Markets and Multiverses (A Serial Transmigration LitRPG)

“How many dead, how many injured in your area?” I asked. My voice rang throughout the clearing, cutting through the sound of people panting and breathing heavily in the aftermath of the battle. It seemed to bring people back to their senses. Several people snapped back to attention, and started looking around. I narrowed my eyes.

Most of the people here were experienced combatants. It was very unusual for them to get so distracted by what should have been closer to a skirmish than a real battle. Did the mist creatures have some kind of mental impact on people who fought with them? I decided to keep an eye out for other traces of this - but first, I had injured to deal with.

One of the people near the front line was the first to respond to my query.

“I see two major injures - no dead, though. Jacob and Gloria are both bleeding a lot.”

“Put pressure on their wounds and get them to me, then!” I snapped.

A few scattered mumbles of affirmation echoed back to me from the front lines, before they started making their way back towards me with the two injured. Meanwhile, other parts of the battlefield buzzed with activity. As I started to treat the injured, I got a more accurate count of those who had died or been seriously injured during the fight with the mist mammals.

In total, the casualties from the battle hadn’t been too bad. We only lost one person during the battle - an [Axe Berserker] who had lost control of his abilities during the battle and rushed into the horde without proper support, only to get surrounded. He had survived several fatal injuries due to the power granted by his Spark, but he had ultimately succumbed to his wounds before his companions could reinforce him.

Apart from that, there were about twelve injuries that would keep people out of fighting shape for a few days, and an assortment of minor injuries that didn’t need anything but a bandage. Given the abnormal vitality of people in this set of dimensions, I doubted most of the severe injuries would leave any permanent problems behind. Just in case, I used a bit of alcohol to disinfect everyone’s wounds, bandaged injuries, and did my best to treat everything. It never hurt to be cautious, after all - I didn’t want anyone to die before I got my healing magic back.

Even so, seeing so many people injured in front of me, while I couldn’t do a thing to help them, was incredibly frustrating. A huge part of me kept trying to reach for magic that I knew I couldn’t use right now, because that was just how I was used to dealing with injuries. The other part of me was just happy that I wasn’t useless without my magic. My centuries of involvement in the field of medicine may have left me with a severe overreliance on the more magical forms of healing - but I was no slouch when it came to healing people in more mundane ways, either.

After I finished handling the wounded, I stared at the misty, overgrown forest again. I started to think.

We were meant to build a new home here, away from the front lines and (hopefully) safe from the Universal Tree’s predation. However, this island had some rather notable problems with it. Specifically, the environment. We hadn’t run into any devastatingly powerful threats yet - in fact, the two types of monsters we had seen so far seemed quite manageable. The flesh-eating insects were confined to their sand pits, meaning they could only attack people who weren’t careful and wandered into one of their sand pits. They were a stationary threat, which meant we wouldn’t need to worry about them overrunning our camps or something in the future. The other monster we had run into was the cloud of monstrous mist mammals. That fight had been a lot scarier - but we had still managed to drive off the horde with only one death and some notable injuries, which indicated their threat level wasn’t that high.

However, while both threats we had encountered so far weren’t devastating, I was starting worry about how dangerous the island was for children. Both threats that we had run into weren’t too problematic for a group of armed and prepared adults, but both threats could absolutely obliterate children who wandered away from camp and couldn’t flee for safety in time. The mist and the sand pits filled with flesh eating insects also seemed like threats that would synergize against us, making the island even more threatening if someone had a mere moment of carelessness. The sand pits were already hard to spot, and the mist compounded the problem. This island hadn’t displayed any threats that could wipe us out in one fell swoop, but it had shown plenty of potential to slowly choke the life out of future generations and erode our new clan down, year after year, until eventually there was nothing left.

That was a huge problem. I didn’t want to build a clan here if future generations would be condemned to gradually wither away in despair. Was there some way to terraform the island, or eradicate the threats here?

My thoughts drifted to our previous world. In that world, we had also faced a hostile, unforgiving world. The constant monster incursions from the sky had been a dangerous day to day threat that we had no way to handle at the source. Furthermore, the people of that world had faced massive, dangerous bottlenecks in mana production, while being inherently reliant upon magic to survive. The only real upside we’d had in the last world were the hero trials… which, now that I think about it, had given us basically everything we needed to get our artificial sun idea off the ground. Those had been the entire basis behind our big artificial sun project. We had no way to pull off anything similar in this world, at least not without exceptional materials that I had no idea how to access. However, the scale of terraforming an island was completely different from creating an artificial sun.

Perhaps we could actually pull off something interesting here?

I decided to file it away in the back of my mind for now. I would talk with my friends about it later and see if we could come up with an actual plan. It was pointless to discuss things right now, when we still had a lot of undiscovered territory on the island and I had zero magic.

As my thoughts wandered, the group started to delve deeper into the forest. We carried a few of the adults on stretchers as we moved, since they were too injured to walk on their own. In order to avoid hampering further self-defense, the adults were carried by the strongest children - which seemed to embarrass the injured significantly, but there was no helping it.

The moment we stepped past the treeline, I felt a very strange sensation. It felt almost as if something ancient had locked eyes with me. It wasn’t threatening, or ominous - instead, it felt kind of like gazing upon an ancient oak tree, one that had withstood aeons of time and had grown into an impossibly large canopy and enshrouded the rest of the forest.

I had a sneaking suspicion that if I could activate my soul sight right now, I would probably see something watching us. I wasn’t sure what, though. Were we being watched by the forest itself? The trees? The mist? Something else entirely? I shivered, and gripped my sword more tightly.

“Anyone else feel like something is watching us?” asked one of the adults near the front.

“I do too. Something is definitely observing us. One of my Traits is constantly feeding me information about it.”

I nodded. I wasn’t the only one who felt it, then.

The group seemed uneasy at the revelation that something was watching us from the depths of the forest, but we had no real choice but to keep moving. We crept deeper into the forest, and the mist grew thicker with every step we took. The strange fog bank that had summoned hordes of mist mammals was incredibly hard to spot in this environment, since it was very difficult to distinguish regular fog from thick, moving clouds of fog.

Fortunately, my Perception was ridiculously high.

“Fog bank about five hundred meters to our west! It’s not moving very fast, we should skirt around it!” I said.

The adults and children of our group acknowledged my words, and we avoided the fog bank before it could even start creating fog monsters to attack us. Now that I knew the fog bank monsters were hostile and knew what to watch out for, it wasn’t actually very hard to avoid it. I had to constantly strain my eyes and check our surroundings, but I wasn’t going to risk another fight before we had some time to rest and recover.

After nearly an hour of walking, we hadn’t seen any other kinds of monsters - just the fog mammals and the occasional sand pit. However, we did stumble upon something else - something far more important.

When we had moved to approximately the center of the island, we reached the edge of the trees. There, we found a massive lake. I guessed that the lake was about seven or eight kilometers across - large enough that I could see the other side of the lake, if barely. On the other side of the lake, I could see yet another dense, mist-covered forest.

Strangely enough, there was almost no fog or mist clinging to the lake itself. The lake was clear of almost any form of obstruction, which allowed me to gaze upon the clear water with almost no obstructions.

However, right in the center of the lake, there was another, much harder to spot island. Unlike the rest of the water in the lake, the island was shrouded in the densest layer of fog I had seen. It was like there was a giant geyser of fog, shooting from the island directly into the sky, before it dispersed into the surrounding forest while perfectly avoiding the lake.

I frowned. Even though I couldn’t use magic right now, it didn’t take much imagination to confirm that the misty island in the center of the lake must be teeming with magic - and most likely, unusual forms of life as well. When I could use my soul-sight again, I intended to get a very good look at the island in the center of the lake.

For now, however, I had a different concern.

The water here looked quite clean, and there were dozens of silver fish swimming around the misty shores of the island. I could also see odd plants on the bottom of the lake. My stomach rumbled at me.

We hadn’t found a decent source of food or water on this island so far. If we wanted to set up some kind of permanent settlement, that was a huge problem. The plant people had given us a few sacks of seeds, to help kick-start some agriculture - but food didn’t grow overnight, and we only had a few days of rations left. At least so far, we hadn’t found a more suitable place to set up a camp besides this one.

I checked our surroundings, and didn’t see any immediate threats. The island in the center of the lake was suspicious, of course - but whatever was there, it didn’t seem actively hostile to us right now.

“Do we set up camp here?” asked one of the adult [Spatial Mages].

“I vote that we do. We haven’t found any other sources of water or food after walking around all day, and we’re running low on rations. We should have a few extra people keep an eye on that island in the center, but this is a good place to stay for the night if nothing goes wrong,” I said.

“I think that Miria has a good point. We need to set up camp somewhere. Even if the giant clump of mist over there is suspicious, we’ve already moved past several fog banks with no problems. They don’t seem to react as long as we stay more than a hundred meters away. We just need to be ready to pack up and move if it starts heading towards us,” said one of the other adult [Spatial Mages].

After a few minutes of debate, it seemed like most of the other adults agreed, so we set up camp. We could figure out what our future plans and long term needs looked like after a good night’s sleep.