Chương 121: Of Markets...

We spent the next three days traveling through the wastes, making sure to take shelter for a day after each day of traveling to make sure nobody got sick. We didn't run into very many living creatures: whatever the black sun was doing, it seemed to have killed off a lot of the local wildlife. Of course, we still ran into a few strange creatures during our travels, even if most of what we found was already dead. The only living creature we saw ended up turning into Achievement for everyone.

It was a nearly-dead creature that seemed to be made entirely of flames. I had absolutely no idea how its biology worked at all, but it was clearly suffering from the effects of the black sun. When it saw us, it turned towards us and tried to shriek at us, before its voice turned into a croak of agony. Sallia and Felix flung a few minor spells at it to get assists, before I finished it off with an extinguish. With how close to dead the creature seemed, it was practically a mercy killing at this point.

The poor creature looked like a patient who had been fighting a losing battle with a terminal illness for almost a decade, and since it displayed aggression towards us, I was more than happy to finish it off. Slaughter: Assist in killing a Flare Eater for the first time Achievement +300 The amount of Achievement the creature was worth, even for an assist, was actually quite high. I couldn't help but wonder how much Achievement it would have been worth if the black sun hadn't taken most of it for the kill.

And I also couldn't help but wonder how hard it would have been to fight at full strength. Anything that gave 300 Achievement for an assist couldn't be easy prey. Either way, the extra 300 Achievement boosted me from 14, 518 Achievement to 14, 818 Achievement. A nice bit of extra Achievement pushing me towards my goal. And, since I had struck the finishing blow against the creature using water, I also got a new skill out of it. Endless Hunger of the Ocean has devoured Flare Eater for the first time.

New Skill created. Desolate Heart of Flames: While this skill exists, your heart will be made of fire instead of flesh and blood. This heart of flames will give you a massive boost to all flame-related abilities, equivalent to adding an [Advanced] grade flame magic Ability to you. In addition, your heart become highly resistant to physical attacks that have yet to reach a certain level of conceptual identity. To be honest, at first glance, I was tempted to ignore the skill.

Even though adding an [Advanced] grade ability to my skills from {Endless Hunger of the Ocean} was tempting, it was a bit of a waste to boost flame-related abilities. After all, I was pretty invested in being an ocean mage. My strongest attack was extinguish, and my two different healing abilities were related to water and life. Almost everything I got out of my primary essence had nothing to do with fire, and so boosting flame-related abilities meant nothing to me.

However, even though my strongest abilities were related to my identity as an ocean-based shaper, I still had a few fire related abilities. Specifically, I had learned how to cast a proper third-circle fireball spell quite some time ago, and it was one of my better offensive spells. Even if I didn't use spells very often, since they tended to be far inferior to using an extinguish to solve my problems, it was still useful to have a backup magic system to fall back on once I ran out of alteration essence.

The fact that my heart would become resistant to physical attacks below a certain level of 'conceptual identity' was also interesting. I had no idea what a 'certain level of conceptual identity' actually meant, which made it hard to gauge the value of that part of the skill: however, it still probably made it harder to kill me by targeting my heart with physical attacks, even if I wasn't quite sure how it worked behind the scenes.

Perhaps physical attacks could overcome a lot of issues if they reached a certain grade, or something? That was my best guess for what 'conceptual identity' meant. At the very least, it meant that Sallia had somewhere she could continue developing without abandoning her role as a swordswoman, which made me happy. In any case, the boost to my fireball spell still seemed useful to me, so I dropped {Crude Manifestation Essence}, which I had originally gained from killing an Orukthyri spellcaster.

I had learned a better fireball spell than the one granted to me by the skill, and I had also learned the wind magic symbol on my own - meaning I had no real need for the skill anymore. Sure, the skill also gave me 10 points of manifestation essence, and 10 points of manifestation were still useful: they seemed to give me a little less than ten extra magic symbols per day, which let me cast two extra second-circle spells.

However, I didn't feel like two second-circle spells really made that big of a difference in my overall combat strength, and while I tried to help, the party wasn't really relying on me for scouting, which was the other thing I spent most of my manifestation essence on. Therefore, boosting my fireball spell just seemed more valuable overall. On our fourth day in the wastes, I was awoken by someone shaking my shoulder.

"Wake up. Something weird is moving," said Sallia. I blinked myself awake, shaking off the sleepy fog in my mind, and noticed that Felix and Anise had already left the cavern we were taking shelter in. Once I was up, Sallia quickly led me outside to join the others. Outside of the cave was a jungle slowly crawling across the wasteland. It wasn't a walking jungle, nor did it have any sort of limbs. It was just… a giant patch of greenery, moving across the area at a speed visible to the naked eye.

It was wide enough that it would probably take less than ten seconds to cross if we speedwalked, and nearly perfectly circular in shape. Furthermore, it wasn't as if the jungle was crawling forward, like a real, living creature. Instead, at the front of the jungle, new flowers and patches of moss would continuously bloom out of the dead, charcoal-scented dirt, growing in a matter of seconds before reaching maturity. And at the back of the circle of plants, plants would die as they were left behind.

I blinked in confusion, wondering if I was half-asleep and imagining things. However, even after I blinked and rubbed my eyes, the circle of plants didn't disappear. It smelled very strongly of salt for some reason, which confused me even more. I had no idea why the crawling patch of plants would smell like salt at all. I wondered whether it was some sort of monster. I took a look at it using my soul-sight, but I saw absolutely nothing.

At least as far as my soul-sight was concerned, the strange tide of plants was a completely ordinary patch of dirt. Which was even more unusual - even moss and spiders had souls, and as far as I had observed, every other living thing in the world had a soul. Even the creatures from outside this dimension had souls, although they were usually quite strange. For a giant swathe of green moss and flowers to have no souls at all struck me as incredibly eerie.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. However, when I looked at the tide of plants in the distance, I got a strange feeling. It was my Ocean keyword increasing how much it was activated. It was faint, and was still nowhere near 'fully' activated, despite the fact that I was wearing my {Lake-Gazer's Dress} and standing near another minor activator of my keyword.

But I could still feel the rate at which my body produced absorption essence, as well as my fourth and fifth runes, starting to strengthen themselves bit by bit, like pictures brought under a magnifying glass. I blinked. Ocean? What connection did the giant tide of plants have with an ocean?

"What is this thing?" asked Anise, shivering as she shied away from the strange tide of plants. It looked like Anise was trying to hide behind a rock and avoid direct sight of the plant tide. When I saw Anise shrink away from the tide of plants, I thought of the fog monster that we had run into during our flight to Silver City. It had managed to kill Felix's father and nearly permanently cripple us just from seeing us. It was hard to say whether the plant tide had a similar ability.

And unlike the gray fog, I couldn't see any soul at all, which potentially made this tide of plants even more dangerous, because Extinguish would do nothing at all to it. However, the strange feeling in my heart intensified as I looked at the patch of moving jungle. Although my first reaction had been fear, as I looked at the tide of plants more, I started to feel less worried. At the very least, the moving jungle didn't seem to be alive, meaning it wasn't a monster.

And the fact that it was triggering my ocean keyword, however faintly, made me feel more at ease around it.

"Is it alive?" asked Sallia, turning towards me.

"It has no soul. And for some reason, it's activating my ocean keyword, albeit very faintly" I said.

"Ocean keyword?" asked Felix.

"Weird. I can't figure out how it's related to an ocean at all. Maybe it's because it smells like salt?"

"None of the other salt I've encountered has triggered my ocean keyword," I said. Felix paused, and then nodded.

"Good point. Hmm…It isn't reacting to our presence, either. Even though it's getting closer and closer to us, I still haven't noticed the tide of plants change directions to move towards us, unlike most monsters we've encountered. I'm wondering if maybe it's some sort of natural occurrence, sort of like the tides of the ocean or gravity?" However, I also noticed that Felix was starting to relax.

"It doesn't seem hostile." Sallia slowly nodded, as well.

"I don't know if it's safe, but at least it's much less dangerous than the other things we've seen in this world. And it's not moving very quickly, either - if this thing started chasing me, I could probably outwalk it, even if I only had one leg. and was asleep half of the time. Though it's pretty weird, so we shouldn't relax completely. But I agree with Felix - it might be some sort of natural occurrence."

"It's quite interesting," said Felix, frowning.

"I mean, I can understand how things like tidal waves work, and my first world had at least some understanding of gravity. However, I have a really hard time understanding how this patch of plants works. I wonder if there's anything I can learn from studying it…" I nodded.

"My first world had a good understanding of most natural phenomena, I think. I don't remember it very well, but I know that we had nothing like this, at least."

"First world?" Asked Anise. I froze, completely losing focus on the moving patch of plants. Anise was giving us a strange, half-suspicious, half-curious look as she edged a little closer to us. I had actually forgotten that Anise didn't know about the Market or our life on the islands. Since there weren't any adults around, and I treated Anise as a precious friend, I had simply… forgotten that I was supposed to not talk about the Market near her. Sallia rolled her eyes.

"She meant… stories that we've heard about, Anise. Stories from… the past." It was a terrible excuse, and it didn't even make much sense, but I started nodding frantically, and Felix joined in a moment later. Anise's eyes narrowed as she looked at the three of us, and I started to feel incredibly guilty.

"If you guys don't want to talk about it, that's fine. I know the three of you have something you're not telling me…" she sounded sad.

"You always make weird references to things when you think I'm not paying attention, and the three of you acted really mature, even when we were all young. When I was…" her cheeks started to turn red.

"Even when I was talking about how I wanted to be a super witch, the three of you were always making plans about how to go to the surface and how to prepare. And a lot of those preparations feel like they would be made by adults, rather than just being stuff kids would say. And…" Anise shook her head.

"There are a lot of things that never really made sense. But you can keep your secrets." I felt even guiltier. I gave Anise as tight of a hug as I could, and she squeaked in surprise.

"Anise, it's not that we don't want to tell you everything about ourselves…" I said, feeling a huge wave of impulsiveness nearly crush any reservations I had about telling people about the Market. Seeing people I cared about in pain hurt. And not telling Anise was hard, especially since part of the reason we were trying to find the facility where the healing cube had come from was related to our knowledge of the dimensions outside of this one.

"The reason we can't talk about it is that some of the things we've gone through are just… unbelievable," I said.

"They're hard to understand, and we don't know if there's some sort of problem that will emerge if we tell you, or if you won't believe us, or…" I trailed off. Trying explain how Sallia and I were using another magic system that didn't belong in this dimension at all would probably be inadvisable. After all, this world that was slowly being corroded by an outside dimension, and it was up to debate if the orthanoid species would still exist in a few centuries because of the black sun.

Plenty of this world's problems could be directly traced to 'other dimensions,' and anyone who knew the history of this world would be quick to point out just how badly messing with other dimensions had mangled this dimension beyond recognition. Admitting that we were using a magic system from outside of this dimension seemed like a terrible idea in that context. If Anise ever let anything slip, the three of us, and Anise, might all die.

And while a part of me wanted to tell Anise everything about ourselves, a part of me didn't want to put such a huge secret on the shoulders of Anise. By human standards, she was eighteen or nineteen years old, which seemed far too young to be forced to keep a secret that might get her friends killed. But I also wanted to be honest with Anise. I treated her like a trusted friend, and not telling her the full truth about me felt terrible.

"I still want to know," said Anise, looking at me directly in my eyes. I paused again. Was it really a good idea not to tell Anise? As I was hesitating, Sallia touched Anise's hair, and then gently stroked it. Then, she looked at me.

"Miria, if we're really bringing Anise into our circle of friends… maybe it's not a bad idea to tell her during our exploration?" She said.

"I don't really know if it's a great idea, but at the same time… Anise has been through a lot with us, and I can definitely see that you want to sing like a canary," she said, as the corners of her lips quirked up in a half-grin.

"We could take this as a… trial run of sorts. To see how telling people we trust about us goes in the future." Felix chuckled.

"Miria, you're pretty bad at keeping secrets. I don't think I've seen this side of you before." Then, he gave me a quick hug.

"I don't hate the idea of telling Anise either. We've been through a lot together. But how about we deal with the weird plant swarm first? Even if it's not moving that fast, we should still figure out what we're doing about it, and then talk afterwards."

"Promise?" asked Anise, giving us a huge, bright smile.

"Will you really tell me more?" I felt my last specks of resistance crumble away like soggy cardboard. I smiled too. I felt like my chest was exceptionally light today.

"Promise. Let's deal with the weird plant swarm, and then we'll talk about the ocean of souls and the Market," I said.