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Chapter 323: Skill Center (3) - Markets and Multiverses
🕑 Added 2024-11-22 05:44:28 +0000 UTCI reached out with my alteration essence and touched the string of fraying essence. Nothing else happened. The string of essence continued to fall apart. I felt a wave of panic as I realized something.
The thread of essence that was unravelling in front of us was meant to collapse the moment the spider died. I had always thought that the spiders could hear particularly well... but there was more to it than that. This was the alarm system. Whenever we killed a spider, a thread of essence in their den would unravel and let something know a spider had died. Then, more spiders would come.
And if we were attacked by a fresh group of spiders, we would die.
In that moment of panic, I found a solution. I could touch the strange, decaying thread with my mind, but I couldn’t ‘hold it together’ the way I needed to. It felt like trying to grab hold of a live eel. It was slippery, and difficult to touch with a mind that could only see regular geometry. Too much of the thread's existence was buried in twisted, eldritch bits of reality.
I couldn't touch it normally... but my clone could.
I resisted the urge to scream as I reached for my still-damaged soul, and ripped out another piece of myself from me. It felt like I had taken a hammer to my head, and I got the feeling that I was not supposed to be doing this. That my soul wasn't ready for more splintering. But I had no choice. If that thread called more spiders to us, we were dead.
Then, as I felt the pain start to lance through my soul, I felt Achievement rush to fill in the gaps. It was like I had nearly lit myself on fire, and then the Achievement had surged into to cool it down. The Achievement was like a soothing balm after a horrible sunburn. My soul stopped screaming in pain.
Then, I became two. My clone reached for the thread, and unlike my main body, it had no problem touching the unraveling thread. I watched for a moment as my clone wrapped its arms around the thread, and then sighed in relief. My clone had stopped the thread from unraveling. I grimaced as the last bits of pain in my soul subsided, and then checked my Achievement.
I had dropped from 8,174.67 Achievement to 7,152.09 in an instant. About a thousand Achievement was spent to create a clone that would only last a day or two. However, while it stung to lose so much Achievement, it was worth it. We weren't about to face a horde of angry spiders. I sighed in relief. Then, I checked the clone’s essence reserves, and winced.
<Did you manage to stop it?> asked Sallia. <I saw you using a lot of essence, and it looked like you were panicking.>
<The thread in the spider's den started to unravel after we killed it. My clone is holding it, but it ate a bunch of my Achievement to make the clone.> I said. I tried not to wince as I remembered the tearing pain before my Achievement had worked to patch up my soul. <If you can, try to trap the next spider without killing it. I don't know if it'll be worse if I try to use a second clone. But don't compromise your safety too much. If it's impossible, I'll see what I can do.>
<We’ll do our best,> said Felix. He sounded a bit worried. Had I let more of my emotions through the bracelet than I thought when I mentioned my clone? The pain had been truly unbearable for a few seconds.
<Let’s try cutting off all of its legs next time,> said Sallia. <If it's one that got weakened by the sound grenade, it should be doable.>
<If it's one that wasn't weakened, we'll be running away anyway.> Felix sent a sense of amusement through the bracelet. <I sure don't fancy our odds of fighting another one of those things in a cramped area like this. So either way, you won't have to make another clone.> Then, his mental voice got a bit more serious. <How long until the clone dissipates?>
<A day.>
<That’s enough time to work with. But let’s get moving. I want to be well away from the Spatial Fair before the clone dissipates.> Then, Felix picked me up and we started moving again.
Luckily, we didn’t run into any other spiders in the next hallway. Unfortunately, we didn't find anything useful, either. There was one room off to the side of the hallway, but it was filled with old administrative documents. All of them had crumbled to dust, so we couldn't even read any of them. I resisted the urge to sigh, as we left the room and continued on.
The next hallway had two rooms branching off from it... and a spider den right in the middle of the hall. The spider twitched the moment we entered the hallway, and I felt a rush of fear as I saw it stir. Was it an empowered spider? If so, we would have to flee.
Right as I was preparing a desperate extinguish, I realized the spider was moving slowly. It seemed hesitant. I breathed a sigh of relief, as I realized the spider was another of the weakened spiders.
That meant that Sallia and Felix could probably kill the horrid little abomination.
Since the spider wasn't coming out to attack us, we decided to take the same approach as we had the previous time. Felix set up blocks of metal at each exit to the spider's den. Then, Sallia prepared to start dicing the monster into pieces. After they were ready, they sent me a signal and I poked the spider with a weak extinguish.
The spider dashed towards the exit to its den. As it exited its pocket dimension and entered reality, Felix tried to squeeze it into paste with his block of metal. The spider cut its way through, then leapt towards Sallia.
Which was probably the worst choice it could have made.
Sallia burned essence, then cut towards the spider so fast that it nearly died right there. It managed to dodge out of the way, but lost two legs in the process. I took advantage of its distraction to blast it with a bolt of lightning. As the spider tried to recover, Sallia cut off three more of its legs.
The spider paused for a moment, then its exoskeleton started to fall away. At the same time, it seemed as if its missing legs were regrowing.
Sallia swung her sword at the spider, but hit managed to shuffle out of the way as its legs started to grow back. I blasted it with lightning again, but it seemed as if my lightning blasts had become less effective. Somehow, the little horror shrugged the blast off.
Anise hit it with a few {Magic Missiles}, tossing it into the air towards Sallia.
That was when the spider's regrowing limbs all disappeared, along with the rest of its legs. In seconds, it went from having three legs and five half-legs to having nothing at all.
This seemed to enrage the spider. It stopped shedding its exoskeleton, and turned bright green. A moment later, the hallway started to turn green as little sprouts of plants and moss started trying to kill us. Anise stopped paying attention to the spider, and started using her dryad's eyes to stop the plant growths. Meanwhile, Sallia and Felix kept stabbing, cutting, and smashing the spider, to weaken it without killing it.
The spider fought back, but pain and rage seemed to keep it from realizing what our plan was. Two minutes crawled by, as the spider tried to regrow its missing limbs or kill us with plants. The spider didn't get any good attacks off - instead, it seemed to grow weaker and weaker as time passed.
I grinned.
It was working.
The four of us kept working to control the spider. Anytime it tried to kill us with vines, Anise held them back. When it tried to regrow its limbs, Sallia cut them off. Felix kept it contained when it managed to start moving. It was slow, careful work… but after a few minutes, it finally ran out of essence. I breathed a sigh of relief as I looked at the little fishing line in the spider’s den. It hadn’t unraveled and alerted the rest of the facility about our intrusion. It seemed like keeping the spider alive was a viable strategy.
Once the spider ran out of essence, Sallia whacked it a few more times with the flat of her blade, just to keep it stunned. Then, she took of one of her Market-made shoes, stuffed the spider inside, and had Felix seal the opening in the shoe with lots of metal. I had no idea whether that would serve as an effective prison, but it was better than nothing.
After that, we started moving again. We moved more slowly than before, since we needed to keep an eye on Sallia's boot. However, the spider showed no signs of escaping.
Finally, we made our way to one of the two rooms in the hallway. Felix carried me inside, before we took a few moments to observe the room we had found. Unlike the first room we had seen, this one wasn't filled with long-decayed documents. Instead, there was a single bed inside.
The bed looked… odd. Physically, the bed didn’t look much different from the type of bed most doctors used. There was room for patients to lie down in, as well as a few tools laying around. However, when I looked at the bed with my soul sight, it looked quite different. There were small bits of metal that only appeared in my soul-sight, which lined the edges of the bed. They looked… almost like robotic arms, except for the fact that they crackled with essence.
I looked at the metallic arms in confusion, while Anise, Felix, and Sallia also glanced around the room. I sent them an image of what I was seeing in my soul-sight, to make sure they knew what we were looking at.
<That bed looks strange. I guess they said that they could do soul surgery in the building, but still! Tools that don't seem to exist in reality, only in your soul sight. That's way more strange than some of the stuff that existed in my world!>
<How do we get it to work?> asked Sallia.
<I don't know,> said Felix. <We've seen a lot of other items in the Market with automated responses to certain types of input. Like that book we found last time. Maybe it'll respond to a vocal command?>
We tried several vocal commands to get the bed to 'wake up,' but none of them worked. Finally, Felix frowned. <I don't think it's a vocal command that makes this thing start working.> he said.
<Maybe something will happen if we lay down on the bed?> asked Sallia.
<I’ll do it,> I said. I had the best ability to defend my soul against attacks, especially now that I had {Eldritch Soul}. Worst case scenario, if I felt like something was wrong, I could try to open a larger portal and then teleport myself out of the bed. However, I suspected this bed was what we were here for. It was the opportunity to change everything and turn everything around.
I laid down on the bed, and a new System popup appeared. Unlike the usual Status Screen or random ads, this one was way more complicated.
Hello New user, and welcome to the automated Skill Improvement Shop! This Skill Bed is sponsored by the sponsors of the Spatial Fair! Please thank Dimension Corp. Spatial Corp., and Void Corp for creating this wonderful fair! To continue, please select an option from below. After that, our automatic ‘Skill Bed AI’ will take the most appropriate follow-up measures.
Remove an Ability - Sometimes, you pick an ability and realize three worlds later that it just doesn’t fit your style. We get it! With our specialized skill bed, we can remove these Abilities so that they no longer take up your glut penalty or keyword slots.
Disclaimer: Some Keyword Abilities cannot be removed. This bed will give you an error message if you attempt to destroy one of these Skills.
Cost - 10 Achievement per glut penalty to remove a non-keyword ability, or 50 Achievement per Glut penalty for a Keyword ability, multiplied by the number of Keywords within the ability. Removal of a keyword ability may also cause extreme pain. Rooms in this building are soundproofed for the convenience of other customers.
Remove PART of an Ability - Some Abilities are useful, but have unnecessary components to them. Removing that part of the skill can allow you advance the Ability only in the direction that you want, or just free up some Keyword slots and Glut Penalty for other needs.
Cost - varies, but typically far less than removing an entire ability.
Modify an Ability - Some Abilities are very useful, and you don’t want to remove ANY part of them. However, you might still want to redistribute some aspects of that ability, emphasizing some parts over others. If that’s what you want, this option is for you.
Cost - Since this does not necessitate anywhere near the level of energy manipulation that keyword ability removal entails, the cost is typically about 100 Achievement. Please remember that if you modify a skill, it may not be a good idea to use it for a few days after the modification, so that your soul has time to heal up. Also, keep in mind that this cannot outright change the way an ability works - it just changes some details behind how it operates.
Hints - Have the bed scan your Keyword Abilities to give you hints on the ‘best’ paths forward for that skill. Many members of the Market evolve their abilities practically at random, taking whatever improvements are offered - but that is almost never the ‘best’ path forward. Especially if you travel with a team. If that’s the case, having each member evolve their abilities towards certain specializations is usually much better. Tell our artificial intelligence the path forward that YOU want, and the AI will help you design an optimized path of progression to fit your needs! This also comes with a bunch of information on how to make ability evolutions easier and more effective, and can even provide information on what law an Ability is closest to. This is critical for those seeking to push an ability from Master Grade to Heroic Grade and leave the nursery.
Cost - 100 Achievement for consultation with an AI. 500 Achievement for further consultation with a specialist. 1,000 Achievement for hints on entering Heroic Grade. Some better specialists may be requested for a higher cost (See pricing options by focusing on this option)
Add a Spatial Ability - Get a catalog of every non-keyword ability our sponsors sell, and choose which ones fit you best! All at a 10% discount for as long as the Spatial Fair lasts!
Cost - varies wildly, depending on what Abilities you buy. Lowest price is 100 Achievement, with highest cost for a single ability being 1,000,000 (See options by focusing on this part of the menu)
Soul Modification and Surgery - Call for a doctor to assist you in changing your soul the way you want. Have you ever wanted to try being a squid person for a few lives, but got born as a human in your first life? Do you want to visit one of the non-human nurseries of the market and fit in? Do you just want your soul to be a bit more malleable to other, more interesting shapes? Or perhaps you wish to guarantee that you will be born in one of the more ‘interesting’ dimensions, where physical bodies are flimsy failures of perception and concepts rule reality? If you have any of these desires, look no further! We can change your soul to make it more compatible with other species, types of magic, or different body structures as needed! All with our Market-acclaimed nursery doctors!
Cost - 15,000 Achievement, plus an additional fee if you wish to shake off the need for physical bodies and transform into a conceptual entity.
As I read through the options, I grinned. Some of the options were baffling and confusing, but I was happy anyway. We had finally found a payoff for the risks we had taken in getting this far..
Author’s Note:
This is a notification that just like every other year, 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
FallenRock
Wait, so the spiders they've been fighting these last few chapters are normal sized spiders? How did something that fits in Salia's boot cut off their arms and legs?
IDFree
Yes, that really strains my SoD. Maybe it's just some base cost to operate the machine and when the Market was fully functional it used to cost a lot more?
MinE
At least the literal soul surgery cost something reasonable unaffordable. I kinda expected it to be relatively affordable to get their abilities modified, but it is way cheaper than I expected.
Arkeus
That moment when extremely precise surgery cost less than eating proteins. This is sure convenient.
