Markets and Multiverses (A Serial Transmigration LitRPG)
Chapter 395: Terror from the Depths

The next three months passed quietly. The most notable even was a five-bell raid that happened about a month after the Astral tides.

Normally, a four bell raid was a bit dangerous - after all, the raid was weak enough that the city was hesitant to use big spells to handle the intruders, but it was large enough that it could hit and kill some civilians if they weren’t careful. In a weird way, higher-bell raids were often safer for the people of the Sanctuary, since by the time a raid was six or seven bells, nobody questioned whether high-level spells were important anymore. As long as the monster wasn’t unusually resilient or hard to kill, the city would burn a bunch of essence handling the threat, and then hope that they had enough essence to last until the next essence crop harvest.

This time was different. The city had only had the artificial sun working for a few months, but during that time, they had tested all three major cities on our sanctuary for people with high essence pools. Then, everyone with a big pool had been concentrated near the artificial sun, to generate as much essence as possible. Those with alteration essence had fed their essence back into the sun, of course - after all, the artificial sun could only absorb alteration essence to grow.

Those who specialized in using the other three types of essence had used those months to learn the basics of a new magic system. With the constant generation of more essence, the city decided to take the four-bell raid as a training ground for the new spellcasters, with the old mages keeping watch in case something went wrong.

The results were mixed, but generally positive. The new mages were nowhere near as experienced as the old Mages, who had been training in their magic systems and essence for decades already. However, while they lacked the same skill of older generations, there were far more Mages than before, and they didn’t need to track every single drop of essence they spent. Without the same caution holding them back, they were far more capable of subduing the aerial threat before it even reached the city proper. Although the monsters breached the flying defenders outside of the island, the moment the monsters reached the outskirts of the city, a wave of spells blasted most of the invaders into fragments. From there, it was simple cleanup to eradicate the remaining invaders. No civilians were harmed during the entire invasion, and most civilians didn’t even draw an arrow before the whole thing was over.

Compared to when I had first reincarnated into this world, where every single invasion was spent huddling together with other civilians in a house and loosing arrows into the approaching horde, there was a world of difference. Instead of frightened civilians preparing to shoot down monstrous flying abominations that might drop from the sky and eat them at any moment, most civilians didn’t even finish looking for cover before they were safe again. 

More than anything else, this signalled a change of times - not just to the upper-echelons of the city, but even to the civilians. Given the huge contrast between this invasion and previous five-bell invasions, everyone could see how times had changed for the better.

The following day, the civilians broke out into a spontaneous celebration on the streets. They people feasted, danced, and thanked the ‘four heroes’ of the city, even if most of them were too caught up in the revelry to notice our passage. I found it pretty funny that we managed to slip by so many dancing couples and celebrating people without them flagging us down and saying something to us - but it felt nice to have accomplished something so obviously good for the people here.

The four of us, along with my parents and Sallia’s parents, ended up joining in one of the dances near the trunk of the tree. Sallia and Felix also ended up dancing together once, when both of them ended up more than slightly tipsy during the feast, while Anise and I ended up laughing and cheering them on. A few minutes later, I also got swept up in the dances from an old grandmother drunk on life, followed by a young man with a merry gleam in his eye, and then a string of other people that flashed by too quickly for me to notice. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Anise cheering me on and doing magic tricks for little children - as well as narrating a few of her favorite stories from our last world.

The rest of the night was a blur, but I had a great time.

The next day, I realized that I had gotten rewards for the fight sometime during the night - I had just been too distracted to notice. Apparently, the fact that I had played such a huge role in the artificial sun meant that I had played a massive role during the fight - even though the four of us hadn’t cast a single spell before the invaders were wiped out.

Despite the fact that we hadn’t gotten a single drop of Slaughter Achievement, the four of us were in a great mood once we confirmed our rewards. Previously, we had gotten around 300 Achievement per raid, due to the fact that we combined our efforts to arm the entire city’s defense forces with flying boots at all times. I had even thought this was a pretty good way to make Achievement - after all, unlike other forms of Achievement, influence Achievement had no ‘diminishing returns’ for repeating the same action over and over again. However, the 2,000 Achievement we got for creating the core of the Artificial sun blew our previous income out of the water. If we hadn’t relied so much on other mages to help grow the Artificial sun, or if we had managed to reach the front lines before the enemy was wiped out, our rewards would have probably been even more unbelievable.

When we reported back to the newly-formed Mage quarters of the city, all of the Mages were in a great mood. For a Sanctuary that had lived in constant fear of the end, seeing such impressive battle results from the new recruits was a huge morale boost. Like the other civilians of the city, they were celebrating a future that was just around the corner - one where people were free from the fear of extinction and had the freedom to look forward to the future.

Another month passed. The artificial sun continued to expand, and the area it covered grew wider and wider. The mage quarters became less miserable to live in, and more mages were also moved into the mage district. The council called for another meeting, and invited several non-council Mages. This meeting wasn’t to make any important decisions, or discuss the future of the city. It was to celebrate the Mages who had contributed to the Artificial sun. All of the Mages who had worked hard to contribute to the sun got a commemorative statue with our name carved into it set up near the base of the tree, to commemorate our efforts (and the months we had spent in cramped, smelly quarters shovelling down food to stuff it back into the sun.) Of course, the four of us got the greatest recognition of all, for making the Artificial sun possible in the first place.

Another year passed. The sanctuary that was closest to our own linked their island with ours, and asked our council members what the Artificial sun was, and why times were so much better than they had been a mere two years ago.

The council of our city asked us to meet up with the ruling council of the other Sanctuary, if we were willing to. We agreed. We were happy to help - we were just afraid of disappointing the other council. After all, without the items we had retrieved from the Hero’s Trial, making another Artificial sun would be impossible. I wanted to spread hope to all of the people in this dimension - I just didn’t have the ability to do it.

When the ruling council learned that we couldn’t create another artificial sun, they were very disappointing. Luckily, the ruling council of the other sanctuary was amenable to my proposed alternate solution: joining the two sanctuaries.

Linking two sanctuaries together to create one super-sanctuary had a lot of obvious drawbacks in this world. If most of the Mages were concentrated in one area, it might leave one of the two trees undefended, which could result in a catastrophe. It was also hard to make two different ruling councils react to new problems as quickly as one ruling council could - after all, with twice as many people in a council, there were twice as many dissenting opinions when a decision needed to be made. Worst of all, if the two sanctuaries were truly tied together, the weight of the sanctuaries would double. That meant that if one tree was destroyed, the other tree would be unable to support the weight, thus dragging both flying islands to their death.

Previously, linking two sanctuaries together had been a foolish idea to begin with. However, the Artificial sun offered hope. If two sanctuaries were linked, then twice the number of Mages could benefit from the Artificial sun. Thus, linking two sanctuaries together was no longer a foolhardy plan with few benefits - it was a tradeoff with some risks, but massive rewards. The ruling council of the other sanctuary agreed, and two sanctuaries became one.

The next year, the other Sanctuaries did the same thing. Some of them were skeptical of how good of an idea this was - but everyone also knew that their civilization was already doomed. The gradual decline of this world had been ongoing for millenia. Even if it was risky, and even if it might go wrong, nobody was willing to risk losing the first sign of hope they had seen in millennia. Thus, all of the sanctuaries joined together to form one super-sanctuary.

In the meantime, the city continued to fend off raids. While the proportion of Achievement we got shrank a bit, as more and more Mages started contributing to the artificial sun, our Achievement rewards for each raid continued to be incredibly high by the standards of other worlds we had lived in.

Together, the 9,800 Achievement I got from these five raids brought me from 92,071 Achievement to 99,871. I was very, very close to having six digits of Achievement for the first time.

The year after the sanctuaries reunited into one super-sanctuary, a sound that I had been dreading came. Each year our Mages and essence reserves grew exponentially higher, and the training quality of our mages grew as well. If things had continued this way, within fifty years the super-sanctuary would have been effectively invincible.

Unfortunately, the enemy didn’t give us time to straighten out every last weakness in the super sanctuary.

A year after the sanctuaries united, I heard the distant ringing of a bell. Unlike previous raids, which had all been five bells or below, this one sent ice through my veins. This was because, for the very first time in my life, I heard more than seven rings of the bell.

Ten rings. A ten-bell raid had come to extinguish the light of hope in this world.