Markets and Multiverses (A Serial Transmigration LitRPG)
Chapter 353: Preparing for the Future

Time passed.

Sallia, Felix, Anise and I kept learning more about the world as months turned into years. A lot of information was limited to us, because we were still considered ‘children’ until we turned fifty or so. However, we still managed to fish out bits and pieces of information. The best source of information we found was our grandfather. The old man seemed more than happy to chat about the ‘Hylian’ magic system, and had at least passing familiarity with a lot of other, less commonly used magic systems. He was also more than happy to get Anise and I to visit him, since there was a good chance our mother would also come along, although our father was still the one who brought us to see our grandfather more often. 

Our grandfather seemed slightly disappointed whenever our father came along, but he still took it in good humor. He also seemed to love spending time with us, which was a nice feeling.

What we learned from him about spellcasting was interesting.

This world didn’t just have one spellcasting system for each essence. Instead, each essence could be subdivided into three to five different spellcasting systems, each of which had wildly different principals and use cases.

Sadly, during the flight to the sanctuaries, many of the magic systems had been lost, either in part or completely. After life started to improve on the Sanctuaries, people had started to fill in the missing gaps in the spellcasting system - but the amount of new or recovered knowledge was still massively outweighed by all that had been lost.

People still had a rough idea how most of the ‘lost’ magic systems worked. Some of them sounded interesting - one of them, for example, took binding essence in a very different direction. Rather than using it as a tool for crafting and creation, the idea was to use binding essence to ‘bind’ people’s beliefs together, creating  a sort of semi-sapient god. Then, practitioners of the magic system would bind themselves to that god, thus allowing them to draw power from it in a sort of symbiotic ‘champion’ relationship.

There were a bunch of other interesting sounding magic systems, but sadly, most of them were lost. There were some scholars still trying to restore the lost magic systems, but with limited essence budgets, it was very hard to experiment. Essence food had, apparently, been far more common before people fled to the sanctuaries, thus implying there had been an easier way to grow it on the planet… but that knowledge didn’t really help us much.

That left the five magic systems still in wide use today.

The Hylian magic system was this world’s manifestation magic system. It was mostly focused on pyromancy, and had a strong emphasis on long-range bombardment. It did have a rather fatal weakness, though - bigger attacks tended to become rather energy inefficient. That might not be a big problem for a Market resident, who had plenty of ways to handle essence consumption if they focused more of their build on it. However, for the locals of this world, that meant that ‘experts’ of the Hylian magic system still tended to have weak understanding of bigger attacks. That was a bit of a shame, since the magic system was theoretically supposed to be able to launch fireballs the size of smaller cities around at its pinnacle. Not that anyone had the essence for that these days - instead, energy efficient attacks to take down fliers were prioritized.

The second and third magic systems were both binding essence systems. One of them was focused on ‘singing’ materials into existence, and the other was focused on layering special materials onto special objects to create ridiculously powerful enchantments. Much like the Hylian system, both of these magic systems struggled with lack of essence, meaning nobody had reached the peak of these magic systems in millenia.

The fourth system was the absorption system - instead of just absorbing essence to improve the body, it was focused on absorbing literal magic artifacts to enhance the user. As far as I could tell, this was actually one of the most energy-efficient magic systems our group had ever encountered. It could give people far greater buffs for far less upkeep than Sallia’s magic system. Of course, that was only if you ignored the cost of creating the artifacts themselves. In the current era, it was also a rather wasteful system, since if the artifact’s effects weren’t maintained with essence, they would disappear. That meant essence costs were being used even when the city wasn’t under attack, which, for obvious reasons, didn’t thrill the people who planned the city’s defense budget. Of course, the city still maintained several absorption essence users - and many of those people were near the top of this city’s combat strength, although they were far fewer in number than the users of other systems.

Sallia and Felix both expressed some interest in trying to study this magic system though, because if Felix found a way to create some absurdly powerful artifact, Sallia could then ‘eat’ it to become even more powerful. It was potentially terrifying, if the two of them found a way to work together and found a good way to keep the magic system intact. I hoped they found a way to make it work.

Finally, there was the fifth magic system. This one interested me quite a bit more, because it was based around alteration essence. The alteration system that had survived was based around amplification - alteration essence users would take the abilities of other spellcasters, and then amp up the effect to a crazy level. Thus far, I mostly leaned towards healing my friends, and either outright killing enemies or ‘cursing’ them by reducing their life force. I found this magic system pretty interesting - although I wasn’t sure if I was particularly committed to trying to retain it after this world. I only had 10 keyword slots, after all. Still, it was highly valued throughout the entire flying island, and based on what our grandfather said, it was incredibly energy-efficient.

Of course, even though our grandfather was willing to teach us the basics of each magic system, he never gave us any specific details about how to start interacting with each system, or how to get started. According to him, if either of us showed talent, he would introduce us to a relevant teacher or teach us himself - but we would have to wait until we turned twenty and went to school first. Based on our understanding of how fast children grew up in this world, twenty years old was about the equivalent of a regular human child turning six or seven. It was also when children started going to public education in the city.

Apparently, the education of this world was quite well rounded. Children learned about math, history, writing, combat, and magic between the ages of twenty and fifty - though children without the ability to use essence just learned about theory. After all, most children had no potential for magic - something our grandfather confirmed when Anise and I asked about it. About one percent of the population had potential to use any one of the four essences - and in most cases, they could only use one. People who could use two or more essences were known to exist, but they were incredibly rare - and they usually only learned to use one magic system anyway, due to the cost of replenishing essence during training exercises and the division of time and focus.

Since our grandfather wasn’t willing to teach us how to ‘get started’ in this world’s magic systems, I spent a great deal of time working on my original magic systems. I paid particular attention to my alteration magic, because I was still waiting until I had more information to form my runes. Luckily, I was more than capable of building my alteration magic up to the level I had previous achieved.

That brought my Achievement from 18,631 to 22,131.

I had reached Expert grade Attunement pretty comfortably three lives in a row now. However, just like the previous two times I hit advanced grade, I started to feel a barrier when I tried to advance to Master-grade. It was like there was a wall in front of me, something I could theoretically move past, but that I was missing a critical insight for. However, I did notice that the wall felt less stable in this world than in previous ones. In our previous two worlds, I felt like I was ramming my head into a solid steel wall, but this time it felt like I was trying to rip my way through a rusty iron wall. It was still difficult to advance, but I felt much better about my odds of pushing into [Master] Grade than ever before, just because this world’s environment made it so much easier to progress.

Apart from that, I made surprisingly little progress in most other skills. A big part of it was because my body was so underdeveloped - children in this world grew up slowly. However, with my expert grade attunement operating, I felt pretty secure in the knowledge that I could fight off most moderate threats, and I had plenty of time before I needed to put our long-term plans into motion.

Anise, Sallia, and Felix also spent the next few years rebuilding their magic systems. By the time we turned twelve, Anise had access to four spells: force shield, magic missile, mage hand, and a utility spell called {Mage Eye}, which let her send an illusory ‘eyeball’ into the sky that she could see out of. It was essentially the magical equivalent of a drone with a camera attached. It would be very useful for scouting things out back in the Market. 

Felix had decided to replace a few smaller parts of his tendons and fingers with metal prosthetics, just like last life. It boosted his physical abilities by a decent amount, without requiring outrageous amounts of essence to keep going. He also confirmed that metal weapons and objects could exist in this world, it was just that natives had no way to work it because concentrating that much heat into an object when non-magical fire didn’t exist was very hard. His dimensional factory could at least somewhat sidestep this problem, since it also had ways to spend essence to create heat - and unlike the natives, Felix wasn’t restricted by the difficulty of generating essence.

Of course, Felix had noted that the way heat worked was… strange. Some parts of how he assumed fire ‘should’ work simply didn’t interact with their environment the way they were supposed to. He could set tools from his ability on fire, but things like wood simply refused to catch fire, even if they sat in the middle of a giant bonfire. It seemed that the lack of ‘natural’ fire in this dimension created some sort of strange interaction with even our ability-created flames.

Despite his difficulties, Felix hadn’t let that slow him down. He had taken to melting down a variety of smaller stone materials that nobody cared about, in order to acquire trace amounts of metal. Then, he had rebuilt them into a variety of metal tools and materials for future use.

Sallia had built a straight up flight rune for her first rune, since she was pretty sure it would be useful. However, just like me, she had avoided going any further into her magic system. Until we turned twenty and started school, we decided to hold off on making any decisions we couldn’t change, such as our rune abilities.

Apart from that, we learned several small things about the world. Things that made this world seem stranger, rather than more familiar. Most of these odd factoids came from Sallia’s family, since Sallia’s parents were farmers, and a family of three children who ran around the house and made trouble. Sallia was the youngest of the bunch, and the only daughter of the family.

For one, we learned that water didn’t fall out of the sky here as rain, or do anything else that I could conceive of as ‘normal.’ Instead, water was a direct byproduct of photosynthesis… or whatever this world’s version of photosynthesis was. Plants here didn’t need water to grow - instead, their leaves created water as they grew. For some reason, root vegetables did not follow this logic - instead, plants such as potatoes glowed as they absorbed starlight, which somehow generated heat for the island. The day I learned this fact was the day I gave up on understanding the physics underlying this world’s laws of reality. Whatever was going on there, it was way beyond my ability to understand, at least not without years of study and better equipment than I had.

Second, we learned that heat and light in this dimension… were the same thing. Somehow. I had already gotten hints about this, but I had never put it together until I identified exactly how my parents were heating up the bread in the bakery.

Apparently, one of the kinds of rocks in this world could trap starlight. The more starlight they trapped, the brighter and hotter these rocks became - and the more light and heat they released. These rocks never ran out of light, because why would silly things like conservation of energy apply in this world? 

Even more odd, several types of rock in this world would totally change their physical properties if they were exposed to enough sunlight. Several rocks would gain a different color, and become harder or softer, while other types of rock would become capable of absorbing essence and storing it for future use. The stones my parents used for lighting and heating apparently started their life as cubes of stone, before they were exposed to starlight for 40 days. By the end of this process, they turned transparent, glowed, and heated up their surroundings. 

Treating rocks using starlight was both a form of craftsmanship and art in this world, and probably part of why arrows seemed so incredibly accurate here. Some rocks, after being processed a certain way, would literally seek certain types of life form after they were made into rocks. People had figured out how to make hive-mind-monster seeking arrows a long time ago, and now they were practically the only kind of arrow in use, because they made it dozens of times easier to hit monsters in midair.

For swords, spears, and other melee weapons, there were instead several types of rock available. Swords were usually made of either a green or a white stone, since they were cheap to manufacture using singing magic and fairly easy to process. Fortunately for our family, we had black stone weapons - which were much harder to make, but also far sturdier. Weapons made of black rock tended to be expensive, but they were also much better at killing monsters if something happened. 

Felix was endlessly fascinated by all of the weird physical interactions of this world’s underlying physics. As much as all of the changes gave me a headache, he seemed to love delving into the underlying logic of everything. At least one of us was having fun with the whole thing.

The years between when we turned six and twelve were peaceful, filled with quiet improvement, study of the world around us, and preparation for the future. Unfortunately, halfway through our twelfth year in this world, something changed. While my mother was putting together a few cheese and garlic loaves of bread, I heard a raid siren in the distance. At first, I didn’t pay too much attention to it - after all, raids happened every few months, and most of them weren’t a real problem. However, when I started to hear how many bells were ringing, I started to realize things were worse than I had thought.

This was because instead of the usual two or three bell raid, I heard seven bell rings, echoing throughout the city and alerting us to the fact that real danger had finally come for us.

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