Chương 86: Time's Tracks

Years passed by. I spent a great deal of that time working with my teacher to improve my attunement, allowing me to improve my Extinguish spell, and also improving how effectively I used my attunement for other things. I figured out how to do a second spell, in addition to extinguish.

Rather than putting out the candle of life by using my image of an ocean, I also learned how to use my image of the life-giving waters of the ocean of souls to replenish the strength of a body, which worked as a kind of healing and anti-fatigue spell. It was pretty expensive, just like extinguish, but it was good to know that when our group went to the wastes above, we would have two healers in the group in case something went wrong.

My image of the ocean of souls lent itself to destruction much more effectively than healing, but the fact that I could do both gave me a lot of flexibility. After creating my healing spell, I decided not to create any new moves with my attunement until I got both of my attunement abilities up to the point where they were effective in combat.

I could probably do much more with my image of the ocean of souls, but I felt that it was a better idea to just keep practicing and improving extinguish and rebirth until I had mastered them. It was better to have a few incredibly effective spells, instead of a lot of useless spells, after all. And extinguish got much better after years of practice.

I hadn't tested it on anything larger than a few insects and plants yet, but I had gone from chewing through nearly a twentieth of my essence just to kill a finger-sized spider to being able to wipe out smaller insects and plants with practically no effort or essence cost. I was reasonably certain the spell was going to be usable by the time we explored the wastes in the future. Apart from learning how to use my attunement, I also worked on improving my attunement itself.

With the help of my teacher, I was present for almost every birth and every death in the city, and I spent several days a month near the city river to get 'in touch' with my image of the ocean. And, of course, my dress ensured that I was almost always touching a lake. My attunement improved by leaps and bounds, making it faster and easier for me to convert things in my surroundings, and making both of my best spells cheaper and faster to activate with every single advancement.

The amount of alteration essence my attunement permanently tied up increased as well, but it was still easily less than 10% of my entire reserve, and the benefits I got from improving my attunement far outweighed the cost. Power: Form an [Intermediate] level attunement Achievement +500 Power: Form an [Advanced] level attunement Achievement +750 I had, apparently, improved my attunement twice during the years of my training.

It seemed harder to distinguish the grades of attunement, as compared to something like swordsmanship, but I was still able to notice a difference from one grade to the next in how easy and cheap it was to use spells related to my attunement. And also important was the Achievement for improving: my Achievement had gone from 858 Achievement to 2108 Achievement, which was already enough to move one of my Stats to Grade 2 and have a small amount of Achievement left over.

By the time I turned twenty, the equivalent of a human ten-year old child, I was much better than most of the children in the city. I was even comparable to some of the weaker adult shapers in the city, both in terms of general shaping and in terms of my attunement. However, I was still notably behind Ella's level of expertise, which made me rather curious.

On the islands, there hadn't been many people with advanced-grade weapon skills; such people had been the cream of the crop, and some of the best hunters on the island. However, here, the average grade of people's Skills seemed to be much higher. Through careful observation of how mana and souls interacted with each other, I started to get a better idea why and how people in higher tier worlds ended up with higher average Skill grades.

The amount of mana available in this world, as well as the quantity of essence in the air around us, was much higher than it had been on the islands. I had known that this was what differentiated lower tier worlds from higher tier ones, but I hadn't known why this made people stronger. It seemed that all human bodies naturally 'ate' a good chunk of mana from their surroundings whenever someone trained, even if they didn't have absorption essence.

The process was quite a bit different from absorbing it with absorption essence, of course, but it seemed like all humanoid bodies naturally used some amount of mana as 'fuel,' burning it whenever someone tried to do… well, anything. And if they improved their skills by a certain amount in a training session, the mana they burned would leave behind some residue in their bodies. This, as far as I could tell, was what a Skill was.

The leftover mana residue was a sort of echo of their training, and served to improve their body and their skills. And, much like the 'Abilities' of Transmigrators, these Skills seemed to have extra beneficials effects on the people of the world. For example, minor stat improvements, enhanced reflexes, and so on. As transmigrators, we only got Stat boosts when we activated our Abilities or used special resources.

However, to normal residents of a world, it seemed like Stats were slightly easier to improve, since some Skills, such as swordsmanship, would mildly improve their bodies as they increased in strength. At least, that was my current understanding of the subject. It had taken me a while to notice the oddities in the way people 'burned' mana to improve their skills, and observe the small differences in people's strength and speed as they slowly grew through training.

When I observed another child train their swordsmanship, I observed that they didn't get as many stats as I had when I activated my {Beginner-Grade Swordsmanship} Ability. I had gotten five points in every stat, while the child I had been observing only seemed to get three or four. However, unlike transmigrators, natives of a world didn't need to buy abilities in between lives to benefit from improving their skills. The native inhabitants had both upsides and downsides to not being part of the market.

As Transmigrators, the process our bodies used to improve looked… quite different. Instead of our bodies burning the mana in our surroundings and using that as fuel to leave skill-residue in our bodies, our souls did everything. Our souls treated our bodies like cheap and unimportant clothes that could be discarded at any time, and greedily gobbled up any mana-residue available the moment it was present in our bodies.

And sadly, souls didn't seem to process 'extra' mana anywhere near as well as our physical bodies could. Which was probably why transmigrators didn't benefit from the mana-rich environment of higher tier worlds anywhere near as much as the natives did. Stolen novel; please report. I wondered if there was a way to improve this process, but right now I knew too little about souls to be comfortable messing with them.

After all, souls were the fundamental core of a transmigrator, and if I messed up, the three of us might end up crippled or dead after this life. However, I did find the process of observing everything using my soul-sight interesting, and even though I wasn't willing to experiment with our souls, I was still learning little bits and pieces of how the Market worked by observing how our souls different from regular souls. Apart from training my attunement, I also worked on my swordsmanship with Sallia and Felix.

I wasn't exactly great at using melee weapons, and I fell far behind many of the soldiers of this world who could take advantage of our mana-rich environment, but I still wanted to have some competence in melee combat in case I couldn't extinguish an enemy or blow them up with a fireball. Sadly, I couldn't advance my swordsmanship to advanced grade yet. My natural talent for swordsmanship was rather lacking, and frankly, it would still take quite a while before I reached advanced grade swordsmanship.

Since most of the soldiers of this world seemed to have advanced grade swordsmanship, this put me at a major disadvantage in most sword fights, during the times my teacher set me up with a soldier for the day to fight. A problem which Sallia did not share. Since the four of us met up every day after our magic lessons to play and hang out, Sallia started helping Felix and I squeeze in some extra practice in swordsmanship, on days when we were up for it.

And after Sallia reached Advanced Grade swordsmanship, even if Felix, Anise and I all worked together, she handily thrashed the three of us every single time. Even in a one on three scenario, Sallia's rune-enhanced body, strength and perception enhancing rune abilities, flesh attunement, and body strengthening spells layered on top of each other made Sallia close to invincible in a melee fight.

Her raw physical stats, exceptional swordsmanship talent, and rune-enhanced Perception were overwhelming, and she was nearly impossible to win against. Not that Felix and I expected anything less. It was amazing to see Sallia finally become the monstrous melee fighter she was always meant to be.

Anise seemed to get a little more frustrated by Sallia's nigh-invincibility, but she was also easy to distract with a conversation about magic, which caused her to perk right up and forget her frustrations with Sallia's swordsmanship training. Anise was the best of the four of us at raw spellcasting.

Her magic-symbol attunement made counterspelling and changing spells on the fly much easier for her, and whenever one of the teachers were supervising us and let us use magic, she always wowed the three of us with her progress as a spellcaster. I had only learned the magic symbols for water, fire and force so far. I was at least able to cast up to second-circle spells relatively quickly and competently, but I was definitely treating Manifestation magic as a backup for when I ran out of alteration essence.

Alteration was simply far easier to fight with, at least in my hands. I had still learned a few second circle spells, though. I could now create a small spike of fire, create a bubble of hot steam, lift up an object and move it towards me, and fling an object away from me by using magic. Spellcasting didn't come to me as easily as alteration, but I still had a decent grasp of the subject for my age, even if I wasn't particularly outstanding. Part of the issue was my manifestation essence pool.

After some testing, I had discovered that I could make 156 magic symbols in a day before I ran out of essence. Which was close to the average of 200, but was definitely a bit on the smaller side. Sallia could do 151, and Felix could do 106 Symbols per day. It seemed like we were a bit below average as far as raw essence quantity went, perhaps as a consequence of this being a higher tier world.

It was a bit of a shame, but the three of us still managed to make the most out of our limited essence pools and learn everything we could for the future. Power: Become a First-circle spellcaster Achievement +150 Power: Become a Second-circle spellcaster Achievement +300 Finally, my runes had come along quite nicely during the eight years of training time. I had formed my fourth rune. After some hesitation, I had ended up forming a similar fourth rune ability to the one I had formed in my previous life.

However, even though I had used the same mental image, and had focused on the life-giving surface of the ocean, just like before, the ability I had formed was a bit different from the ability I formed last time. Instead of the ability to create illusions and healing out of water, I had instead formed the ability to create a whirlpool of illusory, madness-inducing water around me with my fourth rune.

This water took strongly after the ocean water of my previous life; it directly attacked people's willpower, and tried to devour their thoughts and make them jump into my little whirlpool whenever I activated it. Of course, unlike the ocean of my previous life, I couldn't form a large enough whirlpool of water to drown people. I just couldn't create quite enough water, although the whirlpool became deadly in its own way if I swapped out some of the madness-inducing water for ocean of souls water mid-ability use.

My whirlpool of madness did allow me to set up nicely for an extinguish though, and also made it incredibly easy to stab opponents in the face with a sword while they were dazed. Sallia and Felix had higher Willpower in this life, so it wasn't easy to trip them up for more than a fraction of a second by using madness-inducing ocean water, but that was still enough time for me to take advantage of their distraction during a training bout.

And activating my whirlpool also triggered my madness keyword, which improved my essence regeneration and sped up how quickly my body adapted to my fourth rune. At twenty years old, I was getting quite close to forming my fifth rune, although I would probably need another few months before my body finished adjusting to my fourth rune. Power: Construct your Fourth Absorption-Essence rune (note: this world does not have any support for runes or absorption essence in existence. Thus, rewards for rune-related magic systems and Absorption Essence-related Magic Systems are lowered) Achievement +160 With the 160 Achievement from my fourth rune, as well as the 450 Achievement for becoming a second-circle spellcaster, I had a total of 2, 718. 89 Achievement ready for when we next returned to the market. I resisted the urge to grin as I counted over my Achievement, before I thought over the next week and cackled to myself.

Since Sallia, Felix, Anise and I had all expressed some interest in learning to adventure and fight monsters, and had remained consistent for the past eight years, Lauren and Ella had eventually decided that now that we were old enough to fight our first monsters in one of the nearby caverns. We would be going out as a group of four, to learn how to fight together while our masters kept us safe if something went wrong.

And I was also rather excited to finally test out how the sub-Ability creation of {Endless Hunger of the Ocean} worked. I hadn't actually killed a strong enough creature with water yet, meaning I hadn't actually figured out how sub-ability creation worked, but I was eager to get some fighting done with my friends, and to finally test out the ability I had bought decades ago.