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Chapter 329: Final Abilities and Decisions - Markets and Multiverses
🕑 Added 2024-12-11 07:32:31 +0000 UTCAfter Felix finished using the bed, a total of twelve hours had passed since I had made my clone stop the collapse of the nest earlier in the facility. Sallia took a quick look, but decided that any Ability she wanted was outside of her budget. That meant that the four of us were done with the bed.
Felix had purchased several new tricks. First, and most interesting, he had grabbed a ‘spatial factory’ Ability. This was sort of like my own storage space, turned up to eleven. The first component of the Ability was storage. It could store an entire house inside of it. However, that was only the first layer of the Ability. The space inside wasn't just for storage - it was an actual factory. Specifically, it had an assembly line inside of it, with several robotic arms to assemble things. These arms were intelligent, at least in a very rudimentary fashion. They could also be changed to fit Felix's needs. By default, they were robotic 'hands,' with four fingers and a thumb, but they could be easily swapped to hammers, or needles, or any other basic tool. The assembly line itself could also be modified on a whim, to heat up, change elevation, or do a dozen other things. The whole thing could also do some things a 'normal' assembly line could not. For example, using magic to melt metal into putty, before reassembling it into pure ingots of metal.
As long as it was a simple operation we needed, Felix’s factory could do it. Even if it was something a bit more complicated... Felix's factory could do it. It could turn scrap into metal, and then turn that metal into swords or grenades. It was like a mobile logistics center, as long as we could manage our own food and water.
Even better, the space would repurpose itself to match the physics of each world. We didn’t need to worry about items falling apart because a new dimension didn't have atoms in it, or some other ludicrous problem. The factory would adapt to any 'minor' issues such as the laws of physics being totally different. Even better, the Ability would create a starter kit of materials to work with, giving Felix a base of materials to work with. Any reincarnation would now start with Felix owning a factory and some startup materials. As long as he was clever in how he used it, that could be the basis of a financial empire in some lower-tech civilizations. It was a fantastic boost to our kit for future worlds.
Of course, there were limitations. It couldn’t do anything too complicated or precise. There were limits to how small of a component it could work with. The factory also couldn’t do anything ‘magical’ to the materials, such as enchanting them. It could only mess with physical properties. The pocket dimension factory didn’t let any living organisms inside of it, so we couldn't hide inside if things went wrong. However, the upsides of the factory were huge.
Of course, the Ability was also very expensive. Felix had dropped 10,000 Achievement on it, and it ate 30 Glut. It was more expensive than his freaking keyword Abilities. It was understandable, but it still made me wince.
On top of his dimensional factory, Felix grabbed another three Abilities. These ones were more defensively oriented. His first new Ability let him teleport himself and any nearby creatures up to one hundred meters away. He could 'exclude' anything he wanted to from the teleportation, and the Ability could be used once an hour. It took up eight Glut. Not bad for a useful self-protection Ability. Being able to teleport out of danger was never something we would be sad to have on our side.
The second Ability allowed him to fend off ‘spatial locks and curses.’ Felix, Sallia, Anise, and I all remembered the monster from our second world that nearly digested us. Even after escaping from its maw, it had still been feeding on us after several days of travel. The thing had been a major problem, and the reason I started investing so heavily into spatial manipulation. I was more than happy to have a redundancy in our group to ward off such attacks. After all, there was always a chance I would die in a given world and leave my friends unprotected.
Of course, the Ability had a week-long cooldown, and took a hefty amount of essence to activate. It also did nothing to stop an enemy from locking back on to the user after the Ability shut off. However, it was cheap. It only took up two glut and five hundred Achievement.
Finally, Felix had gotten an Ability that made a hardened shell of space around his body. This would deflect smaller attacks on its own, and would slow down bigger attacks. It was fragile, in that it would break after deflecting too much force and then take a week to rebuild. However, the amount of ‘force’ the Ability could deflect was quite hefty. According to Felix’s very rough estimate, the barrier could withstand one of his grenades before it shattered. The barrier repaired itself when it wasn’t under stress, and was powered by heat. At the end of the day, Felix said it was useful because it would keep him from getting killed by a surprise attack. He hadn’t had anyone try to assassinate him during his time in the government at the end of last lifetime. However, he had been in the government for a while. If he did the same thing in the future, having a guarantee was a good idea.
All in all, Felix’s three new Abilities cost him 17,000 Achievement and 45 Glut. That put him at about 23,000 Achievement remaining, and 81 Glut out of 155 used up. Even afterwards, Felix had a completely ludicrous amount of Achievement. He had adapted to our last dimension like a fish in water. Felix had ended his session by promising Anise that he would donate another 10,000 Achievement to get her spell maps started. Even after that was factored in, he still almost as much as the rest of the group put together. I hoped that our next dimension suited him as much as the previous one had. If all four of us could make that kind of income each world, we would be much better positioned to survive long term.
After Felix introduced his new Abilities to us, our group had a hard decision to make.
“Do we want to push for more, or do we leave?” asked Sallia. “Miria’s soul is still weakened, and any further uses of her clone are going to be pricey. She's also still missing her legs. The rest of us are in better condition. We can handle monsters like the spiders by keeping it de-limbed,” she said, knocking the de-limbed spider around for emphasis. “However, there’s a limit to that. The more we carry around at once, the more danger there is of things going wrong. These little monsters are very persistent, and something could always go wrong if we're controlling several of them. We still don’t know what the bigger monster in this facility is, either. So there is danger in continuing to explore and raid.”
Anise looked at the rest of the facility, and shivered.
“I personally think we should leave,” she said, after a few moments of thought. “We’ve gotten the crazy benefits that we were hoping for. We all got something out of our mix of customizing and cutting weaker parts of Abilities. We have way more room to grow than before. Also, I don't think we have a good way to deal with the biggest protector of this area. One wrong move, and all of us are going to lose a life. We only have two worlds left before the three of you die, and I only have three worlds left myself. It’s so easy for something to go wrong, and we're running out of time. I don’t know what else we’re even hoping to find in this building.”
“Achievement,” I said. “When we buy things like Stat points, all Achievement we spend turns directly into the product we use. There’s no way to ‘cheat’ and get our money back, at least not that I've noticed. However… that is not true for these beds. I saw the Achievement going somewhere. In other words, not all of our Achievement is spent creating skills or powering the bed. If we could find wherever this building stored Achievement, we could find a huge amount of Achievement.” I chuckled. “Maybe we’d even be as rich as Felix afterwards. Then, we could buy enough stats to make us hit Grade 4, or even Grade 5 Stats across the board. It might be a bit of a pipe dream… but if it did happen, I would feel much better about our odds. Heck, if we had stats like that, we could crush this building's defenses. The biggest reason the spiders are so dangerous is that their speed is impossible for us to match. If we had high enough stats, that wouldn’t be the case. Besides, we need stats to improve our Glut and have more room for powerful Abilities.”
Sallia nodded. “We only have two worlds left. That means we have this time in the market, and then the next time to really prepare. The final time we come to the Market, we'll need to be ready. So this is our second to last ‘relaxed’ Market visit. If we don’t maximize our time, we won't survive.”
“Worse, whatever destroyed the Market clearly didn’t want new Market members cropping up,” said Felix. “The outer areas of the Market have never felt… well, designed to kill us. In hindsight, I can’t help but wonder if the monsters in the outer Market districts aren’t even an ‘intended’ enemy for us. The skeletons and such that we’ve found there are pretty weak and uncoordinated. They might even be the remnant of some sort of weapon or spell, rather than a proper defense. The Spatial fair is designed to kill us. This area isn’t an accidental spell byproduct, or a chaotic mess of minor monsters. This is more like an organized fortress. There must be a reason for that. They don’t think that anything from the outer districts of the Market poses a real threat of allowing new Transmigrators to survive. However, those who destroyed the Market fear people who have made use of these inner districts.
“Besides, if the defenses for this area are so threatening, I can only imagine how much worse the defenses will be for buying Lives. Two worlds and one and a half remaining Market visits doesn’t feel like enough time. We need to push further, even if we risk something going wrong. I don’t see any way we survive long-term without taking some risks.”
Anise hesitated, and then looked at the three of us.
“So… is everyone besides me in favor of going deeper?”
I hesitated. Anise looked afraid, and more than a little wary of whatever lurked deeper in this building. I was also afraid. But I didn’t think that shying away was a solution either. If we weren’t strong enough, then we were dead. This building represented a golden opportunity to grow. We needed to seize it.
Anise sighed, and then frowned. "All right, I'm in. You guys have made good points. But let's be careful, all right? I don't want anyone to get hurt..." Anise trailed off, as she looked at my still-missing legs. "Well, I don't want anyone to lose a life."
“Don't worry, I'm not suggesting we rush headlong into our deaths," said Sallia. "We do need to move quickly though. We only have twelve hours until Miria’s clone dies. I don’t think we’re equipped to rush down the stronger guardians of this building, so we'll need to do something else.”
Anise looked a little relieved at Sallia’s words. “Then what do you think we should do?”
Sallia thought about it for a moment, before she looked at the Wanderer of Lost Silence that we had incapacitated. Then, Sallia grinned. “It’ll be a bit messy, but I do have an idea. We could start a sort of hit and run tactic with this facility, as long as Miria’s clone doesn’t run out. We could use some soundmakers to trigger a bunch of spiders, while at the same time we avoid killing this spider. Then, we could keep taking prisoners instead of killing them, to keep the rest of the facility from getting alerted to our actions. As long as we move quickly enough, we could shred a few layers of defenses and investigate further. With any luck, that'll let us grab what we need without alerting the entire facility to our presence. If it works, we get what we need and get out without ever seeing or alerting the main defender of this building. It's a bit risky, but I think it has a chance of succeeding.”
“Would that work?” asked Anise, as she frowned in thought.
Felix and I fell into thought. Sallia’s plan had risks… but then again, every plan to raid the facility was going to have risks. That was a consequence of attacking a facility filled with monsters that were stronger than us. After a few more minutes of discussion, we decided that we didn’t have any better options, so we made up our mind. We would give it our best shot.
Author’s Note:
Don’t forget: I will be taking the last week of December and the First Week of January off as a vacation. The last chapter for 2024 will be on December 20th (my time), and I will return around January 5th… ish. I mean, that’ll be the day I start working on rough drafts for chapters for the week, which will take a few days to clean up, edit, and release. The first actual chapter of next year is probably going to be around January 7th for Markets and Multiverses, and around Jan 10th for Budding Scientist. (I say around because timezones can make this a bit wonky, and sometimes I upload really late in the… morning, honestly. But you get the general idea).
Join my Discord! (I’m much more active there than in the comments section).
Comments
Touch
Wholeheartedly agree! I say not only Author can get rid of redundant words, but making a longer chapter could create a sense of “continuity”, making it feel faster even with the same pace…. Not to say the pace shouldn’t be faster Not only the words, sometimes mentioning the same thing or don’t mention it at all would be better
swordmaster savage
I love this story, but sometimes it feels like every little detail is over explained and not much ends up happening chapter to chapter, thousands of pages in and we aren’t that many worlds ahead tbh
Arkeus
I'm glad they are aware they have to do as much as possible in each market trips, though I'm a bit wary of how they are proposing to do it here. Though of course the current plan is fine ish, the issue is a bit more meta. Basically I would assume the best way to go about it is => explore until clone is dead if Miria can't make more immediately => explore outside for a month to grab as much achievement as possible => come back and explore here even more. After all, the nursery other places seems limited to grade 3 in what you can buy, but it also has a lot of easy achievements to grab. If they push, they can easily get 1K+/day that way, which imo isn't negligible, and would let them be much more prepared when they come back here in a month or so, with higher grade stats and also ready to grab better abilities in the bed. Salia especially is uber screwed right now and somehow she isn't being given any achievements to help her out.
Touch
Propose Edit anything too complicated or “precise. There were limits to how small of a component it could work with” These are repeating, might be better to use “precise, meaning there were…”? Or get rid of the second sentence entirely
Touch
Propose Edit Even better, the space itself would repurpose itself to match the physics of each world. We didn’t need to worry about items falling apart because a new dimension didn't have atoms in it, or some other ludicrous problem. The factory would adapt to any 'minor' issues such as the laws of physics being totally different. “Even better”, the Double Even better, using “Even better still” for the second ones would be better
Touch
Propose Edit asked Anise, as she frowned “in thought.” Felix and I fell into thought. Not needed, she frowned already implies enough thinking/emotions, show not tell
Touch
Propose Edit Ability would create a starter kit “of materials to work with”, giving Felix a base of materials to work with Not needed
