Markets and Multiverses (A Serial Transmigration LitRPG)
Chapter 365: Sunlight

A few more months passed. With the encouragement of Elder Veridian, Anise and I continued our study of lost magic systems. She also commended us for what help we had been able to give during the raid. While she hadn’t yet started to teach us the ‘ceremonial’ aspects of being heroes, she said that we had done a good job of bringing hope to the people even without any real training.

From her words, as well as the fact that she had started to emphasize our studies in lost magic systems, I started to suspect that Elder Veridian was changing her mind. Instead of just relegating us to ceremonial roles, she still had some hope that we could bring about change for the future. She was just looking for something to validate that hope.

I wasn’t sure if we could meet that desire yet, but I wanted to do so. The more we learned about this world, the more I wanted to change its fate. This world was dying a slow but nearly unstoppable death. I didn’t want the people of this dimension to fade away, though. So we worked hard at learning and experimenting with our new magic systems.

Anise had a much easier time than I did, at least a first. She had a pretty easy time reconstructing the first stages of her own magic system. With Elder Veridian’s instructions, she was now capable of creating illusions based on other people’s beliefs. She still hadn’t figured out how to turn those illusions into real objects or spells, but she was making progress. Even though she had yet to hit the wall of what was currently understood in her magic system, she was getting close. After that would come the real test - finding ways to advance beyond what was currently understood about her magic system.

Of course, she hadn’t slacked off on her spell maps either. While Anise hadn’t had enough time to build another spell map yet, she had said that she was working on a rather unusual spell - one that was invented by her, instead of inherited from our last dimension. She promised that it would be interesting if she got it to work, and made me promise that I would come watch when it was ready for testing.

I was making progress in my own magic systems, but it was slower. I was learning to conceptually alter objects via dimensional terraforming, but without using my shaping magic system as a crutch, it was difficult. This was because I had a different goal. I didn’t just want to master the new magic system - I wanted to combine my shaping magic system with this one. That way, if I got an ability upgrade for my shaping magic system, it would hopefully roll the new magic system’s specialization into it.

This was for a rather practical reason. The more I learned about the new magic system, the more I saw potential in it. The shaping essence magic system was very good at a variety of things. It allowed me to do basic dimensional terraforming, and it also allowed me to form an attunement and cast my best spells of all, such as Extinguish and Renewal. However, it also lacked the concrete focus that the dimensional terraforming system had. It was a jack of all trades kind of magic system - too much of its specializations had been lost before we were born in that world.  The dimensional terraforming system of this world was limited, but very focused. It could do the same thing with far less essence - and it was also better at a few other aspects of dimensional terraforming as well, such as resisting the re-conversion of a terraformed patch of area back to its original state.

The natural transformation of a dimension from one state to another, in particular, was one of my bigger discoveries. What I had learned was something that was already well known - any change to the underlying laws of reality, no matter how minor, sought to propagate themselves. However, my understanding of how and why that happened was… enlightening.

If I visualized a dimension as a giant colony of ants, most dimensions were made up of one homogenous colony of ants. They worked together to build up the hive, keep things intact, and grow. Of course, dimensional laws weren’t actually sentient, so my analogy wasn’t perfect, but it was close.

If most dimensions were like one big colony of ants, changing a dimensional law in a certain area was kind of like adding in a few ants from a hostile colony of ants. The moment the other ants noticed it, they swarmed it and killed it. Then, the changes I made to a given dimension would disappear.

However, just like a dimension sought to naturally remove any ‘unusual’ laws of reality, any law of reality I introduced to a dimension would try to propagate itself and take over the area. The singular ‘ant’ I could introduce into a dimension would bit the other ants that were swarming it, even if it was hopelessly outnumbered and outclassed. It was just that the difference in scale was way too large, so any change to a dimension I made would quickly revert back.

This was probably why I had managed to do a lot of interesting things with my alteration essence in the past, but most of them were very short lived. I could temporarily warp the way part of a magic system worked, but almost instantly after I ran out of essence, the dimensional laws I had messed with would correct themselves, shifting back to their ‘regular’ state. It was fine for modifying a spell or ability from a magic system, but there was a reason I had never really made a foundational change to reality itself.

Even more interesting was what my discovery implied. At least within the same dimension, dimensional laws naturally tried to propagate themselves. The ocean of souls seemed to work as a kind of buffer, preventing these laws from escaping their own dimension, but I suspected that if it weren’t there, the multiverse would be a far more chaotic place.

It also gave me a rough idea how ‘permanent’ terraforming worked. Any changes to the underlying laws of reality I created would try to take over all adjacent patches of reality. Those patches of reality would also ‘attack’ my own, transformed bubbles of space. To permanently alter an entire dimension, I just needed to change which side of this invisible, underlying war ‘won.’

Of course, that was easier said than done. If I wanted to make my new underlying laws of reality permanent, I would need to make my altered laws of reality have more ‘mass’ to them than the rest of the dimension - in other words, I needed to transform 51% of a dimension to make a permanent alteration to the entire universe.

That was a mind-bogglingly impossible task for me right now. How much mass was there in a universe? I had a hard time even visualizing a galaxy in a more ‘normal’ dimension. A galaxy was nowhere near as big as the entire universe. Not to mention, so long as my transformed laws of reality were smaller in size, I would need to spend essence keeping my changes from unravelling themselves. In other words, the closer I got to completion without hitting 51%, the more essence I would need to spend on upkeep, until I hit critical mass.

Even more absurd was simple travel limitations. I could transform dimensional laws that weren’t directly touching me, but I didn’t have a very big range. I could probably manage to warp reality up to fifty meters away, on a good day. Thirty or forty was probably a more realistic assessment of my abilities. To transform half of the universe, I would need to somehow access most of the universe… while also spending at least a bit of time near all of the previous work I had done every day or two, to keep the whole thing from unravelling.

Even if I had teleportation available to me, and infinite essence, I doubted I could ever be in enough places at once to ever fully transform a dimension. I just had too many limitations that I had no way to overcome.

No wonder the AI in the Market said that I was pretty far away from being able to enact a permanent transformation in a dimension. I was so hopelessly unprepared for the task that I couldn’t even understand what I needed in order to complete the task. Not being able to do something was depressing enough, but being so far away from the finish line that I didn’t even understand how to get there was even more frustrating. It also put into perspective just how absurd of a feat it was to permanently transform an entire dimension, even if I had dozens or hundreds of other mages working with me - which I now assumed was ‘standard practice’ for any Garden world. There was no freaking way most people in the Market did dimensional terraforming on their own. A team of Mages working together made way more sense - or maybe I was just limited by my imagination. Since the Market had evidently terraformed many dimensions in the past, I needed to seriously rethink how powerful the Market had been back in its prime.

This was also why things such as {Space Capsule} were so important. As long as an area was isolated from the rest of the dimension, the two opposing sets of laws of reality wouldn’t oppose each other. This was basically a requirement for any kind of meaningful dimensional terraforming to occur, since I was nowhere close to achieving permanent dimensional transformation. If I wanted to find a way to do permanent dimensional transformation anyway, despite my overwhelming inadequacy, I needed to create and maintain an isolated space and make my changes there. Which put a big damper on my ‘make the astral tides permanent’ idea. There was no way I was ever going to manage that, unless I got some ridiculously hefty upgrades before I died.

However, that wasn’t the only way to make a change. After I realized how hopeless my original plan to save this world was, I felt depressed, and spent a few days just playing with magic to make myself feel better. It was during the astral tides, so I didn’t need to worry about any major essence expenditure, which left me a lot more leeway for messing around. When I was messing with {Space Capsule} and dimensional transformation, Anise and I discovered something critical. I was trying to create a ray of sunlight from the islands world, just so that I could show Anise what the noon sun had felt like. However, when I created a ray of sunlight, Anise and I both jolted in surprise, for a very simple reason.

When the ray of sunlight landed on my body, I felt a small speck of all four types of essence appear inside of my essence reserves. A moment later, the sunlight whiffed out of existence, but Anise and I both glanced at each other.

“Did you feel that too?” I asked.

Anise nodded. “I got a bit of essence back. Not much, but I just got a little bit of all four types.”

I sank into thought. Sunlight that I had made from my first world… had restored our essence?

How very… odd. I had no idea why sunlight had restored our essence for us.

But if there was a chance that this could be replicated for other people in this world… perhaps there was another way to change this world’s fate.

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