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Chapter 402: Time Marches Ever Onward - Markets and Multiverses
🕑 Added 2025-06-13 06:32:35 +0000 UTCTime continued to pass.
By the time the four of us were a century old, the city had finally reached a proper level of self sufficiency. According to most scholars, the city now had four hundred times more essence than before. This was a truly mind-boggling amount, and guaranteed that the city council no longer needed to hoard every drop of essence like a treasure. The city’s combat tactics had also undergone a massive overhaul. Previously, the city council had always needed to weigh the lives of the city’s defenders against essence expenditure - after all, the city only had so much of both. Spending too much of either resource would result in the destruction of a sanctuary afterwards. Now, every single mage could constantly generate more essence as long as they were alive - meaning that fights were dozens of times safer for the city’s defenders, as well as the civilian population. Long gone were the days that people took shelter whenever a bell rang to indicate a monster raid. Young children didn’t even know where the nearest safe houses were - because they had never needed to use them. I couldn’t help but feel proud of our influence on this dimension. We had truly changed things for the better here - not in minor, superficial ways, but in a way that would last for millennia beyond our death, if all went well.
The super sanctuary’s defenses and defenders had also changed considerably. They no longer relied on Felix’s flight-granting boots to maintain the defensive screen around the city. This was because absorption essence users who had consumed an artifact were no longer massive drains on the city defense budget. Now that every single person with affinity for absorption essence constantly generated essence, the city had incorporated hundreds of new flying combatants into its ranks. Even after we died, the city’s defenses wouldn’t grow any weaker, because we couldn’t make any meaningful contributions to the sanctuaries anymore. The seeds we had planted here had outgrown us - and I was content with that.
Of course, that wasn’t great news for our Achievement rewards. The amount of Achievement we got from each fight had been dropping each year, because the ratio of our contribution to other people’s contribution was steadily dropping. I was a bit disappointed by the slow decrease in our income, but I had always known that our inflated income wouldn’t last forever. The amount of Achievement we had already earned was more than enough, anyway. Next time we returned to the Market, all four of us would go through earth-shattering changes just from spending all of our current achievement.
After all, even though our contribution had been dropping for years, five decades of income still added up to quite a bit. Especially because our contribution to creating the sun still counted, even if the percentage was decreasing.
Influence: Contributed to the defense of the Sanctuary by a [Moderate] amount X162
Achievement +47,630
Truthfully, the amount of Achievement that each raid gave us had dropped far more than expected - probably due to the fact that the raids after the five bell raid had gotten so much weaker. Still, 47,630 Achievement was a huge boost. It brought me from 107,800 Achievement to 155,430 Achievement.
This wasn’t even the direct reward for creating the Artificial sun - this was the reward for building the artificial sun, and then having that Artificial sun play a role in the defense of the sanctuary. I was beginning to see why Felix had gotten so much Achievement last world compared to the rest of us - being in a position of power or influence meant that all of your actions and decisions had major ripple effects upon the rest of the world. When each and every one of those ripple effects had an Achievement reward to go with it, every action the sanctuary as a whole took sent us a trickle of Achievement.
That wasn’t our only reward, though.
Four decades after the creation of the Artificial sun, the Sanctuary started working on growing a new tree to replace the one that had been destroyed during the ten bell raid. It was the first time the council had tried to grow a new tree in millennia. More importantly, it was the first time the sanctuary had a realistic chance of succeeding in growing a new tree. A new tree wasn’t just a way to expand the living space for the people of this world. It was an indicator that there was hope for the future. As long as the sanctuaries could keep building new trees fast enough to replace the lost trees, this civilization could sustain itself permanently. We knew that it would take a ludicrous amount of essence to make a new tree sprout, but with the city’s newfound essence reserves, the council had the leeway to invest in big projects like this.
As the council began work on growing a new tree, it also seemed that we had hit the threshold for a much, much bigger Achievement reward.
The previous reward we had gotten for building the Artificial sun had looked like this.
Influence: Create hope in a Dying World
(Note: Since the outcome of this ‘hope’ is undetermined, the current Achievement reward is much lower than it will be if your new ‘path’ is confirmed to work. In other words, this is the Achievement reward you get for creating a possibility. If that possibility bears fruit, expect a much bigger reward.)
Achievement + 30,000
This had been an Achievement for creating a ‘possibility’ of a future for this world. It hadn’t been a full reward for saving the world - it had been a smaller reward, for creating a sliver of hope.
By now, that hope had definitely borne fruit. The Achievement reward we had gotten for rescuing this dying dimension was substantial, to say the least.
Influence: Create hope in a Dying World
Achievement + 150,000
The extra 150,000 Achievement was absolutely ridiculous. It was enough to show me just why Transmigrators were so willing to drive worlds to extinction in order to acquire Achievement. After all, while I didn’t know exactly how this particular Achievement reward was calculated, I did know that the number of people alive played at least some role in determining how much Achievement we got. This world didn’t have very many people left in it, compared to even a regularly-sized planet stuck in the middle ages. This entire dimension had maybe 20 million people in it total. Despite its low population, we had still gotten enough Achievement here to dwarf all of our earnings from every other life combined.
150,000 Achievement pushed me from 155,430 Achievement straight to 305,430. The rewards I got for creating the Artificial sun were probably exhausted by now, and I suspected I was pretty close to the total amount of Achievement I would be exiting this dimension with. I would still do some work to farm a little more Achievement on the side, of course - but I doubted my future efforts would compare to what I had already earned, unless I found a new massive project to work on. I kind of debuted that was going to happen, since I had already put this civilization on track to flourish.
Still, I had earned a lot from building the artificial sun. With the 30,000 for the initial construction, 150,000 for turning the tables on this world’s gradual extinction, and the 50,000 ish Achievement we had gotten for the role the sun played in each raid on the sanctuary, the artificial sun had paid out around 80% of the Achievement we had gotten in this world. That kind of earning level was no joke.
During those two decades, the four of us spent a large amount of time teaching students - however, we also got started on a new project.
After creating the Artificial sun, Felix had more than proven that he had the ability to make Market items. After that, Felix got an idea for how to address one of the biggest weaknesses I had.
This was the problem of power retention upon returning to the Market.
Normally, when we returned to the Market, we had nothing. Anise kept her spellcasting system, but the rest of us basically dropped right back to the strength we had when we were infants. We kept none of our runes, I lost access to Extinguish, Renewal, and Soul Clamp until I rebuilt my affinity, and Sallia lost all of her physical boosts that she got from using her various training equipment. Since we only had a few months of time upon returning to the Market each time, this was a huge problem for us. Sallia would have a way to solve this problem upon returning to the Market, since her next ability evolution would fix this issue. However, I had no way to resolve the problem in my next set of ability evolutions.
Felix had proposed a solution. He had managed to secure a few of the materials from the leviathan which had attacked the monster during the ten-bell raid, with a special focus on the materials that had compatibility with the Market’s system.
After that, Felix told me to hold off on forming more runes - because he wanted to create an item that would let us keep those runes from life to life. It was an ambitious plan, and one that had no guarantee of working. However, if Felix did find a way to let us keep our runes from life to life, both Sallia and I would have far more power upon returning to the Market.
For that purpose, Felix spent a great deal of time working with the four of us. He had Anise constantly use her magic system near him, so that he could get a feel for what parts of her ability let her keep her spell maps from one life to another. Then, he had Sallia and I use our own rune magic system while he observed us, so that he could get a better feel for what our rune magic system looked like, and how to tailor an item to retain those runes from one life to another. He also had Sallia hold off on forming runes too quickly - after all, part of the information Felix needed to design this item was what exactly a rune was and how the process of forming a rune worked.
Two decades hadn’t been enough for him to finish building the item, but real progress was being made. I was grateful for the fact that we had another four centuries to go before we had to worry about old age - that was plenty of time for Felix’s research to progress and potentially fix one of my biggest weaknesses right now.
As we delved into our research and our teaching, and the Sanctuary continued to grow, time… continued to pass.
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!)
Comments
Colin Clark
What ever happened to Elder Veridian? Wasn’t she dying of old age as of chapter 390?
Faces The Wind
debuted = doubted
orangesnowfox
ah, and now it makes sense why they didn't finish their rune abilities.
