Chương 318: Preparation is Key

<We need to rethink our strategy, > I said. I spent a minute replaying all of the things I had seen through my clone's eyes, before I shared my speculation about the 'design' of the Spatial Fair. As I relayed my memories and speculations, I saw the others grimace. <This place is a death trap, isn't it? > said Sallia, as she frowned. <I didn't even see what killed your clone. It looked like a blur of motion. If I hadn't seen the little silver spider at the end, I would have thought a projectile killed the clone.

This inner district is far too dangerous. > <Even if it's a death trap, we only have two lives left. That gives us two worlds and one and a half more Market visits before our final chance. We need some kind of breakthrough point, > said Felix, also frowning. <Otherwise, we'll reincarnate two more times, then die permanently. If we can't even beat the inner districts of the Market this time, I don't see how we can get strong enough before we lose everything.

Not to mention, the inner districts being so heavily guarded isn't 100% bad news. It means that whatever is in here, it's worth guarding. The outer districts don't have this level of care put into their defenses. > Anise didn't say anything, but I saw her squinting at the Spatial Fair. Her eyes were scrunched up in thought, and she looked as if she were trying to solve a difficult problem. <All right, first question. Which enemy do we want to challenge? > asked Felix.

<We still have to get into the inner districts of the nursery. One enemy attacks us if we make zero noise, and the other tracks down noises. Which one do we have the best chance of defeating? > <I think the enemy that's attracted by noise is a safer bet, > I said, after a few moments of thought. <At least I could actually see that one. Being able to understand what's attacking us is important. I don't understand what killed my clone when it didn't make noise.

It felt like something was wrong, and the clone was being dragged into another layer of reality. Then the clone was dead. For the spider, we need a way to see faster and match the thing's absurd stats. It's hard, but I can at least understand what we need to do. > Anise nodded. <I agree with Miria. We should challenge the spider. It's fast, but at least we could see what attacked her clone and how her clone died. We have zero useful intelligence on the other threat besides the fact that silence is deadly.

> <Felix, you're the best when it comes to estimates and numbers, > said Sallia. <The monster was moving too fast for me to process. Do you have an estimate for what grade of Stat Miria would need to land an Extinguish? If it's only another Grade or two, she could hyperfocus on making her second rune and then buy more [Perception]. Her first three runes all boost her mental stats by one grade each, and if she buys another grade of [Absorption] too, the second rune will come quickly.

She even managed to form her first rune way faster than last time we were in the Market. With more familiarity with the magic system and more stats backing her up, it should work. > Felix frowned. <Well, if you wanted to have a good chance of hitting it… I am guessing you would need about Grade twelve [Perception]? Assuming that the way stats work doesn't change past a certain threshold. But at Grade 10 you might be able to land an extinguish on it, if we used some other means to slow it down.

I think that it would be down to some degree of luck at Grade 10. Of course, it'll still have a notable stat advantage. I'm guessing it's sitting at about grade 15 or 16 for [Agility], at least for the memory we saw of Miria's clone dying. > Then, Felix turned towards me and raised an eyebrow. <What do you think, Miria? > <Sounds like a plan to me. I could also focus my second rune ability on vision again. That should help.

> <I could build my next rune ability to support the fight against the spider monster, > said Sallia. <That should help us get other ways to slow the damn thing down. > <You could also use your Tarot deck! > Said Anise. <That item can help you curse the spider first! You would have to sacrifice a clone, but it would let you set up for the actual fight! Does your water clone share your stats? As long as its [Perception] is high enough, it should work.

> <It seems to copy my mental stats, although its physical stats are all around Grade 2 or 3, if I'm not mistaken. Its essence-related stats rely on how much of my soul I give it, > I said. <So if I give it the tarot deck, it should be able to get off a curse before it dies. All that really matters for that purpose is [Perception]. > Felix nodded. <In that case, we have a rough plan. If we pull it off, the rest of the exploration will get much easier.

{Endless Hunger of the Ocean} should help you set up for any future problems in the area. > I nodded. I felt some of the pressure I'd been feeling start to dissipate. It was going to require some tricky timing on my part, but we had a plan. Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. Since we knew what we needed to do, we got to work. To start with, I needed to buy more stats. We scouted the area, killing a few skeletons along the way.

After about ten hours of searching, we found another intact shop that looked as wealthy as the Soul Emporium. There was no Guardian inside of this shop, which was unusual for higher end shops. Furthermore, all of the items and the cash registers in the shop were empty. The only thing we found was a corpse of a monster in the front. It looked kind of like a giant mole rat, although the head was missing. I frowned. We had found a corpse of a monster and an unguarded shop. That was... odd.

Monsters in the Market seemed to know when an area was undefended. Last time we had been in the Market, skeletons had come to replace the ones we killed after we cleared out a pool of reincarnation. It hadn't taken very long, either. That meant one thing. This mole rat monster had been killed recently.

"This thing was decapitated with a sword," said Sallia, as she touched its neck.

"The swordsman wasn't very skilled. I see lots of little wounds on the creature's body, so the fight went on for quite a while. The swordsman inflicted several small wounds until they managed to strike a decisive blow." The four of us scanned the interior of the store again, before Anise sighed.

"I wish we had caught the other group. The people who did this must have been other Market residents, right? It would have been nice to see if they had any information we didn't have. Or if there was a way to work together. I wouldn't mind having more allies in the future."

"They might not have been friends, though," said Felix, frowning.

"The Market doesn't care about the morality of people who join. Otherwise, people of the Market wouldn't have gone around exterminating worlds for Achievement." Anise, Sallia and I flinched at his words. I had no interest in meeting someone who would massacre a world just for Achievement. They would probably consider us free money if they met us. We would fight back, obviously. But that didn't mean we would win.

"Let's just buy what we need and get out," I said. I was no longer interested in trying to meet up with the other group of people. The sooner we got out of this area, the better. The cube selling third tier Soul Fragments for Perception was easy to find. I immediately boosted my Perception up another grade, spending 2, 600 Achievement in the process. I also bought a grade of Absorption essence, for another 2, 600 Achievement. This brought me from 12, 703. 42 Achievement to 7, 503. 42 total.

This raised my [Perception] to Grade 9 and my [Absorption] to Grade 8. I was a bit regretful about spending so much Achievement right before entering the inner districts. However, I needed to condense my second rune as fast as possible. Every day I wasted was a day we could have spent hitting up shops in the Market or the inner district, gathering supplies and Achievement.

I knew for a fact that a higher [Absorption] stat would make my rune creation faster, so even if it felt a bit bad, I was willing to spend Achievement on it. I just had to hope that I would still have enough Achievement for something useful later. Worst case scenario, I would borrow from Felix. After that, we moved out of the inner district and took over a nearby house. I got working on my rune, while Sallia, Felix, and Anise got to work rebuilding parts of their own magic systems. Time began to pass.

We spent a few weeks training, in order to rebuild what power we could. Spending so much time training was frustrating, when our objective was right in front of us... but we needed to be careful. Thankfully, nothing unusual happened during our training. We didn't run into any other groups of market members, or any powerful monsters. The first one to build more of her magic system was Sallia. Since we knew the spiders had incredible speed, Sallia focused her second rune on countering that ability.

Sallia's second rune let her 'harden' nearby air. She could make an ordinary patch of air into something that felt more like thick, sludgy gelatin. It also slowed us down, but it didn't slow down Sallia. That made it a little bit prone to getting in our way, but that was fine. Our plan was to get off a curse with my tarot deck, then blast the spider down with spells from afar. Sallia was the only person we expected to fight on the front lines anyway.

Felix, meanwhile, made several more batches of bombs for Anise to throw. Sadly, Anise's magic system would take too long to rebuild. This was a problem we would need to address by next world. Hopefully, after an ability evolution or two, Anise would have a faster and more optimized magic system. In the meantime, she would still be able to use magic missiles, her sword, and all of the bombs Felix was giving her.

Felix built himself a pair of prosthetic knees, which gave him the ability to unleash a massive burst of speed. For having such a short time to work with, and lacking materials, he had done a pretty good job of improving himself where he could. Most of his time was spent building more bombs for Anise and himself to throw, though. As for me, after two weeks, I managed to build my next rune. I didn't work on anything else, because I knew what I needed to focus on. For my rune ability, I rebuilt my dimensional sight.

I had used it often last world, and I felt it was a pretty good choice for our current needs. Since the spider was so fast and hard to track, giving myself a bigger range to see it was the obvious solution. If I got really lucky, maybe I could kill it before it noticed us. Power: Condense your second rune out of absorption essence Achievement +160 After two whole weeks, our group was getting antsy. Time was ticking away, and we had only barely scratched the outskirts of the spatial fair.

We had a little less than a month and a half left before our bodies would start to deteriorate. By that time, we needed either a way to extend our time in the Market, or a way to reincarnate. We had to get moving. It was time to see if our plan worked.