Chương 200: Soul Fragment

I froze.

"Market?" I asked. I had heard the holographic man's words clearly the first time, but a huge part of my brain just short-circuited the moment the hologram mentioned information that it shouldn't have. Nobody else in the other dimensions we had entered had ever displayed any awareness of the Market. This was a first for me. My thoughts started racing. Was the hologram hostile towards the Market? If something was aware of the Market, it might also know how to actually hurt a reincarnator.

Killing us only sent us back to the Market, but I strongly suspected that attacking our souls might do more permanent harm to us, and if the hologram was aware of the Market, we might be in genuine danger here.

"The four of you all look like six year olds, yet you're wandering around using abilities that don't belong to this dimension at all. And you don't act like six year olds at all - you act more like people in their early twenties. I mean, I guess you could be the children of Transmigrators from the Market too, but the attitude just doesn't match up."

"I'm just… I mean…" I flailed around, searching for a way to explain ourselves, while the hologram simply shrugged.

"You seem afraid of me. Don't worry - I'm not hostile to other transmigrators." I blinked in surprise. Other transmigrators?

"How about this. Since you guys probably already know things are wrong with this setup, I'll tell you the truth. This ruin actually has a lot less to do with the ancient Zelyr than it's pretending to, and most of the 'historical documents here' are a sham. My creator tacked me onto the original Zelyr essence machinery, tidied things up a bit, and then added this little area into it.

But unless you're interested in gathering some keyword abilities, I doubt you have much to gain here, since this is only partially a 'real' inheritance. The Achievement value for exploring here isn't that great, and this ruin has zero real historical value. Can you just leave and pretend this never happened? You guys go your way, and I go mine?" A few words caught my attention immediately. The hologram assumed that we were exploring this ruin in order to gather more Achievement.

This had been the reason the four of us explored most ruins - and I had, indeed, expected to get a nice amount of Achievement for exploring this ruin as well. The fact that exploring a 'fake' ruin would decrease our Achievement reward was interesting, and something I would need to take note of in the future. However, the hologram had also hinted that it was possible to learn keyword abilities here. Keyword abilities related to manifestation essence were very desirable for one member of our party right now.

"Does this place have the ability to give me a keyword ability for manifestation essence spellcasting?" asked Anise. She was practically vibrating with excitement. The hologram turned towards Anise and seemed to study her carefully.

"There's one of you who wants a keyword ability? How young are you guys? Most people finish getting their keywords within the first five worlds." I hesitated, wondering whether or not it was a good idea to tell this guy how 'young' we really were, at least according to Market standards.

"Nevermind, I can tell that you're new to this," said the hologram, before I could even finish thinking.

"Well, if you want a keyword ability, this could also work for both of us. This inheritance ground is used as a place to give people some manifestation essence spellcasting. However, it's not possible for me to give you a keyword ability - there is no known way to just give someone a keyword ability, unless the Market has discovered something new since I was created. Which is unlikely.

People have been searching for trillions of years for a way to expedite skill learning and evolution, and there has been a lot of progress for non-keyword abilities. But none for keyword ability sharing." My frowned. If the Market has discovered something new since the Hologram was created? I realized that the Hologram wasn't aware of the fall of the Market. Should we tell it? I hesitated, before I decided against it.

I wasn't sure how the hologram would react to learning its home had been destroyed, and I was afraid of it potentially managing to hurt us. Claiming that the Market had been destroyed was probably a bad idea. But I also felt a twinge of hope when I heard the hologram so easily refer to life in the Market before the collapse. The hologram had a chance of giving us real answers about the Market. Not pieces of information we had pieced together while rooting through half-decimated stores and ruins.

We could hear information directly from before the collapse. A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. After two and a half lifetimes of looking for answers in the Market and finding nothing but scraps of information, I was ready for some more concrete information. However, information about the Market could come later. First, we needed to figure out Anise's magic.

Anise had been hoping for a chance to be a super-witch for her entire life in our last lifetime, and while she managed to stay optimistic in this life, she did seem rather disappointed with the fact that she could only use magic missiles right now. And she was also notably behind the rest of the group in combat ability right now, which wasn't ideal.

"What specifically are these ruins designed to do?" Felix asked, looking curious.

"Well… the original Zelyr ruins were meant to maintain a sort of… pocket dimension that encapsulated the entire mountain range," said the hologram.

"And fill it all up with manifestation essence. My creator suspects that the idea was for the ancient Zelyr to always have a homeland to fall back to, even if their empire collapsed. That being said, the whole machine doesn't seem to have ever actually worked - at least, not well enough to use. The Ancient Zelyr's understanding of pocket dimensions was pretty good for a civilization that had barely interacted with the multiverse - but it was still far from complete.

So basically, the essence 'machinery' in these mountains are a broken machine that never actually worked.

"My creator added on the ability for this particular set of ruins to reconfigure a person's body, essentially performing a type of surgery that will let them absorb manifestation essence naturally. It will also bond someone to a Zelyrian spellcasting aid, letting them perform Zelyrian spellcasting as if they were born as a Zelyrian instead of a native of this dimension. Whenever someone shows up with an orb, I appear and offer to perform the body surgery for them…"

The hologram seemed slightly embarrassed for a moment.

"Although I may also make my offer sound a bit more… grandiose. It makes people more excited to accept the offer, you see." I resisted the urge to snort. If there was one thing that the original of the Market seemed familiar with, it was advertising. Given how many ads we had been bombarded with over three lifetimes, I could certainly understand why.

"Why did your creator bother setting all of this up in the first place?" asked Sallia.

"It seems like an awful lot of work to go through just to help future generations."

"Help people? What the…" the hologram looked at Sallia as if she had just suggested the moon was made of cheese.

"No! Who would bother doing something ridiculous like that? Obviously … ah, do you not know how legacy Achievement works? You are pretty new, after all, and Legacy Achievement usually requires pretty specific and resource-intense items or abilities to set up." The hologram nodded to itself.

"All right, so what do you know about collecting Achievement once you're outside of a dimension?"

"It… can't be done?" I asked. That was what the System notifications had told us, at least. The hologram nodded.

"Correct. Under normal circumstances, it can't be done. Achievement is formed from the way the mana your souls is comprised of interacts with the laws of reality. If your soul is not present, it can't interact with the laws of reality, so no Achievement is formed. But obviously, being able to collect Achievement from multiple dimensions at once would be incredibly valuable, right? So there was never a shortage of people trying to find a way around that issue.

Unlike some other branches of research, this one eventually bore fruit. It was discovered that if you create a sort of 'dimensional anchor' to a certain dimension, you can still collect Achievement from it. These dimensional anchors can take many forms - such as a fragment of your own soul, left behind to keep the Achievement flowing." the hologram grinned.

"But it works, and that's what matters." I thought about the hologram's words, and then looked at the table again. It didn't seem to have a soul inside of it… but then again, Anise had also mentioned that her eyes had picked up another creature in part of the corridor, and I hadn't been able to see its soul either. The hologram here also referred to us as 'young.' It was possible that there was just an item or ability shutting off my soul-sight in the area.

Or I might just not be able to see soul fragments, if they were too small or hard to see. Unaware of my thoughts, the soul-fragment shaped like a hologram kept speaking.

"I'm also still the same person as my creator - at least, sort of. So I can earn Achievement by teaching relatively strong spellcasters who then go on to influence the world, and then pass it along. After all, if I have a hand in teaching you or helping you grow stronger, a very small fraction of all future actions you take will be credited to me. It's usually not much - but if my creator just keeps leaving behind a few inheritances in every single world they come across…"

I nodded to myself, starting to understand the point of all of this. Just like everything else in the Market, it came down to earning more Achievement. I had seen a section of our 'death reports' that explicitly mentioned Achievement earned from Family and Disciples. I hadn't quite been sure how to gather that type of Achievement, and since there were so many other ways to earn Achievement, I had never really focused on it.

However, it seemed like there was a merit to training a few strong disciples or family members, if I could get a small cut of their earnings in the future. Though I wasn't sure if I had it in me to train someone just to earn Achievement. I knew myself well enough to know that unless they were terrible people, I would probably get way too attached to someone if I spent years training them.

I wasn't sure if that would make it better or worse for me to earn Achievement this way, but it was something to think about in the future.

"Anyway, if you want to earn a keyword, I can help you. If not… I suggest you just leave. You won't get much Achievement from exploring a fake set of ruins, and I don't really have anything to offer you outside of my intended functions." I looked at Anise, and then looked at the talking soul fragment again. We had a lot to gain here. The soul fragment was also a potential goldmine of information.

It seemed to have knowledge of the Market, how things worked before the Market collapsed, and had a bunch of information about earning Achievement that we never would have found anywhere else. And it could also help Anise earn her keyword ability. I looked at Anise, who was looking more and more eager every time the soul fragment mentioned getting a manifestation keyword ability, and grinned. I would need to keep an eye on the whole process, to make sure nothing sinister happened during the surgery.

But I was looking forward to finally figuring out how the Market was supposed to work, and possibly getting some hints about how it had all collapsed.