Chương 425: Chapter 426: Raiders of the Lost Bark (2)

<So the Market was certainly destroyed by a coalition of outside forces, > said Felix. He was the first to break the silence after I finished conveying the man's words to my friends. <That… doesn't surprise me, honestly. > <It also makes sense, given the weird variety of monsters left behind in the Market, > said Anise, after a while. <I'm guessing the undead Market members were probably left behind by some kind of undead multiversal faction.

We've also seem a surprisingly high number of plant-based monsters wandering the area. Maybe those are from the Universal tree, or at least a few factions of the Universal tree? > <It's hard to say exactly what has come from where, > said Sallia. <But it does seem like after levelling the Market, each faction dumped a big monster population into the ruins, just to keep the transmigrator population down. It's a weirdly cost-effective way of hindering the Market from ever regrowing. No manpower costs.

No military budgets. Just… toss enough monsters into the environment to get a big population going, and then leave. > <Cheap, you say? > asked Felix. <Yeah. If the people who destroyed the Market wanted to suppress the Market and create an environment where no new Transmigrators could develop, it would still make more sense to station troops here, I think, > said Sallia. <After all, monsters don't respond intelligently to a few skeleton patrols on the other side of a nursery.

They lack an organized command structure to respond to Transmigrators picking off a few enemies here and there as they move throughout the Market. The only benefit I can think of to this type of setup is cost effectiveness. The monsters in the Market probably breed and regrow on their own, and the coalition wouldn't need to maintain them or handle things like interdimensional logistics> <That's really important, > said Felix.

<It's definitive proof that there are limits to what the coalition that destroyed the Market are able to do. They have limitations. We might not be sure whether those limitations are posed because they couldn't destroy the Market, or weren't willing to pay the price. However, if we're talking about the most effective way to cut down the Market, I imagine it would be possible to totally destroy the Market, ripping it apart one chunk of material at a time until it was a pile of debris. The coalition didn't do that.

In other words, it was too expensive - or they didn't care. Either way, this has some implications about the power of the coalition. > I could almost hear Felix smiling, even though he had only made these statements through the communication bracelet. Then, he turned back to our prisoner. <I have a few new questions for this guy. Hold on a minute. >"Has your group found any specific treasures or valuables?" Asked Felix. The man snorted, though I noticed that his eyes shifted every so slightly.

I could tell that whatever he said next would be a lie.

"We haven't found a whole lot of anything." So the scavengers had found something? I wondered what they had found that could incite interest from them.

"This school seems like it was already looted by some Transmigrators beforehand. There are still plenty of facilities inside that are intact, but the real valuables are gone." I felt a glimmer of excitement at the man's words. This time, it wasn't the excitement of discovering new information about our predicament. It was the excitement of knowing that we hadn't come here in vain. The facilities inside were still intact! To us, those were the real treasures.

That being said, even though the facilities being intact was important, my curiosity had also been piqued by the man's words. While he had claimed that the raider group hadn't found anything valuable, I was pretty sure he was lying. If they had found something valuable… was it something we could use? I considered calling the man out for lying, then glanced at Felix. I could tell that he had caught the man's tell as well. I conveyed the man's words to Felix.

After I finished explaining my thoughts, Felix grinned, and then got very close to the man, before he stared directly into the man's eyes.

"You say you didn't find anything valuable?" asked Felix.

"Not even any leftover transmigrator currency?" He sounded almost as if he were teasing the man.

"You mean Achievement?" asked the man, though he sounded a bit more relaxed this time.

"No, we didn't find any. Part of the reason I'm so sure that Transmigrators have gone through this area before is how little Achievement we found. Legend says that back when the Market was at its peak, members of the Market could literally smell Achievement. They'd sniff it out and then burrow through even solid rock to get it. I've heard that Transmigrators didn't even truly 'smell' Achievement - they could just sense it somehow." The man laughed, though it sounded a bit like nervous laughter to me.

"It's a great crafting material, even if most Systems from other universes don't use Achievement quite so directly as a source of enhancement. My group was hoping to find some liquid Achievement, but we haven't even found a drop. Who else could clear out the Achievement this effectively, apart from a group of Transmigrators who can sense the presence of Achievement?" Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!

I wondered why the man was so confident that Transmigrators could literally sense Achievement. I certainly hadn't noticed any such ability, and I was a member of the Market. This seemed like a ridiculous rumor that had been exaggerated over a pint of beer, until thousands of years after the fall of the Market, half-drunk mercenaries and scavengers might believe it because there weren't enough Transmigrators around to disprove the rumors anymore.

Or perhaps there had been some kind of really common ability that had existed in the old Market that let users sense Achievement? I sighed, before I shook my head. Either way, it was irrelevant to me.

"Sorry, but I don't think it's very plausible that your group found nothing in this place," I said.

"You can see that this building is still intact, unlike many of the other buildings in the Market. This building likely has, or at least had, a few treasures that were left over from the days of the Market. I doubt that a few Transmigrators could have picked every corner of this building clean." The man laughed again, but his laughter sounded much more nervous now.

"You don't know Transmigrators, miss. The ones that existed before the fall of the Market were horrible. They were mad lunatics who went around doing absolutely anything for Achievement. They even put entire worlds to the sword, just to get more. The ones that crop up after the fall of the Market are just as crazy - they just aren't organized anymore. If even one Transmigrator made it into this building, they would swipe every drop of Achievement and every single speck of material.

Sadly, this building is really just a big waste of time." <So the rest of the Multiverse is aware that new transmigrators are popping up. They just don't seem to care, > said Felix. <This further confirms your earlier speculation - the coalition that wiped out the Market likely did not think that the Market had any real ability to put itself back together after the original battle, > said Sallia. <Or they don't think the resource expenditure to stop new Transmigrators from appearing is worth the cost.

> <Perhaps it's a question of threat level? > said Anise. <Without the resources our predecessors have, it's way harder for us to grow to the same level. With that in mind, they might just not care about us. Especially since we don't actually spend very long in the Market each time we come here, making it much harder to hit Transmigrators. We spend… what, two months here? Then, assuming we live to old age, we usually last several decades in each new dimension.

If the enemy hits the Market while we're not here, they could spend literal decades looking for us and still find nothing. Killing a few Transmigrators surviving in the shadow of the Market seems incredibly time consuming and difficult. As long as the Market doesn't hit a critical population mass, I imagine the coalition won't care about us - and with all the monsters here, it's very hard to hit that critical population mass.

> I continued to glare at the man, and did my best to tune out my friends as they debated how much it would actually cost 'the coalition' to swoop down and kill us all. The man started to sweat.

"We found one thing. It's just a… splinter of wood, though. Nothing that important. We spent a while trying to access a hidden safe we found, but all we found inside was a splinter of wood." I blinked. A splinter of wood? Why mention it at all? Then, I realized that I had already seen quite a few unconventional crafting materials. I conveyed the man's words to my friends, and then saw Felix's eyes light up. He had come to the same conclusion I had.

Assuming the people of this magic academy hadn't lost their mind, the splinter of wood must have had some sort of value. A splinter of odd wood certainly sounded like a candidate for a crafting material.

"What's special about it?" Asked Felix. His eyes were shining. The man gazed at Felix's face for several seconds, before he deflated.

"We think it's a splinter of bark from the universal tree. It should be part of the branch that Eluxia used to create the Market. The religion of the Universal tree took back most of the branch when the Market fell, but they didn't get every single piece." I froze, stunned. The Market… was made from one of the branches of the Universal tree?

The very same Universal tree we had found administrative records of, in which each branch was described as its own faction, and which was said to be large enough to contain hundreds of dimensions? The world tree which, apparently, had a religion deifying it? I spent several seconds trying to process the fact that the creator of the Market had apparently strutted into the Universal Tree, chopped off one of the branches, and then rode off into the sunset. What in the world had Eluxia been thinking?

No wonder some religious factions of the Universal Tree had joined the coalition against the Market. If I were them, I would also want to join the coalition and give the market a good kick while it was down. I continued to question the man for several more minutes, with the help of my friends, but couldn't get any more valuable information from him. He seemed open to talking about the old Market, and giving us a few pieces of information. However, he clammed up anytime we asked for information about his friends.

His knowledge of the Market was obviously patchy, out of date, and filled with a mix of rumours and truths, so we weren't sure how many of his words we could take at face value, either. Eventually, the four of us gave up, knocked the man unconscious, made the bindings holding him far, far more secure, and decided to carry him along as we left the room. It was time to find the rest of this guy's band of scavengers and figure out what to do about them.