Markets and Multiverses (A Serial Transmigration LitRPG)
Chapter 379: Trial (4)

When I woke up the next morning, I felt a lot better. I tossed another Renewal at myself, and breathed a sigh of relief as my last few injuries from the previous fight faded away. My essence was still far from full, but I had enough to at least toss out a fairly strong extinguish if I needed to, and my absorption essence could probably carry me away from a threat. I scanned my surroundings for any souls, and smiled when I confirmed there were no nearby monsters. Perhaps the trial System message wasn’t as inaccurate as I thought - even though the monsters in this trial were far faster and more powerful than I had expected, they didn’t seem to leave their territory that often. Otherwise, I would have seen far more numerous souls in my surroundings as monsters prowled around. Of course, I might have also just gotten lucky - but I was trying to be optimistic about this difficult and messy trial.

A moment later, I frowned, as I glanced around the forest. The trial introduction had also stated that food and water would be available in the trial. However, I had yet to find any, apart from the possibly-poisonous giant centipede. I had enough supplies to last me quite a while… but what about my friends? I was the one carrying around all of the food and water, because I had the {Inventory} Ability. My friends did not have this advantage. This was because we had expected the trial to be stocked with some supplies already. 

Every single historical memo we had indicated that this was the case - heck, even the System messages indicated that this was supposed to be the case. However, since things had gone wrong during the trial, I now found myself wondering if something had gone wrong with the food and water supplies that were supposed to be present for my friends. If I couldn’t find food and water, they probably couldn’t either. What if they just wandered around in their trial, getting hungrier and thirstier, until they died or were forced to give up on the trial?

I shivered in fear, before I forced myself to stop thinking about that. When my friends were likely to be awake, I would ask them if they had found food and water. However, Regardless of what happened, I didn’t have the ability to help them. Besides, my friends would be fine.

Sallia and I both still had an ability slot available from the rune magic system, so Sallia could find a way to handle nutritional needs with it if it became absolutely necessary. It would be a waste of an ability slot, since we had originally been thinking about using our two rune abilities to address any ‘final needs’ the artificial sun had and we had been prioritizing production over raw combat ability this world. However, she had a backup plan.

I could definitely imagine Felix solving the problem of food and water with some kind of rain catcher or something, too. He had the dimensional factory, and he was good at making things. He could probably find a way around the problem, if need be.

Anise… Anise worried me a lot more. She had one fewer world under her belt - two, if you included the fact that for her first world with us, she hadn’t had access to the Market and its System. She really only had one world’s worth of growth to push her along so far, and she had the fewest tools in her toolkit.

I couldn’t do anything about it right now, but I decided to keep this in mind for the future. Maybe there was some kind of friendship bracelet upgrade we could find, which would allow me to send items to my friends as well as messages? If so, it might be worth looking into, in order to solve problems like this one.

I sighed, and tried to push my thoughts away. If something went really wrong, Anise would tell me via bracelet. I just needed to keep an eye on messages from the group and make sure I didn’t miss a call for help - not that there was much I could do while we were separated into different trials.

I sighed again, and started walking back into the woods. I had already cleared out one monster from the twisted, dead forest. However, I was still pretty low on information. First of all, I hadn’t found any food or water - which also meant that the monsters here didn’t have any food or water. Was I missing something? Or were they getting supplies from somewhere else?

I decided to head back towards the corpse of the giant centipede-like creature to find out. I had seen where the creature was resting before it noticed me. Perhaps I could discover something if I investigated its den.

Several minutes of walking later, I started to frown.

I couldn’t tell if I had already passed through the site of the battle or not. I had certainly moved through several patches of woodland that looked familiar, but I couldn’t be sure if I had already moved through the battle site. I had expected the battle site to be incredibly easy to find. After all, the Centipede had crashed through dozens of trees during the fight. Most of those trees had shattered into shrapnel, leaving behind giant swathes of ruined forest. I had also blasted the centipede with a massive lightning bolt, and while most of it had gone into the centipede, my aim had been far from perfect. Trying to find a clearing surrounded by shattered trees and scorch marks shouldn’t have been that hard when I already had a rough idea where it was, right?

Wrong. I had a rough idea of what direction the battlefield was, and about how long I had travelled to get from the battlefield to my crappy lean-to. I even recognized a few of the trees that I had moved by during my journey back to the outskirts of the dead forest.

Despite that fact, I just could not find the battlefield.

After half an hour of searching, I started to get suspicious. I took my umbrella, and used it to leave a small scorch mark on one of the nearby branches of trees. I then spent the next twenty minutes watching, as the seemingly-dead tree slowly regrew. The sight was both bizarre, and more than a little bit unnerving.

I tried this with a few more trees afterwards. I tried cutting them up with the tip of my umbrella, scorching them with lightning bolts, and generally doing my best to mark up and ruin the landscape around me.

Within an hour, there was no sign of my actions at all. Tree branches that I had gradually cut off with my umbrella tip slowly regrew. Scorch marks disappeared. Tree shrapnel slowly sank into the ground.

That was when I realized why I couldn’t find the battle site. This forest had somehow made the entire thing disappear overnight.

Even more unnerving, I had no idea how it had happened. If the forest had been alive, I might have thought that the forest had digested the corpse of the centipede, and believed that the trees were incredibly resilient and good at regeneration. I might have even believed that the forest had some sort of special ability, and tried killing a tree or two with extinguish to see if I got anything interesting.

However, the forest around me was completely dead. And that made the whole situation about ten times more unnerving.

I was more than a little bit creeped out now, but simply hiding at the edge of the forest wasn’t an option. If I wanted to pass the hero trial, I needed to actually delve into the forest and explore. Since I now knew that the centipede’s corpse and the battle site had been digested by the forest, I stopped bothering entirely, and instead did my best to track down the centipede’s den from my memory.

It took me the better part of four hours to find what I was looking for - but when I did, I had to rethink several things about this trial.

The den that I found was a giant cave. Unlike other parts of the forest, this cave was teeming with life - it looked like there were hundreds, or perhaps even thousands of other smaller centipedes inside of it. I had a sneaking suspicion that the centipede had stashed its children here, or perhaps they lived in some sort of communal hive, and only the strongest one had patrolled the area and stumbled upon my presence.

However, that wasn’t the only thing that I noticed about the area.

Deep within the cave , I could see a giant soul. It was one of the strangest souls I had ever seen before - it looked kind of like the soul of moss, from back in our second world, but it was several times more… dense, for lack of a better term. The moss didn’t have more life force - it was more like something had taken millions of normal, Grade 5-6 fortitude plants, and then mashed them all together into some sort of patchwork, frankenstein creature.

It didn’t resemble the souls of the centipedes around it, and after observing it for several minutes, I didn’t see it move. Unlike the centipedes, which moved around and squirmed in their cavern beneath the earth, the giant ball of mixed life force remained completely stable.

I frowned. Was it a plant? Some sort of machine? A key part of the trial?

I wasn’t quite sure, but after some hesitation, I decided I wanted to find out. The centipedes inside of the cavern were far more numerous than the one I had fought - but they were also much smaller and weaker. I could probably take down several of them as long as I was careful. I just needed to keep a clear route to the exit, and to make sure that I could always outrun the swarm if they ended up chasing me. Besides, something about the giant ball of life in the cavern made me suspect it was linked to the trial - or, perhaps it was linked to whatever had changed about this trial during the millennia of neglect. Either way, examining it might give me some more information - and perhaps a useful Skill from {Endless Hunger of the Ocean}.

So, after reaffirming my decision, I stepped past the entrance and into the cave.