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Chapter 336: The Witch’s Amazing Accessory Shop - Markets and Multiverses
🕑 Added 2025-01-09 04:35:24 +0000 UTCThe moment Anise showed interest in the shop, I used a clone to check it out. Inside, I saw a lump of glowing, orange green-flesh that looked to be about the size of a person.
“There’s a guardian,” I said. I checked it over with my soul sight, and then examined the size of its ‘candle of life.’ Then I relaxed. “I can’t kill it in one hit, but it shouldn’t be that dangerous.”
A moment later, the lump of flesh seemed to notice my clone. Its glow intensified, and then, a ray of fire shot out of the wriggling lump of flesh and vaporized my clone. I winced.
“It has some sort of fire beam ability, but it takes about a second to activate.” I paused, and thought over the lump of flesh’s movements. “Also, it’s not very fast. Its physical body is probably sturdy, but slow.”
“That should be manageable,” said Sallia. “I could use {Mirror’s Edge} to handle an attack, and your umbrella could also manage it just fine. As long as it doesn’t have any other dangerous attacks, it shouldn’t be a real threat to us.”
“Wanna see if you can get a neat ability from it?” asked Felix.
“Sure.”
We spent about an hour in preparation. Even if we were confident the shop’s guardian wasn’t a huge threat to us, there was no reason to get complacent. We were still facing an unknown enemy, and losing a life here would be catastrophic.
Once Felix finished manufacturing a special item, he handed a bag to Sallia. I lent her my umbrella, and after she finished swapping out her {Noodle Bowl} and equipping {Storm’s Breath}, she dashed into the store.
The monster glowed bright orange, but just as Sallia had suspected, my umbrella blocked the heat ray with no problems. Sallia crept closer to the creature, wary of a potential problem… but the monster just wriggled forward, as if it were a giant slime.
Sallia tossed the bag of Felix’s items towards the monster, and the bag bounced off of the creature’s flesh. The creature’s body undulated like the waves of the ocean, and the flesh pustule fired another heat ray at her. Sallia deflected it with my umbrella again, and then left the shop.
“It’s ready,” said Sallia, as the glob of flesh tried to slowly make its way towards the entrance.
“I’ll push it away from us,” said Felix. “See how much damage you can do before extinguishing it.”
I nodded, and Felix sent a pulse of essence towards the bag of ‘tether bombs.’
The tether bombs unfurled, revealing a variety of half-physical, half-magical ‘tethers’ inside. One end of each tether attached themselves to the monster, while the other half of each tether hooked on to various items on the other side of the building. I opened several portals and activated {Spatial Rift}, creating a deadly field of tripwires.
The tethers collapsed, hurling the monster towards the wall at breakneck speeds. The tripwires cut, rended, and ripped at its flesh, nearly killing the monster on the spot.
“Almost overshot it and killed it by accident,” I said, as I focused on the creature’s ‘flame of life.’ I activated Extinguish, and a moment later, the last life force in the monster’s body disappeared.
Slaughter: Kill a Pustule of Unwoven Embers
Influence: Contributed to the defense of the Market by an [extremely negligible] amount.
Achievement +1,000, Achievement +0.02
Endless Hunger of the Ocean has devoured Pustule of Unwoven Embers for the first time. New Skill created.
Resilient body - your Agility is decreased by 10, and your Fortitude is increased by 40. In addition, your regenerative abilities will be considerably enhanced.
So the monster had been supposed to be abnormally tough and resilient? I… hadn’t noticed. {Spatial Rifts} was far better at inflicting damage than I had thought it was.
I decided that two full grades of [Fortitude] and boosted regeneration was probably worth losing a grade of [Agility], and added in the new skill.
After that, I checked over the shop again to see if there were any other dangers I had missed the first time. Seeing nothing, we made our way into the shop.
“So, do you think this shop will finally have something useful?” asked Sallia, as we stepped through the old, dilapidated doorway.
I glanced at Anise, who was making her way to the cash register. I lowered my voice, so that she wouldn’t hear me. “I hope so. Most of Anise’s items aren’t very useful anymore. The three of us have pretty good gear, and I feel kind of bad,” I said. “If we don’t find anything here, I’ll give her one of my items to make sure she has a good tool kit to work with. But this shop matches Anise’s preferences really well, so it’s promising.”
Sallia chuckled and nodded, before Anise’s voice interrupted us.
“There’s about 400 Achievement in this shop. It’s still well stocked,” said Anise. “I grabbed 100, you guys can split up the rest!” then, she dashed towards one of the nearby shelves. I grabbed my own share of Achievement, bringing me from 8,202.96 Achievement to 8,302.96. After that, I scanned the store, and my grin grew wider.
Whoever had set up this shop would have gotten along well with Anise. There was a row of witch hats set up along the first row of the shelf. Most of the witch hats also had small accessories or decorations added to them. Some of them looked more mature, like something a wizened, seasoned old witch would wear. Other hats looked more like something a kid who admired witch aesthetics would gravitate towards. Anise moved towards the shelf with the more mature-looking hats first, but since Anise had opted for a shorter, cuter body, it looked kind of like a kid sister trying on hats that were too big for her. I resisted the urge to laugh and give her a hug as I saw her struggle to reach the highest shelf of the shop, before she finally managed to snag her first prospective hat and give it a look.
After that, Anise started checking one hat after another. There were nearly thirty hats in the store, and Anise set most of the hats into two piles - one much larger pile of hats that didn’t seem very useful to her, and the other made of hats that she seemed to like. After a few rounds of deliberation, Anise finally settled on one hat. It was a slightly lighter shade of black, and looked just a bit too big for her head. If she moved too quickly, the hat would probably drop over her ears and cover her entire head. It looked far too large for her.
Does Anise like huge witch hats? I wondered, as I gave the item a scan.
Item: Witch’s Hat
Effects: Hat grants the user +20 Intelligence. When casting spells, the hat will ‘empower’ spells to a certain extent, so long as they are recognized as structured spells (for details on what is or is not a structured spell, please see user manual). This empowerment is approximately equivalent to raising the relevant Ability by a quarter of a grade (cannot raise beyond Heroic Grade).
Maintenance cost - 14.5 Achievement per reconstruction.
I hadn’t seen an item that just… directly multiplied the power of all structured spells before. However, it matched very well with what Anise’s magic system originally seemed to be based on - the ability to cast a few spells with a high level of expertise.
“Do you know if your spells count as structured spells?” I asked.
Anise winced.
“I don’t. I can’t find the user manual anywhere. Either it was lost, or it turned into dust hundreds of years ago, or…” she sighed. “But I suspect my magic system probably counts. Once we reincarnate, testing it will be easy. I can just take the hat off and see if my spells get weaker. Even if it doesn’t work, I still appreciate a +20 boost to my [Intelligence], and the other effect is too useful to miss out on.”
I nodded.
After that, Anise went to the other side of the store, where various wands were located. After spending another hour rummaging, she picked out a wand that she liked. This one looked like a branch of a tree, except for the fact that it was made out of bits of metal and wood sewn together in a way I couldn’t understand.
Item: Wand of the Witch
Effects:
You may store a spell inside of this wand, along with the relevant essence to pay for casting the spell. Upon activation, the spell will immediately activate. (There are some limits to the amount of essence each spell can use - anything below Heroic Grade is typically fine. Ask store owner for more details, or check the user manual).
This wand is made from a special material that naturally feeds off of manifestation essence. The more essence you feed it, the stronger it will become. This can raise the number of ‘stored spells’ inside of this wand.
Maintenance cost - 30.1 Achievement per reconstruction.
This wand was also pretty useful. I imagined that Anise would form some pretty expensive spells later on. Normally, she would only be able to cast more expensive spells a few times per fight before she ran out of essence. This wand would solve that problem. It was naturally impossible to check the user manual for the wand, or ask the store owner for more details… but we were nowhere near Heroic grade yet. Therefore, the limitations of the wand probably weren’t very relevant to us right now.
Both of Anise’s items suited her very well.
Anise quickly swapped out her gauntlet and her {Shadow Dryad’s Eyes}, since those two items weren’t that relevant to her anymore. Unfortunately, the shop didn’t have any other items that were useful. Thus, Anise’s final item slot remained occupied by the {Tarot Deck}. However, I was pretty pleased with our results. Finding two useful items in one shop wasn’t a bad use of our time at all.
Once Anise finished swapping out her items, the four of us started conversing again.
It was time to figure out what pool of rebirth we were going to use this time.
The last few times, we had taken pools of rebirth that didn’t have very many specifications. After all, we weren’t strong enough to fight off the guardians of more powerful pools. This time, we only had two lives left, and we needed to make them count. It was time to figure out just how ambitious we could be for our next reincarnation.
Author’s Note:
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Comments
Arkeus
They also probably should be looking to increase their stats a bit before reincarnation
Arkeus
I grabbed my own share of Achievement, bringing me from 8,202.96 Achievement to 8,302.96<= not counting the +1000 from kill
