Chương 477: The Forgotten

The clan was on edge for the next several hours, as our beasts continued to run. Two village-bearing beasts had fallen already. Our clan's population had also dropped by about a third. As I recuperated and healed the injured, I couldn't help but sigh at the ridiculous losses we had faced. So many of the people of the village had died during the battle. A third of the remaining people had fallen. In less than an hour, nearly two thousand fresh corpses had disappeared.

People who had once had loved ones, families, and friends, would never laugh again. All of the fallen had returned to the ocean of souls already. One in twenty people would likely turn into seawater within the ocean of souls, while the others would go on to be reincarnated, their memories lost to the void as they started anew… I glanced at the two missing packs of village-bearing beasts in our usual running formation, and felt lost. I had fought to keep the people of our clan alive.

I had hoped for a battle where we emerged victorious, a battle where few or no people died. I had failed. I couldn't help but feel like this was becoming a pattern. In every single world, we fought, bled, and lost loved ones. In the end, what was it all for? In our first life, we had fought to keep our home village safe against human invaders from across the ocean, and died luring that giant sea monster to attack their ships.

I still didn't know whether the village survived or not, but I couldn't imagine that the village had survived unscathed, whether they won or lost in the end. In our second life, we lost our home to the Orukthyri, and fled to another city. There, we grew up, until we became adults. Then, we left to search the surface for a way to save that dying world, only to get killed off by a living universe nearly instantly.

In our third life, we fought on one side of a war between the refugees of another dimension and the natives of the dimension we were born into. I had been so full of hate at the time - the strange, manta-ray like void creatures had taken Sallia from me, and even if I had known that she was still sapient and capable of communicating with us, they had still forced my friend to exist in a disembodied, dead state for decades.

The only mercy I had managed to drag out of myself was the willingness to spare civilians and only fight soldiers. In the end, an entire continent had been utterly ravaged by the magic of that world, leaving the entire continent shattered and uninhabitable. Our fourth world hadn't been involved in a fight between sapient beings - at least, not on the surface.

Instead, we had saved a dying world from the horrors created by the Market itself, in what was originally meant to be a farm for various kinds of Skills, Abilities, and Achievement. However, every single tragedy, every single monster in that dying world, had originally been engineered by the Market to make it a perfect place for the people of the Market to farm Achievement, skills, and abilities. In a twisted way, we had essentially been fighting the old remnants of the Market at the time.

In this world, most of what I had seen were either people fighting the local monsters, or people being crushed under the weight of interdimensional war. Part of this was because the four of us weren't strong enough to avert each tragedy. I certainly tried to leave each world better than it had been before our arrival. I wanted to make things better for people - less bloodshed, less violence, more happiness. But even though my strength was lacking, I felt like that wasn't the only thing missing from the equation.

I looked around the hastily set up infirmary. There, dozens of warriors from the village were laid in stretchers and beds. Many of them were moaning in pain - I hadn't had enough essence to heal every injury, and I also hadn't healed most injuries completely yet. Thus, there were still plenty of wounded here, although there were no people in the infirmary with life-threatening injuries anymore. People with life-threatening injuries had either been healed by me already, or had passed away.

My eyes settled on a little girl. She must have been six or seven years old, at most. She had dull, hollow eyes, and her gaze never left one of the empty stretchers nearby. I didn't even remember the little girl's name. It had started with a D, but that was all I knew. Perhaps it had been Diana? Dwayna? I couldn't remember. Even so, I knew why she was staring at the stretcher. An hour ago, her mother had been on that stretcher.

I hadn't had enough essence to heal her, and the apothecaries hadn't had enough potions to heal her. I had tried to heal the woman with more mundane medicine, but it hadn't proved to be enough. Before my essence could recover, the woman had returned to the ocean of souls. The little girl didn't seem to have a father to look after her, either - I wasn't sure whether he had died on one of the other stretchers, or if he had died in some other, completely unrelated accident. I sighed.

My heart felt heavy, and I felt like there was an emptiness in my stomach that I couldn't fill. I was so tired of seeing tragedies happen and being powerless to stop them. Finally, I channeled my thoughts in to my communication bracelet. I didn't know what was missing, but I hoped my friends could tell me why it felt like every single world was just a bundle of tragedies that we were helpless to stop. <Is anyone there? > I asked. <Are you three busy? > <What's up? > asked Felix. <I'm here, > said Anise.

<I'm also listening, > said Sallia. <You sound… anxious? That's not quite the right word. You don't sound happy, though. > <Why is it that every world we come to is in the middle of a tragedy? Why can't we make things better every time we come to a world? We try, and struggle, and fight for a better world ever time we arrive, but most of the time, it feels like we've barely changed a thing by the time we die. The only world I can say I actually feel good about was the last one.

In that world, we actually helped people - but at the same time, the only reason we could change things for the better is because the Market originally made things so utterly horrible. I know that a big part of it is the fact that we don't have enough strength yet, but… is strength really the only thing we're missing? How do we make things actually get better in the future? It feels like any improvement we make is just another step in an endless cycle of bloodshed and violence.

Sometimes, that's justified - there's no real 'peace' that can be had with monsters that have no intelligence, since there's no way to negotiate or change things when one side is literally incapable of higher-level thinking. But with other sapient species, or different civilizations, why is the warfare so endless? What are we fighting for, at the end of the day? > This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience. My friends fell silent at my question.

For nearly a full minute, we simply sat there, as if my friends were also processing my thoughts. Finally, Felix sent a mental sight into the communication bracelet. It was a sigh mixed with a little bit of sadness, and a little bit of fondness. <I suppose we haven't really had a more concrete discussion about what we want in the future - or what the future even looks like, really, > said Felix. <So far, what has bound the four of us together is survival. Now is as good of a time as any to discuss things.

> <I'll admit, I've never thought about this kind of question, > said Anise. <I just want to see more interesting spells and kinds of magic. Maybe I wasn't thinking enough about why we were moving forward? I didn't realize you had such big ambitions, Miria. > <I'll admit, I haven't thought about what a more concrete goal would look like beyond surviving, > said Sallia. <Perhaps it's a question I've tried not to think about until now. After all, we aren't the first lost souls to arrive in the Market.

By now, thousands or tens of thousands of other groups of people must have come to the Market, and tried to find a way to survive with their own friends and loved ones. I've seen no evidence of any of them succeeding, and I always thought that our fate would probably be the same. I've treated the past five lifetimes with all of you as something like a pleasant dream - one where I can pretend to be alive for a while longer, with the three of you, who have become like family to me. I love all of you…

but I don't see a way for us to have an afterwards. The splinter of the Universal tree might give us a chance, though. > Sallia's voice took on a more thoughtful tone. <After all, it does seem quite unlikely that the average group of transmigrators who have arrived at the Market and ended up in our situation has materials from another major multiverse-level faction that they can use to create a personalized weapon. > I hesitated. Sallia's words weren't wrong.

So many other transmigrators had come to the Market, but the Market was still a monster-infested wasteland. If another group of transmigrators had succeeded in conquering part of the Market, and driving the monsters back, surely things would have changed for the better? At the very least, I felt that the monster infestation wouldn't be anywhere near as bad as it was. Simple survival had taken nearly every drop of our tactics, strength, and focus in each life.

Even so, I wanted to think that there was more to the multiverse than endless warfare and bloodshed. <Well, a thought occurs to me, > said Felix. <In the third world we came to, the soul fragment we spoke with talked about how Transmigrators would sometimes slaughter entire worlds, simply to farm more influence Achievement and more slaughter Achievement. I think all four of us can agree that's deeply messed up, and I hope to never be part of anything like that in the future.

In the fourth world, the Market was even more blatantly messed up - it essentially culturally genocided even the tiniest fragments of whatever civilization originally existed there, warped the genetics and history of every single group of people on the planet, and then created a desperate, hopeless situation solely to help people of the Market benefit the most from entry into that world. In our second world, that living universe was devouring and destroying the native civilization because…

it needed nutrients, probably? We never really figured out its motivation, though it seemed to be an invasive species, at least. In our first world, the Megailians invaded our islands because they wanted resources. In this world, I imagine things aren't much different - the universal tree is invading us, and I imagine it gains something from conquering new worlds. Resources, land, population…

it's hard to say which matters more, but at the end of the day, the decision makers from the Universal Tree have decided that their benefits matter more than the lives they harm with their actions. <In every single case, it's true that whatever society or organism is responsible for initiating the war stands to benefit from the bloodshed and chaos - so how about we make something better? > asked Felix.

<The Market's System is one that was clearly artificially designed - after all, I distinctly remember one of the ads we saw in the Market mentioning something about 'natural' Systems - implying there are also 'unnatural' Systems. I don't believe for a second that the Market didn't specifically engineer the System to maximize profits as much as possible - perhaps it was even updated and changed multiple times to maximize how efficient it was.

> I didn't even respond to Felix's words - it sounded exactly like something the Market would do, so I just nodded, even though my friends weren't nearby and couldn't see me nodding. <Since Systems can be artificially designed and replaced… if we survive this, maybe we could design a better Market system. If the System specifically rewarded people for helping the worlds they entered, instead of just rewarded them for slaughtering and massacreing everyone…

maybe we could turn the Market into a force for bettering the multiverse. If we get strong enough to do so, I mean, > said Felix. <I could think about how to apply my crafting and essence manipulation to that goal. I also don't mind trying to make every single world we enter better - I just never thought about how to apply it on a wider scale than before. No matter what, any system will always have people in it that push that system to the limits in order to benefit themselves.

If we want to really make the multiverse as a whole a better place, I think the first step is to design a better System. We could interfere with rewards for doing 'bad things' like murdering innocent people, and give subsidies to people who make worlds better… or something. We can work out the details when we know more.

Of course, we'll also need to do much more than that - we would need to find ways to change or remove factions that work as 'bad actors' within the wider multiverse, and find a way to make other neutral factions accept our presence. Given the actions of the Universal tree, I don't think that peace with them is really possible - so we would need to find a way to take on their faction.

I also suspect that a few other problems, such as the living universe, may need to be dealt with using violence - because I just can't see that thing being willing to negotiate with us, or any other dimension it comes in contact with. So maybe the ideal future path for the Market is to create some kind of faction of benevolent transmigrating mercenaries, who move from world to world, perform good deeds, and help people? > I thought about Felix's words, and then I smiled. <I think I would like that.

> The four of us fell into silence as we thought about our conversation - the kind of comfortable silence born from years of friendship, and a small, budding hope for the future.