Markets and Multiverses (A Serial Transmigration LitRPG)

The next day, I woke up feeling nauseous, dizzy, and weak. My first, instinctive reaction to feeling any kind of major discomfort was to reach for a healing spell - which just made it ten times worse. I felt like I was trying to run a marathon on a broken leg, and for a few seconds, I could barely even focus as my vision turned into a blurry mess of pain.

After that, I contacted my friends through the communication bracelet and asked them to poke around the settlement, and see if any of the healers here could give me a quick check. Fortunately, we didn’t need to pay anything or bargain for a healer - whatever this culture’s ‘guest rites’ were, they included the right to ask a few healers to look over our injured, apparently. I was thus treated to a competent medical examination by a two-foot tall cube-shaped shrub, with six insectoid faces made out of branches - one on each side of the cube.

The shrub-person’s diagnosis was that I had overstrained my essence pools, due to trying to cram an entire tribe’s worth of essence into my essence pool. The shrub man actually seemed quite baffled about how I had done so in the first place, since he couldn’t think of a way I had added more essence to my essence pool than I could naturally hold in the first place. I responded by telling him that it was due to the interaction between a gift and a trait I had taken, which only confused the poor shrub more - he seemed quite certain that anything provided by the System shouldn’t harm its user under any normal circumstances. I eventually managed to sidestep the issue entirely, which was lucky, because I had no idea how to even start explaining the fact that I was now half-conceptual entity, and had slightly pulled at the nature of reality to make some things happen that really shouldn’t work under normal circumstances, all due to my market-based abilities.

In any case, the medical diagnosis was simple. I needed to avoid using any magic at all for a week. If I avoided using any magic, my body should finish healing up on its own, so long as I gave it the rest it needed. On one hand, I was glad that whatever I had done to myself wasn’t permanent. If I had locked myself out of magic until our next reincarnation, that would kill any odds of me getting any more useful skill evolutions or high Achievement rewards. On other hand, one week was a very long time, since we were going to be kicked out before I finished healing up. The Guest-Rites these people adhered to came with a time limit, and it looked like I was going to be more or less useless for a few days after we left. That wasn’t the most comforting thought, since it was always the hardest to get started with something. I loved being there for the people we had saved, and I wanted to be there for my friends and family when push came to shove - and at least for a few days that just… wasn’t going to happen. I wasn’t sure how to handle being potentially useless in a crisis. I had gotten used to being someone who could keep the people around me safe when a disaster came, and losing that identity, even temporarily, made me far more uncomfortable than I wanted to admit. No matter how much my friends assured me that they would pick up the slack for the first few days, I felt uneasy at the thought of leaving everything up to them and being unable to help.

I spent the rest of the day in a somber mood. I looked through the rest of my System rewards, but those weren’t enough to cheer me up, even if they at least made me feel a bit better about our odds when we returned to the Market.

Influence: Play a major role in a successful attempt to flee the Universal Tree with a large group of noncombatants.

Achievement +50,000

50,000 Achievement was about three times more Achievement than I had been expected for this whole mess. It brought me from 228,824 Achievement to 278,824 Achievement. At first, I was actually quite puzzled about why I had gotten such a large reward, before I realized what we had escaped from.

The Universal Tree wasn’t just any faction - it was a large group of factions inhabiting Tier 20 worlds. Despite the fact that the Universal Tree was disorganized and broken into many smaller factions, it was still considered one of the major, multiverse-level factions. It occupied the same rung of power the Market had occupied during its prime - and unlike the Market, the Universal Tree was doing just fine in the modern era.

Escaping from a major, multiversal-level faction was naturally far more difficult and impressive than escaping from a weaker faction. Even if the Universal Tree hadn’t really put much effort into stopping our escape, a big part of the Achievement reward was probably due to how strong our enemy was in comparison to us.

In addition to the Achievement reward for escaping, I also got a new Ability purchase option as a reward for my actions - which was much appreciated, even if it wasn’t an Ability Evolution, like I had been hoping for.

Due to your Achievements in cross-dimensional spatial manipulation, you have gained the ability to purchase {Dimensional Movement} as an Ability upon returning to the Market for 40,000 Achievement. This Ability has the following effects:

Keywords: None If you have the ‘coordinates’ and any sort of ‘anchor’ in another dimension, you may use a massive amount of (any kind of) essence to form a bridge between your current dimension and the dimensional anchor. You may also spend a major amount of essence to ‘scout’ the surroundings around your current dimension, and spend a much larger amount of essence to imprint some kind of dimensional anchor onto another location within another dimension. This ability’s cost increases exponentially based on the distance between your current dimension and target dimension. Glut Penalty: 50

This Ability wasn’t so useful on its own, at least in theory - but in practice, I felt that it had a lot of potential. The ability to move from one dimension to another meant that if things got bad in a world we landed in, we could always flee to another world, at least as long as all the prerequisites to use this skill were met. Of course, that brought its own troubles - I would need to have enough essence to fuel this ability, and there was always a chance that wherever we fled would be worse than the situation we found ourselves in. It would be quite unfortunate if we tried to escape from a group of monsters or something, only to accidentally teleport ourselves into the sun or a black hole - and that was just one of several potential disasters waiting for us. Even so, this ability represented our first potential way to traverse the Multiverse on our own, without the Market’s System or some other power paving the way for us. That had a great deal of significance on its own, at least in my eyes.

Finally, I had some levels in the local System for doing [Spatial Mage] related things.

You have leveled up! Frost Void Mage has advanced from level 61 to level 66!

+12 Free Attribute Points (X5) +9 Sense (X5) +9 Mind (X5) +9 Vitality (X5) +20 Mana (X5)

Power: you have leveled up a (3-facet) Compound Spark (X5)

Achievement + 1200 (X5)

This time, I didn’t assign my Free Attribute points to anything, since I had no clue whether tossing attribute points into my mana stat would mess up my already injured mana pool, and I had no intention of assigning my stat points anywhere else. I decided to hold off on using the points until my essence pools healed up again.

After I went over my System messages, I spent the next few days essentially on bed rest, while the rest of our group prepared for whatever came afterwards. While our hosts gave us food and hospitality, they didn’t give us very much in the way of other supplies that would prepare us for later - which was a bit disappointing, but since it seemed like their own supplies were running low after the losses from the war with the Universal Tree, I felt it was at least understandable. The adults from our group, and some of the stronger children, still helped out around the city, and managed to secure a few supplies for us, such as food, some replacement weapons, and a few sets of armor. They were nowhere near the equipment we would need to properly outfit our survivors with the tools for a real catastrophe - but they were still far better than nothing at all, which was what we’d had before.

After four more days, our hosts told us that our Guest-Rite period had ended, and politely asked us to take a few nearby boats and leave - though not after providing us with directions for where we could head next, if we felt like it. It felt like far too little recovery time for our shell-shocked and bedraggled survivor group, but it was still time for us to go once more.