Markets and Multiverses (A Serial Transmigration LitRPG)
Chapter 394: A Road to a Better Future

After I finished looking over my ability evolution options, I spent a few minutes waiting for Sallia, Felix, and Anise. Just like me, they had gotten various ability evolution options after the completion of the sun. All of us had gotten at least one Ability evolution. Felix had I had both gotten two, since my alteration magic and Felix’s item crafting Abilities had been crucial to the creation of the Artificial Sun. Anise had only gotten the chance to evolve one Ability, since she only had one Keyword Ability to begin with. Sallia also only got one Ability to evolve, since her manifestation magic hadn’t been particularly relevant to the creation of the artificial sun.

Felix was the happiest one. His ability evolution options were exactly what he wanted them to be. For his binding essence magic system, he had chosen an item production upgrade. It would make it dozens of times cheaper and easier for him to construct more Market items, and it would allow him to imbue the light of hope into any item he created, so long as he had enough essence to support it. What exactly the light of hope did was ambiguous, but based on the wording, it sounded like it would provide users with either healing or stat boosts. Best of all, this cost essence - not Achievement. In short, Felix could now make any item into a low-quality Market item, and boost the performance of any item he tried to create so long as the item was below a certain ‘complexity’ threshold. This would also allow Felix to make some truly interesting prosthetic arms and legs, if he wanted to, before adding them to his own body to strengthen himself.

The second ability evolution he had gotten was for his alteration essence magic system - the exact same shaping magic system that I used. This one was less exciting, but still quite powerful. Felix had decided that he wanted a more obviously usable offensive magic system, as a way to compensate for his own weaknesses - and one of his evolution options provided just that. It would give him the ability to use the ‘light of a new sun’ to blast enemies with massive heat rays. While Anise could handle fire magic as well, Felix being able to work as a backup spellcaster didn’t seem like a terrible option for our group’s overall strength. It would also let Felix melt down weird metals more easily, so he would still have ways to turn this new evolution back towards crafting.

As a final upgrade, Felix had also triggered his Ability from the last world - the one that allowed him to get a new item slot every time he made a major invention that changed the world. This meant that Felix now had six item slots, instead of five. Not only was this a huge boost to Felix’s combat power in future worlds, it was also permanent. I hadn’t really thought Felix would be able to successfully activate his ‘gain an extra item slot’ ability for several worlds, but he had already managed to do it. If he could keep getting more item slots, I could imagine a day in the future where Felix was like a one-man armory. Plenty of items had incredibly potent once-per-lifetime effects. If Felix stacked enough of those together, he could just bury powerful enemies in them.

Besides Felix’s Achievement earnings, those were all of the upgrades he had gained during the Artificial sun’s creation. Next up was Anise.

Anise’s desired ability evolution was the least exciting, although it suited her well. Anise hadn’t actually been able to contribute very much to the actual construction process of creating the sun, but she had still contributed a huge amount to the creation of the sun during the hero’s trial. Thus, she had gotten the option to purchase a unique upgrade path. If Anise took it, in future worlds, she would be able to increase the strength of her spells by continuously using them, so long as she also fed them a certain amount of Achievement. Essentially, it was kind of like turning all of her spells into lesser versions of Abilities - except that they wouldn’t take up any glut penalty, and she also wouldn’t need to wait until death to upgrade her spells. This upgrade would allow her to constantly improve her spells through use, eventually transforming even her most basic spells into terrifying potent abilities that could warp entire battlefields. It did slightly conflict with Anise’s desire to master a wide variety of spells, since Anise preferred knowing more spells and this evolution encouraged using the same ability over and over again. However, it did mean that Anise would have a second form of permanent growth that would stick around from one life to another. The four of us had high hopes for Anise’s new Ability evolution - of the four of us, she suffered the least power loss upon return to the Market, which would be crucial for the fight for more lives. I could only hope that after I got my new evolutions, I could find ways to customize them in similar directions.

Sallia’s Ability evolution was interesting. Unlike Felix’s straightforward item ability, or Anise’s slow-but-permanent growth ability, or my eldritch upgrade, Sallia’s upgrade was at least partially built around item synergy. Sallia’s upgrade would tweak the way her Ability worked in a pretty major way. Instead of inscribing runes onto her body, Sallia would now form a sword that was linked to her soul, and then add runes onto that, instead. This had a few implications. For one, this Ability would now function as a kind of sixth pseudo-item slot. This sword was far beyond normal items, though. It wasn’t like the items we got at the Market, which would never grow or change over time. The sword had a variety of ways it could grow and improve.

First of all, the sword’s base material could be upgraded, so long as proper materials were found. So long as we found compatible materials or other swords, Sallia’s new soul-sword could eat them to grow stronger. These materials mostly upgraded the sword’s essence generation speed - which could, in turn, be used to add more runes to the sword. The sword could also be upgraded by inscribing more runes onto the blade - each of which would be a permanent boost for Sallia, much like Anise’s spells. Of course, inscribing each rune onto the blade would now cost Achievement and essence, and it would be much slower. However, Sallia was very excited. With this Ability, Sallia had a way to keep upgrading herself forever, as long as she had enough Achievement, materials, and time. So long as Sallia made good use of our time in the next world, by the time we fought for more lives Sallia would be very well-positioned to act as our front line.

This wasn’t the only addition to her Ability. This evolution would also let her add the effects of the 13th, 14, and 15th runes to the 9th, 10th, and 11th runes (according to the original magic system’s numbering). Combined with Sallia’s original ability upgrade, this meant that she would compress the first through ninth rune into the first three runes, and then compress the tenth through fifteenth runes into runes four through six. 

We had never actually reached the 13th rune in the original rune magic system, so neither I nor Sallia had any idea what those runes DID. We were excited to find out, though. With our new Ability upgrades, both of us had a reasonable chance of reaching far beyond what the previous limits of this magic system, since we would finally have ways to keep pushing the magic system further.

Of course, there was an equally terrifying price tag attached to her evolution. Sallia would need 20 more glut penalty and 40,000 Achievement to make her evolution happen. Normally, this would have been a price tag that left our group in despair. Fortunately, due to this world’s setup and our achievements so far, all four of us were wealthy. Even better, we weren’t even sixty yet. Our expected lifespan was around five hundred. With any luck, we would be able to harvest even more Achievement before we left this world, providing a stable Achievement reserve for Sallia to upgrade her sword during our next world. Even if most future Achievement earning would probably pale in comparison to the artificial sun, we still had plenty left we could do in this world.

After we finished looking through our Ability evolutions and making plans for our return to the Market, the four of us got back to work on the Artificial sun. The next few days allowed us to observe the change in people’s attitude, now that the Astral tides had ended and monster attacks could resume any minute.

The Mages that had worked with us were in high spirits. The city had temporarily organized the center of the city into a ‘barracks’ and a teaching center for people with high potential as Mages. In the past, these people hadn’t had any chance to advance, because there wasn’t enough essence to make use of their huge essence pools. Now that the sun was radiating sunlight for all of them to use, all that these formerly untrained people needed was some basic training. Right now, they were still unable to contribute to the city - but within a few decades, the city’s Mage count and available essence would multiply tenfold, at least.

The city was in celebration, the Mages were excited, and the four of us had already reaped a huge Achievement harvest for our actions. I had no idea whether something would go wrong later… but at least for now, life was good.