled a bit. I sighed. We were going to keep moving while I regenerated my essence, so it seemed we would need a bit more travel than expected to escape. Even so, I was pretty sure I would have enough essence to build a dimensional anchor before tomorrow night.

I sent a quick message telling my friends about my new skill, then looked over my other System notifications from the battle. When I saw the messages from the local System, my grin only widened.

You have leveled up! Ice Mage has advanced from level 47 to level 52!

+9 Free Stat Points (X5) +3 Sense (X5) +3 Mind (X5) +3 Vitality (X5) +5 Mana (X5)

Due to getting the last hit on the wooden butterfly, I had gotten the levels from that monster - which proved to be quite substantial. That also pushed me above level 50, which meant I had a new feat to select. I spent a few seconds making sure that the battle was still going well, before I popped open the feat selection screen. There were three options available - but only one stood out to me, since it provided us with everything we needed for a real chance at surviving the aftermath of this whole mess.

Once I saw it, I only briefly checked the other Feats to make sure they weren’t better, before I made my choice.

Level 50 Feat Choice (Pick 1)

Glimpses of Space Unlocked by: You have learned many spells related to the manipulation of space and the more conceptual side of reality, and have gained some authority over it. Effect: All manipulation of space can be done using mana instead of other forms of energy manipulation, and becomes considerably cheaper (about 30%).

Once I saw this feat, I knew I had to get it. First of all, it would let me use mana to pay for my portal related abilities, which would let me diversify my mana pool a little bit more. More importantly, it would make a big portal used to evacuate the alliance of clans after our mission much easier - and thus, more people could survive the aftermath of the battle. In addition, when I got to level 60, I should be able to create a compound spark based around spatial manipulation, based on one of the earlier feats I had taken. This feat would combo nicely with that, assuming I survived long enough to really develop my spatial abilities further.

Right after I picked my new Feat, I saw another of the wooden butterflies wink out of existence. Another quarter of the survivors from the clan alliance woke up, and after another flurry of messages was sent out, both clans started to work on killing the third butterfly. The enemy had started to noticeably thin out now - the rats were no longer flooding out of the portals fast enough to make up for the rate at which melee warriors were clearing them out, which was giving the mages and archers even more breathing room. I grinned in relief, and then carefully watched the battle again. The third butterfly quickly dropped dead, now that so many clan mages and archers were focusing it down. This one died so fast that I couldn’t have snatched a last-hit even if I had wanted to - some other mage hit it with a feat-boosted blast of green energy that dropped it when it was nearly dead.

With that, another quarter of the clans awakened, and the last butterfly quickly died. From there, the clan warriors and mages started to wipe out the remaining rats in our area.

I relaxed. The battle had been won. I checked my final Market notifications, and smiled to myself.

Power: Level up (X5) Slaughter: Assist in killing a Butterfly of Wooden Dreams for the first time Influence: You played a major role in the battle against the extraplanar invaders!

Achievement +300 (X5), Achievement +5,000, Achievement +10,000

That brought me from 188,624 Achievement to 205,124 - the biggest single harvest of Achievement I had gotten from a major battle in this world.

I didn’t know what would come next, but at the very least, we had won this battle - and we had countered the enemy’s first real attempt to shut us down. I just hoped our efforts would continue to bring success.