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Chapter 458: War in the Heavens - Markets and Multiverses
🕑 Added 2025-10-23 08:24:28 +0000 UTCMonths continued to pass by. I quickly learned that {Born of Winter’s Hold} was a Skill that had a variety of different effects. The first day I tried it was the day after I got my second spark. All I had to do was use {Basic Ice Manipulation} to gather a bunch of snow as we were travelling through a blizzard, and then I created a nice pile of snow I could practice my new skill in. Doing so was… odd. The eldritch half of my body was very attuned to the concept of hope, so pulling the concept of cold felt kind of like trying to pull two greased pigs together while they both squirmed in opposite directions. Succeeding took nearly three hours of careful essence manipulation and practice.
When I finally succeeded, it felt like I had dragged an ice cube into my body by cutting open my skin and then trying to eat out of the new openings in my veins. The process was incredibly unpleasant, and I felt more than a little nauseous during the process. However, I could also feel something within the eldritch half of me improving during the process, even if the growth was subtle and slow.
After three months of training, I pushed the skill to Tier 1. That was when I finally figured out what the Skill actually did, and also when I got two System notifications - one from the Local System, and one from the Market’s System.
You have raised basic Born of Winter’s Hold to Tier 1
Mana Stat +5, Vitality +5, Resistance +5
The stat points, as well as the notification from the local System, didn’t provide me with very much information. The new System notification didn’t tell me what the skill did or how to utilize it. However, my own understanding of the Skill that I had acquired over three months of practice, coupled with the Market’s notification, was quite a bit more enlightening.
Skill: You have trained {Born of WInter’s Hold to [Basic Grade] for the first time.
Achievement +2,000
Since you have trained Born of Winter’s Hold to [Basic] Grade for the first time, upon your death you will have the option to purchase [Born of Frost and Snow] as an ability, for the cost of 10000 Achievement.
This Ability has the following effects:
Keywords: None
Your eldritch side gains some minor aspects related to snow and frost, rather than simply being composed of hope.
Allows you to temporarily dissolve your physical body into snow and ice, along with temporary, high speed movement. Mana cost increases significantly for each second spent in a ‘bodiless’ state. (Note: You can still suffer injuries or death if someone eliminates the snow your body has transformed into.)
You gain total immunity to natural cold and all associated biological issues.
Your control over water, snow, and ice is increased by a small amount. All magic based on water, snow, and ice is enhanced by a minor amount.
Glut Penalty: 7
Note: Perk may be incompatible with other abilities such as any variant of ‘body of flames’ or other elemental-aligned biological changes.
This gave me a much better idea of what had changed. Afterwards, I tried using {Born of Winter’s Hold} to activate its most basic function - transforming my body into snow and ice.
Sure enough, the Market’s version of this ability was very similar to the benefits I had received from the local System. After converting my body into snow and frost, I could essentially phase through any attacks that couldn’t melt snow. I had Anise test it with a few projectiles - and the snowflakes my body turned into didn’t suffer from any real damage if they were hit by objects. However, if an enemy managed to pull some of my snow away from the rest of my body, that could still hurt me - and could probably kill me, if they used an incredibly powerful wind attack to scatter my body in all directions. Fire based attacks were also a huge threat when I converted myself into snow - melting my body was a huge danger once I turned myself into snow.
Still, it was a useful ability against pure physical attacks. It was also great as a form of camouflage, at least in this world’s wintry environment. I could basically become invisible when I was in the midst of a field of snow and ice, as long as I kept my essence fluctuations minimal enough that it was hard to spot.
The cold resistance was one of the most surprisingly useful components of the skill. A big part of the food in this world seemed to be used as a way to drive out the conceptual cold from people’s bodies, but my body no longer needed assistance to drive off the cold. I originally thought that this didn’t matter much - but when the warmth from each meal no longer needed to fight against the bitter, conceptual cold, I found that I could channel very small bits and pieces of this warmth into my heart, just like when I had absorbed each of my two sparks. This led to very, very minor improvements in the speed at which I levelled up, allowing me to gain another level during my three months of training.
You have leveled up!
Ice Mage has advanced from level 21 to level 22!
+5 Free Stat Points
+2 Sense
+2 Mind
+2 Vitality
+4 Mana
Power: You have gained a level in your secondary Spark
Achievement +200
I also noticed that {Born of Winter’s Hold} was a bit more useful for water based magic than I had expected. Of course, my control over water based magic such as extinguish was already excellent - I had spent centuries practicing and using that spell, after all. However, when I used extinguish during practice, I could now detect a very faint boost to its power. It wasn’t very useful yet, but I had a sneaking suspicion that if I pushed {Born of Winter’s Hold} far enough, it would become an incredibly useful skill.
When it came to ice manipulation, the impact was far more noticeable. The speed at which my {Basic Ice Manipulation} improved was far faster than before, since I now had two different skills feeding me steady trickles of insight into my mind. I would likely hit Tier 2 far faster than I had originally expected. Furthermore, my ice projectiles had become much stronger. This wasn’t the minor, one to two percent increase that Extinguish had experienced - this was more like a twenty percent boost in strength, flexibility of my magic usage, and durability. It was a major, comprehensive improvement to my ice magic.
For only seven glut penalty, I thought this skill was probably worth picking up. If nothing unexpected happened, I would probably turn this into an ability when we returned to the Market.
Months continued to trundle onwards. Soon, a year had passed since I had acquired my fourth level in my current spark. I gained 600 more Achievement, and a bountiful quantity of stat points to power myself up. As usual, all the points went into mana. Oddly enough, we didn’t stop even once during that period of time. The [Priest] claimed that sometimes, the ember simply didn’t need to rest - but I suspected there was more to the story than that. I knew that the ember was alive, sapient, and a bit calculating. I also knew that the ember was driven to improve. I suspected that the ember had some way of sensing upgrade materials. Perhaps anytime it sensed a material it could use to improve, it stopped in place and forced us to fight monsters until we found the material that could enhance it.
I had no way to prove anything, and all I was going off of were my half-baked suspicions. However, I really couldn’t help but feel that the ember was a bit cunning. It existed in a symbiotic relationship with our clan of moving towns - but I felt that it was important to remember that this relationship was one of mutual gain, rather than benevolence.
However, as I was approaching my fifth birthday, the clan had a rather unexpected event. As we were travelling through a particularly thick blizzard, I saw the sky suddenly darken, as if something had blotted out the already faint sunlight. At the same time, I felt two sudden sparks of sheer horror appear in the heavens above us.
I was unable to stop myself from looking upwards. There, I saw something terrifying. My regular eyes couldn’t track it - it was like trying to see a grain of sand from across the ocean. However, my essence senses could track two somethings in the sky.
They reminded me of the eye from our second world - the one that had killed our group just by looking at us. I felt like I was standing in front of something that could annihilate our clan of wandering towns in seconds, if it chose to. The fact that there were two such creatures, and not one, made my heart pound in my chest.
If they wanted us dead, there was nothing we could do.
A moment later, I felt a tidal wave of essence surge in the heavens, and it felt as if the air had turned into liquid magma. My skin started to burn as if they were coated in acid, and the air itself started to surge and churn as it fought against my need for oxygen.
I coughed in pain, and wondered if I was about to die again.
I felt a ripple of essence from the skies, and felt the choking, burning sensation in the air start to faintly weaken. I looked into the sky again, and realized what had happened.
The two monstrously powerful entities in the sky were fighting. And we were caught right in the crossfire between them.
Author’s Note:
Scheduling Notice for the rest of the year: Those of you who have been around for a while probably already know this, but I take the last week of each year and the first week of each new year off as vacation time. Basically, the week of Christmas and the week of New Year’s. This year I intend to do the same thing as usual. I will also be taking the day of Thanksgiving off, since I live in the US and I’d like to spend some time with my family and eat some turkey. As a result:
On November 27th, there will be no Markets chapter. Expect two chapters for that week, not three.
Then, from December 19th to January 5th, I will be on vacation for the year. First chapter for next year will probably be up on January 6th, unless I see a reason to make some kind of scheduling change to what days of the week I release Markets and Multiverses chapters. I currently tend to mostly release chapters on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, but I might swap these dates to some other configuration. I have been thinking of a different chapter release schedule each week… but I’ll have to give it some more thought. Vacation is a good time to look at my schedule, my plotlines for each story, and spend some time thinking about what I need and what my stories need without the time pressure of ‘gotta release another chapter soon.’ I have no idea whether I’ll actually implement any changes, just noting that some might happen. Anyway, you get the general idea.
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