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Chapter 427: Raiders of the Lost Bark (3) - Markets and Multiverses
🕑 Added 2025-08-13 06:47:02 +0000 UTCThe hallway we had chosen was expansive, and empty. The decorations were also deeply intertwined with imagery of trees, plants, and other fl
The hallway we had chosen was expansive, and empty. The decorations were also deeply intertwined with imagery of trees, plants, and other flora. The lack of obvious traps or enemies, combined with the long, empty hallways, got me thinking about what we had learned so far. I couldn’t help but think back to one of our earlier suspicions - that the Market had developed different dorms for people of different backgrounds. Now that I knew the Market had been felled by a coalition of other multiverse-level powers, I had to wonder what in the world the people who ran this magic academy were thinking when they invited people from the universal tree here.
The fact that the file was found near the top of a pile of papers in the admissions office meant that the policy to bring in people from the Universal Tree had probably been recent. It had likely happened shortly before the fall of the Market.
This painted a very interesting picture of the fall of the Market in my mind, especially because I couldn’t help but wonder whether this school had admitted any infiltrators from the Universal Tree. Did this school have any policies towards which ‘branches’ of the Universal Tree could attend? Did the school welcome those from all branches? How had the process worked?
Either way, it was likely that the chaos that destroyed the Market had been sudden. On an ordinary day, by the standards of the Market, the coalition had likely attacked, and had managed to crush the Market with overwhelming force - or at the very least, they had crushed this nursery with overwhelming force. Then again, since Nurseries housed the weakest members of the Market, perhaps this was one of the areas were Transmigrators had barely been able to put up a fight against the enemy forces. If, as I suspected, spies had been buried in the Market’s nurseries beforehand, the sudden eruption of violence might have taken nurseries like this one completely off-guard.
I sighed, and shook my head. Either way, that era was long behind us. Even so, I couldn’t help but wonder how much the carelessness of the Market had played into its fall. The thing that cemented it for me was the lack of signs of combat in this wing of the school. In most other parts of the Market, there were obvious, prevalent signs of battle. Ruined buildings, scars in the cement - wounds carved by magic, blades, guns, and whatever other means the Market had used during its heyday. Even some parts of the interior of this school were visible from outside, due to damage inflicted by the battle and the deterioration of age.
However, there were no signs of combat at all in the Universal Tree section of the school. I suspected at least a few of the students here had not been attending the school out of good will at all.
Of course, I might have been totally incorrect. Since this information was buried in the sands of time, I probably wouldn’t be able to verify my assumption anytime soon. Still it was a lesson - the Universal Tree was potentially very skilled at burying infiltrators into the midst of their enemies and activating them at the right time.
The Multiverse was vast, but it didn’t sound like the number of Multiverse-level factions was very high. I suspected that at some point in the future, we would be encountering the Universal Tree on our own. When that time came, I wanted to know as much about them as possible.
Felix’s words jolted me out of my thoughts.
“I found something,” said Felix, as he stopped inside of a hallway. Our group froze, just in case Felix had stumbled across a magical mine of some sort, or some kind of magical alarm bell that would alert the scavengers to our presence.
Felix carefully inspected something I couldn’t see - to me, it looked like he was staring at a perfectly normal patch of the floor. A moment later, he materialized his {Craftsman’s Hammer}, and began tapping at the ordinary patch of floor in front of us.
A few moments later, I saw a plate of red metal suddenly appear in front of Felix’s hammer. I gazed at it in confusion, and Sallia and Anise did the same.
<I think it was some kind of… trap?> said Felix, as he continued to tap on the little red metal plate with his hammer. <It might have something to do with spatial manipulation as well. I’m not one hundred percent sure. Either way, I’m sure that it doesn’t have any sort of ‘signalling method’ to let potential enemies know that I’m disabling it. If the scavengers want it here, removing it is probably a good idea.>
As Felix spoke, he continued to tap on the red metal plate. For several taps, the plate didn’t react at all - until finally, it began to curl inwards. Strangely enough, the sight reminded me of a piece of paper that had been lit on fire. It didn’t look like Felix was dismantling a piece of metal - it looked more like the metal was consuming itself.
<There we go. I screwed up the energy system for the plate,> said Felix, after several more seconds. he sounded satisfied. <It should look like a tiny misalignment in this thing caused the energy storage to go haywire, frying the whole thing. It shouldn’t look too suspicious to any of the scavengers even if they find it. I also think I confirmed at least part of what the object did - I think it was meant to somehow interact with the laws of reality. Upon being activated, I suspect it would warp the nearby laws of physics to make them ‘friendlier’ towards certain types of magic,> said Felix.
I nodded thoughtfully. Felix’s words actually answered a question I hadn’t thought to ask.
Even humanoids with seemingly similar biology have their own biological adaptations to survive in their regular environment. Things like the way gravity worked could change from one dimension to another, meaning that a body well-designed to survive in one dimension might literally rip itself apart if the laws of gravity suddenly shift. That’s not even factoring in other things, like how food, air, and water could change from one dimension to another. Heroic Grade seemed to offer some kind of protection against this unravelling process - but these people were not heroic. If they were, we would have struggled to even escape an encounter with the first girl we had seen.
Since that was the case, how had the scavengers survived?
If they had equipment that could manipulate the nearby laws of physics and reality, that explained how their bodies hadn’t unravelled, at least.
I was glad Felix had disabled this device. Otherwise, if a fight broke out, a single invader activating that plate of metal might have instantly caused our organs and bones to explode, killing us so quickly that I wouldn’t have even had time to process my friends were hurting before we all exploded like overripe tomatoes thrown into a hurricane.
After Felix confirmed that there were no other potential dangers in the area, we continued moving onwards. We rounded another corner, and this time, we stumbled across a great hallway.
This time, it seemed as if we had entered a hallway filled with dorm rooms - however, there were far more dorm rooms in the hallway than there should have been. I quickly confirmed that this area was under the effect of a ludicrous level of spatial manipulation. Right in front of us was a series of ten doorways, each bearing a plate with the word ‘dorms’ in front of it. However, while it appeared that there were only ten rooms, I could feel that each doorway was like a bowl of spaghetti. Each doorway led to thousands of different spaces - and I had no clue whatsoever how the doorways figured out which space they were supposed to send people to. What was certain was that the same person, using the same door, could probably go to at least a few hundred different locations, if this area worked the way I thought it did.
Scattered throughout the hallway were scorch marks, chunks of ruined hallway, and most interestingly, deep holes in the ceiling that looked kind of like bullet holes. I wondered if the scavengers were using guns, or some other similar form of weapon.
“The battle happened pretty recently, I think,” said Sallia, as she stepped closer to one of the scorch marks. “It’s still hot, but it’s cooling down quickly. If there was a battle here, I would think it happened minutes ago.”
I frowned, and looked at the man that we had caught. He was still unconscious… but he had approached us nearly twenty or thirty minutes ago. Based on Sallia’s words, there was no way these scorch marks could have been left by this guy as he approached our location. However, there were no signs of any other people in our immediate surroundings, either.
<There might be enemies nearby!> Felix hissed through the bracelet.
I had a bad feeling, and grabbed Anise before pulling her back around the corner. I saw Felix and Sallia also dodge behind the corner a moment later.
I waited in silence for several seconds, until I heard one of the doorways in the side of the room slam open. In my soul sight, I saw seven souls exit one of the spatial connections attached to one of the doorways.
We had found the next group of scavengers.
Author’s Note:
Join my Discord! (I’m at least sometimes active there, while I admit that I don’t generally check the comments section. I’m not very active anywhere, though - writers are antisocial people, okay!)
