Markets and Multiverses (A Serial Transmigration LitRPG)
Chapter 173: Sewer Run

When Sallia noticed that Miria took a few extra moments to rejoin her and Anise, she smiled to herself.

She was pretty sure that meant Miria had decided to steal the potions.

Sallia hadn’t been planning on pushing Miria to take the potions, since Miria seemed pretty uncomfortable with the idea. But… Sallia was glad that Miria had decided to take them. In her current situation, Miria really needed them. Since Miria’s mother couldn’t be counted on to get Miria food and clothes, Sallia was glad that Miria was finding ways to fill in the gaps.

As Miria rejoined her and Anise, Sallia started to speed up as she climbed down the ladder. As the smell grew stronger, Sallia wrinkled her nose.

The sewers smelled awful.

To be fair, she had already assumed the sewers would smell gross. The sewers were sewers, after all.

There were obvious signs people maintained the sewers: the walkways on each side of the sewer were scrubbed clean and remained sturdy. However, the sewers in this part of the city had also been built a few centuries ago, when people’s understanding of architecture was nowhere near as good. Sallia nervously eyed some of the walls, which were made of stone instead of brass, before deciding that nothing was likely to collapse on the group.

But the overall experience was still gross. The smell of human waste was appalling.

“Felix-” Miria gasped before gagging.

<Felix, you better appreciate this!> she sent over the communication bracelet. <We’re in the middle of the sewers now, and it is the worst smell ever.>

Sallia got a lungful of sewer smell as she tried not to burst out laughing. Miria using the communication bracelet to complain without needing to breathe too deeply was… an inventive use of the friendship bracelets.

<I’m sorry. Thank you for coming to rescue me,> Felix said, unusually seriously.

<I’m pretty sure Miria is just complaining because she finds the experience unpleasant,> sent Sallia, as she got her chuckling under control. <This smell is really quite something.>

<When we break you out, you’ll be the one smelling this afterwards,> said Anise, doing her best threatening tone over the communication bracelet. <The smell will never, ever leave you.>

<Maybe there’s some kind of anti-stink potion that we can steal from the lab on the way out?> said Felix. <It seems like something they would have in the sewers.>

Miria paused, gazing at the fetid sewer water for a moment, and then started nodding furiously. <They better,> she sent, shuddering. At the same time, Miria started to look very thoughtful at Felix’s mention of potions.

Sallia wondered if Miria was debating stealing all of those potions too. Sallia hoped that Miria wouldn’t feel quite so bad about stealing potions from Felix’s captors. There was at least some argument that Miria was stealing from a random innocent person when she grabbed the potions from the shack above, but the people who had imprisoned Felix could take a dunk in the sewers for all Sallia cared.

Sallia caught Miria glancing towards the spot where she usually materialized her backpack, and a guilty expression reappeared on Miria’s face for a moment.

Sallia frowned.

Perhaps Mirai was thinking about returning the potions if the group found more to steal? That would make a lot more sense. 

<All right, Sallia, what direction are we heading?> Miria sent over the communication bracelets.

<We should be heading that way, roughly,> said Sallia, as she pointed to the Northwest. As she used her third rune ability to track Felix’s friendship bracelet, she could feel Felix’s copy of the item calling to her in the distance. <Anise, you have that item called {Shadow Dryad’s Eyes}, right? How exactly does the vision granted by them work?>

<They let me see from any darkness within about twenty meters of myself,> said Anise. <So as long as we get close to any secret entrances in the tunnels, I should see them. We just need to be in range.>

<Good enough for me. Let's start walking in the right direction and hope we see something. Miria, can you keep an eye out for any humans in the area? Your perception is probably the highest out of all of us.>

<Got it,> Miria said, before Sallia felt Miria start to access her absorption essence. <I can see around corners well enough, so I’ll take a peek anytime we need to turn. But I’m going to keep my ability off at other times, to preserve my essence.>

<Sounds good,> said Sallia.

The three kept walking through the dimly-lit sewers as they talked over their communication bracelets. Sallia couldn’t help but marvel at how convenient the ability to talk telepathically to each other was. 

The ability to communicate silently, and send images gained from using abilities back and forth instantly, and communicate over any distance was incredibly useful. Sallia felt that such communication tools had a great deal of potential on battlefields, and the longer the group walked, the more impressed Sallia was by the communication bracelets. 

Twice, Miria was able to spot maintenance people making rounds in the sewers and let everyone know that they needed to avoid a certain area. Doing so without needing to whisper was incredibly convenient.

However, as the group walked through the sewers, Sallia found herself missing the adventuring boots the group had ditched back in the Market. She needed to be very careful about where she stepped, since her and Miria’s shoes weren’t very waterproof, and Sallia was not eager to get brown slime into her shoes during this adventure. 

Apart from the occasional maintenance person, the group’s journey through the sewers was mostly unstopped by other people. Sallia didn’t see anything else that was particularly noteworthy, until Miria suddenly shot a question over the bracelets.

<Does anyone know if there are any monsters in this world?> she asked.

Sallia felt slightly surprised by Miria’s question. Had the topic simply never come up before?

<There are none in this world,> said Sallia. <No monster species at all. Just humans. I mean, there are some wild animals that are kind of dangerous… but ever since guns were invented, most of them have either gone extinct or very close.> At the same time, Sallia felt the urge to wince.

A lot of Miria’s abilities fed off of monsters. {Endless Hunger of the Ocean}, in particular, benefitted greatly from having powerful monsters running around for Miria to kill and copy abilities from. Not to mention, Miria seemed to like fighting monsters a lot more than people. Given how much Miria was struggling in this world, Sallia suspected that wiping out a small monster horde or two might have been good stress relief for Miria, since there were no moral conundrums when fighting monsters.

Sadly, in this world, that wasn’t an option. Even though monsters tended to make achievement farming easier for the group, there were no monsters to hunt in this world.

<No monsters at all, huh,> sent Miria, sounding a bit sad.

Sallia simply nodded as the group kept moving.

Eventually, Miria sent word that she had noticed something else. It took a few minutes of checking what everyone saw, but after a bit of examination, Sallia was pretty sure they had found their first underground alchemy workshop. Unlike the rest of the sewers, this workshop had a few doors installed into it. They were locked… which meant very little against Sallia’s metal manipulation.

A few seconds later, she stepped into the workshop, leading the way in case an ambush had somehow slipped past Miria’s senses. Sallia breathed a sigh of relief as she stepped into the underground structure. 

The all-invading stench of the sewers had finally disappeared inside of this workshop.

<Some kind of smell-blocking method?> Miria asked, as she walked into the workshop. <I can still smell a bit of the sewers, but it’s pretty faint here. And I have grade 10 perception. How about you, Sallia?>

Sallia sniffed the air more carefully, and shrugged. Her perception was only at grade 8, even after forming her first three runes. <I don’t smell anything,> she said.

Then, she looked more carefully at the workshop the group had entered.

The alchemy workshop was very different from what she had expected.

When Sallia thought of alchemy, she remembered those chemists that Felix and Miria had talked about from their first worlds. Even though Sallia had never seen them personally, she imagined people sitting around little jars and dumping little colored liquids from one jar into another. Sallia had no idea whether that was accurate or not, but that was what she imagined.

That was clearly not the way alchemy was handled in a post-industrial society.

Instead of little glass vials, embedded in the ground at the center of the room was a massive mixing bowl. It was probably two or three times the height of a grown man, and wide enough for five men to stand next to each other comfortably. There were some pipes and vials near the edge of the mixing bowl, which probably let ingredients flow in and out of the mixing bowl as needed.

Sallia could also feel the giant mixing bowl… calling to her, somehow. It was a very faint feeling, but it felt like the alchemy bowl was reaching out towards her.

<Does anyone else feel like the alchemy bowl is trying to talk to them?> Sallia asked.

<Yes, actually,> said Miria. <It’s very odd. Kind of like a magnet or something.>

<That’s an industrial alchemy mixer,> said Anise. <My father’s workplace has a lot of them. They connect to people’s binding essence really well and conduct it efficiently. Alchemists use the metal the bowls are made out of to control the essence interactions. Alchemists used to need to actually supply all of the essence themselves, and then do all of the mixing on their own. Binding Agent lets people collect and store binding essence from miscellaneous factory workers, the mixing bowls let alchemists control that binding essence during potion creation, and industrial mixers do all the hard physical work. It’s why alchemists can create potions and bottle them up by the gallon every day. A proper alchemist with the right equipment can produce thousands of bottles of bone-mending or anti-disease potions every day. And all that’s needed to make a potion that cures a new disease is a sample of the disease, so potions are pretty cheap nowadays. At least, they’re cheap compared to a century ago.>

Sallia looked at the industrial mixer with quite a bit more curiosity than before after Anise’s explanation. Sallia had never been able to wrap her head around how industrial societies worked, at least not in their entirety. The first two worlds she had been born into after meeting Miria and Felix had been similar to her first world: people used swords to fight, and magic to protect themselves from the creatures of the wilds. Miria and Felix had told her all about guns and machines, but this was the first time Sallia had been so directly confronted with the power of an industrial mixer.

In her mind, the image of a person stuck in a room with glass jars started to fade away, as Sallia looked at the industrial mixer.

The size of the industrial mixer was so massive that Sallia could easily imagine just how many potions it mixed every day. 

The most terrifying thing about an industrial society might not be its gunpowder. The sheer abundance of resources might be even more terrifying. Sallia wondered if industrial societies had similar ways of amplifying food and metal production. Did mines have similar machines running them? What about farms?

The old part of Sallia, the one that had once been an integral part of a noble family, wondered whether a noble family could easily crush its competitors if it had access to industrial machines. It seemed like a crushing advantage, both for internal and external struggles. Sallia filed that thought away for future use. This world didn’t have nobility anymore, but perhaps in future worlds…

<Anise, any signs of a hidden passage in this room?> Miria asked, breaking Sallia out of her thoughts.

Anise paused, and then shook her head.

<I think we’re a bit too far away from Felix anyway,> said Sallia, checking the location of Felix’s friendship bracelet again. The group was definitely closer to Felix than before, but there was still some walking ahead of them. <We need to walk a while longer before we get anywhere.>

Miria sighed, but nodded. 

Sallia led the way as the group continued left the industrial alchemy workshop and continued through the sewers.

The next hour was spent creeping through the sewers as they made their way closer to Felix. Twice, Miria spotted new alchemy workshops. Unlike the first workshop they had found, these two weren’t abandoned. In one of the alchemy workshops, Miria reported almost a dozen people standing around the edges of the industrial mixer, shoving binding essence into the fluid as spouts of brown and blue liquid, water, dirt, and other materials were poured into the industrial mixer.

Finally, as the group started to draw close to Felix’s location, they found a third alchemy workshop. In this one, Sallia could see almost two dozen alchemists, some of which were working and some of which were taking breaks. At first glance, nothing seemed odd about that - after all, alchemists probably needed to take breaks in between batches of potion. Even if they didn’t use much of their own binding essence, they still used some, and it was probably mentally exhausting to keep control of the whole mixture for several minutes or hours at a time.

However, when she looked more closely at the people in the workshop, they seemed… odd. Some of them were standing near the edge of the workshop, and it didn’t quite look like they were taking breaks.

Sallia could also sense large metal rods hidden underneath their clothing. She was pretty sure those were guns.

<We’re pretty close to Felix,> said Sallia. <Less than ten minutes of walking, I think. And the alchemists staring at the entrance to that workshop seem suspiciously similar to guards.>

<I see something! Behind that wall!> Anise said, sounding very excited. <It looks kind of like a passage.>

Sallia nodded, taking a closer look at the security guards and alchemists watching over the entrance to Felix’s cell.

Nothing was ever easy, was it?